photo: Jenise Jensen

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“The project itself was three years in the making,” Joe Bonamassa says of Live at the Hollywood Bowl with Orchestra, a CD/ DVD that presents his debut performance at the storied amphitheater in August 2023. “We originally were going to do the Colorado Symphony at Red Rocks in August of 2020, which obviously never happened. We had charts written and I was going to do half the show with the orchestra and half on my own. We were going to record that and make a DVD, but that got pushed to the side. Then we did another DVD at Red Rocks in 2022, so we didn’t want to do two in a row from there.”

“Otherwise,” he jokes, “people could get the wrong impression that I only play at Red Rocks or on a cruise ship.”

The change in venue allowed Bonamassa to realize one of his few remaining performance goals. He moved from New York City to Los Angeles in 2003 and had long aspired to appear at the Hollywood Bowl. So with song arrangements by David Campbell, Trevor Rabin and Jeff Bova, Bonamassa appeared with his septet, augmented by a 40-piece orchestra conducted by Campbell. The material spanned his career, from “If Heartaches Were Nickels,” which appears on his initial solo record, 2000’s A New Day Yesterday, through “Twenty-Four Hour Blues,” from his most recent studio effort, 2023’s Blues Deluxe Vol. 2.

“I live close to Hollywood Bowl,” Bonamassa says. “I’m just over the hill, and I can see the lights when they do shows over there. On occasion, I have made the fatal error of trying to get on the 101 northbound off Highland Ave. during a Bowl show, and that traffic has cost me hours of my life. So, finally, I was the one causing that. It doesn’t matter if it’s John Williams with the LA Phil or Rod Stewart or whoever’s playing there, every single driver that’s not attending that Bowl show is cursing the artist. So I love the fact that somebody drove by a marquee that said, ‘Tonight, Joe Bonamassa’ and was like, ‘I don’t know who Joe Bonamassa is but fuck that guy!’ It was a thrill for me.”

When One Door Opens

That’s the overture. We needed an orchestra intro, and it was kind of turnkey. It’s an original piece of music, and it’s not like we could say, “Hey, David, go out there and play two minutes of Bach.” [Laughs.]

That was something Jeff Bova wrote for the song when we did it on our Abbey Road record [2020’s Royal Tea, which was recorded at Abbey Road Studios]. So it’s the original piece of music that was all charted out and it set the tone of what the rest of the evening was going to be.

Jeff, who wrote a lot of the string arrangements for the Bowl and toured with us as part of the Bova Orchestra, was playing the charts while we were doing gigs, so we could get used to how many bars everything needed to be. It’s very specific and that’s how we got all our mistakes over with.

Curtain Call

“Curtain Call” is a newer song [from 2021’s Time Clocks], which is kind of proggy.

There’s an open-ended section in the middle that’s very specific. All of our guitar amps were off the stage—we couldn’t do our normal thing since there’s so much bleed. I memorized the orchestration in the middle section of “Curtain Call” because there are specific cues the orchestra would give to get us into the next section. So while I was doing the Theremin and all this kind of esoteric stuff, I was waiting for those cues and I was like, “OK, now we’ve got eight bars.” By the end of that section, you started to really feel how big this thing was going to sound.

I give a lot of credit to my drummer, Lamar Carter, who was definitely Easter egging some hits for me because he knew that I needed those cues. He would hit a little cymbal like a ping, and I was like, “Oh, here we go.”

Self-Inflicted Wounds

“Self-Inflicted Wounds” is one of the best songs I’ve ever written. That’s off of Redemption (2018), and it’s still in our live show. The one-two punch with “Curtain Call” was a lot of newer stuff, but we knew it was going to play well live. We had played those songs in front of crowds before and they really set the tone and got way bigger with the orchestra, as you would hope with an extra 42 pieces.

David Campbell arranged it, and he’s one of the best in the world. I’m not a string arranger and there are so many underground rivers that are traveling. I’m up there in the center, so I’m hearing the orchestra talking to itself between the brass and the strings and all of this stuff going on around me. I’m like, “Wow, this is really complicated stuff above my pay grade. I’m just going to play F-sharp minor and be happy with that.” Between David, Jeff Bova and Trevor Rabin, it doesn’t get any better.

No Good Place for the Lonely

We rehearsed the day before. We had 90 minutes with the orchestra before they would put their bows down and walk off the stage—that’s the union rule— which was the same on the night of the show.

We really had no beta test because we were touring. We toured for a month with those arrangements, but we would also cycle in other material. So we only played that show once in front of people, and I’m glad it worked out.

Kevin Shirley, our producer, was the bridge between the seven-piece band and the orchestra. He found a few mistakes in the rehearsal while he was reading the charts and would stop us.

David, to his credit, knew we were coming into their world more than they were coming into our world, and he was very sensitive about that. I’m not usually as regimented as I need to be, so it was definitely a learning curve.

The rehearsal also was a little stressful because some of the orchestra guys thought I was too loud and we were trying to get the happy medium.

I wasn’t sure if “No Good Place for the Lonely” was going to work because it’s kind of upbeat and busy to begin with. It was very tough to envision until I was actually in the room with those guys. It has a big solo at the end, but it’s a specific amount of bars and it really took to the orchestra well.

The Last Matador of Bayonne

We’d never played the song before that tour, and we’ve played it every night since. It was the one that was like, “Why haven’t we been playing this song forever?” I just never got to it. But with the orchestra and having a good run at the solo at the end, you could feel the energy coming off the stage.

Once again, Lamar Carter was just a genius because he knew I needed some cues. He’d remind me that we’d be approaching the point where the orchestra would keep going and we couldn’t be off the bars. They were reading the charts and David Campbell wasn’t going to tell them: “He’s going to go an extra round. Go back to chart one.”

“Last Matador” is about a gig I did at a bullring with ZZ Top back in 2008. We were on this tour with ZZ Top, playing this circuit of Roman amphitheaters. There’s a bunch of them that the Romans built outside of Italy for matadors and gladiators. We play them every couple of years.

So in this bullring, there was this little room where the matador would sit and pray before facing the bull. I thought, “Man, 2,000 years ago, the entertainment was a lot different than ZZ Top.” Then I wondered about the last guy to sit in this room before going out there. So it’s a song about bygone eras and the matador who had to acknowledge that he might die doing what he did for a living.

People sometimes accuse me of being highfalutin and up my own ass. So I was like, “Well, it’s the Hollywood Bowl and they’re going to finally get their wish because we’re going totally bow tie and white glove and hors d’oeuvres before dinner.” [Laughs.]

Ball Peen Hammer

This is one of the songs that was easier to orchestrate. We’d already had some orchestration done for the record [2007’s Sloe Gin], so that was helpful.

“Ball Peen Hammer” was one of my favorite Chris Whitley songs. I knew Chris back in the day. I met him at a place called The Patio in Indianapolis. We had a pretty good power trio going at the time. I opened up for him and he came out with a National Dobro guitar and a piece of wood that had a kick-drum trigger on it, and it was the most intense, loud, solo acoustic gig I’ve ever seen in my entire life. He blew us off the stage. I was like, “Holy shit, is this guy on another planet?”

I would later run into him in Europe. He was very popular there, but at that gig at the Patio he only had maybe 75 people there and he was just by himself. I was a fan of his full-band stuff, but him by himself was just out of this world. He gave me a copy of his record Dirt Floor, and “Ball Peen Hammer” was always one of my favorite songs. I could never find a full-band version of it. I covered it with an orchestra [on Sloe Gin], but I don’t think he ever heard it before he died. He was 45 at the time.

To me, he’s a true hall of famer, and anybody who’s not hip to Chris Whitley is doing themselves a disservice musically because he was a deep lyric writer and a wonderful guitarist and musician. It’s like |if Leonard Cohen played a Dobro. His daughter, Trixie, is really good as well. She lives in Belgium. Daniel Lanois was producing her, and they had a band. We did the Gent Jazz Festival with them once, and they were really good, so I guess music runs in the family.

If he was still alive, he would totally be packing theaters out on his own right now because, with talent like that, you can only keep it underground for so long. He was one of those guys just hiding in plain sight.

Prisoner

“Prisoner” is a fan favorite, although it was never a favorite of mine. It was always at the top of the list of the fan polls, with people asking when I was going to play it. But I thought it was too high to sing and I just didn’t feel the same way about the song that the fans did. Then we finally did it and it came out great. The orchestra really glued it together and it was a showstopper.

If Heartaches Were Nickels

In 1997 or ‘98, I got signed to Sony Music and we were looking for songs. I was doing the record with Tom Dowd and I’d known Warren [Haynes] from working with him while I was in the band Bloodline five or six years before that. Warren sent over three or four songs that he had written in the ‘80s or early ‘90s when he was in Nashville, back when you made very complete demos. These were like records—they weren’t acoustic, they were fully produced demos. “Heartaches” was one of them and the song just immediately hit me.

I always wonder why Warren never recorded it himself, either with Mule or on a solo record. [He eventually did record the song on Gov’t Mule’s 2021 album, Heavy Load Blues]. It was the same thing with “Soulshine,” where Larry McCray was the first guy to cut it. Warren had this bag of songs that were floating around for years and they finally found homes with Larry McCray and myself. I don’t think you can go to a Gov’t Mule show now and not hear “Soulshine.” It’s one of his classic songs—among others—but all those were written at the same time. There’s a real style to those songs he was writing then. “Heartaches” has a great sentiment, and the tempo being a big ballad really lends itself to orchestration. There’s plenty of space for them.

You’ve got to leave the space or else it just makes no sense to go through all this stuff to do an orchestra show when your band’s just going to run over them. The orchestra can play along, but if it doesn’t separate, it just sounds like a cacophony and it’s not worth doing.

The Ballad of John Henry

Every artist has songs that resonate with the fans but sometimes don’t resonate with them. “The Ballad of John Henry” is one of those where it came out and everybody was like, “Oh, my God, that song!” I didn’t necessarily feel the same way, but the thing about it is the fans tell you what resonates with them, and you have to be in tune with that. I know some artists just ignore it and go on their merry way, but I personally love the fact that something I wrote resonates, and far be it for me to question it. We played it ad nauseum for years. It’s Eric Gales’ favorite song to sit in with us on.

Trevor did a great arrangement of it. I remember hearing the orchestra and being like, “Shit, it sounds like we’re in a Jerry Bruckheimer film.” Trevor does all the Jeffrey Bruckheimer movies—the big ones—and I was like, “That’s the sound of it.” So I was really thrilled with the way it came out.

That was the last song of the night. We walked off and then we did a two-song encore.

Twenty-Four Hour Blues

Calvin Turner, our bass player, who’s a brilliant musician overall, did the string arrangements for this one. It was a last-minute entry. He had two week notice and his charts were flawless. He’s an overachiever and we love him, so we were saying, “Of course, Calvin’s chart are flawless.” He wrote it on his computer.

Kevin was like, “I’m not sure if we have time.” I said, “Let’s do it. It’s on the new record and we need to do something off the record.” It was a great orchestration and it turned out to be a star.

That was the first encore, and it really set up “Sloe Gin” nicely. I didn’t want to do two ballads back-to-back, but they’re totally different songs. And with an orchestra, you almost have to check that instinct of writing setlist peaks and valleys. You have to check that at the door because you have a finite amount of material, and orchestra stuff, by nature with the band, is very majestic and big. So it’s a lot of hot fudge sundaes throughout the night.

Sloe Gin

That was the first song we thought of for the encore. It was either that or “Mountain Time.” I’m not sure why we didn’t orchestrate “Mountain Time,” but I think it was a time consideration, no pun intended. “Sloe Gin” just seemed right. Play the hits, as they say.

I started my career playing the Mint in Los Angeles, and the fact that we were able to do the Bowl was insane. I was very happy with the turnout and it felt like a real retrospective of how far this thing has come.

Now that we have the charts, we have offers for next summer in Europe. At North Sea Jazz and a few of the big festivals, they have national orchestras. It’s BYOC—bring your own charts— and it’ll be a lot easier to do this again. With the first time, there was the challenge of getting your head around what it’s actually going to take to do this correctly. It wasn’t all rainbows and bunny rabbits. There was some hard work and frustration along the way, but I’m very proud of the end result. We got there.