George Thorogood, songwriter/vocals/guitar
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?
double quotation markBad to the Bone brings out the lion in the mouse, but it’s not to be taken that seriously
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.
Recording is expensive, so we rehearsed Bad to the Bone so that it wouldn’t take long when we got in the studio. The stutter in the vocal just seemed natural to me. In 1965, there was “talking about my g-g-g-generation”. A decade later, there was “b-b-b-baby you just ain’t seen nothing yet”. Every 10 years in rock’n’roll, something is up for grabs.
I didn’t have any expectations for Bad to the Bone. But when classic rock radio stations got hold of the song, it took off. They played it right next to Led Zeppelin, Steve Miller and the Stones, and the young people listening just figured: “Well, Bad to the Bone is a classic.”
Then it appeared in Terminator 2. Arnold Schwarzenegger is not somebody to be trifled with. We got a call from him saying in his Terminator voice: “Your song. Give it to me. Now.” It was perfect for the biker and bar fight scenes, because it was rough. There was a bit of violence, but it was tongue-in-cheek.
That’s the whole idea of the song. None of us in the band are tough guys. Bad to the Bone brings out the lion in the mouse, but it’s not to be taken that seriously. It’s an over-masculine chuckle. These days, I’ll be pushing a baby buggy and some people will go: “Oh, you’re supposed to be some kind of bad guy, huh?” And I’m like: “Well, y’know, even wolves have babies – it doesn’t make ’em any less bad!”
Jeff Simon, drums
I remember being in George’s house in Delaware when he came in saying: “Hey, I’m working on this song.” He hadn’t done a lot of writing before that, but at some point you have to make that step, because material is everything.
We started out with a lot of blues influences, like Bo Diddley and Muddy Waters. Bad to the Bone was right along those lines. It has a popular hook and similar things have been done many times before. We’re equal-opportunities thieves: we steal from everybody. And everybody does it. You take your influences and make them your own.
Bad to the Bone is not Beethoven – we just went in there and knocked it out. And George isn’t Tom Jones, but he really delivered that vocal. I didn’t chart out my drum part, I just played what felt right. But later I had an interesting conversation with Joey DeFrancesco – a musical genius who played with Miles Davis. He told me my intro reminded him of something [jazz great] Elvin Jones would’ve played. And I thought: “Well, that’s the only time our names will be said in the same sentence.”
There was a lot of drinking at our shows. We would break records for beer sales everywhere we played. And there was fighting. One time, we were playing at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver and the crowd were just going at it. George put his guitar down and jumped off the stage to break it up. We played for a lot of bikers too. One time, these Hells Angels came in demanding Born to be Wild. We said: “Sorry, we don’t know that one.” They said: “You’re gonna play it.”
But our most memorable performance of Bad to the Bone was at Universal Studios, when they opened the Terminator ride in 1996. It was a big production, with Arnold coming down on to the stage from a helicopter. That was something, y’know?
The Baddest Show on Earth: Greatest Hits Live is released on 12 June, and the band play the UK on 29/30 June