Courtesy Madi Silvers | Medium.com

How does it feel to be 17 again?

This was not your average Friday night. Sitting in a pool of my own sweat during Paris’ record-breaking canicule, I really started to question my own sanity. While weather alerts continued flashing across my phone with phrases like “nobody is safe,” “keep your skin moist,” and “stay inside,” I, per usual, chose the path of most resistance, and for what? For music, duh. As I headed back out into the thick of it with my hair becoming more and more like Rod Stewart’s by the minute and the streets of Paris’ 11th arrondissement steaming around my feet, I arrived at one of the city’s many temples of music: The Bataclan.

In that, here we are folks, all in the name of rock and roll. King of boogie blues George Thorogood and the Destroyers took the stage, but not before Wisconsin native Jared James Nichols opened things up. He serenaded the audience with something very much akin to the love child of Guns N’ Roses, Def Leppard, Whitesnake, and Aerosmith all rolled into one. Epic might be the word of choice. Nichols’ long blonde curls and finger-tapped guitar solos landed enthusiastically with the evening’s crowd.

At one point, a roadie wandered across the stage wearing a Loveless Café t-shirt. It was a detail that somehow felt perfectly at home in the strange fever dream unfolding before us. For those of you who have spent time inside this Nashville-adjacent dining establishment, consider this to be a very special shoutout. Meanwhile, security guards at Bataclan spent most of the evening spraying concertgoers with Evian mist bottles, extending what felt like an olive branch during an otherwise merciless week. Very French and very appreciated.

Then something very, very American was about to transpire. As the humidity rapidly increased, so too did the excitement. The lights dropped and Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction” rolled through the venue’s speaker system, which was the most relevant walkout song imaginable as we stood embroiled in what felt suspiciously like Dante’s Inferno. Then, a somewhat shy-looking 76-year-old man stepped onto the stage, but within minutes, George Thorogood had turned back time. We were no longer looking at a 76-year-old, we were suddenly in a recording studio in 1976 in Wilmington, Delaware.

A thick fog hanging in the air, the melodies were rolling and he was no longer shy. Mesmerizing the audience through a string of hits including “Who Do You Love?”, “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” and the definitive “Bad to the Bone,” Thorogood reminded everyone exactly why he remains one of rock and roll’s undisputed masters. Part musician, part comedian, and part traveling preacher of the gospel of rock and roll, he stalked the stage with a glossy black Epiphone ES-125 slung across his body. A blistering rendition of “Talk to Me” featured an absolutely unhinged solo from guitarist Jim Suhler while Thorogood answered with a string of his own fiery leads and signature guitar excursions. What makes him so compelling, however, isn’t simply the playing — it’s the performance.

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Courtesy: The Guardian

‘There was a lot of fighting and drinking at our shows. We played for bikers, for Hell’s Angels. We would break records for beer sales everywhere we played’

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?

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