JOE BONAMASSA

Amid the mayhem of his European tour, Joe takes time out to give us a guided tour around his 2025 live gear, delivers the lowdown on some of his more storied guitars, and tells us why his mighty multi-amp rig has to run at breaking point in order to make the earth move and those riffs resonate...

- David Mead

Let’s face it, this year didn’t exactly get off to a good start for Joe Bonamassa. For the first time, his renowned collection of guitars and amps at his LA home, known as Nerdville West, was under threat via circumstances that were raging completely out of his control. January’s wildfires in California came way too close for comfort, and suddenly the whimsical question that we’ve asked many players in these pages regarding which instrument they’d save from a burning building became not only personal but horrifically real. “I mean, I got evacuated and a lot of stuff had to be moved around,” he tells us. “It’s something I'd care not to go through again, but a lot of people lost everything, so I consider I’m one of the lucky ones.”

At the time, Joe posted on social media a film of him standing by a fully laden van, saying that he’d done all he could while preparing to drive some of his more irreplaceable instruments and amps to safety. “A friend and I were able to get all the big stuff out,” he continues. “The Flying Vs, there were nine sunburst Les Pauls at the house at that time, a fancy Martin, the Broadcaster... all the big stuff went. We only had one shot and it was like, I think, 55 guitars and a Dumble and a Trainwreck. My manager [Roy Weisman] was there a couple of weeks later for the Grammys, and he was at my house. He’s like, ‘Wow, you really did a good job putting everything back after you were evacuated.’ I said, ‘Roy, this is what I left behind.’ I mean, I have 400 guitars there and probably 300 amps; there was just no way I could take all of it. It would take a week to move it.”