Location: Zagreb / Boogaloo / Croatia
Date: Friday, 10/29/2010
Joe Bonamassa – a child prodigy who was already scratching at guitar strings at four, on a guitar his father first pushed into his hands without asking. The man comes from a musical family and is its torchbearer for the fourth generation running. Now 33, he has grown into a proper machine of vehement blues conquest, winning over the masses. With his body of work, Bonamassa has swung himself up among the most visible faces of the new generation of blues. Not because he’s revolutionary in his musical sermon. The truth is much simpler: Bonamassa is accessible to everyone. He’s the herald of modern, made-up, sweet-smelling blues rock. And yet, even in all that sweet smell, you can still easily find so much individual character, knowledge, skill, general musical resourcefulness, talent and catchy ideas from a creative mind that Bonamassa is the new-age blues magnet. He pulls in the spoiled connoisseurs who are used to the best, and also everyone else, the ones who don’t need to work out “theory of relativity equations” in music to let themselves go and surrender to its unbridled vibe.
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 signature, and both showing, even on a quick first listen, an instantly recognizable range of variety. That confirms Bonamassa is still developing and growing as a performer. Add in his activity in the new-era superblues-rock band Black Country Communon, who put out the excellent debut “Black Country” this year, and there’s surely no doubter left with any ill-meaning hints that Joe might be a one-hit wonder.
It’s 8:00 PM! We’re visiting Boogaloo again! The Zagreb club is packed to the last corner. Well, not almost. It IS packed to the last corner. You can barely move in this cauldron. And people are still pouring into the hall. Right on schedule. With no support act, ten minutes past eight, a man in a white jacket steps onto the stage, with white shoes, even white socks, a vivid green shirt under the jacket, and hair “gelled” and “combed” into a Valentino-the-charmer look. The slightly tinted shades are naturally in place. And he’s hot in the fingers! Joe sets himself the goal of setting the crowd on fire right from the start. For that he picks Rory Gallagher’s cover Cradle Rock, which, in Joe’s hands, first got an official recording on his 2000 studio debut. Only a quartet is on stage. There’s tons of room left to move around. And still the rhythm section sticks together like glue, while the stage becomes Joe Bonamassa’s.
He circles away from the mic, left and right, all the way to the edge of the stage, where he whirls out bluesy solos. Once we’ve tasted Gallagher in Bonamassa’s boots, the man hits us with So Many Roads, which venomously channels 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 according to Billboard.
He invited two special guests on stage. First came Sandi Thom, who for So It’s Like and then If Heartahces were Nickles brought even a bit of a country connotation to the songs. Interestingly, Bonamassa didn’t look for more bluesy authority in a female voice, more blackness, something that would set up the right dose of melancholic yearning and eroticism, the very thing blues is actually after and delivers. The singer’s otherwise lovely voice came across as far too fragile next to the solidly built bluesy rock template of the song. In the second half, vocalist Paul Rafferty joined Bonamassa on stage and effectively used the closeness of his vocal color to Paul Rodgers on the classic Free hit Mr. Big. Rafferty’s charismatic voice won everyone over completely with his presence and performance.
Bonamassa came to Zagreb that day with a mild cold, so his voice didn’t fully serve him. But he made up for everything with exceptional skill and an extraordinary feel that guides his blues rock persona and keeps winning over more and more of the crowd. Woke Up Dreaming served up an acoustic, more than 10-minute excursion into wide-open spaces, even enriched with touches of Spanish flamenco. The end of the regular set was pretty unusual, as the man combined the instrumental Django with Mountain Time. The quartet created a hypnotic atmosphere of perfectly dosed prickling that beautifully blends dreaminess and bluesy melancholy. In a completely painless but velvety seductive way, with a refined feel for placing individual notes and extraordinary control over the instrument, the result of a gift full of bluesy confession, or rather an innate ability to sense the elementary traits of blues and turn them into a language the masses can all understand.
Over two full hours, Bonamassa confirmed that he masterfully moves through the different elements of the blues, and that he’s a real chameleon at fusing many of the genre’s reference points. He built the repertoire from original material as well as proven classics. He surprised most of all with the encore, when he chose to play 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, into which he wove a pinch of the Led Zeppelin classic Dazed And Confused. Boogaloo, which by then was boiling and steaming, with free oxygen molecules getting scarcer by the minute, finally blew up with excitement at that moment.
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 the a la Joe Bonamassa kind. A mature crowd, let’s be clear! Great atmosphere in a jam-packed Boogaloo, something you don’t get to experience every day. The audience sent the guitar master off with thunderous ovations as he left the stage one last time with his backing crew. Masterful, unforgettable and one of a kind. Bonamassa counts your bones and realigns your joints. His presence is fresh, inspired and restlessly provocative. The man is on a roll!
Given the great commercial success of the album “Black Rock”, and the fact 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. If things keep going like this for Joe, next time we’ll be watching him in halls for 3,500 to 5,000 people!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
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
