ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED ON AUG. 18, 1989
By Steve Newton
Anyone who’s seen blues-rocker George Thorogood play will tell you that the guy’s no slouch on stage. Once he gets rollin’ with his big white hollow-body Gibson, look out. He shakes, he spins, he duckwalks across the stage–all the while ripping out volleys of simple but effective boogie that has been clinically proven to get people on their feet.
When Thorogood plays live–as he will at the Pacific Coliseum September 2–he and his trusty axe become one, and for a while there, not a lot else matters.
But just how did Thorogood ‘s love affair with the six-string come about? As it turns out, the romance was initiated more for practical reasons than anything else.
“Well I tried to play the harmonica,” says Thorogood, “but I wasn’t very good at it. And as far as being able to sing, I never really was comfortable. I mean Rod Stewart is a great singer, and Robert Plant at that time was very big. But my style of singing–I just needed something extra.
“And guitar was the easiest thing, because you can travel with it, you can play on the street corner with it, and you can do auditions with it–it’s not like you have to haul a piano around. So the guitar just made all the sense in the world to me. And plus I really dug it.”
Before Thorogood’s band, the Destroyers, first came together in ’73, the easy portability of an acoustic guitar had him playing on street corners in San Francisco for a while. But not too long.
“There were others who made tons of money doing that,” he recalls, “but I couldn’t really make a good living doing it. I was just wailin’ away there, trying to get enough to get a hamburger.”
When he tired of the cheeseburger lifestyle in S.F., Thorogood headed back to this hometown of Wilmington, Delaware, and set about putting together a blues-rock outfit to play clubs. He recruited boyhood pal Jeff Simon on drums, then hired a second guitarist, and for a while the band performed as a bassless trio. It was during these early years that Thorogood appeared on bills with such blues greats as Hound Dog Taylor, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters.
Since then he’s recorded songs by all those people–and a few more by a fellow named Chuck Berry, who Thorogood has meet three times. In the last 10 years, Destroyers albums have included revved-up versions of “Nadine”, “It Wasn’t Me”, “No Particular Place to Go”, “Memphis”, “(Let’s) Go Go Go”, “House of Blue Lights”, and “You Can’t Catch Me”.
“It just always seems to get around to that,” says Thorogood of the Berry covers. “It’s funny–I think the first album we did [1977’s George Thorogood and the Destroyers] was the only one that didn’t have any Chuck Berry on. At that point someone said, ‘Geez, you do all this Chuck Berry stuff live, and you didn’t put one Chuck Berry song on your album!’ And I said, ‘Yeah, that is funny.’ And since then it’s been every single record. Now every time we make an album we go, ‘Well this time we won’t do one,’ and every time we still do. It’s almost like an obligatory thing now.”
When he cranks out those great Chuck Berry tunes on stage nowadays Thorogood is helped out by rhythm guitarist Steve Chrismar, who joined up in 1985. The addition of a second guitarist was a necessity brought on by the natural evolution of the Destroyers, says George.
“We had to get somebody to help us fill out the sound, ’cause the venues were getting bigger and the volume of the audiences was getting louder and louder. And we didn’t want to keep crankin’ our volume up so loud that we couldn’t hear anything. We already play loud enough!”
Thorogood says that his on-stage style also changed somewhat when Chrismar was brought in.
“Steve stepped in right at the right time, ’cause I was getting a little bit more into performing and a little bit away from playin’ the guitar. Prior to that I was playin’ the guitar all the time, and it was getting to be kind of strenuous. I’ve just gotta have someone to take the edge off occasionally, so I can get a little bit of a breather.”
From the streets of San Francisco to the stadiums of the world, George Thorogood’s performing days have left him with piles of memories. Some of his best ones come from the 16 dates that the Destroyers shared with the Rolling Stones in 1981. That year also saw the band carry out it’s 50/50 Tour (No Nights Off), which took Thorogood and his mates to all 50 American states on 50 consecutive nights. But Thorogood, seasoned road warrior that he is, plays down the accomplishment.
“It’s not that astonishing, really. I just tell people, ‘Can you get up and go to work 50 days in a row? ‘Cause it’s only 50, you know, it’s not like 350.”
To hear the full audio of my 1989 interview with George Thorogood–and the ones I did with him in 2003 and 2014 as well–subscribe to my Patreon page, where you can eavesdrop on over 600 of my uncut, one-on-one conversations with:
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