PRIMAVERA: Friday

Friday’s music begins for me creeping into the darkened indoor auditorium to catch the last half of the set by Holly Golightly & The Broke Offs. Holly seems a little distant and uncomfortable in such a huge space, but, her music being what it is - namely all that feels right and rocks solid and is undeniably GOOD, naturally she brings it home nicely. Of course I miss the swing of her full band, but the rough Sun Records style honkytonkin’ blues she bashes out with the Broke Offs man are dead good too. I mean, how could they not be, right? One day I’ll find the time to write some appropriately real good stuff about Holly Golightly, but it shall not be today, as I am tired this evening and I’ve still got a ton of other festival reviewing to get through.

Back out in the sunshine, I’ve agreed to meet up with Pete to go and see a band called It’s Not Not. The reasons for this are unclear in my memory, but I think we wanted to make an effort to catch some genuine Spanish punk rock in amongst all the laurel-resting old American geezers who comprise the bulk of this festival’s lineup, and I took it as a good omen that some of this lot apparently used to be in a group called ‘Tokyo Sex Destruction’, and that they decided to call their first album ‘NO TIME FOR JOKES’. That title alone, along with the accompanying photo presenting them sitting outside some woodland cabin absent-mindedly poking gas canisters with sticks and generally skulking around in some gap-toothed hardcore kid/hillbilly fashion, led me to suspect we may have been in the presence of some odd kind of genius. Sadly though, It’s Not Not are, well… not. Not dreadful by any means, but not all that great either. They’re a pretty serviceable unit – one of those bands that I guess marks the exact point at which what were once daring post-punk moves become expected, default rock moves. Heavily in thrall to Liars, their most exciting song is even one where they all go “Run! Run! Run for your life!” over tom-toms and doom-funk bass in precisely the way you’d expect. I think a band like this one might be just the ticket if you were, I dunno, 17, and saw them in some sweaty, scary club having previously had no experience of Birthday Party / Jesus Lizard type performance punk, and the singer accidentally hit you in the back of the head of something. But playing to the jaded likes of us in a three quarters empty concrete coliseum on a sunny afternoon, their antics are just not happening.

After that, there’s a big gap in my schedule where it seems I didn’t see any music… I think we went and had some dinner, and stuff. So, you rejoin our correspondent a few hours later, charging alone across the big, open square and taking a flying leap (ok, not quite, but you get the idea) into the centre of the crowd to watch The Sonics.

Andy Parypa of The Sonics

Yes, I know, the actual Sonics! It seems completely ridiculous. In my mind at least, those timeless, frenzied, holy sides of unparalleled maximum rock n’ roll that busted out of Northwest nowhere back in 1964 with ‘The Sonics’ stamped on them might as well have been made by cartoon characters rather than real, flesh & blood people, such is the disconnection between their larger than life, brain-bypassing lunatic appeal and anything extant in what is commonly held to be ‘the real world’. But, as the mania for lucrative and unlikely band reformations gains increasingly silly momentum, here we all are in Spain, and the sun is shining, and the bloody Sonics are playing. Well, some of them are anyway. Sax man Rob Lind would seem to be the driving force behind this new get together, dominating most of the between song chat as if he were taking a run for the senate, along with original guitarist Andy Parya and legendary organist/frontman Gerry Roslie (who’s looking a bit shaky these days, but still keeping it together and looking/playing like a cool cat), ably assisted by a bassist/vocalist who I thiiiink (correct me if I’m wrong) is Wally Kemp of the New Colony Six, and a new drummer.

Now, a number of people I spoke to later in the weekend said they found The Sonics set to be disappointing. The phrase “pub-rock” was bandied about. Well let it be said that if this is pub-rock, maybe I should be spend more time hanging out in pubs, because dancing with a load of random Spanish guys to some of the most joyous, good-times rock n’ roll ever laid down, yelling along to every word of “Boss Hoss” and “Walkin’ The Dog” and “Have Love Will Travel” and “Dirty Robber”, was undoubtedly the most FUN thing I’ve done in months.

I don’t know what the show’s detractors might have been expecting – some terrifying explosion of proto-punk violence perhaps? Well certainly, The Sonics lack the energy and attack they brought forth on their original recordings, but I mean, of course they do – sixty year old guys with careers, families and Eagles tapes in the car are just NOT going to swing out like sexually frustrated seventeen year olds trying to be Little Richard, playing three sets a night for gas money, and it would be churlish to expect them to. It must be said that the manic fills and killer timing of original drummer Bob Bennett are notably absent – quite possibly the new guy is still playing them, but one of the secrets of The Sonics impact on record was the way in which the drums sprung so unnaturally loudly into the foreground of the mix, and a modern outdoor festival set-up can’t/won’t allow for that sort of unusual tweaking. And Roslie and the other guys’ trademark “AAAAaaaaaRRRggGGhHH!!!!”s are perfunctory rather than spine-chilling, but hey, they make the effort bless ‘em, and the audience are more than ready to compensate if they can’t hit the high note anymore.

For, as long as they keep busting out the hits (and ALL Sonics songs are hits), one can’t help but think, FINALLY, somebody at this damn picnic’s had the good sense to bring The Proper Music to the people amid all the marathon doses of arty, noisy shit, and as a result the positive energy in the crowd is immense when they close, as they must, with ‘Louie Louie’, and their unbeatable triumvirate of original punk rock classics… I won’t patronise you by reminding you what they are. But remember: she’s got long black hair / and a big black car / I know what you’re thinking / but you won’t get far / she’s gonna make you itch…. (ready?)…. COS SHE’S THE WITCH! AAAAAAaaaaaaaRrrrgghh!!!

They don’t write ‘em like that anymore. And for good reason! But the bare bones of the Sonics material is eternal: these songs can be played anywhere, by anyone, and two minutes and ten seconds of knuckleheaded, feral abandon is guaranteed, so being able to get down for a while with the creators of such integral pieces of rock n’ roll culture is a rare privilege.

The development of punk rock of course took a pretty strange and circuitous route after it was pounded into shape by The Sonics, and little do I suspect that I’m immediately going to get hit over the head with an even more primal experience by a guy who embodied it twenty years after them, as I look at my watch as the last note of ‘The Witch’ dies away and think, hey, I’m still in time to catch some of Bob Mould’s set…

Now a quick survey: who here remembers ever reading/hearing anything good about Bob Mould’s solo albums of the past decade or so? I don’t own any of them, and that’s probably because all the critical/public feedback that seems to surround them tends to boil down to “oh, he’s such a hopeless middleaged windbag, his songs get so generic and awful, he tries to do all this pop stuff with vocoders and dance beats and it’s just embarrassing, oh why can’t he just rock out like he used to” etc. And I could never really get into Sugar either to be honest, so, y’know, shrug, fair enough, fickle, hype-led swine that I apparently am, I haven’t exactly made catching Bob’s latest endeavours a top priority. Instead, I’ve been satisfied to just wait for one of those grim mornings when it’s a struggle to put one foot in front of the other, and drag myself into some sort of forward motion by cranking up the volume to lose myself for the millionth time in the sanctuary of the tinny, poorly mastered hurricane of the seven or so years Bob Mould spent co-fronting one of the truest, most inspiring, cathartic and NECESSARY rock bands of all time.

Bob Mould

But, as soon as I get close enough to the stage he’s playing to see/hear what’s going on, I instantly want to stick it to all the haters who’ve led me to believe that Mould is washed up, because clearly he’s in GREAT shape, and he and his backing band are on fire. I don’t know whether Bob’s been putting in time down the gym, hiking through the wilderness or has just been toughened up by a few decades of additional life experience, but frankly he looks like he could beat the shit out of the sadsack who turned up in those grim Candy Apple Grey promotional appearances back in ’87. He’s lunging around the stage in full-scale punk rock fashion, hands a blur, guitar ringing out sheets of purest, shrieking treble.

The couple of solo Bob tunes I catch are sounding pretty damn fine to me, and I’m about to turn to some friends I’ve noticed I’m standing next to in order to express this thought when suddenly……. the opening riff to “I Apologise”. Whoa. Battle stations! The next twenty minutes or so are something of a blur of white light, sweat and myself quite possibly freaking out like some sort of spastic, but at least some part of my brain was still on-point enough to recall that he went on to play “Chartered Trips” and “Celebrated Summer” and “These Important Years” and “Makes No Sense At All” and finished with – holy jesus – “New Day Rising”.

As with most of the important / overwhelming events in life, I wasn’t expecting this one at all. It came out of nowhere, left me utterly wrecked, and went back into nowhere. I know I’ve invested a lot in Bob Mould’s songs over the years (although at a push I’ve always been more of a Grant Hart man), but I never realised it was QUITE this much until now.

And there’s not much more to say on the matter. I may often be apt to bitch about aging indie-rock stars, cynical band reformations, lacklustre performances, poor sound, corporate festivals and the like, but feel free to kick me or ignore me the next time I get started on that line, because as both Bob Mould and The Sonics prove beyond a doubt, sometimes it’s only the songs that matter. And no matter how lame the nostalgia-fest might get, there’ll always be people in the audience for whom they matter a HELL of a lot, and, whether or not the musicians are still feelin’ their work of x decades ago or just putting their kids through college, it can be their duty to acknowledge and respond to that ‘hell of a lot’, even if it’s just by being there, and remembering how to put their fingers in the right place for a few minutes.

What happened after that? Man, who cares. Oh yeah, I bought a bootleg Husker Du t-shirt off some genuinely nice folks who’d printed up some shirts in order to cover their expenses in coming to the festival. Then I went and watched Sebadoh. They were alright.

Then there was, like, a 45 minute break or something before we were allowed the opportunity to become yet more disillusioned in the face of Cat Power’s new brand of soulless soul, so I declare I’ve had enough for one night and go home instead.

Hopefully it won't be another whole week before I finish writing up Saturday!

Mp3s>

Holly Golightly & The Brokeoffs - You Can't Buy A Gun When You're Crying
The Sonics – Keep A Knocking
The Sonics – The Witch (live)
Husker Du – I Apologise
Husker Du – New Day Rising

Labels: Bob Mould, festivals, Holly Golightly, Husker Du, It's Not Not, live reviews, Primavera, The Sonics

PRIMAVERA 2008: Thursday

Ok, so I guess I should write some stuff about Primavera…. After all, it was by far the most expensive and exhaustive live music thing I’ll be doing this year, and I should probably come up with something a bit more solid than “uh.. it was pretty fun I guess”.

I mean, I haven’t bothered to approach writing about until now simply because the experience as a whole adds up to a whole seven days worth of travel, and people, and events, and non-events, and food, and exercise, and sleep, and emotions, and non-emotions, and geography, and weather, and boredom, and japes, and alcohol, and non-japes and non-alcohol, and sights and sounds and all the rest of it that goes along with a week of continuous STUFF…. But needless to say, I lack the Henry Miller-like writerly prowess needed to transform all of this essentially humdrum business into gripping, fiery prose of some kind, so, this being a musicblog, I’ll stick to the music, but rest assured that I didn’t just jet in and watch bands in a critically detached manner for 72 straight hours then go home again.

Note on the photos: I didn’t bother to take many myself. Stew took the one above, and I ripped the others off from Pitchfork – hope they don’t mind too much (they were taken by Shannon McClean ).

Right!

Primavera takes place at the Parc del Forum, about a 45 minutes walk East from the city along Barcelona’s Olympics-ravaged coastline. An imposing complex of purpose-built concrete auditoriums (auditoria? auditori? – you tell me) constructed around a barren heat-trap of a central square, and so initially impressions are somewhat unwelcoming, to put it mildly. I can well imagine the place becoming some desperate Ballardian nightmare come July or August… all empty space and shadows that go on for miles, dehydrated dogs limping across the endless concrete in search of a place to die, lone entrepreneurs huddling ‘neath lead-lined umbrellas sipping carefully guarded H2O and contemplating the possibilities for their next boatshow, that sort of thing. But thankfully, Primavera takes place in May when it's cooler, and the brutalism of the surroundings is diffused by throngs of cheery people, SO IT’S OK.

But the festival is also a far bigger, and more corporate, affair than I’m used to. There’s one kind of beer on offer, one kind of soft drink, and one kind of spirit (the festival’s sponsors, natch). Searches at the gates ensure that the only water available on-site is bottled, costs a Euro, and they twist the cap off for you so you shall drink it straight away, buster. Punters are required to queue to exchange their money for pointless drinks tokens, to queue to exchange Thursday’s tokens for Friday’s ones, and to queue to buy (yes, BUY) tickets for the sets taking place in the seated indoor auditorium, before they queue again to get into it in time to catch said sets. A giant, diesel-powered inflatable Coca-Cola bottle provides the festival site’s clearest visible identifier and natural meeting point.

I know, I know, I’m moaning unduly and accentuating the negative…. I’m sure Primavera is utterly idyllic compared to all those huge European festivals where toilets explode and innocent people get crushed to death etc., but maybe End Of The Road and ATP have given me unnaturally high expectations re: the potential for comfortable and enjoyable alternative music festivals. If nothing else, Primavera is certainly extremely well-organised on a practical level once you’ve navigated all the queues and shite; the site is clean and friendly, even at 5am after twelve hours of continuous racket and inebriation, and toilet and waste disposal facilities are perfectly decent. Crowd-size is rarely an issue, and the auditorium set-up and unfailingly BIG, BOOMING sound allows latecomers to a set (or those who just want to sit down) to generally get an equally good experience to those down at the front. Throughout the weekend, bands start on schedule almost to the minute, and despite being split across five or six stages, sufficient gaps and easy mobility allow one to check out a wide variety of different stuff, socialise and eat/drink, without having to worry unduly about fencing out a good spot for the next must-see band. Despite my reservations above, it’s actually a pretty amazing festival experience once you get used to it, although it should be noted again that it’s the high quality of the music and the good feeling of the crowd that brings the fun here, rather than the location or the sponsors.

ATP have called shotgun on what’s probably the site’s best outdoor stage – it has the best acoustics, is most removed from noise-leakage from the other stages and even has a rare patchy of scrubby grass for people to sit on – and it is here that the festival begins for me on Thursday afternoon with a marathon set from The Microphones / Mt. Eerie. I’ve always found listening to Phil Elvrum’s music to be a slightly odd and draining experience in the past – for the first few songs on any given record, I’m awed into mental silence by the presence of what could well be a singular genius, but as he works his way through one of his (on the whole excessively long) song cycles, the singlemindedness and thematic repetition with which he approaches his application of starstruck spiritual romanticism to minimalist indie-folk inevitably leads to a bad case of diminishing returns. The overall effect is a bit like going to an exhaustive retrospective of the work of Caspar David Friedrich; the first painting you look at will be breathtaking, but by the time you’ve seen eighteen of them you’re likely to just be thinking, yeah, I see - this guy was sad, and looked at the sky a lot, what’s next?*

But, for a variety of reasons, this particular Elvrum set proves utterly captivating, a thing of endlessly reassuring beauty that I’m just beginning to sink my soul into when he finally winds it up near ninety minutes after he started. For one thing, he is accompanied for most of the set by the ever-beautiful tones of the eternally awesome Julie Doiron, singing harmony and occasional lead, and a second electric guitarist who plays some gorgeous cosmic blues style drift, creating a far richer and more engaging sonic palette than that of Elvrum-alone. For another thing, their set happens to coincide with a sudden bout of inexplicable washed-out misery on my part, and thus hits the spot perfectly, dragging me out of it like a guiding hand – thanks Phil; your music has done what music is for.

After that I catch a couple of songs by The Notwist, playing on the big, main stage. And, having heard their name bandied around a lot a few years ago but never being sufficiently bothered to check them out, count me pretty damn impressed – this is fantastic stuff, fusing hypnotic krautrock rhythms to blissed out indie guitar/synth textures and big,melodic songwriting like a more muscular take on Yo La Tengo’s ‘And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out’ blueprint – nice!

Eric's Trip

Time enough to make a mental note to get hold of some Notwist records when I get home, and it’s time to dash across to another stage to rejoin Ms. Doiron, who is bassing and singing in the recently reformed Eric’s Trip (it’s a shame Primavera couldn’t find the time to schedule a solo set from her too, but such is life). The Eric’s Trip guitarist dudes both look like they’ve just awakened after sleeping on some promoter’s couch since 1996, and, muddy festival sound aside, they would seem to be rockin’ all the better for it. Although Eric’s Trip are sometimes unfairly maligned as a derivative or second-string grunge-era band (the name doesn’t help), it must be said that if you are willing to accept college radio-friendly early ‘90s American alternarock as a genre in it’s own right and spend some quality time nestling within the folds of its established conventions (which I certainly am, having been raised on a steady diet of the stuff), they do it as well as anyone ever has, busting out a steady stream of perfect Posies / Teenage Fanclub power-pop augmented with Dinosaur Jr histrionics, heart-on-sleeve Sebadoh lyricism and ripping Dirty-era SY skronk, if you can dig that…. and if you can’t, well, good luck to ya. Yes, on one level it’s all your indie-rock needs under one roof, but rather than just presenting a cut-price pastiche of their heroes, Eric’s Trip are solid guys who feel no shame in playing genuinely great music in within a noble tradition of great music, and they can boast more than their fair share of startlingly affecting songs to go with it, so what else do you need to know? – get down!

At the opposite end of the early ‘90s cultural sphere, the next thing that hits us is Public Enemy, owning the main stage and reigning over the whole festival complex like benevolent global dictators declaring a particularly furious party-time. Checking back over my Primavera schedule, let it be said that my heart goes out to British Sea Power and The Shipping News, who were unfortunate enough to have been playing at the same time, because trying to make it through a set in competition with Chuck and Flav blasting out ‘Bring The Noise’ at about a million decibels can’t have been much fun.

To be honest, I wasn’t particularly bothered beforehand about whether I caught PE or not. I mean, yeah, I, like everyone else in the world, dutifully bought ‘..Nation of Millions..’ and ‘..Black Planet’ back in the day, after hearing the hundredth music journo declare them the best albums in the history of the world, and indeed, it would take a prize fool to try to argue that they don’t remain staggering achievements of raw power, sonic invention, furious intellect and righteous spirit, unequalled to this day. But, you know me, for better or for worse I’ve always been a fair-weather hip-hop fan, and they’ve always been the kind of band I’ve appreciated from a distance rather than loved on a personal level. I’d assume a lot of the other people milling about chatting or getting a bite to eat at the top of the auditorium steps as PE take the stage are equally ambivalent, but, as they are about to remind us, ‘ambivalent’ and ‘Public Enemy’ are not words that really deserve to be used in the same sentence. For, as my friend Pete succinctly puts it, “oh my god, these guys are fucking SHREDDING!”

Public Enemy

Pete also sagely notes that PE are essentially the hip-hop equivalent of The Ramones in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the sense that no one bar the hardcore fans is ever really going to pay much attention to whatever recorded material they’ve produced since their ‘classic’ period, and they know it, but it’s on stage that they truly exist, blasting out the finely honed essence of What They Do Best with a near inhuman level of commitment and energy that renders any question of ‘new material’ laughably irrelevant… why fucking bother, when you’ve already got two hours worth of tightly compressed, massively amplified greatness that makes even the best of your competitors look like clueless amateurs? Like I say, it’s probably about eight years since I last played ‘..Nation of Millions..’ all the way through, but isn’t it great how I still know all the words, and how, when Chuck D demands to know what the name of his DJ is, I’m one of several thousand non-committal indie kids ready to tell him at the top of my voice.

Anyway, who else did I go to see on the Thursday…. oh yeah, Boris, that’s who! They kicked off before our tired eyes and ears at midnight on the ATP stage and they played an absolute blinder. Unlike a lot of the bands playing this weekend, a loud, booming outdoor festival soundmix suits Boris perfectly, and, clearly aware of the FESTIVAL element, tonight they ditch all that drone crap and decide to totally max out the OTT rock cliché moves of ‘Heavy Rocks’ and ‘Pink’, and, well, you know the rest: Boris is as Boris does; an overpowering juggernaut of windmilling doubleneck guitar posing, the purple smoke, the swirling black hair, the gong, screechin’ wah solos, thunderin’ sub-bass , plentiful “Ho YEEe-AAaH!!!”, riff after riff cranked through absurd space echo and more Orange cabinets than anybody could ever really need…. too much, man. About halfway through Boris’ set, and I swear I didn’t imagine this, I’m stunned to see an actual, literal juggernaut – a huge articulated lorry of some kind – emerge from within a few feet of the left hand side of the stage, rumbling off into the night along some previous unnoticed narrow track along the waterfront toward god knows where. A perfect visual metaphor.

Boris

Shortly after all that, we’re again sitting on the steps above the main stage, chatting to some friends. Some disappointingly obnoxious bellowing announces the start of De La Soul’s set, and, at 2am or whatever this is, I frankly don’t care whether or not this dude was on ‘Three Feet High & Rising’ (which the deliriously poorly translated and typo-ridden festival booklet reminds us hit the scene back in 1889), I can do without him yelling at me for another ninety minutes, so that serves as my cue to call it a night and head home.

Mp3s >

Mt Eerie w/ Julie Doiron – Lost Wisdoms (live at Helm Gallery, Takoma WA, 18/04/08)
Eric’s Trip – Sunlight
Public Enemy – Rebel Without A Pause
Boris - Karuso


*This point works nicely as a comparison, but I should make clear that it is somewhat unfair to the works of Mr. Friedrich (one of my favourite painters), who also took the time to paint forests, and rocks, and monks, and ruined churches and all kinds of other gnarly stuff, as well as sky.

Labels: Boris, Eric's Trip, festivals, Julie Doiron, live reviews, Primavera, Public Enemy, The Microphones, The Notwist

Summer Shoulders.

So it's summer, as you may have noticed. I know this primarily because it's too hot in my room, because I sat on a beach with some people last weekend, and because I've finally completed work on my 2008 Plan B Summer Mix CD.

Assembling a satisfactory track-list proved a ridiculously painstaking process, as these things can easily become with the possibilities for endlessly tweaking put at our fingers by iTunes.... we can agonise over the overall feeling conveyed by the CD over a matter of weeks, crafting watertight segues and checking them for leaks... man, remember the old days with the tapedeck, where if you decide you're not entiiiiirely sure about that 13th Floor Elevators track you laid down four songs back, well, tough luck, it's there already.

Anyway, I'm not going to post the finished CD for you - that'll be hard copy only, as is only respectful to my friends and CD swapping buddies.

What I'm going to do is post LAST YEAR'S CD, which came together a lot more easily, and which is still basically my ultimate Summer Music tour de force, featuring many of the usual sunny suspects and relatively little disorientating weirdness, and overall I'm still very pleased with it.

(Several of the best tracks I should point out for grabbed directly from another excellent Summer Cd put together a while back by that indefatigable knight of the mix tape, Grant Balfour, and that the cover art is ripped from a comic by Bryan Lee O'Malley, so credit where it's due etc.)

Enjoy.

download (90mb .zip file)

Labels: mixtapes, radio show, summer

Deathblog:
Bo Diddley 1928 - 2008

So it’s kind of gutting to get back from abroad to find that Bo Diddley’s up and died.

He of course having a better claim than just about anyone of being the originator of all that crazy, rackety rubbish I went over there to see and hear.

Don’t know if I’ve got the time or energy for a big post, so I’ll try to be concise.

Having read some of the other obits, I guess I’d like to try and make the point that there was a lot more to Bo Diddley than his ‘beat’, his square guitar and some dreary run-down of British invasion groups, post-punkers and garage revivalists who may or may not have dug him.

I guess you could say that where Chuck Berry was your main man in terms of establishing the mainstream of rock n’ roll convention by very knowingly kitting out black r’n’b with lyrics white teenagers could relate to and taking the whole deal to town with winning pop hooks and a big, bright sound, Bo Diddley is more like some fucked up old man of the mountain who might as well have been there forever, doling it out raw in his own uniquely twisted fashion, and changing the world – or all the bits of it that matter – a little more subtly, and a little more thoroughly in the process.

Yeah, that sounds about right to me I think – if you’re following the breadcrumb trail back to the source from a Classic Rock perspective, then Chuck’s your guy, and that’s fine, but if you’re tracing back the past fifty years worth of Underground music – better bow before Bo.

He’s got to be a dead cert for the greatest rhythm guitar player of all-time too (with all due respect to Sterling). His tunes – and it seems like he wrote about a million of them – are all knuckleheadedly simple, practically straight outta the cave… until you sit down and try *playing one*. Have a go, then you’ll see where the genius kicks in.

And despite the vast role he played in shaping the development of rock n’ roll, just about everything Bo Diddley recorded in the ‘50s sounds UTTERLY INSANE to this day, completely unlike anything else on earth, except other people trying to rip off Bo Diddley.

And the stuff he knocked out through the ‘60s, ‘70s and beyond was scarcely any less noteworthy – in fact, many rock n’ roll true believers would contest that his records got even gnarlier, more rocking and more nuts as time went on, refracting the developments of the punk kids he inspired back into his own mad universe, recording endless weird songs in his own homemade studio, answerable to no one.

I mean, he’s fucking BO DIDDLEY, for christ’s sake. What more do you need to know? Like the God of Abraham, he is what he is. The kind of name that can resound in legend forever, be all things to all people and never leave the earth.

He’s got a graveyard hand and a tombstone mind, he’s just twenty-two and he don’t mind dying.

(His earthly vessel nearly made it to eighty in the end, so I guess he must be feeling pretty alright about things.)

“Bo Diddley Is Jesus”, The Jesus & Mary Chain once declared, and maybe they weren’t just pissing around.

But enough talk! Seeing the guy in action will say more than this rubbish ever could.

First, here’s a young Bo Diddley, singing as usual about his favourite subject, Bo Diddley, on the Ed Sullivan show back in 1955.

A placid enough performance by today’s standards maybe, but I mean, can you IMAGINE being some kid, growing up in some suburban hellhole with zero contact with black culture, before rock n’ roll was an established phenomenon, before you even knew ‘the blues’ existed, turning on the TV and being confronted with… THIS?! It’d be enough to give you the screaming fits…



Ok, now move forward maybe, I dunno, 20 years (there’s no date on this next video, but I’d guessing ‘70s), and Bo’s right in the middle of the music world that those kids who probably watched him on Ed Sullivan went out and created, and what’s he doing…? HE’S SHEDDING LIKE A ABSOLUTE MOTHERFUCKER is what he’s doing.

Seriously, just watch:



And, to end, a few tunes.

You’ve probably heard the hits, but still, I’m going to post ‘Who Do You Love’, just because, and a couple of slightly more obscure numbers to go with it.

Until recently, I’d assumed ‘Pills’ was a New York Dolls original (it’s my favourite tune on their debut album), and thus was uproariously happy to discover it was actually a Bo Diddley song, rock n’ roll nurse and everything! Amazing! What a fucking punk! How many other ‘50s legends can you imagine layin’ down something like this as they cruise through middle-age?

‘Dancin' Girl’, which I first heard on the great ‘Songs The Cramps Taught Us’ compilation doesn’t require much of an explanation – it’s just plain rad.

Bo Diddley >
Who Do You Love?
Pills
Dancin' Girl

Oh, and finally, I can’t resist the urge to post ‘The Story of Bo Diddley’ by The Animals, a terrific and very funny tune which I feel will fill out the historical aspects of this post in a far more entertaining manner than all this hyperbolic midnight blather ever could.

The Animals – The Story of Bo Diddley

Labels: Bo Diddley, deathblog, rock n' roll, The Animals, videos