I Knew Diddley

And you should, too.

That’s me and Bo Diddley in 1989, when I was the assistant manager at Turtle’s Records and Video in Gainesville, FL, conveniently located right next to the Wal-Mart in the strip mall on the far side of town. Bo lived in Gainesville.

A few months after this photo was taken, I’d move to New York City, where I’ve resided for the past thirty-four years. I was definitely looking to get out of Florida at this point, less than five years after even more urgently looking to get out of Alabama, but I wasn’t quite gone yet.

The fact that Gainesville is a college town—Go Gators, I guess—doesn’t mean it was full of music aficionados who would get a jolt out of hobnobbing with grade-A rock & roll royalty like Bo Diddley.

Guitars, bass, and drums were the mainstays of my musical diet, the onions, bell peppers, and celery of my aural gumbo. Not so much for my customers.

Just because you can see posters pushing new albums by Lou Reed, the Replacements, and Bob Mould on the wall behind Bo and me in the photo there (I obviously chose those particular posters), it doesn’t mean anyone bought those albums. At the time the photo was taken, UF’s students were far more focused on the Beach Boys, in all their beer-gutted, late-period glory, than they were on Bob Mould screaming through his residual Catholic angst.

Two albums I remember selling ad nauseam during my time at Turtle’s were the soundtrack to the super-craptastic Tom Cruise picture, Cocktail (featuring the dreaded “Kokomo”) and Upstairs at Eric’s, by a synthesizer-heavy British pop band called Yaz.

I don’t know how it happened, because the album never made it higher than 91 on the U.S. charts, but it seemed that every makeup-encumbered sorority girl on campus had somehow been brainwashed into buying Upstairs at Eric’s. Here’s a track.

I…um…wasn’t gonna be listening to that.

Year after year, semester after semester, the Sisters would march into Turtle’s like pod people to grab up their copy of Upstairs at Eric’s. Then they’d rush home and play it while gossiping about that little bitch Ashley and drinking Diet Pepsi out of a red plastic cup.

Or so I'm guessing.

So the vast majority of our customers didn’t give a fat shit that Bo Diddley walked among them. I, on the other hand, had a deep interest in the formative days of rock & roll that was kickstarted by Bruce Springsteen’s vocal, utterly contagious enthusiasm for his musical lineage.

He always mentioned some song or some artist that would ignite my curiosity during his magazine interviews, and then I’d go searching for the record—no easy task in those pre-Internet days. You actually had to leave the house, and very often leave town, to do it.

I had to be the only sixteen-year-old in North Alabama who was digging through used record bins searching for a copy of Frankie Ford’s “Sea Cruise.”

Thanks to Bruce, I’d been listening to artists like Bo Diddley since I was in high school. Bo’s presence in Gainesville meant a lot to me. This guy was an icon.

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Bo was one of the founding fathers of rock & roll, along with Chuck Berry and Little Richard. That’s an unfair boiling down of a gradual process that involved scores of gifted R&B artists, of course, but if I had to pin it on three people, that’s who I’d pick.

Pivotally, Bo invented (or adapted from African sources, which is the story with the vast majority of great American music) the “Bo Diddley beat,” a pounding rhythmic figure that, in the mid-1950s, helped transform traditional blues and R&B into something far more aggressive than it had ever been before.

If you squint and think about it at the proper angle, Bo’s beat might be considered the opening salvo of rock & roll. At the very least, it’s a significant strand of the music’s DNA. That beat, and myriad variations on it, is a dominant trait that will never be totally crossbred out of the music.

Here’s an example of Bo wielding said beat like a sledgehammer in a ridiculously exciting live performance that conveys his raw, steamrolling power. (That woman playing electric guitar in a skintight evening gown is Norma-Jean Wofford, aka “The Duchess.” If there was a cooler female human being in 1965 than the Duchess, I can’t imagine who it was. Jeannie Shrimpton? Marianne Faithfull? Oh, please…)

Bo (actual name Ellas McDaniel, in case you’re ever on Jeopardy) was certainly ahead of the curve rhythmically. Beyond the beat, though, he was a hectoring, caterwauling joker of a vocalist who regularly cackled over his own zingers. A lot of his songs are thoroughly infused with sarcastic, street corner humor.

In effect, he made braggadocio an art form several years before a young boxer named Cassius Clay picked up the gauntlet…and several million years before boastful rap and hip-hop became cultural phenomenons. So he was ahead of the curve on that, too.

Many of Bo’s songs consisted of literally one chord repeated endlessly, as if two chords meant showboating.

Back in the fifties, the relentless drive he created sounded pretty dangerous. Bo—not as big and Black as Howlin’ Wolf, but still pretty damn big and pretty damn Black—made a lot of people very uneasy, and he knew it. But that was all the more reason for him to hector, caterwaul, and cackle.

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Bo would come in the store wearing his big cowboy hat with a sheriff’s badge on it, looking exactly like the Bo Diddley in my mind, a dream in the flesh, and rarely did anyone even recognize him. As far as they were concerned, he was just another bored Gainesvillian looking for a movie on a slow Friday night.

Here was one of the carved heads from Rock & Roll Mt. Rushmore, right there in front of them, and they were too uninformed to be bothered. Instead of being swarmed by fans, as he should have been, Bo would simply rent Friday the 13th or I Spit on Your Grave and go home. Every time he came in, he’d ask us if any new slasher movies had been released.

As you might imagine, Bo didn’t walk around with a guitar and an amp strapped to his back all day, but the gang at the store eventually did get to hear him play. He was releasing a new record on his own mini-label—the cover looked like it was drawn by a niece who was good with a magic marker—and wanted to do an in-store appearance to promote it.

Unfortunately, his “people” (if he actually had any people) didn’t send us a single copy of the album.

So, on the day Bo and three or four band members showed up with their equipment in tow, ready to play and sign some autographs, we had to inform the great man that we didn’t have anything for him to sign! “Well,” he said, “I guess we’ll just plug up outside and play for a while.”

Our manager, the inestimable Tim White, pointed out that Bo almost certainly needed a city permit to do that, and the cops would likely shut him down if he tried. “If the cops drive by,” Bo replied, “we’ll stop. Then we’ll start again when they drive away.”

And that’s exactly what he did. For three solid hours, Bo stood in front of the store and pounded on that big rectangular guitar of his—WAMPA-WAMPA-WAMP…THUMP-THUMP…WAMPA-WAMPA-WAMP…THUMP-THUMP—over and over and over and over again, and no one was going to stop him.

Never mind that hardly anyone passing by even paused to listen. This was not the Beatles playing on the roof at Apple Corp.

At one point, the cops did pull through the parking lot, and, as expected, they told Bo and his cohorts to cool it. So Bo shrugged amiably, waved, took off the guitar, and put it in its case. Then the cops left, and—WAMPA-WAMPA-WAMP…THUMP-THUMP…WAMPA-WAMPA-WAMP...THUMP-THUMP.

He obviously loved that beat.

Bo Diddley let me hold his guitar on that glorious day, which is more than you can say...

...and he autographed this cd for me.

When he signed it, he looked at the picture on the cover and said, “See that horse by the fence back there? Every time I climbed over the fence, he’d walk over real quiet and bite me on the arm. We had to wait for him to walk away, then I jumped in with the guitar, and they took the picture. Then I climbed out again before he came back.”

At least the horse had good taste.

Here’s a final thing I remember about Bo Diddley, and I’ve thought about it often in the ensuing years.

One time, Bo was at the store, casually browsing through the bins, when he saw that the Rolling Stones had released a huge new boxed set, The Complete Singles Collection.

“The Stones got a new one out?!” he excitedly asked as he picked up the box and perused the track list. “They got any of mine on there? I get money when they do that.”

Unfortunately, the Stones didn’t cover any of Bo’s tunes on the set, and he didn’t get any money out of them. I bet he could have used it, too. He didn’t seem destitute, but he wasn’t exactly driving around in a Ferrari, either.

The Stones, who simply wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for guys like Bo Diddley clearing the way, had long ago transformed themselves into smug, Luis Vuitton-pampered vampire bats raking in millions of dollars per show, while Bo was hoping for them to re-release a cover of one of his songs so he could possibly land a little extra spending cash.

You can’t exactly blame the Rolling Stones for this turn of events. But there’s so much wrong with that, it’s hard to even unpack.