One of the first real rock and roll albums I bought was a Bo Diddley disc on sale at the Bunch of Grapes in Vineyard Haven. I had graduated from the folkie wave and gotten swept up in the psychedelic tsunami of the 1960s, but that old time rock and roll kept pulling me back, especially Chuck Berry's Golden Decade, a Chess double album set that tracks nearly every Berry hit, on which I had spent most of my meager summer job earnings one week, adding the Diddley album as an afterthought .
I thought Bo was boring at first. Most of the tunes had that trademark "thumpa-thumpa-thump- THUMP THUMP". True, it was lively and bouncy but redundant. I liked Bo's sense of humor - you could tell from titles like "Mushmouth Millie", "Bo Diddley's Hootenanny" and one song that features him mocking an English accent that he didn't take himself too seriously. I've always felt that the rock and roll pioneers had the right attitude about the music - big and bold and laced with tongue-in-cheek humor. Two of Diddley's signature tunes stood out: "Can't Judge A Book" and "Who Do You Love?" Both tunes have been covered by The Fabulous Thunderbirds, George Thorogood and Tom Rush, just to name a few. The lyrics combine that brash sense of satire with a hint of menace, especially the latter, with one of Bo's most famous refrains: " Got a brand new house on the roadside/Made out of rattlesnake hide/Little bitty chimney up on top/Made out of a human skull" and "Got a cobra snake for a necktie." I lost my Diddley album somehow in the chaos of constantly shifting from one apartment to the next, and proceeded to pretty much forget about Bo. His distinctive guitar musings would crop up when I least expected it, most notably using the single "Bo Diddley" as the soundtrack for the depiction of Harlem in the R. Crumb classic "Fritz the Cat".
Then I picked up a 4 CD set of blues tunes that just happened to be sprinkled with some outstanding live performances featuring Diddley at his finest. Since the songs were on one of those minimally-labelled, deeply discounted collections of music randomly thrown together, there is absolutely no information about where or when the cuts were recorded, so it's impossible to provide any details about the flawless performances of "Can't Judge..." (In which Bo actually stops the tune in the beginning to laugh at the audience), "Mona" (Standard thumpa-thumpa-thump-THUMP-THUMP, packed with exceptional guitar and sax solos) " Road Runner" (I grew up listening to Junior Walker's version) and a vaguely psychedelic "Dr. Jeckyll". Probably the best collection that really covers most of Ellis McDaniel's (Bo's real name) output is another CD I borrowed from a friend that was called (I think) "Rare and Well Done". I always thought that "I'm A Man" was a Muddy Waters composition, but it turns out it was the flip side of the "Bo Diddley" single released by Chess in 1955.
Ironically, the day before Bo Diddley died in Florida at the age of 79, I had been thinking about trying to find the "Rare" CD to add to my collection. I was actually hoping to see Diddley and his trademark rectangular guitar in person, but I'll have to settle for his legacy.
