george thorogood and the 46 year grudge
mad to the bone
I’m not the kind of person to hold grudges. In fact, I’ve only had three in my life and they are all long-held and still in effect. The first one is against Q*bert (It’s ugly. You don’t want to know. It involves a lot of cursing). The second is against Shaq (it's dumb and involves the 1996 movie KAZAAM). The third is against musician George Thorogood. That one, I’ll tell you about.
It’s the end of January, 1978. I’m 15 years old and Thorogood’s album Move It On Over is a huge hit. I develop a little crush on both George and the album and I’m overjoyed to find out he’ll be doing an in-store appearance at Jimmy’s Record World or Bill’s Record Emporium or something like that. Whatever the name was, the store was about a mile and a half from my house.
A couple of friends said they’d go to the store with me that day so we could meet George and get our albums signed and maybe get a chance to talk with him. How cool would that be to sit around in this small record store with George Thorogood, talking about music and maybe convincing him that he needs a 15 year old girl as a roadie and I’m just the person for the job? Or, just talk with him.
That night a major winter storm rolled in. I woke up the next morning to several inches of snow outside, and it was still coming down. I called my friends and said neither sleet nor snow nor blizzard conditions would keep me from my appointed rounds of meeting George Thorogood. My friends, however, bailed. Pussies.
I called the record store and they assured me that George would still be there. His dedication to the fans of Long Island warmed my heart. I was hoping that everyone else who wanted to come out to see him were wimps like my friends who didn't want to go out in the snow and I’d have George all to myself. Maybe we’d get snowed in at Jimmy’s Record World and we’d have to spend hours just talking and we’d end up being best friends! The mind of a 15 year old star-struck fan is a dangerous thing.
I walked to the record store. The wind was blowing, the snow was coming down hard and icicles were forming on my face but I didn’t care. I trudged on, walking through foot deep piles of snow, climbing over snow banks, pushing off thoughts of frostbite and death. This would be something to tell my children about. “Why, in my day, I had to walk uphill through a blizzard to get to see my idols!” It was tough going, but I had to get there. I would show George Thorogood that I was a faithful, devoted fan and surely that faithfulness would pay off somehow. Maybe his people would even give me a ride home.
I got to the record store at noon, just when George was supposed to show up. I was the only person in the store besides the clerk. I waited. And waited. And waited. I went through every album in the store from Aerosmith to ZZ Top. The snow came down harder. I started to panic a little about walking home.
The clerk - sympathetic toward me and I think a little disappointed himself - said he was going to close up the store soon. I asked him, what about George? He said George’s people had not called to say they weren’t coming but at this point — and it was almost 2:00 — it was a good assumption he was a no show.
I looked out the window of the store. The snow was still coming down. I had to walk home in that. My boots were soaked, my hands were numb, my heart was broken. He didn’t show. A fifteen year old kid walked an hour and a half in a blizzard to see a guy who couldn’t be bothered to have someone drive him to an appearance, albeit in a blizzard.
The whole way home I just kept repeating “Fuck you, George Thorogood” in time to my feet sloshing through the snow. It took me almost two hours to get home. It took me another week to warm up. I took my George Thorogood cassettes and albums and defaced them in a fit of sullen anger. I pulled the tape out of the cassette and left it in a heap on my bedroom floor. I drew a mustache and devil horns on the pictures of George I had lovingly cut out of Rolling Stone magazine. And I vowed to never listen to his music again.
46 years later and I still can’t listen to him. Though maybe that’s not so much about the grudge as it is about me wondering what the hell I ever heard in his music, anyhow.
Ok, maybe it's about the grudge.
(you really didn't think i was going to put a thorogood song down here, did you? no, this is kevin devine, who i met two times at a record store and at least three times at his shows. thanks for always showing up, kevin)