“Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers

song info

    “Bad to the Bone” by George Thorogood and the Destroyers (official video) is a hard rock song.

link to the static song information page for this song:
http://www.thissideofsanity.com/music/songs/ba/badtothebone.php

    Summary quotation from Wikipedia:

    “Bad to the Bone” is a song by George Thorogood and the Destroyers released in 1982 on the album of the same name. While it was not a major hit on initial release, its video made recurrent appearances on the nascent MTV, which was created a year before. Licensing for films, television, and commercials has since made “Bad to the Bone” better recognized.

Structure and influences

    The song’s roots can be traced back to rock and roll musician Bo Diddley’s song “I’m a Man”, which uses a similar guitar riff and vocal rhythm, and has a similar overall structure, as well as Muddy Waters’s “Mannish Boy” or “Hoochie Coochie Man” and Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love”. The riff is also very similar to the one from Chuck Berry’s song “No Money Down” as well as Elvis Presley’s “Trouble”.

Music video

    The video intercuts a live performance by Thorogood and his band with his playing a lengthy game of pool with Bo Diddley. Pool player Willie Mosconi is summoned from another room by a spectator, and he wagers a large sum of money on Diddley. As Thorogood appears to be winning, a group of children outside celebrate while Diddley gets a dirty look from Mosconi.

    Thorogood smokes a fat cigar throughout the pool-playing sequence. The video ends with Thorogood making the 8 ball drop into a pocket by flicking a large quantity of cigar ash on the floor, apparently triggering the drop of the ball in the pocket.

Authorship claim


    Chicago area musician James Pobiega, who goes by the stage name “Little Howlin’ Wolf”, has claimed that he wrote “Bad to the Bone” and that Thorogood stole it from him.

—from Wikipedia (the Wikipedia:Text of Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License applies to Wikipedia’s block of text and possible accompanying picture, along with any alterations, transformations, and/or building upon Wikipedia’s original text that ThisSideofSanity.com applied to this block of text)

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