Bo Diddley Goes to Heaven
Among the first generation of rock and rollers, the class of 1955–I’m talking about the greatest generation here: Chuck Berry, Elvis, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.–Bo Diddley sometimes seemed like the forgotten man. He wasn’t a wild child like Richard or Jerry Lee, a virtuoso guitarist and writer like Berry, or a looker like Elvis.
Sure, his songs remained frequently covered and of course the latin-tinged clave beat which he didn’t invent but which he possessed so fully that it took on his name, became part of the lingua franca of rock. But there were no Bo Diddley biopics, valedictory concert movies or all-star tribute cover albums.
That’s a damn shame, because Bo Diddley was a giant in every way: A grand, American character. Born Elias Otha Bates, Bo invented a enormous persona built around a macho swagger and bragging songs that borrowed from everything from tall tales of the American west to the African-American rhyming insult game known as “the dozens.” Pecos Bill may have roped a whirlwind, but Bo walked 47 miles of barbed wire, had a cobra snake for a necktie, and lived in a house made of rattlesnake skin with a chimney made from a human skull.
It was a playful personna but one Bo fully inhabited. I can still remember the jealousy I felt at the look in my wife’s eye, when, on one of our earliest dates, I took her to see Bo at the old Lone Star Cafe. There was no doubt about it when Bo sang I’m a Man. (I was lucky enough to see Bo perform frequently in New York City in the 1980s and early 1990s at gigs where his friends among the NYC chapter of the Hells Angels were frequently in attendance.)
His songs were deceptively simple. The best of them, like Who Do You Love?, Bo Diddley or Bring it to Jerome have no harmony to speak of–just a single chord, a driving rhythm pounded home by guitar, drums, maracas, handclaps (the unsung hero of Bo’s 1950s and early 1960s Chess sides is maracas player Jerome Green). It was a razor sharp sound of sheer propulsion without which the music of later groups (like The Rolling Stones in particular) would have been unimaginable.
Bo was underappreciated as a musician, a rhythm guitarist without peer whose use of tremolo and phase shifting effects in later years gave his live performances a swirling, almost psychedelic quality. (Rhythm, of course, was the essence of Bo’s shows, which usually ended with him taking over the drum kit, tho he also doubled on violin.) His axe–a custom, rectangular semi hollow body Gretsch with Filtron pickups and, in later years, on-board effects– is as iconic a piece of 1950s industrial design as automotive tail fins.
The money, fame and prestige that usually accrues to living legends such as Bo, seemed to ellude the man, and, in latter day interviews he was frequently bitter about it. But in the end he remained what he had always been–a gigging musician, not the sort of oldies act you would see on a package show playing a medley of hits, but a rock band leader in command of a sound, style and persona that was sui generis. Bo Diddley built his own Mount Rushmore, a titanic monument to himself more slyly comical than, say, Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, but no less gigantic. We won’t see his like again.
UPDATE: Fun to listen to a 1970 Bo set, from an era when the 50s stars were not yet oldies acts but not really contemporary either, recorded a Boston nightclub and available at Wolfgang’s Vault, a gig where Bo was opening for the Byrds. When it comes to lead guitar, Jimi Hendrix Bo wasn’t. But this is stripped down Bo in his natural habitat: on stage.
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July 22, 2008 at 7:07 pm
[...] Jerry Lee Lewis, etc.??