Blues-Rock Mix Is Thoroughly Thorogood

The man likes to work alone. And this is just another lonesome afternoon session for George Thorogood, strapped again to an electric guitar in his small Hollywood rehearsal room. The walls here are bare, but the sound is loud and primitive, a blend of rock and the eternal blues. Thorogood spends his days here battling to keep it fresh.

“Seems that ZZ Top and Steve Miller and Keith Richards kind of beat me to all the good stuff,” Thorogood says with a smile. “I sit here and pound away, and I go, ‘No, no, Billy Gibbons already did that. Let’s see, no, no, Clapton already did that.’ ” He sighs. “Especially as years go on, it gets tougher.”

Thorogood, who plays the House of Blues on Saturday and Sunday, isn’t about to abandon the sound that launched his career in 1977, when he and his band, the Delaware Destroyers, released an epic reworking of John Lee Hooker’s “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer.” He’s planning even more ragged barroom boogie, more overloaded amplifiers, when he begins work on a new album this month for release in the spring.

His last album, 1997’s “Rockin’ My Life Away,” was a strangely understated collection of Creedence-flavored swamp rock, but his new label, CMC Records, already has asked Thorogood for another collection of old-school blues-rock. “That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” Thorogood says.

The album will again be a mixture of originals and old blues tunes, a blend he committed to as a teenager partly from his own fanaticism, but also because it was a simple style he knew he could master.

“I thought I was supposed to do it,” says Thorogood, 46. “I thought an actor was supposed to learn Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams, a writer was supposed to read Hemingway. I thought to be an accomplished rock guitarist you had to learn Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. I’m fond of saying I didn’t write the book, but I read it.”

It’s a commitment Thorogood has maintained ever since, inevitably turning him into a high-profile champion of the roots of pop music. And when he appeared at Live Aid back in 1985, he was standing fittingly alongside rock and blues pioneers Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Albert Collins.

Thorogood grew up in suburban Delaware, but that was still close enough to Philadelphia and New York for him to make regular road trips to see the bands that ultimately inspired him. “It was a good place to get out of,” he says. “It really wasn’t for me. It was a conservative place. College and marriage was the vogue.”

He rarely visits Delaware, he says, and is now a longtime resident of Los Angeles, with his wife of 14 years and a new baby daughter.

If Thorogood has been derided by some critics for progressing little from his original formula, he’s now a classic rock staple with hard-knuckled drinking songs and such originals as “Bad to the Bone,” which has become his signature song, played endlessly at sporting events and in movies, from 1991’s “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” to last year’s remake of “The Parent Trap.”

The arrival of provocative new artists such as Marilyn Manson only seems to make Thorogood that much more in demand by his core audience, he says, much as the late-’70s anti-disco backlash sent rock fans to his club shows in search of old-school rock.

“There were a thousand cats before me who’ve done this much better than I have,” Thorogood says. “And [my audience] said, ‘But we need it now! We need it now!’

“If I see a very extreme alternative artist, people ask, ‘What do you think of that?’ I go, ‘I love those guys.’ Every time they do their thing and somebody doesn’t dig that, that makes those people come to see us even more.”

So he pays close attention to the radio and VH1, even if he can never quite remember any of the names.

“When I see a guy come on with a band, and he’s got a guitar and a snakeskin headband on, that’s when I’m going to put that guitar in that guitar case,” he says with a laugh. “That’s the end of Lonesome George. That’s what I’m watching out for: OK, I’m safe.”

* George Thorogood & the Destroyers, House of Blues, 8430 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, Saturday at 10 p.m., Sunday at 9 p.m. $25. (213) 848-5100.