George Thorogood & The Destroyers
Courtesy - The VancouveSun.com
May 2-3, 8 p.m. | Hard Rock Casino Vancouver (Coquitlam)
Tickets: $49.50 plus charges at Ticketmaster.ca
“Get a haircut and get a real job.”
At the mid-point in his career, now 40 years strong, George Thorogood wrote an unlikely hit.
In 1993, during an era dominated by grunge, with plaid flannel shirts and long, greasy hair the signifiers of a new rock generation the same way paisley print and bell-bottom pants (and long, greasy hair) had been that of the ’60s, there was little room for a blues-rock anthem.
Yet, Get A Haircut became Thorogood’s new calling card, a tune as beloved now as the other big hits in his catalogue — Bad To The Bone, and his classic reboot of Bo Diddley’s House Rent Blues/One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer — and one that, unlike many of his hits, he penned himself.
“We just got incredibly lucky with the timing,” Thorogood said in a recent phone interview. “The grunge rock/garage thing was big at that time. I said, ‘Eventually, Neil Young is going to write a song like this. And he’s going to give it to Nirvana or Alice In Chains or someone like that.
“Actually, the song is the same song as Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young when they sang, ‘I almost cut my hair.’ Sometimes, something is so old it’s new. But what really thrilled me is that when we did it, the song went to No. 1 requested and No. 1 most played song in Canada on FM radio. Not in sales, but you take a No. 1 for what it is. ‘Well, Canada is our place! We’re going to play Haircut for the rest of our lives up there.’”
Get A Haircut is evidently featured on George Thorogood and The Destroyers’ new ICON compilation, a bargain collection of Thorogood’s most famous cuts that includes live versions of Who Do You Love? and One Bourbon ... and a newly recorded (and quite excellent) cover of Howlin’ Wolf’s Do The Do.
Although the song has been part of his live arsenal for decades, there is a good reason why Thorogood hadn’t put the song to tape until now.
“I’ve been singing it since 1970,” he said with a laugh. “But I’m not a flat-picker, that style that Hubert Sumlin and Eric Clapton play. I’m a finger picker — I can never get that lick down. Actually, it’s a variation of the Whole Lotta Love lick. I could never play that.
“But next to Howlin’ Wolf, nobody can do Howlin’ Wolf like I can.”
Although Thorogood is slinging an unlikely golden Gibson Les Paul on the ICON album cover, on the back he is showing off a classic semi-hollow body Gibson ES-125, the guitar on which he built his signature sound. (Thorogood has two of these that have become legend, White Fang and Blacktooth.)
“There I am looking like a tough inner-city rock punk,” he said with a chuckle. “That was the energy I was trying to portray anyway. That’s the rock thing, isn’t it?”