The title of Bonamassa’s back-to-the-blues diptych is borrowed from a cut on another enormously-influential album of the ‘sixties, the Jeff Beck Group’s Truth. The “Beano” album was over ten years old by the time Bonamassa was born, and its reverential takes on Chicago blues had long since morphed into the bone-crushing blues-rock of the Jeff Beck Group, Led Zeppelin, the early version of Fleetwood Mac, and other off-shoots of the London blues scene. That seminal album, along with the first Paul Butterfield LP, The Blues Project Live at the Café Au Go Go, and a few other white-kids-play-the-blues collections, led many a bedazzled young lad or lass to seek out the hard stuff-Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Etta James, the Three Kings, John Lee Hooker, the list goes on.

He cites hearing John Mayall & the Blues Breakers with Eric Clapton (the “Beano” album) as a particularly revelatory encounter. 2įor Joe Bonamassa, the UK “guitar gods” of the sixties were the gateway drug that led him to develop a passion for the blues.

Lazy poker blues band still lazy