BO DIDDLEY
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1955–1996 |
Early rock’n’roll |
Who Do You Love? (1956) |
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Compilation
released: 1958 |
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Tracks: 1) Bo
Diddley; 2) I’m A Man; 3) Bring It To Jerome; 4) Before You Accuse Me;
5) Hey! Bo Diddley; 6) Dearest Darling; 7) Hush Your Mouth; 8) Say Boss Man;
9) Diddley Daddy; 10) Diddey Wah Diddey; 11) Who
Do You Love; 12) Pretty Thing; 13*) She’s Fine She’s Mine; 14*) I’m
Looking For A Woman; 15*) I’m Bad; 16*) Cops And Robbers; 17*) Down Home
Special; 18*) Mona; 19*) Willie And Lillie; 20*) Bo Meets The Monster. |
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This
is probably a crying shame, but I must say that I have never been the hugest
fan in the world of what is commonly known as the «Bo Diddley beat». When it
comes to rocking the very foundations of my conscience, it is the likes of Chuck
Berry’s naughty guitar licks, Jerry Lee Lewis’ assassinations of the piano,
and Scotty Moore’s steady-as-a-rock amplification of Elvis’ legendary status which
always take precedence over Bo’s relatively rigid and predictable formula —
essentially just an electrified rendering of a traditional Juba dance in its
African-American form ("Juba dis and Juba dat, Juba killed da yellow
cat"), which means that Bo did not even have to «invent» much of
anything; all he had to do was plug in his guitar. |
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Not
that plugging in like that was anything short of a miracle back in 1955: ʽBo Diddleyʼ (the song) sounded like nothing else at the time. It is essentially
two parts past and one part future — combining an ancient African dance
rhythm pattern, a lyrical motive going back to an Anglo-Saxon folk tradition
(‘Hush Little Baby’), and a prominent tremolo effect on the guitar which adds
a proto-psychedelic feel to the whole thing. For a composition released on
the Chess label in the mid-1950s, this was as daring and futuristic as
possible at the time — and it also showed the label’s first willing sign to
move away from its rigorous support of the pure 12-bar blues formula (the
second sign would be Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybellene’ just a few months later — but
in strict terms of musical innovation, Chuck Berry was a conservative
traditionalist compared to Bo Diddley’s musical vision at that particular
point in time). Unfortunately, Bo’s biggest problem was that, having
said A, he found it hard to follow it with a B. Some of his subsequent
recordings which also utilized the Bo Diddley Beat (let us abbreviate it to
BDB from now on) did improve on ‘Bo Diddley’ in sheerly technical terms —
speed, tightness, sound clarity, funnier lyrics, etc.; but none of them
succeeded in taking it any place further than the original explosion. Minor
variations on chord structure could be observed, or the addition of extra
instruments (e.g. the piano groove on ‘Hush Your Mouth’), but the general
mood, energy level, overall effect on the brain would always remain the same.
Not coincidentally, you might notice that most of the British Invasion fans
of Bo Diddley were usually quite content with covering one and only one sample of the BDB — e.g., the
Stones only did ‘Mona’, and the Animals, who probably were the best
interpreters of Bo Diddley across the Atlantic, only recorded a cover of ʽPretty Thingʼ, although they would also go on to write their own ʽThe Story Of Bo Diddleyʼ as an homage to / parody of the BDB. But before succumbing to sadness and
disillusionment, let us also try to revive ourselves with a deeper, more thoughtful
immersion into the man’s creativity — and realize that there is much more to
Bo Diddley than the proverbial, occasionally tiresome BDB. In fact, even on
this «debut album», which is not really a proper LP but rather just a
collection of several of Bo’s A- and B-sides spanning almost four years (from
1955 to 1958), only three out of twelve tunes strictly follow the BDB proper:
ʽBo Diddleyʼ, ʽHush Your Mouthʼ (with the extra piano), and ʽPretty Thingʼ (with extra harmonica, so at least formally there is enough variation
to be forgiving). Of the others, some would probably be expected to also
follow the BDB (ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ, for instance, which is sung to the exact same
vocal melody as ʽBo Diddleyʼ), but in reality they do not, since the rhythm
pattern has been modified to such an extent that it can no longer qualify. Finally,
other songs are altogether quite removed from the basic formula, and follow
different paths of inspiration — perhaps not as
innovative as the BDB but sometimes, in my own view, even more exciting. As already stated, Bo Diddley, along with Chuck
Berry, was somewhat of an anomaly for the Chicago-based Chess Records, whose
overall specialization used to be less explicitly dance-oriented electric
bluesmen, from Muddy Waters to Howlin’ Wolf to Little Walter to Buddy Guy.
But with ‘Rock Around The Clock’ and other early rock’n’roll recordings
already ruffling the feathers of more time-honored genres, it is hardly
surprising that the Chess executives, too, were looking to diversify their
output with something a bit more energetic, aggressive, and commercially
viable. Besides, it’s not as if Bo Diddley himself was a total stranger to
straghtforward 12-bar blues. In his live shows at Chicago clubs, he always
played a mix of the tried-and-true with the fresh-and-daring, and there is at
least one notable example of the former on this record: ʽBefore You Accuse Meʼ, a straightahead piece of 12-bar blues somewhat in the style of Sonny
Boy Williamson, one of Chess’ major blues stars at the time. Amusingly, even
here Bo could not resist slightly speeding up the tempo, so that the final
result looks like a cross between old-fashioned blues and new-fashioned rock’n’roll.
(The 1970 cover version by Creedence Clearwater Revival is expectedly sharper
and more polished, but the song as a whole still firmly belongs in 1957). However, the very first of Bo’s blues-based songs in
the Chicago vein, already released as the B-side to his very first single,
was anything but typical. Essentially,
ʽI’m A Manʼ simply takes Muddy Waters’ ʽHoochie Coochie Manʼ and deconstructs it down to the basics. It is as if Bo heard the song
and thought to himself, "that first bar, man, that’s the shit, who really needs anything else here now?" Complexity
fans will think of this decision as a dumb move, but when taken in the
musical and cultural context of its time, it is a classic example of brutal,
radical genius, right out there vying for first place with the likes of ʽLouie Louieʼ and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’. In later years, the Who would be the perfect
band to cover this symbol of mythic-status virility; the Yardbirds, with
their wimpy singer, slightly less so; and too bad that it was too slow for Motörhead.
The trick here is that if you pay «emotional
attention» to ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, you might indeed notice that the song’s
cockiest, bossiest, most self-assertive moments are the stop-and-start part
of the blues verse, whereas the "you know I’m here, everybody knows I’m
here" blues chorus already feels like a small step back. 12-bar blues,
after all, was not originally invented for advertising yourself as The Man
Who Moves Mountains; it was more of a vehicle to express depression and
melancholy than arrogance and exuberance. Thus, if you pardon the blushing
analogy, does Bo Diddley become the Larry Flynt of blues to Muddy Waters’
Hugh Hefner — and even Muddy himself had to adapt, retorting but a few months
later with his own ‘Mannish Boyʼ, essentially
the same song with slightly different lyrics. As a generally better singer
than Bo, you could argue that Muddy actually made the groove sound even more
imposing and convincing, but he would never have gotten the idea himself — «The
Originator» was there first, forcing his teacher to acknowledge some of the
new rules. And what else did «The Originator» originate? Well,
the idea of stringing the entire song on one chord, for instance, which,
since we already mentioned Motörhead, is the genuine precursor to the
jackhammer method of headbanging. ʽHey Bo Diddleyʼ is done that way, but a more fabulous instance is ʽWho Do You Loveʼ, with its aggressive lead lines scattered along the road — not to
mention the gorgeous lyrics: "I walk 47 miles of barbed wire, I use a
cobra snake for a necktie... I got a brand new chimney made on top, made out
of human skull..." Not a lot of black lyricists used that sort of
voodooistic imagery as lightly as old Bo, who just rattles it off the wall at
top velocity, as if chased by some speed demon. But the gamble paid off —
even a band as distant from the «100% body-music» style of Bo Diddley as the
Doors covered the song during their live shows. (Question: how does one get four doors for one telephone booth? Answer: write "cobra snake"
and "human skull" on the walls). Of special note is Jody Williams’
fast, stinging, almost venomous guitar break, as sonically close a
predecessor to the classic nasty lead guitar of Mike Bloomfield as possible
(for instance, if you play the original recording of ‘Who Do You Love’ back
to back with some of Bob Dylan’s legendary live recordings from Newport ’65,
you’ll know what I’m talking about). And these are just the most essential highlights of
the compilation. Listing the other goodies in chronological order, there is Bo’s
second single ʽDiddley Daddyʼ, opening with one of the simplest, yet most elegant
guitar figures of the decade — one which
Billy Boy Arnold, present at the session, would nix from Bo and quickly
insert in his own ʽI Wish You
Wouldʼ, which is how
all of us British Invasion fans know it (from the Yardbirds cover; ʽDiddley Daddyʼ itself evaded hit status in the UK, although the Stones and others
did play it live). From 1956, there is ʽDiddey Wah Diddeyʼ, which takes an
old slow «dance-blues» pattern of
Muddy’s, adds a playful, poppy melody resolution, and makes for an experience
that is swampy, disturbing, funny, and catchy at the same time — an ideal fit
for a young, teeth-cutting Captain Beefheart in 1966. And from 1957, there is
ʽSay Boss Manʼ, a lesser known tune that shows Bo perfectly at
home with ʽJim Dandyʼ-style danceable R&B. (I suppose that is Otis
Spann locked into that maddeningly simplistic dum-de-dum, dum-dum-de-dum
piano groove in the background, but it is hilarious to hear him try and make
a break for it during the super-short instrumental section, only to be caught
and locked back in his dum-de-dum cell by Bo fifteen seconds later!) «Ingeniously simple» and «intelligently stupid» is
what characterizes most of these early singles, so nicely collected for us by
Chess on this 1958 compilation (note that some expanded versions of the album
also add about half a dozen bonus tracks, mostly B-sides; most of them are
expendable, and some are flat-out self-repetitions, e.g. ‘I’m Bad’, an
unimpressive sequel to ‘I’m A Man’). This makes Bo, similarly to his
contemporary Jimmy Reed, somewhat of a sacrilegious blues renegade, but this
is also precisely why we love them both — except that Jimmy Reed was
perfectly happy to find one basic formula and stick to it like glue until his
last teeth fell out, whereas Bo, as this album shows, was a restless seeker,
and in just three years’ time, he had found more than many bluesmen of the
highest caliber had found in several decades. The BDB was merely one of these finds, and, as the first one and the one that made
him a star, it was bound to become a repetitive trademark. But there is very
little that is repetitive, uninventive, or just plain boring about Bo Diddley, an album where I myself
knew most of the songs — typically, as covered by other artists — before
hearing it. That Bo never managed to outgrow and surpass the perfection of
these early singles should not reflect poorly on one’s perception of them,
nor on one’s assessment of his artistic persona, because when we are talking
about Fifties’ artists, who else did, really? Just like everybody else, Ellas
Bates McDaniel firmly believed that one’s purpose was to find one’s own
special place in life, and once you’ve found it, hold on to it for dear life
unless someone rips it out from under you. And unlike quite a few of the less
lucky Fifties’ artists, at least he,
«the Originator», did find that place. |
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Album
released: July 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Crackin’
Up; 2) I’m Sorry; 3) Bo’s Guitar; 4) Willie And Lillie; 5) You Don’t
Love Me (You Don’t Care); 6) Say Man; 7) The Great Grandfather; 8) Oh Yea; 9)
Don’t Let It Go; 10) Little Girl; 11) Dearest Darling; 12) The Clock Strikes
Twelve. |
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One
might argue about whether Bo Diddley truly deserves his title of «Originator»
to the exclusion of other worthy rock’n’roll heroes of the 1950s, but I do
not think it is arguable that most
of the man’s «originating» can already be found compiled on his first,
self-titled LP. The unwritten artistic laws of that decade clearly stated
that there was literally no way in Heaven or Hell he would be able to push
the boundaries of pop music even further on any of his subsequent records;
and like a respectable, law-abiding citizen of the rock’n’roll district, Bo
complied. Not that Go Bo Diddley, his
second and probably second best LP of original material, should be described
as «scraping the barrel». Its bulk, consisting of new singles that Bo
released from late 1958 to mid-1959, unquestionably shows him trying out some
new styles and directions — but the problem is that most of those new styles
are not essentially his, and
adapting them to the already established persona of Bo Diddley is a risky
business that sometimes pays off, and sometimes... pays through the nose. |
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Although,
unlike Bo Diddley, this record
actually had four LP-only tracks that were not to be found on previously
issued singles, it still makes sense to reshuffle the tracklist to reflect
proper chronology. Once we dispense with ‘Dearest Darling’, the B-side to
1958’s ‘Hush Your Mouth’ which had already been included on Bo Diddley and probably crept its way
here through sheer publishing mistake, the next single is ‘Willie And Lillie’
from October of the same year — a sad tale of a lady leaving her gent for
love of the devil’s music ("Willie
and Lillie used to live on a hill / Wasn’t for rock’n’roll Lillie be there
still") with a happy ending of her coming back once the gent makes
the conversion as well after "Willie’s mama bought him a hi-fi, his
own". While it does show that Bo has a way with introducing Mother Goose
to the pleasures of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, musically it does not amount
to much other than a slowed down, slightly relaxed remake of ‘Hey Bo Diddley’
and the like. (Somewhat more interesting was the B-side, ‘Bo Meets The
Monster’, which put a spoof of contemporary horror movies atop a riff adapted
from Larry Williams’ ‘Bony Moronie’ and crowned it all with the first
appearance of the pick-scraping technique that we all know from ‘Roadrunner’.
For some reason, it was not included on the LP, though). 1959
opened with what was probably Bo’s weakest move up to that point — ʽI’m Sorryʼ transparently
proves that doo-wop, of all things, does not agree with Bo’s personality. Not
only is the production, perhaps intentionally lo-fi-stylized to echo the early Fifties, downright awful, with
near-parodic back vocals rising out of the imaginary coal mines, but Bo
Diddley as a soulful doo-wop crooner simply cannot be taken seriously. If I
want to listen to the Cardinals, I’ll go straight to the source; the addition
of Bo’s usual heavy reverb to the doo-wop guitar riff is hardly sufficient to
sway my interest. For some barely explicable reason, the single did return
the man to the R&B charts, for the first time ever since 1955’s ‘Pretty
Thing’ — something I can only explain by a fit of sentimental nostalgia. The
B-side, ‘Oh Yeah’, was far more Bo Diddleyesque in nature, but that’s not
saying much, since the song is essentially a call-back to Muddy Waters’
‘Mannish Boy’, which was itself a call-back to Bo’s ‘I’m A Man’, which was itself
a call-back to Muddy’s ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’, and it’s all about as exciting
as watching your favorite TV show slowly decline into repetition and
self-parody with each new season. By
May 1959, things seem to pick up a little with the release of ‘Crackin’ Up’, which
was not too musically innovative, either, based on an old Afro-Cuban-style
riff by Jody Williams which Bo had already exploited on ‘Love Is Strange’
(written for Mickey & Sylvia) and which had also served as the basis for
Buddy Holly’s ‘Words Of Love’. But the riff does get a new coat of paint for
this song, with tremolo and reverb effects giving it an oddly «oceanic» aura,
and the song’s harsher, crispier sound, paired with its funny Man’s Lib
agenda ("I do your laundry and your
cookin’ too / What for a woman can a man like me do?"), makes it a
blast if played in tandem with
either ‘Love Is Strange’ or ‘Words Of Love’ — it’s like an inverted version
of the latter’s love-serenade atmosphere. (At the risk of incurring the wrath
of Bo’s defenders, I’ll still go ahead and say that the genuinely crispiest
version of that riff was played on Paul McCartney’s Snova V SSSR album in 1988 — the man spared no expense back then
to introduce us Russians to the sonic potential of Fifties’ rock’n’roll. The
Rolling Stones also did a fine job with the song, both back in their early
days and later, when they revived it in Black
And Blue-style for the 1976 tour, as captured on the Love You Live album — Mick Jagger is definitely a finer candidate
to sing the song than Paul, who, I imagine, would be only too glad to do
Linda’s laundry and cookin’ back in 1988). ‘Crackin’
Up’ was fine, but its B-side, ʽThe Great
Grandfatherʼ, was probably
more surprising: here, Bo steps up to take on something really archaic — ye olde
working song — and this is a style which he tackles with far more conviction
and spirit than doo-wop. Perhaps his moans and groans that bookend the verses
are not nearly as authentic as, say, Leadbelly’s, but at least he makes up
for that with plenty of animalistic intensity. Interestingly, this is the
first song in Bo’s catalog to feature almost no guitar (except for the
dissonant, choppy, crude instrumental break): the melody is carried entirely
by the minimalistic rhythm section, with Otis Spann adding a quiet, sadly
rollicking piano part in the background. If you look hard at the lyrics, it
is difficult to take the song seriously — it is more of a parody on the Old
Frontier Settler stereotype ("when
the times got hard and the redskins smart / said his prayers with the shotgun
cocked") with special focus on the importance of sowing one’s oats
("twenty-one children, came to be
blessed... the great grand-pappy was a busy man"); but if you don’t look too hard, you might just
get a vision of Mr. Bo humming it somewhere in a ditch, breaking rocks like
there was no tomorrow. A strange and funny guy he was, Mr. Bo. The
single was another small hit, keeping Bo’s presence active on the charts, but
his hugest win for 1959 did not come until the end of the year, already after
the release of the LP, when one of its new songs was singled out for solo
release — this was ʽSay Manʼ, on which Bo and his maracas shaker Jerome Green
trade off silly jokes and friendly mutual insults to a samba beat. This was
yet another first — a mixture of time-honored «African-American comedy»,
going back to the Dozens game, and new-fangled R&B that all the white
kids around the world must have been really thrilled to hear. (That said, the
actual jokes are really dumb; they should have hired some of Louis Jordan’s
songwriters instead. Bo says that the producers took out all the dirtiest
bits, though, which is... just sad). Tame and dated as it feels now, ‘Say
Man’ is often called a spiritual predecessor to rap music, and it certainly was the first recording of its kind —
whether that’s a good or a bad thing is not for me to decide, but I guess the
general public was quite thrilled, as the single rose to #20 on the general
pop charts, an achievement Bo Diddley would never be able to top. Musically,
I would say, it is the B-side that takes precedence: ʽThe Clock Strikes Twelveʼ starts out deceptively as yet another variation on
the ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ theme, before turning into a slow instrumental
12-bar blues jam with Bo playing the violin
— it’s safe to say that Heifetz or Menuhin probably
would not be impressed by his technique, but for a few moments out there, I
am ashamed — or thrilled? — to say that I could not actually understand if it
really was a violin, or if it was some
trickily produced inventive part blown by Little Walter on his harmonica.
With more of that quirky Otis Spann piano and Bo going from bowing to
pizzicato and back, in a way, the jam has more of a roll-over-Beethoven vibe
than Chuck Berry ever offered, but, of course, in the long run it’s still
more of an escape-from-routine-boredom thing for Bo than a revolutionary and
influential musical creation. The
remaining four LP-only tracks, predictably, deserve only passable mention. ʽLittle Girlʼ seems to intrude on the turf of New Orleanian barroom players from
Professor Longhair to Fats Domino, and just as he is not much of a doo-wop
singer, Bo does not quite master the sort of nonchalant drunken swagger that
it takes to make these things loveable, so just give it a quick listen and go
back to the real thing instead (why should one subject oneself to repeated listens of Bo Diddley trying
to sound like Fats Domino? at least Fats Domino never tried to make you
listen to him sounding like Bo Diddley). ʽYou Don’t Love Meʼ is the
ever-on-the-watchout Bo stealing the carpet from under the feet of Slim Harpo
— a variation on ʽGot Love If You Want Itʼ which, in
terms of sharpness, energy, and professionalism, destroys the original
completely, yet it still did not help Bo expropriate the original (UK bands
like the Kinks and the Yardbirds still got stuck covering Slim Harpo). ‘Don’t
Let It Go’ is just another variation on the never-ending ‘Diddley Daddy’ /
‘Say Boss Man’ / ‘Willie And Lillie’ pattern, a fact subtly acknowledged in
the mantra-form chorus ("hold on to what you got but don’t let
go!"). Best
of the four is another instrumental, ‘Bo’s Guitar’, which combines a
variation on the Diddley beat with shards of twangy surf-style melodies —
supposedly, Bo the Omnivorous must have kept one ear open to Duane Eddy’s
recent hits — and then goes into proto-noise-rock territory, with the man
trying to extract as much sonic diversity from his instrument as was
technically possible for 1959. There wasn’t a lot of things yet that were technically possible, but I can
imagine that this was the kind of music to inspire young Pete Townshends and
Jimi Hendrixes all around the globe: the very idea that you can just fool
around with the guitar any way you please while your rhythm section does all
the disciplined hard work. Looking
back on all these descriptions, I feel like maybe I ought to take back the
review’s opening phrase, yet in the end I think I shall still stick with it.
One reason is that Bo does seem to bite off a bit more than he can actually
chew — best proof of that being the failed doo-wop experiment of ‘I’m Sorry’ and
the unconvincing New Orleanian stylizations of ‘Little Girl’ — and the other
is that this time around, new ideas creep in more subtly, rather than
bursting in on a here’s-Johnny! note. In fact, most of his actual innovations
in 1959 are on the verbal side, from the Mother Goose influence on ‘Willie
And Lillie’ to the monster-movie stuff of ‘Bo Meets The Monster’ to the
spoken insult game of ‘Say Man’; and those which are not, like the violin on
‘Clock Strikes Twelve’ and the chunks of noise on ‘Bo’s Guitar’, take a while
to sink in as genuine examples of musical experimentation — whereas the
melodic dependence on riffs and patterns already introduced in 1955-1958 is
nearly always obvious right off the bat. Still, compared to many, many of his peers who couldn’t put out
more than 3–4 completely original songs without spending the rest of their
career re-writing them in inferior versions, Bo Diddley’s sophomore record is
a relative triumph: one of the best rock’n’roll collections of 1959, the year
that the lucky star alignment was lost and staying true to the exciting
spirit of rock’n’roll became a heavy chore for most of its practitioners. Not
good old Bo, though. You don’t get this
guy turning into a black Bobby Darin just because being wild and crazy
temporarily went out of fashion after «the day the music died». |
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Album
released: January 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) She’s Alright; 2) Cops And
Robbers; 3) Run Diddley Daddy; 4) Mumblin’ Guitar; 5) I Need You Baby; 6) Say
Man, Back Again; 7) Nursery Rhyme; 8) I Love You So; 9) Spanish Guitar; 10)
Dancing Girl; 11) Come On Baby. |
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Bo
Diddley opened up the Sixties with his first LP that could be more or less
justifiedly called an «original album» rather than a «compilation»: two of
the songs were taken from his most recent single, seven were recorded
specifically for the LP, and only two more were pulled out of the archival
pile: somehow, ‘Cops And Robbers’ from late 1956 and ‘Mona’, the original
B-side to ‘Hey! Bo Diddley’ from 1957 (retitled here as ‘I Need You Baby’)
had previously avoided the 12-inch treatment, so they were recalled out of
retirement to pad out the empty space on the record (which, even with both of
them, is still barely half an hour long). |
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Unfortunately,
in terms of easily recognizable «golden oldies» the record lags far behind
Bo’s two LPs from the Fifties, and even behind quite a few of the succeeding
releases. ‘Mona’ is probably the one with which most people are familiar,
largely due to the Stones’ cover on their own debut LP — its special secret
is that it combines the standard danceable Bo Diddley beat with an element of
soulful romanticism, being more of a serenade than a braggadocio, and
consequently, is guaranteed to work on cool chicks rather than cool cats for
a change. The "Hey, Mona! – woah, Mona!" refrain has a sort of
strange magic that makes it more memorable than almost any other such incantation
in Bo’s catalog — maybe it’s just the element of nagging insistence, so
natural to the heart of every hormone-driven teenager and so sublimely
captured in this ritualistic chorus. Not to mention how well the line "listen to my heart go bumpity-bump"
agrees with the rhythm of the song. ‘Cops
And Robbers’, for some reason, also attracted the attention of at least some
of the trans-Atlantic rockers, having been covered by the Downliners Sect and
Wayne Fontana in the Sixties, and also played by the Stones (not released
officially at the time, but regularly played live in the early days — you can
have yourself a live version from the BBC sessions). However, it is more of a
repetitive musical anecdote than a song, and feels like Bo needed to do
something in the style of Chuck Berry — but couldn’t, so he borrowed a tune
released by minor songwriter Kent Harris, who originally cut it with his
backing band as «Boogaloo
And His Gallant Crew» in September 1956 (curious coincidence: one of the
chorus lines goes "don’t try no
monkey business", and Chuck’s ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ also came out in September 1956!). The
problem is, neither the Kent Harris original nor the Bo Diddley cover are
particularly exciting on a musical level (at least the Harris version has
some nice piano playing for it), and not tremendously funny on a lyrical
level; overall, Bo Diddley’s (or, more accurately, Kent Harris’) sense of
humor has nothing on Chuck’s, so this is a battle Bo was bound to lose. As
for the newer material, well... rather tellingly, the album was organized
around a single whose A-side was a full-on rehash of ‘Say Man’ called ‘Say
Man, Back Again’ — if you loved those friendly jokes and insults the first time
around, here’s a second dose for you! ("Where you from?" – "South
America!" – "You don’t
look like no South American to me!" – "I’m still from South America!" – "What part?" – "South
Texas!" – har har har!) — and whose B-side was a long, energetic, aggressive
groove (‘She’s Alright’) that shows Bo had been paying serious attention to
the success of the Isley Brothers. Give the band plenty of credit for being
able to blow the roof off the house — but, perhaps, keep that «Originator»
tag in the back drawer for the moment. (Fun fact: the original single version
of ‘She’s Alright’ was relatively short and featured a minimum of backing
vocals, but the LP version was extended and embellished with multiple vocal
overdubs to create more of a party atmosphere — not sure if it helps). Still,
as a whole, the new material is not completely worthless or hopeless. Two of
the tracks are instrumental, and both are fairly inspired: ‘Mumblin’ Guitar’
is built around the gimmick of Bo «muffling» his sound by running his axe
through some weird sonic devices (not sure of the technical details) so as to
make it «talk», and ‘Spanish Guitar’, also true to its title, has the man
trying to integrate some flamenco chords into the usual Diddley beat, with
interesting, if somewhat puzzling, results. Perhaps the chief virtue of both
tracks is that they show the man still willing to experiment — in pure
enjoyment terms, the gimmick of ‘Mumblin’ Guitar’ becomes predictably tiring
after the first minute, whereas the combination of Andalusian romanticism
with African tribal rituals... well, it might work for somebody on a gut level, but I don’t really feel as if it were
the most organic mix in the world. But it’s always good to expand one’s
horizons, that’s for sure. Of
the new vocal numbers, ‘Dancing Girl’ may attract special attention due to
the lead guitar work — I don’t know if it’s Bo himself or his trusty
sidekick, Peggy «Lady Bo» Jones (for some reason, I just hope it might be the
lady), but while the song itself is just a variation on ‘Diddley Daddy’,
those intense breaks between verses are... intense. Remember Dylan’s
‘Maggie’s Farm’ and how Mike Bloomfield’s hystrionic mini-breaks between each
verse add so much to the song’s aggression level? That can certainly be
traced back to the likes of ‘Dancing Girl’, where each of the half-sung,
half-spoken tense-as-hell verses is «signed off» with an equally tense,
sharp-ringing guitar flourish. ‘I Love You So’ and ‘Come On Baby’ are less
aggressive and more party-friendly, but both also feature some juicy-thick
distorted guitar work, especially the latter with its almost metallic riff
running throughout the song, hilariously contrasting with the jolly
minimalistic lyrics. Still,
there is no need to pretend that Have
Guitar Will Travel turns over some new leaf in the musical history of Bo
Diddley. With the coming of the Sixties, «The Originator» more or less
morphed into «The Adaptator», keeping, perhaps, a sharper ear to the ground
than many, if not most, of his Fifties’ peers but using these new fads and
influences to refuel his already existing formula rather than come up with
any new ones. And since the early Sixties were not particularly hot on progressive new fads and influences,
it is no surprise that there was relatively little fuel around to keep that
formula as fresh, hot, and nutritious as it was just a couple of years ago.
From here on, Bo’s LPs — particularly now that he was actually recording them
as LPs, which required more material and, consequently, more filler material — would become patchy
and disappointing, though never disappointing to the point of needing to be
ignored. The man did learn how to cope with the «Fifties’ Curse» a bit better
than everybody else, but to be altogether immune to it would require a
miracle, and for that, Bo Diddley found himself ineligible. |
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Tracks: 1) Road
Runner; 2) Story Of Bo Diddley; 3) Scuttle Bug; 4) Signifying Blues;
5) Let Me In; 6) Limber; 7) Love Me; 8) Craw-Dad; 9) Walkin’ And Talkin’; 10)
Travellin’ West; 11) Deed And Deed I Do; 12) Live My Life. |
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Perhaps
it would be unfair, after all, to poke fun at Bo Diddley for letting his
creative well of ideas run all dry when the clock struck twelve on the last
day of the previous decade. It’s more like he was not too quick to grasp the
true potential of this new LP medium. Imagine this — you used to enter the
studio to record just two songs and
be done with it, and now they’re expecting you to enter the studio and cut twelve of these fuckers! Even if you
stretch it out (In The Spotlight
was actually comprised from eight months’ worth of various recording
sessions), you can’t really be expected to be creatively inspired every time
you drag your ass to the studio, right? I mean, even Mozart and Beethoven
wrote shitloads of variations on their own themes, so give The Originator a
break here. |
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At
least, unlike Have Guitar Will Travel,
In The Spotlight has one unquestionable absolute classic on
it. Taking the original riff of ‘Lucille’, slowing it down and removing one
note at the end to give the thing a bit more gravity and heaviness, Bo comes
up with perhaps the greatest ode to motorbiking written up to date — using
the Road Runner character from Looney Tunes (with his trademark beep beep!) to draw you in. The actual
musical — or, perhaps more accurately, sonic
— hook of the song is that entrancingly odd effect of the guitar string being
«skinned alive» as Bo imitates the sound of a motorbike dashing past the
listener, over and over, a classy gimmick whose smooth transition into the
song’s riff probably made many a British kid at the time pick their jaw off
the floor; it is, in fact, one of the most vivid exploits of the electric
guitar’s world-building potential prior to Hendrix, and pretty damn difficult
to pick up properly. (The
Rolling Stones, for instance, never learned to do it; their unreleased version from
1963 instead features a rather measly «up-the-stairway» progression which
does indeed prove that they can’t keep up with the fastest in the land. Nor
could The Zombies,
for that matter, who try to wiggle their way out of it with a set of
distorted trills, getting a little closer to the required goal but still
stalling and spluttering. Only The Animals, back in the day, receive an A+ for effort — and
with the addition of Alan Price’s organ and Eric Burdon’s vocals, come up
with the definitive cover; although, in terms of sheer noise and ruckus, you
can hardly beat the classic Who live version from
1975 — who but Pete Townshend, the supreme Grand Torturer of the electric
guitar, could properly improve upon the Originator’s engine-in-overdrive
thing?). Mood-wise,
‘Road Runner’ is really the same old shit — hyperbolic, but humorous
self-aggrandizing with lyrics working in tandem with the instrumental backing
— but it is really the sound of it
that counts, that heavy and lumbering vibe created by Bo’s and Peggy Jones’
guitars working in tandem (note that there is no separate bass guitar on the
recording! at least I don’t really hear one, and there is none listed in the
liner notes), combined with Clifton James’ massive bass drum pounding. This
is basically the 1960 equivalent of the massive Led Zeppelin groove of 1968 —
not at all the kind of sound typically associated with Bo Diddley, who, up
until then, usually preferred to soar up in the air rather than making it
feel as if he were trying to drill a hole into the center of the Earth. But
even so, this is arguably Bo Diddley’s biggest contribution to the future
genres of hard rock and heavy metal, and even with The Animals and The Who
rising up to the challenge, the original version still remains the
"fastest in the land". And
now the line you’ve all been waiting for: too bad there is absolutely nothing
on the rest of the album to even
remotely match the power, the fun, and the innovation of its opening title.
And this is not an exaggeration — every
other track is a piece of filler. Sometimes boring filler, sometimes silly
filler, sometimes enjoyable filler, but each and every one of these other
eleven recordings is a variation on Bo’s past glories, dragging us back in
time rather than beep-beeping us forward like ‘Road Runner’ does. When was
the last time you saw ‘Limber’ or ‘Craw-Dad’ or ‘Live My Life’ on a Best-Of
Bo Diddley compilation? That’s right — no-when, that’s when. Okay,
correction: most of the Chess compilations actually include at least the
original B-side to ‘Road Runner’, called ‘My Story’ on the single release and
later renamed to ‘The Story Of Bo Diddley’. (Not to be confused with The Animals’ later own ‘Story Of Bo
Diddley’, which would be more centered around the band’s own relationship
with the man than his personal biography). However, it can hardly be argued
that the song’s only bit of importance is in its autobiographical detail (or,
should we rather say, automythological
detail — "I come in this world playing a gold guitar" isn’t exactly
something that could be properly fact-checked) — otherwise, it’s basically
just ‘Dearest Darling’ with a new set of lyrics, as much as I always like to
hear Otis Spann add his crystal-clear piano runs to Bo’s jamming. Elsewhere,
we have ‘Live My Life’, which is a new version of ‘Before You Accuse Me’,
with fairly appropriate lyrics to boot: "If I could live my life, I’d
live it all over again" — Bo states with just a pinch of syntactic
inaccuracy and a whole load of commitment to this particular mission, because
even before the song gets started, it has already
been lived all over again in the form of ‘Scuttle Bug’, an instrumental mix
of the exact same performance with wiped vocals and added extra piano lines
from Spann. I love Mr. Spann and his piano playing on ‘Scuttle Bug’ is
beautiful (some Fats Domino echoes in here, but with a prettier, clinkier
timbre), yet really, why put it in our face in such an obvious manner? And
does the world really need another
sequel to ‘Say Man’ (‘Signifying Blues’)? Around this time, Bo seems to have
had enough insults accumulated for a whole book, which would at least mark a
more original approach to the matter. A
couple of these things take a little more time to unravel; for instance, ‘Walkin’
And Talkin’ makes absolutely no sense until you realize that it is really
Bo’s strange idea of a thematic sequel to the Coasters’ ‘Along Came Jones’ —
the original song starts out with "I plopped down in my easy chair and
turned on Channel 2", while Bo’s verse changes this "ploppin’ down
in my easy chair, tunin’ on Channel 3". Apparently, in Bo’s vision poor
Sweet Sue from the original song has developed some sort of Stockholm
syndrome and is now actively working on rescuing her former stalker (Salty
Sam, though he remains unnamed in this sequel) from legal persecution — I am
not sure if there is some moral lesson to be learned from this, but I am sure that by slowing down the
tempo, getting rid of the yakety-sax, and adding a new repetitive chorus Bo
made the whole thing about ten times less interesting than the Coasters. Oh
well, at least this time around he tried to riff on somebody else’s ideas rather than his own. Another
thing that may be hard for us to understand unless we were there at the time
is ‘Limber’, which is Bo’s specially curated «uneducated» transcription of
‘Limbo’, the brand new dance from the Trinidad area that was just beginning
to replace the calypso craze in the States. Bo would be among the very first
artists to capitalize a bit on that craze — way before Chubby Checker’s
‘Limbo Rock’ or Duke Ellington’s ‘Limbo Jazz’ — but, unless I am very much
mistaken, his idea of the limbo dance is way different from the fast,
energetic representation on, for instance, ‘Limbo’ by Little
Anthony & The Imperials. Bo prefers to take it slow and easy,
decelerating one of his own rhythms and ultimately presenting the whole thing
as more of a send-up of the new fad than a tribute to it. The end result is
not so much groovy as monotonous, and not as much funny as annoying. In
the end, the only other track that I find somewhat exquisitely fun is ‘Deed
And Deed I Do’, which mainly gets by because (a) it is fast and groovy and
(b) I appreciate the contrast between the high-pitched wailing guitar in the
intro and the «mumbling» bass-heavy guitar concluding each of the verses.
Again, it’s more comical than anything else, but Bo Diddley’s bits of musical
comedy, when they succeed, always transcend the silly-novelty stage — the
tone, the echo, the energy, all of that stuff just can’t be beat. It’s just
that you only find them on two or three tracks here. Perhaps that is
precisely what he meant (not really) when choosing the title for the album —
there’s ‘Road Runner’ In The Spotlight
for you, and then there’s everything else that is, by definition, not in the spotlight. |
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Tracks: 1) Gunslinger; 2) Ride On
Josephine; 3) Doing The Craw-Daddy; 4) Cadillac; 5) Somewhere; 6) Cheyenne;
7) Sixteen Tons; 8) Whoa Mule (Shine); 9) No More Lovin’; 10) Diddling; 11*)
Working Man; 12*) Do What I Say; 13*) Prisoner Of Love; 14*) Googlia Moo; 15*)
Better Watch Yourself. |
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REVIEW You
certainly gotta give Bo some credit for closing out 1960 with a third LP of mostly «original» material
(the quotation marks are important, though) — even if the ten tracks on the
original LP barely amount to 25 minutes; no pop artist from the same era was
capable of matching such an achievement. It is almost as if some sixth sense
took over, insinuating that Bo Diddley’s grand mission in 1960 was to save
rock’n’roll from extinction and that, in order to do that, he had to work
thrice as hard as he used to — to make up both for himself and for all those
rockers who’d died, crashed, burned out, or mellowed out in the great
catastrophe of 1959-60. Unfortunately, this was exactly what it was: work. The same crisis that affected
all of those Bo Diddley’s peers that he was stepping in for affected Bo just
as well — and Bo Diddley Is A
Gunslinger is a perfect example of this, a record that features plenty of
well-crafted invention but almost
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In
retrospect, the record does have a rather surprisingly high reputation, with
many critics and fans alike referring to it with what seems to me like
somewhat inadequate warmth and affection. It sometimes finds its way onto
lists of best albums from 1960 or the early 1960s in general, is often
praised for the diversity and energy of its tracks, and a few of the songs
would later get covered by UK artists (for that matter, the LP itself
originally charted as high as #20 in the UK, which was an absolute record for
Bo at the time). This singling-out feels weird to me, because essentially, Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger shares
exactly the same flaws and virtues as any other Bo Diddley LP from around the
same time — except that it does not contain even a single truly outstanding
number of the ‘Road Runner’ variety. It
is possible that some of this mild admiration is triggered by the album’s
funny and slightly daring concept. Expanding upon the theme that he initiated
with ‘Walkin’ and Talkin’ on his previous LP, Bo makes this one into a
«semi-conceptual» record, a part of which revolves around classic Western
themes — only a small part, mind you, but enough to pique our curiosity about
such a quintessentially African-American performer as Bo Diddley encroaching
upon such a quintessentially white artistic genre as the Western. Whoever
heard about a black gunslinger back in 1960, anyway? (Not that there weren’t any — history has preserved
quite a few interesting examples for us, from Bass Reeves to Isam Dart — but
clearly, whatever you can scrape up will still always be the exception rather
than the rule). In theory, this does sound like a promising idea — cross the
Bo Diddley beat with all sorts of country-western themes — and it could have
aligned well with the agenda of other black artists, such as Ray Charles
laying his own claim to the Great American Songbook and the folk / country
traditions of white rural America. In
practice, however, the concept essentially remains limited to the album
cover (but who dropped that guitar on the poor gunslinger’s crushed foot?)
and no more than three songs: title track, ‘Cheyenne’, and ‘Whoa Mule’. Of
these, ‘Gun Slinger’ is little more than yet another variation on the ‘Bo
Diddley’ groove, with appropriately «Western-ized» lyrics ("When Bo Diddley come to town / The streets
get empty and the sun go down") and a fairly standard and
predictable amount of grooving energy on the band’s part — no less and no
more than usual. There’s not even any traces of guitar solos or any special
sonic pyrotechnics: just a basic groove stretched out over two minutes. The
only idea is that we are supposed to go crazy over the idea that "Bo Diddley’s a gunslinger", but
since we know all too well that he really is not, the fantasy ends up in the
mediocre tier. It
gets even more baffling with ‘Cheyenne’, an unfinished and unfunny cowboy
story which once again draws its
musical and lyrical «inspiration» from the Coasters’ ‘Along Came Jones’, this
time fully ripping off the verse melody and the "and then?..." bridge. The lyrics are precisely the kind of
thing that emerges when somebody without the talent of Jerry Leiber and Mike
Stoller is motivated by jealousy to write something in the style of Jerry
Leiber and Mike Stoller, and the music is... well, honestly, I’d simply much
prefer a direct cover of ‘Along Came Jones’, just to see what Bo Diddley
could do with it, rather than this crude and clumsy re-write. The best thing
about the song is its oddly psychedelic extra percussion layer — I have no
idea if it’s someone fiddling around with marimbas or using some sort of
prepared electric piano, but it’s a cool sonic addition, unfortunately wasted
on this complete turkey of a song. Completing
this «Western trilogy» is ‘Whoa Mule (Shine)’, perhaps the most musically
interesting number of the three, though this ain’t saying much: essentially a
cross between a classic, slightly sped-up, doo-wop chord sequence, a classic
Bo Diddley tell-tale verse, and a chorus that adapts a classic
country-western cliché to the realities of a new age of music. The
«story» is predictably unfunny and its moral is left hanging high up in the
air (we had a mule, I liked the mule, the mule liked me, the mule wrecked our
wagon, papa tried to shoot the mule, the mule ran away — END OF STORY!), and the music reveals all its secrets in the
first five seconds. But, uh, whatever rocks your saddle, Mr. Gunslinger. Okay,
so you’d think maybe Bo was just so enamoured of this new invented
personality of his, he thought that the very idea of «Bo Diddley going West» would be enough to redeem any
track on which it was promulgated. But the problem is that the «non-Western»
songs on the album usually do not fare any better. Thus, ‘Ride On Josephine’,
which I have many times seen lauded as a highlight, is essentially a hybridization
of Chuck Berry’s ‘Thirty Days’ (chorus) with ‘Maybellene’ (verse, and I don’t
mean just the melody — Bo more or less nicked the storyline as well). So
what? — people might ask; ethical moments aside (such as not giving Chuck any
songwriting credits), what’s wrong with Bo Diddley covering not one, but two
Chuck Berry classics at the same time? What’s wrong — or, maybe, not wrong,
but simply disappointing — is that Bo slows down the original tempo, deletes
the original solos, replaces the original funny lyrics with crude,
meaningless simulations, and basically does not produce a single musical
argument about why I should ever bother listening to these inferior shadows
of far more exciting originals. Ironically,
when he does offer credit (just
once on the entire album!), the results are even worse. ‘Sixteen Tons’, that
Merle Travis / Tennessee Ernie Ford classic about the grueling hardships of a
coal miner’s life, appears on the album in an utterly reinvented and utterly
ruined version — sped up and set to a typical Bo Diddley groove, the song
becomes an upbeat dance number, completely dumping the original’s gloomy,
agonizing atmosphere. To salvage at least a little something, Bo sings most
of the lyrics with clenched teeth and a deep growl, as if this were a song of
revolution rather than one of resignation. Needless to say, it doesn’t work
and only makes things worse. You couldn’t fuck up more if you re-arranged
‘Eleanor Rigby’ as a happy polka dance number. And
I have not even mentioned the worst offender yet: ‘Doing The Crawdaddy’, a
sort of thematic sequel to last album’s ‘Craw-Dad’, only this time the added
gimmick is a nagging pseudo-children’s choir, chanting the song’s title in
the most obnoxious and irritating sort of way over and over while Daddy Bo is
providing his «kids» with the proper instructions to master this brand new
dance. Do you enjoy hearing the
likes of "na-na-na-na-NAAA-nah!"
for three minutes? Then this song is for you, especially because there
doesn’t seem to be much of anything else to it. In
the end, there are just two tracks
on here that I might be willing to single out and salvage for eternity. One
is ‘Cadillac’, another lightweight joke number distinguished by a sharper,
crunchier, juicier guitar tone than almost anything else on here and some
great sax work from Gene Barge. No more original than any other Bo
Diddley-beat number, it is at least an example of a formula working well —
not nearly as repetitive as ‘Gun Slinger’, featuring better use of the
backing vocals than ‘Crawdaddy’ (the call-and-response between Bo’s lines and
"C-A-D-I-L-L-A-C" is an
aurally pleasing groove in comparison), and with a quirky, satisfying chorus
resolution to the verses. At the very least, this song has some fun
potential, something that The Kinks would perceive when they recorded a
sped-up, slightly «poppified» version of it for their 1964 self-titled debut
(replacing saxophone with harmonica). The
other okay number is the final instrumental ‘Diddling’, which, incidentally,
is also based on the interplay
between Bo’s stormy guitar playing and Gene Barge’s saxophone parts. The two
occasionally merge in a wonderful wall-of-sound, predating the future heights
of excitement to which raunchy electric guitar and sax duets would soon be taken
by garage bands like The Sonics; not sure if there are any compositional
advances here, but the saxophone is precisely the ingredient that was needed
to update and reinvigorate the Bo Diddley groove. Too bad it remained so
drastically underused on all the other tracks. Subsequent
CD reissues of the album threw on from two to five extra bonus tracks,
recorded during the same sessions and, rather predictably, suffering from the
same issues — thus, ‘Do What I Say’ is another variation on ‘Diddley Daddy’,
‘Googlia Moo’ is another variation on ‘Diddy Wah Diddy’, and ‘Better Watch
Yourself’ is another variation on the ‘I’m A Man’ / ‘Manish Boy’ groove. The
oddest and most outstanding bonus track is Bo’s take on the old popular song
‘Prisoner Of Love’, which he rearranges as some sort of a cross between a
typical Bo Diddley number and a soulful Mexican ballad, ending up with a
weird hybrid sound — unfortunately, the song still remains a «novelty». In
conclusion, I might be a little harsh on the album here (I actually gave it a
positive review back in 2012!), but
I think the best compliment that I could give it at the moment is that Bo
himself feels perfectly happy doing it — I think he himself must have been
seriously convinced that he was really doing something cool here, rather than
merely rearranging old ideas in a new order. The grooves are as tight as
usual, the voice is as youthful and energetic as usual, the arrangements are
truer to the rock’n’roll idiom than just about any album released in 1960 —
what’s not to like? At this point, it may really have seemed as if Bo Diddley
was the only classic rocker from the 1950s to escape the 1959-60 stylistic
grinder relatively unscathed — sure, out of new musical ideas (replacing them
with baffling lyrical and image-related concepts), but keeping the flame
largely intact, in comparison with most of his old competitors. The
bottomline is that for the standards of late 1960, Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger served its mission fairly well, and it
did offer the small group of «rock’n’roll survivors», as well as the starving
kids over across the Atlantic, a tiny ray of hope that things weren’t nearly
quite as «over» with the rock’n’roll revolution as the almighty Establishment
would want the world to believe. For the standards of rock music as a whole,
though, the album is an almost pathetically mediocre offering. It is quite
telling that not a single track off it is typically featured on Chess’
single-disc best-of compilations of the artist, and equally telling that,
apart from The Kinks with ‘Cadillac’ and a few latecomers (like George
Thorogood, who did a totally rearranged hard rock cover of ‘Ride On
Josephine’ in the 1970s), pretty much nobody ever cared about covering these
songs — not even such hardcore Bo Diddley fans as The Animals. |
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Tracks: 1) Not Guilty; 2) Hong Kong,
Mississippi; 3) You’re Looking Good; 4) Bo’s Vacation; 5) Congo; 6) Bo’s
Blues; 7) Bo Diddley Is A Lover; 8) Aztec; 9) Back Home; 10) Bo Diddley Is
Loose; 11) Love Is A Secret; 12) Quick Draw. |
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REVIEW The
scarce-as-heck assessments of Bo Diddley
Is A Lover (the music, that is, not the actual potential of Bo Diddley as
a lover, which is a bit hard to judge based exclusively on his songs), from
the brief raving review of Bruce Eder at the All-Music Guide to anonymous
comments on RYM and the like, would all make you believe that Bo Diddley Is A Lover is some
unjustly forgotten and seriously underrated masterpiece. Even my own original
review of it gave the album a thumbs up, concluding that "the man is still willing to combine
brains, brawn, soul, and ego to good effect", a rather meaningless
phrase that could describe a thousand ships. I guess I was in a good mood and
wanted to say something nice, so don’t judge too harshly. |
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Now
that I took a couple more listens to this, surprisingly the only LP that Bo put up in 1961 after his
triple punch of 1960, I think that the only correct positive recommendation
to make is an Amazon-style formula: «If you liked Bo Diddley, Go Bo Diddley,
Bo Diddley In The Spotlight, and Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger, you might
like Bo Diddley Is A Lover». Then
again, maybe not. At the very least, Spotlight
had one immortal classic (‘Roadrunner’), and Gunslinger had an amusing semi-concept that came through only
occasionally, but was still a fun concept. Bo Diddley Is A Lover does not have a single song that would have
its own strong identity, and the concept... well, emphasizing the fact that a
big black guy playing the Devil’s music and singing about hot chicks since
1955 is a «lover» would be the same as, say, a certain guy from Pink Floyd
announcing his next album as Roger Waters
Is An Asshole. What’s the big surprise? Perhaps
we might be expected to admire «The Originator» simply for sticking to his
guns at an age when rock’n’roll was temporarily going out of style and the
wild men of the Fifties were expected to «mature», soften up, and re-orient
their output at audiences that craved craft and gloss over aggressive energy.
Looking at the album from that point of view and in that particular musical
context of 1961, Bo Diddley Is A Lover
does indeed rock harder than almost anything else put out in the States that
year. But Bo Diddley’s blessing-and-curse is a lot like Lemmy’s: he is just
what he is, and changing too much
is impossible for him on a physiological level. What could he have turned into if he ever decided to sell out — Ben E.
King? Impossible. Admiring Bo Diddley for refusing to change his spots is a
waste of admiration mana. Let’s
just look at a few of the songs instead. The album opener and the album’s
only single was ‘Not Guilty’, whose main point of interest are probably the
lyrics and a little bit of theatricality — this time, Bo arranges the usual
call-and-response vocals between himself and his backup singers, The Impalas,
as a mock-trial session, where The Impalas impersonate the jury ("why do women bow at your feet?")
and our man himself puts up his defence ("just to hear me holler ‘hey Bo Diddley’!"). The gimmick is a
bit amusing, but music-wise, there is nothing going on here that we have not
already heard half a dozen times. Perhaps Bo thought that people would be
amused, but those few who did buy the single must have been pretty befuddled
with dialog like "Did you kill a
man named Bob?" – "To make
my baby a Sunday coat". It’s good to know Bo Diddley has a sense of
irony, but it feels a bit... misplaced, perhaps. I mean, when we’re on the
subject of famous people subjected to public scrutiny, Britney Spears’ ‘Piece
Of Me’ sort of makes sense in 2007, but Bo Diddley’s ‘Not Guilty’ hardly
makes any in 1961. It’s not even an Elvis-type situation. Much
more interesting was the B-side: ‘Aztec’ takes the Latin-influenced side of such
Bo Diddley’s songs as ‘Crackin’ Up’ and expands it to a full-fledged foray
into Mexican territory (cue the name), with an experimental solo that is
mostly composed of disjointed, choppy, twangy, sliding licks creating a
proto-psychedelic feel. Rumor has it that the song, despite being credited to
Bo as usual, was actually written by «Lady Bo» — Peggy Jones — and that she
played all the rhythm and lead guitar parts herself; I am not sure that the
sources are credible but surely there would be nothing impossible about it,
given Peggy’s overall musical reputation. Given that ‘Aztec’ is unquestionably
the album’s most creative composition, settling this question some day would
be important, but since both involved parties are already dead, we’ll have to
wait until we join them both in Heaven to conduct a proper confrontation. Until
then, we can only guess how all those albums might have sounded like if the Bo
Diddley / Peggy Jones partnership was more of an actual partnership and less
of a «look-at-me-I’m-so-cool, I-have-a-chick-playing-guitar-in-my-band» sort
of situation. Anyway,
speaking of instrumentals, they are arguably the most interesting songs on
the album: in addition to ‘Aztec’, there is also ‘Congo’, which threatens to
be just an instrumental recreation of ‘Roadrunner’ in the opening bars but
then quickly turns into a piece of exciting twangy rockabilly that probably
does not have much to do with ‘Congo’ but has everything to do with, let’s
say, Bo Diddley playing Chuck Berry with a typically Bo Diddley sound (well,
maybe a little Duane Eddy for good measure as well). The same approach is
later applied to ‘Quick Draw’ which ends the album, although the sound on
that one is less deep and more thin than on ‘Congo’. Alas,
when we return to the vocal numbers, they all follow the formula of ‘Not Guilty’:
more theater, more story-telling, more (questionable) humor, fewer fresh
musical ideas. ‘Hong Kong, Mississippi’ is a variation on ‘Who Do You Love’
with new lyrics that tell the story of Bo picking up a girl from «Hong Kong»
only to find out, in fact, that we’re talking cotton fields instead of rice
paddies. If the idea was to send up both Chinese and Southern stereotypes at
the same time... well, as a famous Chinese philosopher once said to his
opponent, "the teacher’s goals are
noble indeed, but the teacher’s methods leave a lot to be desired". ‘Bo’s
Vacation’ is the next-in-line (seriously, I’ve long since lost count) in the
endless series of ‘Say Man’ retreads, this time, though, trading in the
mutual insult lines with a bunch of insinuations on conjugal infidelity — not
funny and not memorable. And the title track is ‘Diddley Daddy’ with lyrics
that show the well truly running dry: "I’m a lover like they say / I can love my baby both night and day"
seriously does not tell you anything about Bo Diddley that you haven’t
already been carrying around in your head for six years. The
only redeeming aspect of it all — and probably the one aspect responsible for
Bruce Eder and others’ kind words — is that Bo keeps on launching into those
endless streams of self-repetition with so much verve and energy, you’d
almost swear that he himself does
not realize even for one moment that there is a problem. So perhaps this
album leaves me, the listener and
critic, a little depressed; but if there is one place from which that
depression does not come, it is the
communicative signal sent out by the artist. Even if the world of rock and
roll was crumbling all around Bo Diddley, you would never ever notice it from
listening to tracks like ‘Bo Diddley Is Loose’, which recycle the licks, the
words, and the moods of past Bo Diddley songs with such total joy and
abandonment, it would seem like self-repetition is simply the most natural
and predictable thing in the world. In
light of this, I wouldn’t make too
much fun of that pseudo-Amazon recommendation. There are times in life when
an artist repeats himself out of boredom and desperation, and you can sense
that boredom in his playing and singing. And then there are times when the
artist simply runs out of fresh inspiration, and says, fuck it, why should I
keep on inventing stuff? why can’t I be allowed to simply make a record that
sounds totally like the one before it, just because I love that sound so much?
(And I’m not talking about AC/DC, as those guys always strove to come up with
new riffs — even on their worst records; I’m talking about total self-recyclement where you
abandon the very idea of new chord combinations). This is the case of Bo Diddley Is A Lover, a record that
thrives on sounding exactly like its predecessors while still somehow
managing to kick ass against all odds. |
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