“He wanted to show me his really nice old Les Paul, and I just said, ‘I don’t like Les Pauls,’ and walked off”: When Joe Bonamassa was introduced to Joanne Shaw Taylor – who “offended” him on their first meeting

Joe Bonamassa’s rolodex of guitar greats is as comprehensive as it gets, and one of his closest contemporary collaborators is Joanne Shaw Taylor – who left quite the first impression when the two players met.

Having emerged from the UK pub circuit as one of the country’s finest blues guitar exports in recent memory, Taylor first struck up a friendship with Bonamassa in 2008. Over the years, the pair have performed together, recorded together, and in 2022, Bonamassa produced Taylor’s The Blues Album.

It’s been a fruitful collaboration to say the least, although it’s one that might not have gotten off the ground had things turned out slightly differently at that first meeting – during which Taylor “offended” Bonamassa.

“It was at the Notodden Blues Festival in 2008,” Bonamassa tells Classic Rock when asked of their first meeting. “We ran into each other at the hotel check-in.”

“And I offended you,” Taylor remembers. “Because you wanted to show me your really nice old Les Paul, and I just said, ‘I don’t like Les Pauls’ and walked off.”

Bonamassa wasn’t offended, though. In fact, he admired the straight-talking Taylor: “I said, ‘Ah, she’s cool.’ Matter of fact I don’t think she liked my music at all – which is why we bonded.”

Joanne Shaw Taylor - "Summertime" (Live) - ft. Joe Bonamassa - YouTube

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The pair bonded further when they next met up in New York, during which they both reflected on their early years as aspiring child guitar players who had been thrust into the gigging circuit from an especially young age.

“We stayed up all night talking,” Taylor recalls of the meeting. “You were the first person I’d met who had started at the same age. We weren’t exactly child stars – we weren’t Macaulay Culkin. But it was kind of weird to have your parents driving you up the motorway to gigs, aged thirteen, skipping days of school.

“So we had a lot to talk about. The next day, I got stranded in New Jersey and we just hung out until you finally got sick of me and shipped me off to Memphis.”

As mentioned, Taylor’s dislike of Les Pauls did little to deter Nerdville’s curator. That didn’t mean Taylor was completely ambivalent about the rest of Bonamassa’s collection, though, and when she came to record The Blues Album, she was keen to try some of JoBo’s guitars.

However, Taylor soon found out it didn’t prove to be quite the experience she was expecting, as she once told Guitar World.

“I phoned him and was like, ‘You do know I’m not bringing shit to this session?’ Who goes to Nerdville and takes their own gear?” she said. “It just felt stupid. When I got down, we used a few of his amps, but I really struggled to play his guitars. I didn’t realise how different our setups are.”