In 2014, Joe Bonamassa was well-established, with 11 albums and one Grammy nomination under his belt. But his reputation as a gear connoisseur and teacher supreme wasn't quite on par until a viral lesson on the versatility of Les Pauls changed the narrative.
Reflecting on that video, which has 2.5 million views at the time of writing, 11 years later, the bluesman has revealed he was wholly unprepared for it. In fact, all he wanted was a martini and the chance to put his feet up after a grueling day.
“What stood between me and a martini was this 30-minute lesson,” he tells Tyler Larson and Jared James Nichols on the No Cover Charge podcast.
He was in at John Henry's, the famed gear hire warehouse in London, England, busy on the press trail for his Different Shades of Blue album. The record's release had been bolstered by his collaborative record with Beth Hart, Seesaw, scoring him his first of four Grammy nominations he’d had to this day.
His itinerary for the trip was exhausting. A chat with Guitarist magazine was the last task to check off. Or so he thought.
“We had a long day,” Bonamassa sighs. “I was there with my tour manager, Clay, and we're at John Henry's, and they're [Guitarist] like, ‘Okay, now that we're done with all this, we were promised a half-hour guitar lesson on camera.’ I'm like, ‘Nobody told me that.’”
That martini would have to wait a little while longer. Bonamassa opted to play ball.
“I go, ‘I could teach you everything I know in, like, 15 minutes, okay? I just can't teach you how to apply it. That's it's a personal thing,’” he continues. “But you know the feeling, of course, when you've checked out.
“So I quickly came up with something. I completely blagged the whole fucking thing. And then it was one of the first videos of mine that went viral.”
Having had a Dickey Betts Les Paul reissue plonked in his hands, and with an amp “way back” out of the way, he focused on the guitar he was holding. More specifically, he wanted to show viewers how to re-characterize the electric guitar’s voice by using its onboard controls. Or, as he charmingly calls it, the lesson was “the affirmation of how you don't know your own fucking instrument.”
“I said, ‘You realize that all of the sounds in your head can come out of this little thing right here.’ Forget these [strings/humbuckers] — it's how you tweak the knobs and how what you hear in here is being channelled through the guitar.
“What you have here is a plethora of sounds without having to plug into one pedal,” he says in the well-watched three-minute clip. “How? Well, you have your volumes, pickup selector, and the forgotten tone knob.”
He very quickly unfurls Eric Clapton's famous woman tone, followed by a mean Wes Montgomery impression, a “bright, clean sound,” and Johnny Winter/Freddie King–style guitar solo tones.
There's something about the pace with which he cranks through the gears here, clearly thinking about clocking off, that really accentuates his mastery of the Gibson singlecut. It also, as the lesson intends to, shows how diverse-sounding the instrument can be without looking to external sources for answers.
Yet, despite playing Les Pauls more often than any other model of guitar, he has recently hailed the Fender Stratocaster as the Swiss Army knife of guitars, outstripping the LP’s versatility.
He’s also given the backstory of one of his most obscure Les Pauls, Royal Albert, which he saved from 50 years of collecting dust under its previous owner’s staircase. The profit made on a guitar bought for £50 in 1967 is also outrageous.
But it wasn’t the Les Paul he placed above all others when picking which guitars to move away from his Nerdville home as the L.A. Wildfires closed in.
His lesson-giving days are far from over, either, as he tells Gibson, the days of mindless shredding are long gone, but adds that this one trick will always be a crowd pleaser.
