
joe bonamassa.
Bet you didn’t think Lexington had anything in common with St. Petersburg, Russia. That it does is just one factoid that surfaced during a Derby Day phone chat with Joe Bonamassa.
Of course, it goes without saying the global guitar hero plays a significant role in that linkage. Specifically, Bonamassa managed to sellout significant venues on his first visit to both cities. In our case, the event came two years ago, when he filled the Opera House with little promotion and next to no radio airplay.
“St. Petersburg…same situation as you guys,” Bonamassa said. “Sold out the place the first time in. People were singing songs back to us in both places, too. I mean, that’s awesome. You’re just left going, ‘Dude, this is pretty crazy.’”
Lexington gets Round 2 tonight when the guitarist plays Rupp Arena. While the venue will use a half-house seating configuration for the performance, there is still no mistaking the fact that Bonamassa will be playing the big house.
“It’s been a nice progression over the years,” Bonamassa said of his continually mounting popularity. “It’s just been this nice organic build. Nothing happened overnight and there is still a long ways to go. But everything is still fresh for me. It’s still exciting. And I like my 13th album even more than my first. With a lot of artists, the opposite is the case.”
Bonamassa’s 13th album (including a 2011 collaborative effort with Beth Hart and two records with the blues-rock supergroup Black Country Communion) is Driving Towards the Daylight. Due out May 22, the recording is something of a return-to-form for Bonamassa. Its cover material boasts a broad stylistic reach – from roots music icons Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf and Willie Dixon to comparatively contemporary stylists such as Tom Waits, Buddy Miller, Bill Withers and Jimmy Barnes. Yet, the dominate sound on the record belongs to the blues music that placed Bonamassa onstage at age 12 with the likes of B.B. King.
“This album was a real benchmark for us. We just had a lot of fun making it.”
But to call Driving Towards the Daylight a blues record is any conventional or even traditional sense is misleading. Bonamassa is a major devotee of the electric British blues that came to North America in the wake of John Mayall’s first Bluesbreakers bands of the 1960s.
An exceptional case-in-point is Daylight’s rendition of the Johnson blues classic Stones in My Passway. Instead of the wiry blues sway the song is rooted in, Bonamassa plugs into a chunky electric grind that immediately brings to mind the playing of Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page.
“That’s just a different take on a Robert Johnson tune,” Bonamassa said. “It’s all in a Zep mode, for sure. I imagined how Led Zeppelin would sound doing that song. I used a 12 string – a 12 string electric double neck guitar, the kind Jimmy Page used to play. But playing slide on it gave the song a kind of Leadbelly feel. In the end, it became this big, stomping thing.”
On a more modern overseas roots-rock tip comes A Place in My Heart, a rich, slow-blues song penned by longtime Whitesnake guitarist Bernie Marsden but played with the rockish intensity of Irish guitarist Gary Moore, who died last year.
“We just tried to make that one our homage to Mr. Moore,” Bonamassa said.
Incorporating all of those inspirations is the album-opening Bonamassa original Dislocated Boy, where churchy keyboards meet a steadfast guitar charge to trigger a blues-rock drive straight out of 1971.
“That came from the same school as the song The Ballad of John Henry (the title tune to Bonamassa’s 2009 folk-blues oriented album). I wrote it really quick and it just came together – this big, swampy blues song. I wish they all came that fast.”
With Daylight slated to hit stores just before Memorial Day weekend, it would seem a given that Bonamassa will spend much of the summer on the road promoting it. But given how he has spent the entire first half of 2012 touring, the summer months will serve as a vacation. Once fall arrives, though, Bonamassa will embark on a short acoustic tour of Europe (which will be filmed for a DVD) and then plug in for shows in Southeast Asia, Australia and Japan, further nurturing an international fanbase that has remained loyal throughout his career.
“I made my notoriety overseas,” he said. “A lot of times, I’m still viewed in this country as an international artist. Not a day goes by when somebody goes, ‘Oh, thank you for coming all the way from London to play here.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude. I live in California. I’m American.’ But to be thought of as British? Hey, that’s pretty cool, too.”
Joe Bonamassa performs at 8 tonight at Rupp Arena. Tickets are $51, $61, $71and $81. Call (859) 233-3535 or (800) 745-3000.