When Times Square music reporter, Peggy Hogan, started this interview with George Thorogood, she asked him how he was doing and he answered, "Bad." Since recording his first demo over thirty years ago, Thorogood has committed himself to living and breathing the blues attitude. The musical legend shared with Times Square some thoughts on how blues has changed since his beginnings and why he thinks New Yorkers have their own unique reputation.

Times Square (TS): As someone whose career in blues has spanned several decades, how do you feel the idiom has changed, and if for you personally, anything has changed about what it means to play the blues.

George Thorogood (GT): Well now, due to the movie The Blues Brothers and the expansion of clubs like The House of Blues and the internet, everything is widely exposed now. Nothing is a well-kept secret like the blues was for a while. Technology has changed the industry. Plus the passions of people like the guys in Aerosmith who were instrumental in getting The House of Blues off the ground. Those have helped the blues image, but for my taste, blues isn't the same because the original blues guys, with the exception of B. B. King have all passed on. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, Willie Dickson – I was fortunate enough to see these people play when I was young and I even opened for some of them. So that's one thing. It's now a marketable commodity, which at one time it wasn't.

TS: I understand that you used to pay baseball, and you switched to music after seeing John P. Hammond play. What was special about that show – what particularly struck a chord with you and kind of made you reassess.

GT: I didn't reassess anything. My destiny since I was 15, I knew I was going to be in music. Prior to when The Stones hit, and The Beatles and Hendrix, I was out rolling a career in comedy, I was very much interested in that and I was good at it, but I saw The Stones perform – I'd never played a musical instrument and I'd never sung a note in my life, never even touched the guitar, but I saw that and I felt like there was hope for me, this is what I'm going to do. There's a lot of rock bands that make a decent living, but the decent comics, you can count them on one hand. I kind of laid dormant for about five years – when I saw John Hammond I felt like I could make it right then. There was no turning back after that.

TS: What does it feel like for you to really have a good night and connect with the people in your audience?

GT: Well the spark is the audience itself. That's the spark. You're only as good as your audience is. You know when you walk on stage before you play your first note how it's going to go. You get your fast read from the crowd. You can usually tell right away if it's going to happen fast or if you're going to have to work for your money.

TS: On August 7th you're playing B.B. King's and I'm wondering what your experience is playing that room and if there's anything special about playing that particular venue.

GT: I enjoy all the rooms that I play, there are just some I enjoy a little bit more. I'm in this circuit now and I play regularly for a living. I saw Jane Lynch on television recently, and she said something very interesting. They said to her, "it took you a long time to achieve success," and she said, "No, it took me a long time to get to this level but I figure I've always been a success because I've been paid to do what it is that I do." That's really how you should look at it in any line of work, if you're a comic on The Tonight Show or a comic headlining at Caesar's or you're doing the cat stills, you're able to say that you're getting paid to do what you do.

B.B. King's is also special because it's New York City. That's the Big Apple. They're accustomed to only getting the best entertainment. Nobody plays in New York City and there people walking down the street and somebody starts playing and people go "Who's that I never heard of him." It doesn't work that way in New York.

I'll tell you something else – since we're playing in the summer time – for years when I've played New York, it had the reputation of being very hard and blasé and cold. That's just not true. I believe the city is not an easy city to get around it's 110 degrees on that concrete and people have been working all day, fighting the muggers, fighting the garbage strikes, fighting to get a taxi and they're exhausted, so by the time I get on stage at ten o'clock, just to get any kind of reaction from an audience is a super boost to my confidence because it's a hard city to live in. When they say, well, New Yorkers are just kind of city on they're hands, I say, can you blame them? They've been up since seven in the morning and fighting the heat all day! Twelve hours later you're hitting the stage and their energy level is probably not at its peak. It's not fair to the New Yorkers - it came to my attention about ten years ago when I was working there, I said to myself, "You know, George, these people really like you here, and you can only expect so much out of these people because they've been pounding the pavement all day long!"

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