For the fourth time, legendary rocker George Thorogood is coming to perform in Prince George.
The force behind Bad To The Bone has struck a good vein in B.C.'s biggest northern city. It is here he is beginning his Canadian tour on April 19.
He finally revealed why, though, and it wasn't the obligatory answer about enthusiastic fans.
"It's the name of the city," he said, his facetious shrug almost audible through the phone. "I've got an ego, c'mon, gimme a little bit here."
What would make grin like a little boy at Christmas would be an official proclamation from city hall proclaiming the town Prince Thorogood for one day.
He added to that joke (well, sort of a joke) with one about how he'd be scoping out real estate prices around Prince George in case Donald Trump gathers any more political power (well, sort of a joke).
"You've got the best of both worlds, there," he said about P.G. but also Canada as a whole.
"You've got your sophisticated inner city culture and then you've got your frontier places. You've got a good combination of frontier and cosmopolitan. That's what I like about Canada. People (in the States) say 'oh it's so rough up there, it's so cold' and I say great. You've gotta want to go there (to perform on tour). How bad do you want it? If you don't want it, why would they want you?"
He loves that he can play in Seattle and move on next to Vancouver, or play Detroit and whip over to Windsor and then Toronto.
"When we play at Turning Stone (a casino in Verona), three-quarters of the audience is Canadian anyway and that's in New York State. And your farther-up cities like Edmonton and Prince George aren't that far, really, and we like to drive. We've had to drive from Albuquerque to San Diego (in one go), that's like 14 hours, so Prince George isn't a problem."
Trump's idea of a wall to separate the United States and Canada is anathema to his profession but also his common understanding of life in the two countries. But being a historian isn't confined to just music, for Thorogood. He knew of another time such a thing was proposed.
"Did you know that during the Lincoln administration there was an idea floated to build a wall to divide Canada and the United States to protect both countries and give a lot of work to both Canadians and Americans, and Lincoln vetoed it," Thorogood said. "He said no, we want to show the rest of the world that the two countries on the world's longest border could live side by side in peace, and it would stand as an example to the world. I thought that was kinda cool. You protect two countries with trust."
Baseball is one of the world's great cultural conciliators. Babe Ruth hit his first professional home run at a game played in Toronto against the Maple Leafs baseball club. Jackie Robinson broke the colour barrier in professional baseball playing for the Montreal Royals. Before his days as a rock 'n' roll star, Thorogood was a baseball prospect, and even though he's a Mets fan, he also applauds Canada's team and got a thrill out of Jose Bautista in last year's playoffs.
"I love the Blue Jays," he said. "I loved the bat flip when Bautista hit the home run. (The backlash) was ridiculous. It's just a game, and the game is for the fans, isn't it? What's wrong with a little enthusiasm? And Rich Gossage writes a letter to give him grief about it - don't you have better things to do Mr. Gossage? They were down three games to one, it's the playoffs, the Blue Jays haven't been there for years, this guy comes up and he's been with that team for years, he hits a decisive home run, the fans go crazy, and he wants to toss the bat? If you don't get emotional in that situation, I don't want you on the team. And they almost pulled it off against Kansas City, too, and in that last game, who was it that hit two more home runs?"
He said the height of his baseball skills was flipping the bat. It was getting the ball over the wall he couldn't quite nail down.
Music benefitted from his change of sports heart. He picked up the guitar, studied the blues masters, let his wild youth dictate the amp volume, and out came the hits. Bad To The Bone is just the signature song. There's also Get A Haircut & Get A Real Job, a golden cover of One Bourbon One Scotch One Beer done for his old pal John Lee Hooker, another blockbuster cover of the Hank Williams classic Move It On Over, and he also upscaled Bo Diddley's Who Do You Love to great success.
As you can see from that list of hit singles, he writes his own material sometimes and he calls in strong material by other writers, sometimes. He said this used to be the norm, but it was rapidly changing. For the past 30 or 40 years, songwriting was a financial superpower. Composers were paid a lot of money for a hit, even if they didn't ever perform it themselves. It also scared some performers away from the price of bringing in a good song when they could get more cash for recording mediocre ones they self-penned.
Now that music downloading has exploded all the old rules, music is being consumed en masse without much money getting back to the writers, the whole industry was on the cusp of changing into acts just like his. Yes, in the modern consumer context he gets some income from his hits, but his biggest revenues come from the stage door. So it behooves the act to have great material, and that means bringing it in from more writers than the self.
"What you're seeing is not unusual. This is what was standard in the '50s and '60s. Elvis and Chuck Berry and Little Richard got record contracts because they had a dynamite live show. The Who was great live, so was Jimi Hendrix, so was Mick Jagger, Mitch Ryder, Janis Joplin, everybody was brilliant live. That's what got people's attention. Brian Epstein saw The Beatles and couldn't take his eyes off them, they were dynamite live, he had to get a record deal for them. When I saw Madonna and Prince back in the '80s and '90s, I thought of how much it reminded me of Screamin' Jay Hawkins or James Brown, but to the audience in the '80s, this was all new."
Like how the age of the blues faded into the age of rock 'n' roll, now the winds of taste are blowing again, he said.
Rock 'n' roll's popularity is forever dwindling. He said he considers scaling back or retiring from the grind of touring, "but then I get a call from Canada, eh," he said with a laugh.
Are Canadians really that important a market to you?
"Yeah you are. It's one of the few places - the United States and Canada - where you can travel both countries by car. You really don't have to go any farther. You don't need any air travel to get over there like you do to Europe or Asia. And Western Canada is just so beautiful it takes your breath away. The scenery there...have you ever crossed the Rocky Mountains? Just beautiful, and right next door."
Thorogood comes to CN Centre on April 19 along with opening act Ben Miller.
