Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Venue: Boogaloo / Zagreb / Croatia
Concert date: October 29, 2010
Attendance: 900
Ticket price: €29.00
Joe Bonamassa – a child prodigy who was already rubbing guitar strings at age four, with a guitar his father first pushed into his hands without asking – comes from a musical family and is its torchbearer for the fourth generation running. Now, at 33, he has grown into a proper machine of blues-fueled mass conquest. With his body of work, Bonamassa has swung himself up among the most prominent faces of the new generation of blues. Not because he’s revolutionary in his musical sermon. The reason is far simpler. Bonamassa is accessible to everyone. He’s the herald of a modern, made-up-pretty-smelling blues rock. And yet, amid all that polish, you can still easily find so much character of his own, know-how, general musical resourcefulness, talent and catchy ideas from a creative mind, that Bonamassa is a modern-day blues magnet, both for the spoiled and the seasoned who want only the best, and for the rest, who don’t need to work out “equations from the theory of relativity” in music to freely give themselves over to its unbridled vibration.
Joe Bonamassa is on the rise. Right now he’s sitting at the very peak of a gigantic creative wave. In two years he’s put out two albums, both stamped with the Bonamassa seal, yet even on a quick first listen they show a clearly recognizable range of variety. That confirms Bonamassa is still developing and growing as a performer. Add to his solo releases his work in the new-era blues rock supergroup Black Country Communon, which put out a superb debut, “Black Country”, this year, and there’s surely no doubter left with any evil insinuations that Joe might be a flash in the pan.
The clock says 8:00 p.m.! We’re back at Boogaloo! The Zagreb club is packed to the last corner. Well, not almost. It’s packed to the last corner. In that cauldron you can barely move. And people keep pouring into the hall. As announced, there’s no support act, and ten minutes past eight a man in a white jacket takes the stage – white shoes, even white socks, a vivid lime-green shirt under the jacket, his hair gelled and combed back like a Valentino charmer. The slightly tinted shades are of course there. And he’s hot in the fingers! Joe sets himself the goal of firing up the crowd right from the start. For that he picks none other than Rory Gallagher’s Cradle Rock, which in Joe’s hands first made it onto record on his 2000 studio debut. Onstage we see just a quartet. Tons of room to move was left on the stage. And still the rhythm section sticks together like glue, while the stage itself becomes Joe Bonamassa.
The man circles from the mic to the left and right, all the way to the edge of the stage, where he whirls through bluesy solos. Once we’ve tasted Gallagher in Bonamassa’s shoes, the guy hits us with So Many Roads, which leans venomously toward Gary Moore’s salty blues ballads. With the roaring When The Fire Hits The Sea, the band breaks out of a seductively erotic blues massage. It’s time to present the new album “Black Rock” (2010), which, by the way, is this year’s best-selling blues album, going by the Billboard charts.
The man invited two special guests onstage. First up was Sandi Thom, who brought even a touch of country connotation to So It’s Like, and then If Heartahces were Nickles. Interestingly, in a female voice Bonamassa wasn’t looking for more bluesy authority, more blackness, that would set up the right dose of melancholic longing and eroticism, the kind blues actually seeks out and delivers. The singer’s otherwise lovely voice came across far too fragile next to the solidly built blues rock template of the song. In the second half vocalist Paul Rafferty joined Bonamassa onstage, and he made effective use of how close his vocal color is to Paul Rodgers’s on the classic Free hit Mr. Big. Rafferty’s charismatic voice thrilled completely with its presence and performance.
Bonamassa came to Zagreb this day with a mild cold, so his voice didn’t fully serve him. But he made up for it all with exceptional skill and a remarkable feel that guides his blues rock presence and wins him ever more sympathy from the crowd. Woke Up Dreaming served up an acoustic, more-than-10-minute excursion into wide-open spaces, enriched even with touches of Spanish flamenco. The close of the regular set was rather unusual, as the man combined the instrumental Django with Mountain Time. The quartet created a hypnotic atmosphere of properly dosed stinging, one that perfectly merges the elements of dreaminess and bluesy melancholy. In a completely painless yet velvety seductive way, with a refined feel for placing individual notes and extraordinary control of the instrument, the fruit of a talent tailored to full bluesy confession, or rather an innate sense for perceiving and converting the elemental properties of blues into a language the masses understand.
Over two full hours Bonamassa confirmed that he moves masterfully through various strands of blues and that he’s a true chameleon at fusing the many starting points of the genre. He built the repertoire both from his own material and from tried-and-true classics. He especially surprised with the encore, choosing to perform Cohen’s Bird On A Wire together with Sandi. After the dreamy version of the Cohen standard, the quartet let loose one last time and hammered out the ZZ Top classic Just Got Paid, weaving in a snippet of the Led Zeppelin classic Dazed And Confused. Boogaloo, which by this point, with ever fewer free oxygen molecules in the air, was boiling and steaming like crazy, finally erupted into the air with excitement at the move.
Throughout the show the crowd swayed freely beneath the stage, with no ruckus and no special gymnastic acrobatics. Simple as that. They gave themselves over to the sweet vibration of a sound a la Joe Bonamassa. A mature crowd, let’s be clear! The atmosphere in the packed Boogaloo was superb, something you don’t get to experience every day. The audience sent the guitar master off with thunderous ovations as he left the stage with his backing crew one last time. Masterful, unforgettable and one of a kind. Bonamassa counts your bones and sets your joints. His presence is fresh, inspired and restlessly provocative. The man is on a roll!
Given the excellent commercial success of the album “Black Rock”, and given that halls for 1,000 people (going by the Zagreb experience with Bonamassa) are suddenly too small, we don’t have to worry about the future of blues rock music. If things keep going this way for Joe, next time we’ll be watching him in halls for 3,500 to 5,000 people!
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Setlist
1. Cradle Rock 2. So Many Roads 3. When The Fire Hits The Sea 4. So It’s Like That 5. If Heartaches were Nickels 6. Slow Train 7. Young Man’s Blues 8. Sloe Gin 9. Ballad of John Henry 10. Happier Times 11. Walk in My Shadow 12. Blues in C 13. MR. Big 14. Woke Up Dreaming 15. Mountain Time —encore— 16. Bird on a Wire 17. Just Got Paid
Photo gallery
