A blues-rock guitarist drawing inspiration from Elmore James, Hound Dog Taylor, and Chuck Berry, George Thorogood earned little favor among blues purists yet found broad popularity in the early 1980s through steady FM radio rotation and appearances on the arena circuit. His sound stayed loud, basic, and straightforward, with riffs and licks lifted directly from 1950s Chicago blues and rock & roll, yet that predictable style helped him build a sizable following as his albums routinely reached gold.
Thorogood had begun as a minor-league baseball player before turning to music in 1970 after catching a John Paul Hammond concert. He put the Destroyers together three years later in Delaware, with bassist Michael Lenn, second guitarist Ron Smith, and drummer Jeff Simon completing the lineup. Shortly afterward he relocated the band to Boston, where they became regulars on the blues-club circuit. A 1974 set of demos later surfaced in 1979 as the album Better Than the Rest.
John Forward discovered the Destroyers within a year of those sessions and secured them a Rounder Records contract. Billy Blough replaced Lenn on bass before the group recorded its self-titled debut, issued in early 1977. Move It on Over followed in 1978; its title track, a cover of the Hank Williams classic, received heavy FM airplay as a single, pushing the album into the American Top 40 and to gold status. That success prompted MCA to release Better Than the Rest, an album the band disliked. Ron Smith exited in 1980, saxophonist Hank Carter joined, and the group delivered its third album, More George Thorogood and the Destroyers.
Thorogood then signed with EMI Records and released his major-label debut, Bad to the Bone, in 1982. The title track became his first major crossover hit after MTV gave the video saturation airplay. The album went gold and stayed on the charts for nearly a full year. His next three releases after Bad to the Bone also reached gold. Steve Chrismar was added as second guitarist before the 1985 album Maverick appeared.
By the start of the 1990s Thorogood’s audience had begun to shrink. None of his subsequent albums went gold, although the title track from 1993’s Haircut reached number two on the album rock chart. He kept touring blues and rock clubs and continued to draw large crowds, with later releases including 1997’s Rockin’ My Life Away, 1999’s Half a Boy/Half a Man, Live in ’99, 2003’s Ride ’til I Die, and 2006’s The Hard Stuff. He returned to EMI/Capitol in 2009 for the bar-band covers album The Dirty Dozen. Two years later he continued his covers project with 2120 South Michigan Ave., a tribute to Chess Records. In summer 2017 Thorogood rejoined the Rounder label for his first solo album, Party of One, issued that August.
