Blues To The Bone

06/07/1999 4:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
David John Farinella

It's been 25 years since George Thorogood first strapped on his now-signature white Gibson guitar, stood in front of the Destroyers and belted out a rave-'em-up bunch of blues songs. 25 years later, you gotta wonder if it's still exciting. "No, it's not exciting, I'd much rather be in the dentist business," he says, laughing. "Yes, it's exciting. I would be hard-pressed to find another line of work that is this exciting."

Wait a minute, does that mean he doesn't want to trade in his Gibson for a set of drilling tools and collection of toothbrushes? "It's rewarding to just be here, period. With the music it's just a bonus," he replies. Oh.

George Thorogood's music is a collection of hard-edged blues originals--written by names like Howlin' Wolf, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley--that he's made his own. Whether it was "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" from his self-titled debut or the classic "Bad To The Bone" or even Willie Dixon & Eddie Shaw's "I Don't Trust Nobody" from his current release, Half A Boy/ Half A Man, Thorogood has brought some of America's classic songs to a brand-new generation.

That new generation, in fact, spans Gen Y, Gen X and the Baby Boomers. When he says young people come to his shows, he means young people. "I'm talking like 10, 12 years old. Either junior brings Mom and Pop or Mom and Pop bring the kids. I'm talking young here, not a college drinking crowd," he emphasizes. And when he says older, he means older. "There are now grandmothers and grandfathers coming to see us because they are of that age, they grew up in the '50s and '60s and they bring their sons and their daughters to hear the songs they heard when they were young."

On his latest release, some of those vintage songs include the genius "Nothing New" and "Hellbound Train," as well as his own songs "Just Passin' Thru" and the stunning country number "Not Tonight (I Have A Heartache)."

As he explains it, there is no rhyme or reason to how he picks the songs for an album. "There's a couple songs on this record that I heard over 20 years ago, some of them even longer, and I just stuck 'em in the back of my mind and said, 'Someday, push comes to shove, I might have to do that song.' Then there's others that I may have just been turned on to recently and say, 'I gotta do that right away before somebody else does.'"

He's fortunate to have such a wide palette of songs to choose from, and he feels a bit like he's keeping alive a part of American music culture that may die at some point. "Our act is nothing more than a combination of what Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, the Stones, the J. Geils Band, Mitch Ryder, and the Detroit Wheels did," he says. "That's all I was doing from day one. I watched all those acts, Johnny Cash and Howlin' Wolf, and I put together a little thing in my head and said, 'This is how it's done.' That's all I've been doing for the last 20 years. The writers in the early days said, 'This guy did his homework. He studied this.' Like I always say, 'I didn't write the book, but I sure as hell read it.'"

No matter what the song or the purpose, Thorogood admits that he that mostly he's a live performer. "The records are made for that, to get us on that bandstand," he says, adding humbly, "I'm never going to write like Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Paul Simon or Joni Mitchell or any of those people, and I'm never going to be able to play the guitar like Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton. I know I'm not going to sing like Aretha Franklin or Elvis Presley or any of those people. All I have is my performance, I try to feed in the best of everything that I could possibly do into those 90 minutes and to make a live entertainment show out of it."

More than anything, it's that hard work and his live reputation that has enabled Thorogood to be around to tour again. "Luck is the residue of design," he explains. "You can't rely on luck. I've had some stages in my career where I've said we're going to wing it, and we've always ended up in trouble. We've plotted through the years of how to get to here, where we are now, or we would have never made it."