Kelly Marquel was the lucky recipient of Alex Marquel’s entry into the Joe Bonamassa autographed guitar, meet and greet and concert tickets giveaway. All that was needed was to go to our website, www.bhamweekly.com and register. That couldn’t be easier. She was chosen from hundreds of entries by random selection.
Doug Gilbert also benefitted from the march of entropy as he was selected for second prize of a pair of Joe Bonamassa tickets. If you didn’t enter, you should have. Just keep checking out our website and you can correct some of your previous failings without the need for therapy.
Never heard of Bonamassa as his own front man? He recalls at age 7, sitting with his parents on Saturdays and listening to Guitar Slim; Bonnie Raitt; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Eric Clapton; and Jethro Tull. Thus, he sees his music as an amalgam of all the various rock and blues he heard as a child. He has since played with Buddy Guy, Foreigner, Robert Cray, Stephen Stills, Joe Cocker, Gregg Allman, Steve Winwood, Paul Jones, Ted Nugent, Warren Haynes, Eric Clapton, Derek Trucks, and Jack Bruce. For an American rocker, he went to a strange source to get the blues. Within the genre, hearing the traditional blues players, as with Guitar Slim, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and all the traditional American players, (with the exception of B.B. King), comparing the music in the United States to the “European” versions of the blues, Bonamassa found the English blues, fostered by the Jeff Beck Group, Eric Clapton, and the Irish blues player Rory Gallagher to be far more interesting to him than the original Delta blues players.
Bonamassa’s solo début, in 2000, was his Top 10 Blues disc A New Day Yesterday, named after the 1969 Jethro Tull classic. Bonamassa followed it up in 2002 with “So, It’s Like That”, which included “Pain And Sorrow”. The album was his first to hit #1 on Billboard’s Blues Chart. Reviewing 2003’s “Blues Deluxe”, former Creem editor Jaan Uhelszki stated, “New York guitar phenom walks tall in the blues tradition…jettisoning fiery riffs inspired by John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, Elmore James, and Albert Collins into the future with furious playing, a hard-rock sensibility, and a grizzled voice that owes a debt to Gregg Allman. Equally inspired by the Delta blues and the mid-’60s British blues boom, the young firebrand … is able to fuse those two schools together, creating edgy blues rock.” Had To Cry Today followed in 2004.
I could go on and on but, better yet, just read the impressions of the concert in Birmingham by Sean Humphreys and check out the photos by Austin Richardson. And don’t fail to take it seriously next time we are giving guitars and tickets away.
Those who participated were treated to some nice sights and sounds at the BJCC.
For those who are more easily approached through their sense of stomach, we have also been trying to give away some Mudtown gift certificates for those who could answer some movie trivia--if not from their own vast storehouse of knowledge, then from reading the Birmingham Weekly. Cooper Bennett was the first one clever enough to divine F. Scott Fitzgerald’s . We are still waiting for someone to take the second place certificate by giving the answer and giving an account of the author’s merit. If you are hungry, get busy so we can give all this food away.
You can also win a meal ticket by going back to the last issue to guess the most often quoted movie line of all time, even ahead of such cerebral utterances as “I’ll be back.” To check out what we are still giving away today, go to http://www.bhamweekly.com/birmingham/article-2694-favorite-leftovers.html.
And if you are a quick reader, you can still make it to the wine dinner at Cosmo’s on Thursday, December 1.