Wall of Paul

Bo Diddley died on Monday, at the age of 79, and I’m really sad about it. I’m sure, by now, most people have no idea why Bo was one of the more important figures in rock & roll history. So I’ll tell you, and you can tell somebody else.

In a nutshell, Bo Diddley invented the “Bo Diddley beat,” which was a pounding rhythmic figure that, in the mid-1950s, helped supercharge traditional blues music into something far more wild and demented than it had been before, a vibe tailor-made to scare your parents. If you think about it at the proper angle, you could call this the beginning of rock & roll.

Bo (whose real name was Ellas MacDaniel, in case you’re ever on “Jeopardy”) was certainly ahead of the curve on that one. His beat remains a staple of rock songs to this very day, and, lo and behold, dementia has become the new national consciousness.

He was also a hectoring, caterwauling, joker of a vocalist who regularly cackled over his own zingers. 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 rap became a phenomenon. So he was ahead of the curve on that one, too.

Bo wasn’t for the feint of heart— many of his songs consisted of literally one chord, repeated ad infinitum, as if two chords meant showboating. Back in the day, he had the effect of a guitar-playing mountain lion unleashed into the bedrooms of middle-class teenagers around the country…and he was a big, black mountain lion. Bo made a lot of people very uneasy, and he knew it. And that was all the more reason for him to hector, caterwaul, and cackle.

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I actually sort of knew Bo Diddley. About 20 years ago, I was the assistant manager at a video and record store in Gainesville, FL. Bo lived in Gainesville, for whatever reason, and used to rent slasher movies from us. It was really bizarre, because he’d come in wearing his big cowboy hat with a sheriff’s badge on it, looking just like Bo Diddley. Then, instead of breaking into a few choruses of “Mona” or “Say Man,” he’d just rent “Friday the 13th” and go home.

One day, I did get to hear him play, though. He had released a new record on his own label, and wanted to do an in-store appearance to promote it. Unfortunately, his “people” (if he actually had any) didn’t send us any copies 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 autographs, I 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.” I pointed out that he almost certainly needed a permit to do that, and the cops would likely shut him down if he tried. “If the cops drive by,” he replied, “we’ll stop. Then we’ll start again when they drive away.”

And that’s exactly what he did. For about three hours, Bo pounded on that big rectangular guitar of his - WAMPA-WAMPA-THUMP…WAMP-WAMP - over and over and over and over again, and no one was going to stop him. At one point, the cops did cruise through, and, as I expected, they told him to cool it. So Bo shrugged amiably, took off the guitar, and put it in its case. Then the cops left, and— WAMPA-WAMPA-THUMP…WAMP-WAMP.

Once, I got Bo to sign a copy of this cd for me: