Blues guitarist Thorogood recalls gigs at venues delightful and dumpy

It seems a little funny that “Bad to the Bone” George Thorogood is playing the fancy Reynolds Hall at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts.

So to find out just where that fits into the 40-year career the guitar-slinger is celebrating this year, we asked him to name the best and worst places he’s ever played.

“The bad places are so bad that I shudder to even think about them,” he says. “I’m living in denial.”

Upon further goading, he withheld the name to protect the guilty, but recalls a Philadelphia bar he once played on New Year’s Eve, with “no cover charge and one bathroom for men and women. There was no lock on the door. … Every drunk in the Delaware Valley was stumbling in and out of the place all night.

“Not only did we do it one year, we did it again the following year,” he adds. “The second year was worse because we hadn’t even progressed in one year.”

The record label was sitting on his 1977 debut album “George Thorogood &The Destroyers,” which was to define his electrified blues sound with tunes such as his cover of John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.”

“We were waiting for it to come out so we could get out of that place,” he says.

The nicest place is, hands down, Royal Albert Hall. “You’re not going to do any better than that,” he says. “I can’t say it’s the best (hall), but it’s the greatest thing this band’s ever accomplished as far as playing live.”

A few other reflections from the guitarist on 40 years of drinking music:

■ He and drummer Jeff Simon found their enduring sound very quickly. “It happened so fast it almost scared us,” he says. “It just clicked immediately. I didn’t even own an electric guitar and I went and bought one I think, two nights before our first gig. From the first song we played the dance floor was just packed. We had to play the whole set twice.”

“Jeff really gave me the confidence to get out there (by saying), ‘Listen man, if you can do all those theatrics like Mick Jagger and Jimi Hendrix do, go for it. People love it. Don’t hold back.’ He was telling me, ‘That’s what’s going to help sell the act.’ And he was right. That’s what we did.”

■ It was not coincidental The Destroyers’ first album was released in 1977, the year “Saturday Night Fever” came out. Thorogood remembers a crowd chanting, “Disco sucks! We want George!” “They just did not care for disco. Undoubtedly that helped us,” he says.

■ However, this may surprise you: “I personally really like the Bee Gees very much. They’re a great group. One of the greatest groups of all time.”

■ Thorogood will not embrace the prevailing tour trend of playing one album — and in his case it would probably be 1982’s “Bad to the Bone” — in its entirety. “That’s boring,” he says with a laugh. If a couple of stray album cuts aren’t in his set list already, there’s a good reason for that: “Nobody likes ’em.”

■ Movies and TV ads have used Thorogood songs, particularly “Bad to the Bone,” to set a mood or bring on a bad guy throughout his career. He’s usually fine with this, but there was that one time. “There’s one in particular, I won’t bring it up. And that’s the last time one of our songs was in a movie. I pulled the plug on it after that.”

Was it “Megamind” in 2010? It better not have been “Joe Dirt.”

Contact reporter Mike Weatherford at mweatherford@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0288.