Before Bad to the Bone, George Thorogood and his band played mostly old blues songs, pulled from the archives. But that all changed when they toured with the Rolling Stones.
Thorogood noticed the audience's reaction to the intro to "Start Me Up" and realized that he too needed an original song with a memorable intro. Otherwise, as he saw it, in a few years people would simply remember him as "that musician who played well Chuck Berry."
Bad to the Bone was born as a male fantasy, built on the image of the strong, dangerous and unyielding man. Thorogood grew up with Hollywood films and figures such as Bernardo from West Side Story, Steve McQueen, James Bond and Howlin' Wolf, for whom his band had opened a concert in 1974. In that cultural world, being "bad" did not necessarily mean evil, but style, strength and charisma.
Johnny Cash’s advice to songwriters was simple: write down a list of rhyming words and build your lyrics around them. Thorogood started with the word “bone.” Then he remembered that in his neighborhood, the word “bad” was used to mean “cool.” Steve McQueen might be “cool,” but James Bond was “bad.”
The song was initially offered to Muddy Waters. But his manager reacted angrily, saying that Muddy would never record a blues song written by a white guy. Thorogood rejected the idea, saying that if Eric Clapton or Keith Richards had written it, the song would have been accepted immediately. But he was still an unknown name from Delaware, so the offer was rejected.
Since recording in a studio was expensive, the band carefully prepared the song before entering the studio. The famous vocal stutter came naturally to Thorogood. He linked it to the tradition of rock'n'roll: in 1965, The Who sang about the "ggg-generation", while a decade later Bachman-Turner Overdrive brought "bbb-baby you just ain't seen nothing yet". According to him, every ten years rock creates a new space for something like this.
Thorogood didn't have high expectations for Bad to the Bone. But when classic rock radio stations started playing it, the song exploded. It was played alongside Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller, and the Rolling Stones, and new listeners began to perceive it as an instant classic.
Then came Terminator 2. Arnold Schwarzenegger, according to Thorogood, was not someone to joke with. The band got a call from him, where the actor, in his Terminator voice, said: “Your song. Give it to me. Now.” Its use in the scenes with bikers and bar fights turned out to be perfect. The song had the right grit, but also a kind of hidden irony.
That was her idea, in essence. None of the band members saw themselves as dangerous men. Bad to the Bone brought out the “lion in the mouse,” but it wasn’t to be taken too seriously. It was, as Thorogood sees it, a joke overloaded with masculinity. Even today, when he pushes a stroller, a passerby tells him ironically that he was supposed to be a “bad boy.” His response is just as playful: wolves have cubs, but that doesn’t make them any less ferocious.
Drummer Jeff Simon remembers the moment the song took shape at Thorogood's house in Delaware. Thorogood came in saying he was working on a new song. He hadn't written much original material up until then, but it was clear to Simon that a band had to take that step, because repertoire was everything.
The band was formed under the influence of the blues, especially Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. Bad to the Bone came directly from that tradition. Simon doesn't try to present it as complicated music. According to him, it wasn't Beethoven: the band just went into the studio and recorded it. Thorogood was no Tom Jones, but he delivered the vocals with the right force. Even the drums weren't written in the score; Simon played what felt natural to him.
Later, he had a special conversation with Joey DeFrancesco, the famous musician who had played with Miles Davis. DeFrancesco told him that the drum intro reminded him of something Elvin Jones might have played. Simon took this as an incredible compliment, joking that it was probably the only time his name and Elvin Jones's would be mentioned in the same sentence.
The band's concerts often had a reputation for being rough. The anticipation was high, so much so that the band broke beer sales records wherever they performed. There were even fights. Once, at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver, the audience got so angry that Thorogood put down his guitar, got off the stage, and tried to break up the fight. They often played to bikers. On one occasion, some Hells Angels members came in and insisted on playing "Born to Be Wild." When the band told them they didn't know the song, the response was a curt, "You'll play it."
However, Simon's most memorable performance of "Bad to the Bone" remains the one at Universal Studios in 1996, when the Terminator attraction was inaugurated. It was a grand production, with Schwarzenegger descending onto the stage from a helicopter. For a song that had begun as a blues-rock fantasy about a bad boy, it was a moment that definitively sealed its myth. /GazetaExpress/
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