by Matt Hanson

originally published in Flak Magazine

            It's easy to deify rock stars, they being as un-geeky as possible by design if not nature, but easier to love them and worship them appropriately if they're more like you.  Bo Diddley is God (or Jesus, according to The Jesus And Mary Chain) because of this charming and agreeable state of affairs.  Either Bo Diddley was the coolest man who ever lived, or he wasn't even close, and (better yet) no one ever felt it necessary to tell him otherwise.  Bo Diddley was, sincerely, a bit of a geek. A geek who was the invisible presence hovering in the framework of two modern, international art forms.  And he also "ebb'd with the ocean of life", as Whitman put it.  Seriously.  I'm talking sonic god.  Let us pause to praise and examine his blessings.      

            Consider the look.  Bo Diddley was iconic.  Think of the black glasses, the black cowboy hat, the jackets, the guitar itself- he knew he was and he knew you knew it, too.  I always took this status for granted until I started studying his cover art, often shot on his own dime.  He looks for all the world like a gangly, black, Buddy Holly!  (Remember that Buddy Holly did make a career out of deconstructing gawkiness and actually sort of ripped Bo off in this respect, nabbing Bo's clothes as well as his beat to transcendent effect on several occasions.)  His giant, gentle frame (no barrel-chested Leadbelly he, nor the ovoid Blues Boy King) hunched in mid-strum over his custom made square guitar, in a giant Christmas red checkered jacket and horn-rimmed glasses, goofy-assed grin staring straight at you, wide as the day was long.  He looked- you'll have to forgive me- like a huge seventh grader.  Not for him the snicker and scowl or noble, haunted look of your typical blues man, nor the glazed visage of the preening alpha male of the hoodlum set.  He was colorful, but not so you'd notice.        

            According to an interview done in 2005, Bo mentioned that he built the legendarily square guitar because he had rocked out so hard in some of the earliest shows that he landed awkwardly, injuring his groin. The need was there for something more compact to accommodate his antics. I hereby suggest this as one of the finest pieces of rock trivia ever, one of the greatest things ever, and a sort of parable to boot.  It's akin (at least to me) to the concert footage where Pete Townsend (another devotee) is swiping at his own Gibson so powerfully that he is so overwhelmed by his own instrument that he literally wobbles and sweats and wobbles again.  It's awkward and exhultant at the same time.  There isn't a more endearing metaphor for music's sway over human existence, if not life itself.            

            He had the rhythm  of the universe in his pocket, knew it, and that was pretty much all he had to worry about. The sounds!  The reverberations!  After telling a friend of my earlier conversion, he (slightly sarcastically) asked if it was the guitar, the maracas, or the guitar that sounded like maracas.  I couldn't answer, so it had to be all of the above.  Bo Diddley's guitar shook, shook, shook AND shook.  The warbly, reedy, chomping smack of it!  When I saw him in New York, a few years ago, I could have sworn he had a steel drummer guy tucked somewhere in the band.  Over a long career his guitar, all tremolo and reverb, took on many delicious and raving manifestations.  His wiggle (undulation is probably the better term) could be seductive or menacing, smooth or raw, playful or desolate.  It floated, humped, chuckled, and rattled.  One can feel it make you start to move- it's very near hypnotism or telepathy.       

            It's magical and everyone who came after took a piece of it.  Diddley knew this, and crankily reminded everyone of it as he got older.  But it doesn't matter.  Everyone knew whose mad laboratory had given birth to the beast.  Think of the endless shading in versions using his ancient, primal 'shave and a hair cut' to great effect: The Stones, The Animals, the aforementioned Buddy Holly, The Stooges, Captain Beefheart, The Doors, The Clash, George Michael, Bow Wow Wow, The White Stripes and pretty much everything which was garage rock and whatever else you can think of which uses this basic bump-bump-bump-and-thump.  It's everywhere.  And it's glorious.        

            His classic first single, signifying everything, was entitled- what else?- "Bo Diddley" and established a loose, surrealist poetry which he was to use again on occasion, when his uncanny knack for song structure wouldn't do.  Bo Diddley was his own creation and mythology: doomed lover and ultra stud alternated roles to suit his rhythm, with the former generally winning out.  For every "I'm A Man" and "Who Do You Love" each of which struts and signifies in a strangely haunting, wounded way there's heartache at the end of the ride.  Listening to the surging "Mona", for one, it's hard to tell if he's actually going to even get the girl in question.  But he wants to.  He's sure trying.  He doesn't seem to have much planned if he is granted his wish: "tell you Mona what I wanna do/ live in the house next door to you/ can I see you some time/ we can go kissin' through the blinds."  That's pretty much it.  Listen to the way he snaps and whips the chorus (her name), and the painfully trembling tremolo just a little too jittery for conversation.  This carries with it all the hushed turmoil of the Delta with the primal joy of early rock, back when it was still being called rhythm and blues.  He uses the guitar-as-train blues motif with incredible power and tension in "Back Home".  It feels like you're in a fast dark traincar in the twenties, watching the light flash over the tops of the ceilings.  "Ooh Baby" has his girl say "I love you but I'm leavin" to his shock and incomprehension with lapping chords rocking up against a plaintive, curling violin.  Bo played the violin very rarely on record, which is a shame.  It's one of the sexiest songs about being dumped ever written.        

            Bo Diddley did seem to have a tendency to be a day late and a buck short, as the saying goes.  He didn't always come out on top.  Muddy Waters took "I'm A Man" and answered it with the  immortal "Mannish Boy", thereby slightly trumping Bo in terms of recognition and machismo.  I had loved the song for years before I knew that it was even partially written by Bo Diddley.  He bought his first four track off of Chuck Berry, who probably ripped him off.  The late sixties work rehashes old riffs with unbearably perky hippie backup singers.  It's true he traded on nostalgia for a little longer than was necessary.  I believe him when he said he never got paid appropriately for his shows and his records.  He wasn't the only one.       

            Placing Bo Diddley in any specialized field is fairly impossible.  He didn't play blues without playing rock n' roll, and he didn't play rock n roll without gospel, R&B, and blues.  He didn't have Chuck Berry's sleek wit or Howlin' Wolf's trenchant groan.  He had a hype man (before it was cool!) by the name of Jerome Green, who cackled and maraca'd for him and did the dozens, trading put downs in "Say Man", which has been traced back as an ancestor to rap.   What he had was the sound, his own animism brought electric from ham bone chest-slappers, nursery rhymes, and gospel rapture.  Witnesses said he sang a gospel song called "Walk Around Heaven" on his deathbed and that his last words were that he was headed that way.  There wasn't any need to mention the fact that he was already there, and had been for a long time.