Joe Bonamassa: The World Guitar Day Interview

By. Rob Laing

WORLD GUITAR DAY 2017: It’s hard to think of another player who illustrates the rewards of working hard to learn the craft and history of guitar as much as Joe Bonamassa. He may have been a child prodigy on the instrument, but his ongoing career success is the result of a musician who never stops learning about every facet of his art.

Joe’s achievements as a solo artist and band member made him the obvious choice to speak to about his inspirations, motivations and wisdom for World Guitar Day 2017. If he’s not recording or writing music, he’s usually somewhere in the world playing it. And on the night we speak it’s the impressively titled Thunder Bay in the Canadian province of Ontario that’s playing host to Bonamassa and his band for a show.

But Joe being Joe, that’s not the only thing going on in his world right now. The recent release of Black Country Communion’s fourth opus, appropriately titled BCCIV, is a reunion of his classic rock supergroup with bassist/vocalist Glenn Hughes, drummer Jason Bonham and keyboardist Derek Sherinian that again lives up to the pedigree of its members.

You first picked up a guitar at a very young age, but do you remember your very first memories of it?

"My first memory of guitar was seeing my father play one. He had a Martin D-35, probably from the mid-seventies, the one with the blue casing. He would play Dan Fogelberg songs, Jackson Browne and Crosby, Stills And Nash. A lot of the kind of seventies singer/songwriter stuff. He had a band called Raising Cain."

You were playing the blues from a young age. Did you encounter the resistance of people saying ‘you’re too young to play the blues’? How did you feel about that?

"I still get people that say I’m too young to play the blues. I’m 40 and I’m cranky! At the end of the day, I think having some life experience is helpful to play any kind of music. The more laps around the sun you have… the deeper the music gets. It’s like anything – if you worked in a factory that made woven blankets, the more years you weaved, unless you get sick of weaving blankets, you’re going to get pretty good at it after a while.

"What happens a lot of times is, and I was a victim of this myself, when you’re a kid you’re playing a facsimile of what you heard, vis-à-vis ‘feeling’ it. There’s a certain thing when you start getting into your late thirties or early forties where you stop caring. Not to the extent where you stop caring about the music, you just stop caring about what anyone thinks of you and you just kind of let it go – let the chips fall where they may. I think that’s kind of what has happened to me in the last four or five years. You’re not going to please everybody, so stop trying. Just do your thing."

You’re an incredibly hard working guitarist, and you’re prolific too, but do you encounter periods when you don’t feel inspired? How do you work through them?

"I think every working musician gets to a point where you’ve got to be careful you’re not mailing it in. For me when we’re on the road it is a show, it’s pretty much the same show every night but there are subtle differences in communication that happen between the group that give it a spontaneity, that’s different than say a Monday night, we’re on a Wednesday night. It’s different spontaneity things, little glances and throwing different things in every night. That’s an important part of it all.

"I think when writers and musicians get in their own heads and they start thinking about stuff, that’s when the inspiration kind of drains out of them. That’s the best stuff I’ve ever done, when I’m not thinking about it and when I don’t care. The worst stuff I’ve done is the stuff that’s overthought out and I’ve over-calculated it thinking, ‘I think they’re really going to like it’."

Guitarists these days are bombarded with information if they want to be – they can go on YouTube and watch countless players sharing their experience. But do you think it’s important to view guitar playing as a personal journey?

"I think it is a personal journey. I think people now have access to so much information, both good and bad. And I think the good information is like this; I have an air conditioning unit in my house. I don’t know how to program it because it came with my house. Three times a day the temperature setting on this damn digital piece of shit goes crazy. Can I look up on YouTube on how to program it and did my girlfriend do that? Yes she did. That’s the good information. The bad information is anybody with a camera on their phone and a YouTube page can get up there and basically shout from the rooftops about what they think is right or wrong, especially about vintage guitars. And 99 percent of the people who claim to be ‘experts’ and have the loudest voice don’t really own vintage guitars or may have just been around them at a guitar shop or handled them on Denmark Street. These are not the hardened collectors.

"So I think there’s pros and cons. Want to learn how to play The Rain Song? Look it up on YouTube, it’s there. So I think that’s good, but it also takes away from that personal journey. I learned the Rain Song this way and I put my own spin on it; I listened to the record. Trying to figure something out and knocking the needle back, slow it up and try to figure it out. Now with digital time compression they slow the riffs up in the same key as the song. It’s a great learning tool but I think it kind of quells originality. It almost takes the challenge and the ear training out of it. If you want to learn Eruption, you’re not going to make any money from learning it but your ears are being trained how to figure stuff out. And that’s the value."