“There’s nothing more deflating and Spinal Tap than going to one of the epicenters of the blues and drawing zero people”: Joe Bonamassa recalls his worst gig
With over three thousand gigs under his belt, blues legend Joe Bonamassa is no stranger to the highs and lows of live performance. From sold-out theaters to sparsely attended club shows, he’s seen it all. And just like any other job, some nights are better than others.
“I’ve done a lot of shows,” Bonamassa tells Guitar World. “If you take the last 25 years with an average of 100 shows a year, that’s 2,500 shows right there. Between 1990 and 2000, I probably did 1,000 shows, so we could be looking at over 3,500 gigs in all, and thankfully, more of them were good than bad.”
But every musician has that one show – the kind that lives in infamy. For JoBo, that moment came in the year 2000, after the release of his debut solo album, A New Day Yesterday.
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“All musicians have bad shows,” he says. “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.”
The incident took place at Beale Street Live in Memphis – a venue that no longer exists, now replaced by a Coyote Ugly. The gig was set up as a door-deal, where the band would receive 100% of ticket sales. With tickets priced at $12, it had the potential to be a great payday. But there was just one problem: no one showed up.
“Our showtime was 8:30, no opening act. I was backstage and I said, ‘It’s kind of quiet out there,’” Bonamassa recalls. “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.”
“There’s nothing more deflating and Spinal Tap than going to one of the epicenters of the blues and drawing zero people,” the guitarist adds. “Not a single person paid, no one came in. The bartender said, ‘If you start playing, people might come in.’ But it was a rainy Tuesday night. I said, ‘There’s nobody out on the street. We’re done.’”
“We ended up working on a couple of things arrangement-wise, so it was like a rehearsal. I think we worked up the Starship Trooper ending to one of our songs because we were just fucking around. This went on for 45 minutes. Not even the bartender was watching us. It was ridiculous.”
That night, Bonamassa walked away with nothing but a Diet Coke and a brutal lesson in the unpredictability of the music business. “So the Golden Goose Award for that day goes to Joe Bonamassa,” he says. “If you looked at the settlement sheet for that gig, it was zero paid.”
“I didn’t play Memphis for years. Nowadays, we play there to packed houses and it’s great, but I always tell the story about the Golden Goose.”
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