“The obvious one would be the Royal Albert Hall in 2009 with Eric Clapton. That one was good — it was my bar mitzvah.
“But the absolute best performance I ever gave, in my humble opinion, was the first time we played Red Rocks in 2014. The weather was perfect — it was 80 degrees, and no wind. It was a golden era and a perfect storm. And luckily, we filmed it.
Going back to the Albert Hall, I learned something very important during that first show in 2009: You’ve got to play the venue; you can’t let it play you. The first time I did the Albert Hall, it played me. I’ve now performed there 13 times, and I play it. So I walked into Red Rocks with a bit of bravado. You can’t walk out all flat-footed, like, ‘Oh, shucks, oh, my… ’ You’ve got to own the place. You’ve got to be like, ‘I belong here.’ We had done some great warm-up shows, so we went in with the wind at our backs.
BONAMASSA SAYS – THE WORST
“All musicians have bad shows. Your gear fails, your strings break. The audience doesn’t know the inside baseball of it all, because as long as there’s sound coming out at them, everything seems fine. But I’m going to introduce readers to the concept of the Golden Goose. It’s happened to quite a few people, and in 2000, it happened to me…
For the Memphis show, the ticket price was $12, but we were getting 100 percent of the door, so it was a good deal. Our showtime was 8:30, no opening act. I was backstage and I said, ‘It’s kind of quiet out there.’ Time to go on came around, and I swear, there were five people in the club: me, the bass player, the drummer, the bartender and the guy driving the van. We grossed zero dollars. We got the Golden Goose.”
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BONAMASSA SAYS – THE BEST