Bo - wow wow!

 

Some years ago I saw a fantastic slice of Bo Diddley footage on TV, a long clip from a live concert. It wasn't from the '50s or '60s, I don't think - 1970s by the look of it - but I took it to be his act, more or less the same as the heyday. 

It was all noise and all rhythm.... hypnotic, almost Velvet Underground level, but more physically convulsive - made to make you jump rather than trance out. 

The recordings are terrific but they don't approach what I heard, in part because they're generally short and to the point, whereas whatever the song was I saw in this clip seemed to go on and on, almost like a Neu! track. Perhaps there's a live album that captures it.

This clip below isn't the thing I saw but it has something of the same "European Son"-endlessness quality. But - being Diddley - it's more rhythmically lively than the VU. 

Diddleybeat beats Tuckerbeat any day of the week. 

In this concert clip I originally saw, I was also struck by the odd hard-angled guitar shape. Like this rectangular one.

This post started as an excuse to display the photograph at the top - what on Earth is he wearing?  

A sort of metallicized corset, made out of several belts.... with further belts, or straps on the arms, and a couple of belts creating a halter top effect. All that leather, all those buckles and metal eyelets and studs - it has the look of some sort of DIY version of Skin 2 fetish wear.  The cinching at the midriff - the pinched overhang of moob flesh - it all gives off kinky vibes.

It's a bit Rob Halford, now I think about it.

Making a fur-covered guitar also seems slightly kinky

 

This guitar - one of many square / rectangular / polygon-shaped guitar bodies he designed and had built for him - has a set of effects-processors built into the body.

"Bo Diddley created a brash sound that opened new frontiers for the electric guitar, as he experimented with reverb, echo, vibrato, tremolo, distortion, and flange effects. He designed his own guitars, including his signature rectangular Gibson; a hexagon-shaped guitar with a built-in effects processor"

What a tumult!

That last one suggested by Ed in Comments

A very repetitious artist - every song pretty much is a chip off the same block  - but then again Bo Diddley is his own genre, so being "generic" is just being himself all the more forcefully. 

Genius-as-scenius-of-one.

And then Diddleybeat becomes a real scenius through being so widely copied.... and copied across quite a duration too ("Faith" by George Michael is Diddleybeat)

Copy of a copy

Copy of a copy

Apparently  Bo was wowed by Bow Wow Wow's reinvention

Now this - from the early 1960s -  is a funny bit of meta-rock: a "Love and Theft" confessional by The Animals. 

It tells the story of Bo Diddley and entourage turning up at an Animals show and hearing them covering his songs. 

“And I overheard Bo Diddley talkin'

He turned around to the Duchess

And he said, "Hey Duch

What do you think of these young guys doin' our material?"

She said, "I don't know, I only came across here to see

The changin' of the guards and all that jazz"

Well, Bo Diddley looked up at me and he said

With half closed eyes and a smile

He said, "Man...," an' took off his glasses

He said, "Man, that sure is the biggest load of rubbish...

I ever heard in my life"

The Pretty Things took their name from a Bo Diddley song

And copied the sound on their archetypal tune

This next tune seems Diddley-derived but it's also a creative extension of the feel - bringing in a distinct British starkness, sound you can see. Also quiet / loud dynamics. 

More straightforward rip-offs / emulations / covers.

Delving through the DNA trails in Brit beat, freakbeat, garage punk etc, would be a consuming task

Let's jump ahead to glam

This Sweet monsters indebted (as was the contemporaneous "The Jean Genie") to "I'm A Man" -  actually a slightly different feel from Diddley, more of a trudging straight blues. 

This fantastic last-burst-of-genius phase T. Rex smashsingle cuts between Diddleychurn and sway-and-glide

 

Jump ahead some more (can't think of much Diddleyism during the New Wave era... Chuck Berry, although present initially in punk, and Diddley  - all those kind of "feels" (also twelve-bar and boogie shuffle), these were rhythm-modes that had to be expunged in order to create the feeling of NEW in New Wave)

But then you started to get some artists who had initially been Year Zero anti-rock types but then for various reasons plugged themselves back into the American Southern roots matrix. Like No Waver Lydia Lunch: 

I wonder if they reached it via Beefheart's version?

As suggested by Doug in Comments, Jesus & Mary Chain pay homage - picking up on the noise, not really pulling off the rhythm. 

At the time I disdained George Michael for the most part - but repeated exposure over the years on MTV and American radio has swayed me re. this (and "Freedom '90") (But "I Want Your Sex" can do one and as for "Praying For Time"...).

And of course there's "How Soon Is Now" - but it just takes the tremolo guitar-pulse, the beat is completely different (and comparatively dead)

I refuse to play "Desire" by U2, though

Lurching back a bit temporally

Just two of many many covers of this Bo tune 

Doors is fine but Quicksilver, gosh no... 

Check out this live / Live Aid version of "Who Do You Love", where Bo guests with George Thorogood, who'd covered it on record. The metallic flange-scree comes from Bo's guitar.

Texturally could almost be off "Staircase Mystery"

At about five minutes into this next clip from long after the heyday, Bo starts into a heavily effected, reverb-soaked harmonics-laced solo that is.... pure postpunk.... or like something off a Rangers album

It's the emphasis on guitar-as-sound and guitar-as-rhythm (EVERYTHING as rhythm - voice included) that makes Bo leap outside of the 1950s and feel like a contemporary:

"Diddley’s emphasis was always on the rhythm guitar. His approach didn’t revolve around the single- and double-note leads that came to dominate the music. Instead, Bo Diddley pioneered a sound that involved every member of his combo playing with a percussive sensibility. Rhythm was emphasized over melody, with a vocal style that often approximated Rap set against that rhythmic backdrop. Earlier even than James Brown, Diddley inadvertently pointed to a Hip Hop future. His best-known rhythm guitar pattern (three strokes/rest/two strokes, or “shave and a haircut, two bits”) influenced many.

"Percussion takes clear precedence over melody or chord progressions. His emphasis on looped rhythm patterns, combined with semi-spoken, often boastful lyrics, position his music closer to the Hip Hop

aesthetic than his fellow Rock and Roll pioneers in the 1950s...  In a 2008 article in Smithsonian Magazine, music historian Ned Sublette writes that Bo Diddley “was practically rapping anyway, with stream-of-consciousness rhyming over a rhythm loop.”

Bo inventing rap, according to David Toop in the Rap Attack

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Along with that photo, this post triggered by 

a/ Nik Cohn's Awopbop

b/ stumbling on this tribute track by the ridiculously entertaining and rhythmically lively 2nd-div Krautrock unit Guru Guru (their first 3 albums, especially Hinten, massively recommended)

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Not sure what I think of this, Bo jamming with the David Letterman showband  - Diddleybeat isn't really funky.

This is more like it

This is mad and the cover / album title maybe explains that belt-corset garment up top.

Suggested by Doug, an anti-LSD tune by Bo Diddley

And more suggestions from the parishioners

Via Ed, footage from the Rock and Roll Show, a massive revivalist event in London in 1972, with legends and resurrectionists jostling in the lineup

Via Tyler, a frat party live bootleg from 1959

... and a B-side that's just traded insults over maraccas drums piano

From Stylo, a Fall tribute (M.E.S. a fan, apparently)

... also, Bo talking about supporting the Clash, and complaining (odd, given that he liked to make a bit of clangour) about how they used too much amplification. 

... and his name taken in comedic vain by Peter Cook & Dudley Moore in their famous "Bo Duddley" sketch, source of the "voodoo ray" / "voodoo rage" sample used by A Guy Called Gerald. Although  Pete 'n' Dud aren't taking the piss out of Bo, or even out the blues  - it's the white bourgie bluesologists who are the figures of fun here. 

The original TV sketch from a decade or so earlier

New Wave (premature sighting)

 

Melody Maker, November 1967

(via Peter Stanfield's post on Velvet Underground literature)