"Bad to the Bone" by George Thorogood & The Destroyers (1982)

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Key Tracks:
Back to Wentzville is a great, straight-up blues tune.  Nobody but Me and No Particular Place to Go show Thorogood's true colors.  Bad to the Bone.  Songs get overplayed for a reason... I'lll explain a little later on.

Obvious Filler:
G.T. ends the album with an acoustic cover of a song made famous by Johnny Cash - Wanted Man - and it almost derails the whole outing.  Fortunately, the means justify the end.

My Overall Rating of the Tracks Separately: Recommended Listening (3/4 stars)

On the "Bad to the Bone" sessions, Thorogood reaches for some kind of a cross between Muddy Waters and Bruce Springsteen.  What confounds me is that he seems to be actively working against a much closer association - The Ramones.

If you take away the saxophone (which I would strongly recommend for every track) and replace it with Thorogood's all-too-scarce guitar solos, you're left with a record full of rockabilly punk tracks - they're short, punchy, heavy and to-the-point - deperately trying to be garage recordings from the sixties.  If you don't believe me, just listen to Thorogood's covers of Nobody but Me and No Particular Place to Go.  Both are as punk as punk gets.

But like I said earlier, he seems to be reaching for something else.  When he covers John Lee Hooker's New Boogie Chillun (complete with sax and organ), Lonesome George tips his whole hand.  He never breaks free of the twelve-bar structure or the riffology requisite for any bluesman worth his salt; but then again, he never really seems to try to.  Even the ballads are held together by nothing more than whiskey-soaked vocals, scotch tape and good intentions.

And then there's the title track.  Like I said before, songs get overplayed for a reason.  Bad to the Bone is just that - the roaring slide guitar swallows every other part of the song whenever it checks in.  And stuttering is always cool - just ask BTO. The lyrics feel like they were picked up on the cheap at a Bo Diddley yard sale. The combined payoff from all those factors is monumental.  But don't think for a second that the LP exists solely to push this song.  It is a layered, outrageous experience that only lets up when it needs to catch its breath before pushing even harder on the next track.

So, is it an album?
Yes.  The similarity of the tracks pulls everything together and there is a distinct balance struck among them.  With the exception of the closer, each song feels like a natural progression from the one before as well as a natural segue to the next.

Up next - my random number generator must be tooling around in a 1979 Firebird, playing mailbox baseball and whistling at chicks because it has decided to follow up "Bad to the Bone" with "Free-for-All" by Ted Nugent.