thedailytimes.com : Your 24/7 news source

For blues aficionados and casual music fans alike — at least, for those around when MTV was in its infancy — there's an iconic image of George Thorogood burned into the brain:

A fat cigar, a game of pool, a satisfied and shark-toothed grin as the 8-ball drops, giving him victory in a game of pool against blues guitar legend Bo Diddley.

It's a simple storyline, made for a music video at a time when there were few music videos period, much less ones stocked with special effects, dance moves and scantily clad, gyrating girls. It propelled the song for which it was made — "Bad to the Bone" — to the top of the charts, and established Thorogood as one of the early stars of MTV.

Thorogood, however, was around long before MTV hit the airwaves. And though he may not outlast it, he'll certainly be the sort of iconic rock star that's sorely lacking on the channel these days. "Bad to the Bone" may have been co-opted as the song to countless commercials and movie scenes, but it's still inextricably tied to Thorogood. It's who he is, and when he talks, it's with a confidence that the listener can't help but accept as fact.

"I'm the last one — I'm it, the last of the old school,"
Thorogood told The Daily Times in a recent interview. "Let's say I'm about 50
or 60 (the Web site Wikipedia lists his birthday as Dec. 31, 1951); I'm the
last of the card-carrying bunch that saw Muddy Waters play. I played with him. I opened for him. Howlin' Wolf, John Lee Hooker … we're the last band of that time, and it's not the fault of the young people who came after me — those guys have just died and passed on.

"I think sometimes these younger people think I'm younger than I actually am, and that I only have two records out. Some of these young guys can really play, but unfortunately because of the time that they came along, they didn't get a chance to see the real deal. Seeing it, witnessing it, experiencing it — that's something you can't learn off of listening to a record.

"Granted, I heard Robert Johnson on a record, but I saw Muddy Water play a Robert Johnson song two feet in front of me," Thorogood added. "The whole time, I was saying, 'This is it, George; this is as close as you're going to get to the real thing.'"

George Thorogood and the Destroyers came blasting out of the 1970s with "Better Than the Rest," released in 1974. On the strength of powerhouse covers of songs by Chuck Berry, Elmore James, Hooker and Diddley, the group signed to Rounder Records after moving to Boston, releasing "Move It On Over" in 1978, the title track of which was a cover of the 1947 Hank Williams Sr. hit. In 1979, another cover followed — Diddley's "Who Do You Love," with Thorogood cranking up the electric guitar firepower to the boiling point and stirring the pot with his trademark growling, swaggering vocals.

In the 1980s, a combination of exposure and hard work helped the band earn a reputation as a workingman's blues-rock outfit that churned out the ideal soundtrack to Saturday nights spent drinking, fighting and loving at roadhouses along America's blue-collar backroads. In 1981, the band made several appearances opening for The Rolling Stones; and in the early part of that decade, the band undertook an ambitious, 50-states-in-50-nights gig run that kicked off with a show in Hawaii followed the next night by one in Alaska.

Almost 40 years later, Thorogood and the Destroyers are still doing what they've always done best — play hard, rock hard and work hard. It's something Thorogood said he never grows tired of, and while songs like "Who Do You Love," "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" and the aforementioned "Bad to the Bone" may have given many folks the impression that he's some sort of eternal hell-raiser who sleeps beneath the bar at places in which he plays and has spilled more liquor than today's young Turks will ever drink, he's very much a family man.

"That song ("Bad to the Bone") — half of it is reality and half is fantasy," he said. "You watch movies with James Bond and Sean Connery playing him, and you think, 'I'd like to be that guy,' but that's not reality. Certain songs of mine are reality, and certain ones are fantasies, and I guess I'm a little bit somewhere in between the two of them.

"Since my daughter has been born, I've been going to more parties than I ever have in my whole life — birthday parties, Halloween parties, you name it. It's a lot safer, though — all kids and no booze."

Not that Thorogood's pace these days is all play and no
work. According to his publicist, he's following up 2006's studio album "The
Hard Stuff" with his first-ever acoustic album (although Thorogood, when asked
about it, plays coy, feigning ignorance of such a project). In addition, his
greatest hits compilation, "30 Years of Rock," was named the No. 1 blues album
of 2005 and 2006 by Billboard magazine, meaning there's an ever-steady demand for his hits.

Despite the success, he remains grounded in the reality of his place in the grand scheme of things — a torchbearer, the last man standing at the fabled crossroads where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul. The ghosts of his predecessors are there to keep him company, and the young guns who have followed in his wake stop by to pay homage ... but in the end, it's Thorogood, standing tall, still smoking that fat cigar and grinning like a wolf.

"The music is bigger than me, and it'll go on long after I'm not here," he said. "The songs made me famous; I didn't make them famous. I know where I stand in this thing. I always say, I went to the same school as Keith Richard and Eric Clapton; the only difference is that they graduated.

"I'm the last person to go to that school before they shut the school down. I got the chance to see the best, and you can never replace those people. Sure, there are guys out there now that might sell as many records and become icons of their own generation, but they'll never do for music what somebody like Jimi Hendrix did.

"I'm so fortunate to have seen what I saw and got to be a part of," he added. "It was a gold mine of education, and it can never be replaced or duplicated."