By Samuel J.Fell.
George Thorogood hasn’t changed much in over fifty years, and the punters love it.
George Thorogood appears on the screen looking just as one would expect George Thorogood to look – black shirt, black Ray Bans, the shock of dark hair topping his longish face, the face of boogie blues and rock ‘n’ roll for over half a century. He smiles and asks me what’s on my mind and I ask him how he is, a question to which he pauses and seems to think before saying, deadpan, “Bad.”
Of course, one would expect George Thorogood to be ‘bad’. He’s been bad since the early ‘80s (and earlier, indeed), but just in case, I ask him why he’s bad, what’s wrong with him, to which he half smirks and says, “No! That’s the whole deal! Bad, bad to the bone, you know?” Of course I know, this is George Thorogood I’m talking to. I tell him I’d have been quite upset if he wasn’t bad.
“There you go,” he smiles.
Thorogood, just turned 75, is in good spirits. Throughout our interview he laughs and makes jokes and throws down one-liners like breadcrumbs to birds; truly, even at this age and after so long plying his trade, he is in his element and appears, if anything, more energised than ever before.
From mid-April, Thorogood and long, long-time band The Destroyers will rip through Australia and New Zealand, beginning with sets at the Byron Bay Bluesfest and continuing on through towns and cities the country over, playing a few bigger dates with fellow lovers of the blues, ZZ Top. This is, of course, not the first time Thorogood and band have been to Australia, far from it – GT and the Destroyers have a solid fanbase over here, and whether they’re gracing huge festival stages, or smaller clubs and pubs, the punters are out in force, revelling in the music the band have made their own over so long.
“Oh, I know why it is,” Thorogood says when asked why he thinks the band’s music resonates so strongly with Australian audiences. “One word – beer.” He laughs, and I ask him if the same goes for him and the band. “Um, you know, to a degree, yes.
“But it doesn’t compare to Down Under, where you know… people say, name what is on the menu for Australians, for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I say, beer, beer and beer, OK? It’s almost like a way of life down there. I’m not pushing being an alcoholic, that’s not what I mean; it’s just part of your culture.
“Which, when we [first] went there, we couldn’t believe the response to us! And I have to say this, to be truthful, it didn’t have to do with just that one song (‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’)… they got off on the energy of our band, and it was vice versa. In other words, we were great dance partners.”
There is no doubt (and I say this from experience), that beer and rock ‘n’ roll blues do go rather well together, and so it’s no surprise that Thorogood recognises this. The energy that the band give out is returned to them via a boisterous bonhomie, and it’s this back and forth that has sustained Thorogood since he first hit the scene in the early ‘70s, first as a solo acoustic bluesman wannabe, and then with his band, developing their muscular sound into how we know them today.
And it’s this sound which defines George Thorogood. Little has changed, sonically, since those early days. One would think, perhaps, that this would become monotonous – I mean, look how Bob Dylan, with whichever band he’s surrounding himself with, reinvents the songs he’s been playing for almost a lifetime, sometimes into arrangements rendering the song almost unrecognisable (at least to a casual fan like myself).
However, this is not the George Thorogood way. “I don’t wanna do anything different,” he shrugs. “This is what I set out to do when I was a kid. And the style of music we play, was my passion from day one.”
“And I’m fortunate enough – I won’t say I’ve mastered it – but I’m fortunate enough to be able to do it enough to make a living, and that’s a thrill,” he goes on, enthusing, “to be playing music live, or even making records, and you’re doing the exact music you have a passion [for]?
“Let’s face it, there are a lot of people that make records or songs just ‘cos they wanna big hit or make a lot of money, OK? And sometimes they don’t even care for it, but they do it for that purpose. Like an actor making a movie that she doesn’t really care for, but she knows it’s gonna be a hit. That was never the factor with us. We’re playing exactly [what we wanna hear].”
“This is gonna sound strange,” he adds after a moment’s thought, “and don’t think this is an ego thing, but I would pay money to see us play. See what I’m saying? We’ve said amongst us, where are our Destroyers? You know, that we can get off on!”
He laughs, and adds, “The J. Geils Band broke my heart when they retired!”
I venture that, in a sense, Thorogood’s Destroyers are them – they get to go out and hear this music every single time they step onto a stage. “Well, it’s a mutual thing with us and the audience,” he muses. “When we play a song, I feel like I’m enjoying or getting off on this as much as the audience is. And that’s a blessing for us… don’t you agree?”
I cannot help but agree; over fifty years slinging blues/rock, in high octane fashion, drawing from the deep well that is the blues and wrapping it up in swathes of rock ‘n’ roll; it’s a formula older than the hills themselves at this point in time, but George Thorogood and The Destroyers have made it their mission to purvey it all to such a degree, that who knows what the world would be like if they stopped?
Well, actually, George Thorogood knows – it’d be bad.
George Thorogood & The Destroyers kick off their Australian tour at the Byron Bay Bluesfest, April 18. Full list of dates HERE.