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George Thorogood music biography continued...

Delaware, Thorogood was nurturing a career as a professional baseball player before turning his aspirations to music and forming the band The Destroyers in 1973. Shortly after the group was formed, he moved them to Boston, where they became regulars on the blues club circuit and recorded a batch of demos. One of those made its way to Rounder Records, which released their self-titled debut album in 1977 to little notice. The group's second album, Move It On Over, was released in 1978. The title track, a cover of a Hank Williams' classic, was dropped as a single and it received heavy FM radio play, helping the album enter the American Top 40 and go gold. Two more marginally successful albums followed, but in 1982 George Thorogood and the Destroyers broke through with their fist major label debut--"Bad to the Bone"--a track that was the group's first crossover success. The album Bad to the Bone went gold and spent nearly a full year on the charts. Thorogood's next three albums after Bad to the Bone all went gold as well and Thorogood won kudos from critics and blues rock fans for his ability to take cover tunes of classic songs and make them his own unique creations. In the meantime, "Bad to the Bone" was used in several movies, including Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Problem Child and John Carpenter's Christine, as well as during many episodes of the television sitcom Married with Children, making George Thorogood and The Destroyers a household name.



By the beginning of the 90s, Thorogood's audience began to wane, but he continued to record and perform at large venues. Subsequent efforts included 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, which demonstrated that Thorogood's brand of straight ahead guitar rock was still in demand. Thorogood once told a newspaper: "A lot has changed since 1977. Radio is not the same as it was." Thankfully, George Thorogood himself is still the same.