‘There was a lot of fighting and drinking at our shows. We played for bikers, for Hell’s Angels. We would break records for beer sales everywhere we played’
Before Bad to the Bone, we just played obscure blues songs from the archives. But when we toured with the Rolling Stones, I noticed the reaction to their Start Me Up. I said: “Man, we’d better hurry up and write an original song with a catchy intro or, five years from now, people will go, ‘Oh yeah, George Thorogood – wasn’t he good at playing Chuck Berry or something?’”
Bad to the Bone is a male fantasy. Let’s face it: every guy wants to be bad. We were raised on Hollywood movies and all those tough guys, like Bernardo from West Side Story, or Howlin’ Wolf – we opened for him in 1974 and he had a ferocious reputation.
Johnny Cash’s advice for songwriters was to write down a bunch of words that rhyme then work around that. So I started with “bone”. Then I remembered that in our neighbourhood, the word “bad” meant “cool”. Like, Steve McQueen was cool, but James Bond was bad, y’know?
First, we shopped the song to Muddy Waters, but his manager got very irritated, saying Muddy would never record a blues song by a white guy. And I said: “That’s a bunch of horse manure.” If Eric Clapton or Keith Richards had written it, they’d have recorded it in a minute. But me being a nobody from Delaware, they turned us down.
