‘Using his Terminator voice, Arnie said: “Your song. Give it to me. Now”‘: George Thorogood on Bad to the Bone | Music

George Thorogoodsongwriter/vocalist/guitarist

Before we started Bad to the Bone, we just played some obscure blues songs from the archives. But when we talked to the Rolling Stones, I saw what they did with their Start Me Up. I said: “Man, we better hurry up and write an original song with a catchy intro or, five years from now, people are going to say, ‘Yeah, George Thorogood – didn’t he know how to sing Chuck Berry or something?'”

Bad for Bone is a male fantasy. Let’s just say it: Every guy wants to be bad. We were raised on Hollywood movies with tough guys, like Bernardo from West Side Story, or Howlin’ Wolf – we opened for him in 1974 and he had a bad reputation.

Johnny Cash’s advice to songwriters was to write a bunch of lyrics that have a melody and then work around them. So I started with “bone”. Then I remembered that in our community, the word “bad” means “cold”. Like, Steve McQueen was cool, but James Bond was evil, you know?

First, we bought the song from Muddy Waters, but his manager was very angry, saying that Muddy would not record a white man’s blues song. And I said: “That is a pile of horse manure.” If Eric Clapton or Keith Richards wrote it, they would record it in a minute. But I, being without a person from Delaware, refused us.

Recording is expensive, so we rehearsed Bad to the Bone to save time when we got into the studio. The stuttering in the speech just seemed natural to me. In 1965, there was “talk about my gg-generation”. Ten years later, there was “bbb-baby you ain’t seen nothing here”. Every 10 years in rock’n’roll, something happens.

I had no expectations for Bad to the Bone. But when mainstream rock stations picked up the song, it took off. He played it next to Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller and the Stones, and the young listeners just thought: “Okay, Bad to the Bone is great.”

Then it appeared inside Terminator 2. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not a man to be compared to. We got a call from him saying in his Terminator voice: “Your song. Give it to me. Now.” It was great for bike and bar fighting, because it was hard. There was a bit of violence, but it was tongue-in-cheek.

That’s the whole idea of ​​the song. None of us in this group are tough guys. Bad for Bone brings out the lion in the mouse, but it should not be taken seriously. It’s a manly laugh. Today, I asked some young kids and they said: “Oh, you can be such a bad person? And I’m like: “Well, you know, even wolves have children – it doesn’t make them bad!”

Jeff Simon, drums

I remember being in George’s house in Delaware when he came in and said: “Hey, I’m working on this song.” He hadn’t written much before this, but at some point you have to make that step, because material is everything.

We started with a lot of blues influences, like Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. Bad for Bone was along those lines. This is a popular hook and similar things have happened many times in the past. We are equal opportunity thieves: we steal from everyone. And everyone does it. You take your inspiration and make it your own.

Bad for Bone is not Beethoven – we just went in there and knocked it down. And George is not Tom Jones, but he gave the voice. I didn’t name my drum part, I just played what I felt good about. But then I had an interesting conversation with Joey DeFrancesco – the musician who played with Miles Davis. He told me my introduction reminded him of something (very jazzy) Elvin Jones would play. And I thought: “Well, it’s the only time our names will be mentioned in the same sentence.”

There was a lot of drinking at our shows. We were breaking sales records everywhere we played. And there was a fight. One time, we were playing at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver and the crowd was just going. George put his guitar down and jumped off the stage to break up. We also played a lot of bikers. Once upon a time, these Hell’s Angels came to demand Born Wild. We said: “Sorry, we don’t know that one.” They said: “Play it.”

But our most memorable Bad to the Bone performance was at Universal Studios, when they opened the Terminator tour in 1996. It was a big production, with Arnold coming off the stage from a helicopter. That was something, you know?