Just released is The Original George Thorogood — a 14-song collection of Thorogood’s best known self-written classics. Among the highlights on the new set are “I Drink Alone,” “Bad To The Bone,” “If You Don’t Start Drinkin’,” “(I’m Gonna Leave),” and “Born To Be Bad.”

In talking about the new compilation, Thorogood looked back at his side career as a rock songsmith: “I guess a good song is a good song is a good song, y’know? It’s easy to write a song, difficult to write a good song, and even harder to write a great song. It strikes home that I have the ability to write some pretty great songs, and there’s a real sense of achievement to that.”

George Thorogood owes a huge part of his success to his presence on early MTV, which included near saturation airplay of his early videos — especially “Bad To The Bone,” which featured his hero Bo Diddley. Thorogood explained to us that back then, MTV was in no position to be discerning about any of its content, and happily ate up everything rock bands — especially cool and envelope pushing artists — were handing them: “The politics of MTV were this; the demand was bigger than the supply, ’cause when MTV came on it was on 24 hours a day — no commercials. And they were lookin’ for stuff; and they were showing old Elvis Presley movies, they were showing (American) Bandstand — y’know, anything they could get their hands on. So, I knew that in ’81 when they started, because in ’82, we did the video ‘Nobody But Me’ and ‘Bad To The Bone,’ because I knew it was like the early days of television. Television was in its infancy — so was MTV. And at the time, we had just signed with EMI, we were hot off the (1981 Rolling) Stones tour, so we were a pretty hot item at the time. About five or six years later I got tired of it, because then it became a commercial for your record. It wasn’t like the early days.”

George Thorogood & The Destroyers kick off their next string of dates on April 29th in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin at Crystal Grand Music Theatre.