![]() That doesn’t mean you don’t need to have your sound together and your playing together, and have pretty good clarity about what you want to do before you go into the studio. I’ve learned it’s better to be open to different approaches. I’ve yet to find a standard way to write. He exemplified what it meant to be a complete guitar player. I remember reading articles where Hendrix would say, “Guitar players need to learn how to play rhythm guitar.” He was a big proponent of rhythm playing and composition. His lead playing was phenomenal, but that was just part of a larger picture. ![]() Then as I started to play in bands, I started listening to the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds. When I was really young, it was the Ventures. But as far as learning songs, learning music, that came either from watching friends play or from picking out parts on albums. I took lessons from Wayne Wood-who was the guy in Austin-for a few months and learned some theory. When I got a guitar, I sat at the piano with the guitar in my lap and taught myself the notes using what I’d learned on piano. It all comes down to how listenable the music is. Stevie Wonder’s vocals are a good example: He gets great performances in single takes. It’s not fair to say there’s no place in pop music for that type of excellence. But then there’s the other polarity that involves a higher level of performance. That’s one polarity, and that’s predominantly my type of music. But a lot of the music I love-folk, blues, rock and pop-is wonderful when it’s rough and off-the-cuff. On this album I tried to strike a balance between those two ways of doing things.Ībsolutely. They’re so well rehearsed, their performance level is so high, they just go in and nail it-capturing a real performance. The question then becomes, how do you achieve that-by constantly redoing something? Or do you achieve it by being so proficient that you’re able to pull off something great at any given moment? Classical musicians don’t make music the way rock artists do, where there’s lots of overdubbing. The desire to play at that level was instilled in me. I grew up listening to classical music, to players whose performance level was very high. If you want to grow, you have to break down walls and find ways to work that are different from the past. If you keep to the same format, the vibe stays the same, even though the music might change. I wanted to break some of that repetition. After a while, we start to create certain patterns in what we do. Bonamassa spoke with us about his guitar roots, his aversion to demos and the advice he received from the King of the Blues. His new solo effort, Dust Bowl, finds Bonamassa mixing incendiary originals with gritty covers like John Hiatt’s “Tennessee Plates” and Free’s “Heartbreaker.” The acclaimed six-stringer also recently wrapped up work on the second Black Country Communion album, set to be released in June and followed by a tour early next year. Bloodline recorded a self-titled album for Capitol Records in 1995 before breaking up, but now Bonamassa has a new supergroup alongside first- and second-generation rock royalty: Black Country Communion, which features Bonamassa, Glenn Hughes, Jason Bonham and Derek Sherinian. A friendship with the late Danny Gatton helped to expand his musical horizons, and at age 14 he co-founded the band Bloodline with sons of Miles Davis, Robby Krieger and the Allman Brothers Band’s Berry Oakley. ![]() King when he was just 10, Bonamassa went on tour as a pre-teen with the likes of King, Buddy Guy, Robert Cray and John Lee Hooker. ![]() Record labels might not have believed in Bonamassa, but his guitar-slinging forbears certainly did. That way, if we failed, we did it on our terms.” We didn’t have a label that believed in us musically, so we decided to own and control everything ourselves. “But it was really just a case of necessity being the mother of invention. “People think my manager and I sat down and hatched a master plan,” says Bonamassa, who has spent most of his career releasing albums through J&R Adventures, the label he started with manager Roy Weisman. “But I knew there had to be a better way.” But more than a decade and a half into his career, today Bonamassa has arrived at the pinnacle of the blues-rock world-and he’s done it without the help of a record label. “People told me I was destined to play rib joints and biker rallies all my life,” says Joe Bonamassa, reflecting on his early years as a struggling blues-rock guitarist. JOE BONAMASSA Goodbye to the rib joints, hello to blues-rock guitar hero status
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