Bad To The Bone

I only teetered on the edge of bad girl. Yes, I snuck Salem Menthols behind the dumpster at Little Sue’s Mini Mart, but come on, when you grow up in the heart of North Carolina’s tobacco country, you’re barely dressed if you don’t have a crushed cigarette package in your pocket and a roach clip in your hair. The atrium in the center of our High School was practically branded the RJ Reynolds “Smoking Flats”. Teachers sat puffing away at a table in full view of the students, while the goths took tokes between woodshop and Spanish 1. My rebel smoker was closeted and always covered in a healthy spritz of Love’s Baby Soft.

I was also a connoisseur of Boonesfarm and a master at the beer bong. I never ventured into hard liquors, likely because I couldn’t afford them, but for the sake of this story, let’s pretend that it was because I was actually as sweet as Strawberry Hill.

Sure, I let Rhett Riggins feel me up in the back of his mother’s shag carpeted mini-van with Van Gogh’s Stary Night modge-podged onto the ceiling. We were pleasantly stoned as Dark Side of the Moon oozed from his boom box and it was kind of romantic until we tumbled out the door like Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High when Bobby Duke came looking for his bong so WE DID NOT HAVE SEX.

Plus, I was waiting until I was married and only dancing on the periphery of my sexuality At most, I just dabbled in dirty, and 99% of those dabbles occurred when I was drunk, because I just wasn’t bad to the bone. But there was that time that being wasted possibly ended up saving me.

My best friend Cathy and I were freshmen in college and we were pre-gaming in the parking lot at the Greenville Auditorium before seeing George Thorogood and the Destroyers. We were tipsy on wine coolers as we entered the arena when a man in black approached and offered us backstage passes for an after-show party. HELL YEAH! As he put the lanyards around our necks, we were already imagining all the cool photos we’d have to share off the disc camera hidden in my Cowboy boots in a couple of  weeks once the film was developed.

Now, what you must know is that we were not strangers to attention from bands, though there is very little photographic evidence. We’d danced on stage at countless fraternity parties, we’d crowd surfed at the B-52s; sang backup at The Brewery while Modern English stopped the world and melted with US; and we’d waived a giant Irish flag on stage with U2 as they sang Sunday Bloody Sunday in Norfolk Virginia in 1983.

But backstage? We’d never been invited backstage. And as George sang One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer, we drank several beers from the case of Pabst Blue Ribbon at the foot of a huge Sim Kinneson look-alike in a leather Harley Davidson jacket, we took tokes off a joint passed our way by people we didn’t know, and had a swig or two from a golden bottle of Four Roses. Let’s just say that by the time George was singing I wanna be yours, pretty baby

Yours and yours alone

I'm here to tell ya, honey

That I'm bad to the bone

B-B-B-B-Bad

Bad to the bone 

We were B-B-B-B blitzed and thinking, if we were thinking at all, surely this will wear off by the time the after party starts. But when we teetered to the curtain by the stage, following the path of others also adorned with laminated necklaces, Cathy and I were not our best selves. Had George given us a Delaware flag to wave over the crowd, we’d have fallen off the stage.

So, this account is tainted. But here is what I remember.

Someone told us to “wait here.” And we leaned against a cement block wall in a long hall, eventually sliding down to the floor while everyone else with a laminated necklace just disappeared.

I don’t know how long we were there. It might have been ten minutes or we might have dozed off for an hour or so while the party we’d longed to be invited to was surely raging on somewhere down the hall. I recall rejoining the scene as equipment rumbled past my face on the cool concrete. Giant amps and gear on dollies observed by a single squinting eye and maybe the brush of a foot or wheel against my cheap boots.

Then I was looking up at leather pants-covered legs and long shaggy heads shaking and laughing. I’m 72% sure that one of those baffled heads was George Thorogood’s. Backstage at last with no photos to capture our good fortune, but also no photos to capture our shame. We were the last to walk out the coliseum door at the gruff urging of a security guard as the tour bus headed off to West Palm Beach. And there stood Cathy’s car virtually alone in the parking lot.

The band and the roadies have likely seen worse. Maybe if we’d been consciously drunk, we’d have gotten ourselves in a lot more trouble. Or maybe it would have been the most memorable party of a lifetime. George Thorogood has no recollection of us, but I am mortified at the memory of being curled up on a concourse.

Like the buzz from one bourbon, one scotch and one beer, humiliation can last a good long while. Nearly four decades later I can attest, maybe a little longer than one might wish.

As shared at Story Salon on August 13, 2025.