An apt metaphor for rock and roll might be coffee: ground from various kernels gathered in remote or forsaken corners of the world; black or dark brown in its original brewed state, light brown or white when diluted; sugared with various sweeteners; hot and stimulating, but cold if left to stand; identified by provenance, yet appealing to a universal palate; energizing; addictive. The English, given to tea, seemed unlikely aficionados, but over the years their tastes had been dulled by mild confections, and among British youth born during World War Two and coming of age in the sixties, there was a thirst for a stronger brew. Not surprising, surely, if during your formative days you had been bombed and blitzed for five years and, worse, deprived of candy for ten. Whether you lived in Liverpool, or Newcastle, or London, or in a town anywhere in the land, the strong percolation of rock and roll was likely to answer your need.
Fortunately, the early sixties in Britain was a good time to be around. For one thing, the Americans were coming. Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Eddie Cochran, among others, were cutting up stages in dance halls and cine mas all over Britain. And for another, your own people were doing well, too. The Beatles, those lords of Liverpool, were of course causing a stir with their super simple, skiffle driven ditties, and with their timely national television ap ances. But if you lived in London you could get on the Central Line of the Under ground and go all the way out to Ealing and catch, raw and as yet undiscovered, what was surely the Best Little Band in Britain. The joint where they played was a grisly near sewer called simply the Rhythm and Blues Club, and if you could get past the obnoxious East European at the door who checked for traces of alcohol on your breath and the bouncer who was rumored to "know judo," then you'd find a group there who, but for the pallid, London bleached faces, could make you believe you were in some blues bar on Chicago's South Side, so authentic was their sound.
They were led by a Cockney tenor with amazing control and perfect R & B phrasing who, though quite chummy offstage, had a look in performance so decadent as to suggest that youth had passed him by altogether. Yet, his would soon become the consummate white voice in rock. And with him were two rhythm and blues guitarists who could fill you with mellow wonder, one a short, silky haired doll of a man whose rhythm work would later even astonish Bo Diddley himself; the other a dark, gaunt, waif like youth who played with such savage energy and concen tration that he was likely to spin off the stage at the end of a set and fall exhausted at your feet. You would have to step over him to get to the door. And if you were thinking of forming your own group, once you had seen Mick, Brian, and Keith the band's front line you gave up that thought from that moment on, henceforth and evermore, and like Lemuel Gulliver, retired to the country. You could n't match that: they were so advanced, so schooled in their craft already, so atrociously sullen, those Rolling Stones.
What the Rolling Stones possessed, apart from their winning anti establishment style and rather gauche professionalism, was an innate understanding of the rhythm and blues genre which, once they started to write for themselves, they transformed with a combination of intelligence and barbarity unmatched by any group before or since. Speaking of the Stones' early days in a 1989 interview with Stanley Booth, Keith Richards said, "This is a band that expected to play four club gigs a week in London for a year or two, to make a point about other people's music. . . . I was becoming this very unlikely sort of missionary for a new kind of music. That's what Jimmy Reed, Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf did to me. Elvis, Buddy, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee, Little Richard, Bo Diddley it's what all those cats did to me. . . . We were disciples."
It's interesting to hear that the Stones' template during their developmental years was forged primarily from the music of the Mississippi St. Louis Chicago corridor. It was this deep background in blues and blues based lines that set them sharply apart from the Beatles, Britain's premier recording group of the time and the spearhead, of course, of the British Invasion. The Beatles honed their craft through massive sampling from the entire breadth of the American vernacular canon: rockabilly, soul (then emergent), gospel, blues of various derivations, jazz standards, even muzak. By 1961 their liveperformance repertoire numbered well over one hundred songs drawn from the work of between thirty to forty artists. They had also written many songs of their own. But the Stones were, by intention, more restrictive. When Keith Richards recalled how he and Mick Jagger met by chance as seventeen years olds at the Dartford train station, the details of his recollection encapsulated the essential musical difference between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
"The thing about Mick and my meeting was that he was carrying two albums with him Rockin at the Hops, by Chuck Berry, and The Best of Muddy Waters. . . . He was very heavily into blues, already had his connectionyou couldn't get that music in England. The guy he would write to was Marshall Chess at 2120 South Michigan Avenue in Chicago,and Marshall filled Chess Records' international orders."
Jagger's letters to Chess operations and the unique record collection they generated, would be pivotal in shaping the direction the band would take, and when, shortly thereafter, he and Richards connected with Brian Jones another budding bluesman who apparently knew every riff, rhythm, and ritornello from the songbooks of Elmore James and Bo Diddleythe die was cast.
Diddley material seemed to be predominant in their appearances at the Ealing club. You might see Brian and Keith, for example, shaking out a rendition of "Diddley Daddy," grinning and huddling in to share the mike as they trotted out the recursive refrain, " Diddley, Diddley, Diddley, Diddley Daaddy"; or Mick might close the show with a rave up version of Bo's "I'm Alright," a protosoul number, a performance of which is captured in that otherwise embarrassingly juvenile documentary of the Stones' professional infancy called Charlie is my Darling. Other staples were "Pretty Thing," "You Don't Love Me," and "Crawdaddy." Norman Jopling, the first writer to do a feature on the Stones, has said, "When they played a Bo Diddley number, it sounded like Bo Diddley. And the whole scene around them in the room was unbelievable."
These songs were all from the earliest crop of Bo's classics. In fact, the British mu sic public had scarcely heard of the advent of the Bo Diddley phenomenon before the American correspondent for The Melody Maker, the U.K.'s leading trade paper, gave a rave revue of "Bo Diddley"/"I'm a Man" in an April, 1957, issue, some two years after the single's American release. A Canadian reader, John Nogris, immediately responded by sending in an account of an appearance by Bo in Montreal at the local "House of Rock 'n' Roll." Under such sub headings as "Maracas" and "Sax trio," Nogris reported on Bo's heavy amplification and "the deep, rich slurring tone and pulsating rhythm" of his guitar work. "I was able to show him the review and he was surprised and im pressed to find mention of his music in a British paper." Continued Nogris, "At pres ent Bo is keen about rock 'n' roll, mainly because of the unprecedented good times and money he can enjoy. For added rhythmic effect he would like to use three saxes but I can hardly imagine any sax player being content to play in the rhythm section."
This was the first eye and ear witness report of Bo's music to reach Britain's then docile shores, and as such it may be noted as the faint but definite beginnings of the long love affair that was to develop between Bo and his British fans. But there were to be additional sonic hints of what was to come before Bo himself finally arrived there: Duane Eddy's "Cannonball," for instance, a mighty seller in 1959 both in the U.S and the U.K., had drawn generously from Bo's sound, as had Dee Clark's great dance number, "Hey, Little Girl," in the same year; and in 1960 Ciff Richard, Britain's perennial pop idol, had scored with a cover of Johnny Otis' "Willie and the Hand Jive," which was, after all, simply a white translation of "Bo Diddley" same melody, same rhythmic phrasing, different words.
Although some Chess items were available in those days through import stores such as those on London's trendy Charing Cross Road, it was not before Marshall Chess flew to London in 1961 to negotiate a licensing package with Pye Records that Bo Diddley material was generally available to the British public. The outcome of that deal was that the first clearly identifiable Chess product ever to be marketed in the U.K. was Bo's out standing album Bo Diddley is a Gunslinger. The choice of Gunslinger as the opening salvo in a Chess sales campaign was dictated, of course, by its million seller status, for although Chuck Berry, Chess's other luminary, had achieved superlative record sales with singles, none of his albums had, to that date, gone gold.
Because blues and its outgrowths had previously been sold in Britain only in such specialty jazz outlets, Pye management decided at first on the wholly inappropriate mar keting strategy of assigning Bo Diddley to its jazz label. There's no telling how much disservice this did to Bo's initial sales and reputation, for British teenagers of the time were turning their backs on jazz as being either too declassÈ in the case of Dixieland ("Trad," as they called it) or too intellectual in the case of modern jazz. Despite Pye's blunder, Bo's name quickly became known among the burgeoning rock and roll fraternity, and by early 1963 there was an increasing demand for his music among U.K. youth. While his individual chart performances were not overwhelming, if judged by the solid concentration of his appearances on the charts, Bo Diddley's seminal impact on the nascent rhythm and blues culture in Britain was undeniable. In the period October, 1963 to February, 1964, for example, he had, according to the Record Retainer (then Britain's counterpart to Billboard), no fewer than four albums continuously in the Top Twenty. For that moment at least, only the Beatles enjoyed wider success in the market.
Then one day the British fan read ecstatically in the Melody Maker that Bo Diddley himself, "live and in person," was coming to England, and that with him would be the Duchess and Jerome, and the Everly Brothers, and later, Little Richard. On the same bill would be those very fellas from the Ealing Club, the Rolling Stones. For rhythm starved Britons this was heady news.
The Bo Diddley Everly Brothers Road Show was set to begin September 29, a Sun day, at the New Victoria Theatre in Central London and to conclude five weeks later at the Hammersmith Odeon, London's equivalent of New York's Radio City Music Hall and the tour's largest venue. In between would be 60 shows throughout southern England and the provinces, with one stop at Glasgow in Scotland. The two shows in Liverpool were slated for Sunday, October 13, but because of Lord's Day Observance rules, the action there would be all over by 10.00 p.m. (The Beatles, now hardly ever in their hometown, missed this date, though George Harrison did manage to catch the show on October 31 at the Lewisham Odeon). The package would have a "compere," Bob Bain, and a road band, The Flintstones. The Flintstones did well from the tour, backing Bo and his two associates on most appearances, and walking away with a gift from Bo, a little number of his called "Safari."
Of Bo's immediate traveling companions, the better known was Jerome Green, the tall, debonair hipster and maracas player extraordinaire, whose friendship with Bo went back many years. Norma Jean Wofford, however, was a relative newcomer to Bo's band. In assum ing the stage name of "The Duchess," she was joining that long line of black mu sical royalty that stretches (now) from Count Basie, say, to Queen Latifah.
"When Peggy left the show I wasn't able to wait to see how her career was going before I hired someone else," says Bo, "'cos everytime I'd get to the gig, the promoter would say, 'Where's the girl? Where's the girl?' So I brought Norma in she was a 'playsister' of mine, known her since she was a kid to put some flower on the stage! I've always had a female player or singer with me on stage; I'm known for that."
The Duchess, in fact, took up where Lady Bo left off, adopting the same sexy styling of her show outfitsusually skintight toreador pants and stiletto heels and carrying her guitar in the same low slung, sexy manner. Slightly older than Peggy, the Duchess had a stage presence that was both luscious and elegant. The British found her impressive yet new to their experience. Wrote one bemused observer: "In her silver tights, the Duchess looks for all the world like the Principal Boy from some improbable rhythm and blues pantomime."
Bo and his companions arrived precisely one day before showtime, but man aged to throw for a loop those English fans who had planned an airport welcoming party when he travelled on a foreign carrier rather than the trusty BOAC. However, the Rolling Stones had been forewarned and were at his hotel to greet him. Pooling their money ("We were makin' just about enough bread to stay alive," attested Keith Rich ards), they bought Bo a pair of gold cufflinks. Bo was both impressed and moved by the gesture.
"It was my first time in England. I'll never forget it. They all came to welcome me at the Cumberland Hotel, treated me like a king, gave me a pair of gold cufflinks with my initials on 'em, and that said something to me. I never knew what to expect but those cats showed me what hospitality was, man. Me, Brian and Keith, we all became what you call jug buddies, drinking wine out of the same jug! They weren't earn ing but a spoonful of money, so I let 'em sleep on the floor in my hotel room."
"One time on that tour they got us up early to go and play on the radio [BBC's 'Saturday Club']. I had the Duchess with me and Jerome, and also Brian, Bill and Charlie I think it was of the Rolling Stones backing us up. It was a great gig. But you see that's when I found out the difference between American deejays and English deejays they had this cat there [Brian Matthews], at the radio station that was talking so fast it was like his words were shot out of a cannon. I like to have said, 'Say what?' everytime he spoke, but the Stones helped me out."
"And the theatres were kinda funny, mostly these huge movie houses, Gaumont this, Odeon that, you know. The house managers were always worrying about a riot breakin' out among the kids in the audience. One time they dropped the curtain on us real quick thinking we were gonna have a riot. That really surprised me, 'cos I'd seen rock 'n' roll riots happen with my own eyes back in the States, but I couldn't see it happening in England, not with all them bowler hats and umbrellas flying everywhere!"
Ned Enal, then an educator in one of London's outer boroughs and a self confessed Bo Diddley freak, followed the tour from town to town and remembers in particular the sensational opening and closing nights. "I think it was one of the first allout, full production Rock and Roll package shows to take place in England. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis had visited England for single shows or brief tours, but there had been nothing like this before. Just flipping through the glossy programs told you this was going to be something special. Except for the Stones, there were unfortunately some weak British acts as warmups, but each segment of the show closed with one or two of the American acts. Sometimes Bo would close the first half, sometimes the second. They switched it around a great deal.
"The Americans were all so professional, so polished. Someone did a tremen dous 'A Rose in Spanish Harlem'; Little Richard did his usual 'striptease.' But there was no doubt it was Bo Diddley's tour, he stole the show every time! Just his outfits and his guitars were dazzling. All glitter and glamourous color.
"At the opening night at the New Victoria he broke a string in the first number but just kept on playing and moving around and singing and replacing the string all at the same time. It was unbelievable: nobody had seen someone dance at the same time as play ing the guitar before. He had this amazing fluency.
"Then to close the show he and the Duchess and Jerome had this routine. They were doing ìGunslinger,î and he and Jerome floated away to opposite sides of the stage, and the Duchess stayed in the middle. Bo and Jerome would have this ìgun fightî over her: Jerome had these fistfuls of maracas which he would pump like six shooters, while Bo would throw his guitar in front of his body like a machine gun and at the same time he'd do this Alishuffle stutter step, but leaning way back away from the center of gravity and still pumping bullets! Afterwards in the pub everybody swore he was levitating. It was the only explana tion! Peter Guralnick mentions this very same routine in his introduc tion to Rock Archives and says he just wished he'd had a camera to record it all.
"At the Hammersmith show the last night of the tour he went all out, no holds barred, the full rock and roll theatre, like falling to his knees and playing behind his neck, straddling the guitar and 'riding' it, doing endless encores, throwing his jacket into the crowd: everything! He meant to leave something behind, I think, something the audience would never forget, and you didn't.
ìAnd the music had such power: spirit, volume, vibration. It stayed in your mind for days and days afterwards. It was just imprinted.î
Enal and the other Diddley confreres might certainly have tempered their colossal devotion, however, as letters to a leading music paper published on October 12 seem to indicate. Under the banner headline "RUDE," one letter chided Diddley fans for showing "absolutely no appreciation for the efforts of the other stars on the show. . . . In fact, many walked out during the Everly Brothers performance at the New Victoria." Another writer suggested that "there are enough R & B and [Everly] fans respectively to have supported separate shows." But putting the Everlys and Bo Diddley on the same bill was not such an incongruous pairing on the part of Don Arden, the tour promoter, as one might have thought.
With the unusual white gospel timbre of their harmonizing, Don and Phil Everly had proven themselves to be hitmakers of the first order: from "Bye Bye, Love" and the (supposedly) shocking "Wake Up Little Susie" to such distinctly differ ent numbers as "Bird Dog" and "All I Have to Do Is Dream," the Everly boys had developed an immense international following. While uninformed observers commonly thought of them as a standard country duet (one American writer uncharitably called them "harmonic hicks"), the brothers had a richness and a depth that went far be yond simple formulas and that en ompassed a strong rhythm and blues component. Indeed, the boys had long been aware of the appeal and originality of the music of their fellow star, Bo Diddley, on that tour of England.
"Musically, I was interested in lots of things," Don Everly is quoted as saying in Phyllis Karpp's Ike's Boys: The Story of the Everly Brothers. "[From the beginning] I was turned on to rock 'n' roll already. I had heard Bo Diddley, and my mind was blown from that. I loved country music, loved Hank Williams equally as well, but I fell in love with what Bo Diddley was doing. . . . So I would talk with Chet [Atkins] about that. He showed me the G tunings and the E tunings we would discuss how Bo would get that sound. I started fiddling in those G tunings and started writing in those tunings, and that, basical ly, is how we came about with the arrangement sounds of the Everly Brothers.
"If you play my [acoustic] part from 'Bye Bye, Love' on electric guitar," said Don, "it sounds just like heavy metal rock. On that one, I was trying to sound like Bo Diddley!"
The tour with Bo, then, could be said to have been as much a culmination for the Everlys as it was for the Stones.
"He's the greatest onstage entertainer I've ever seen," Phil Everly said of Bo at the time. These were no lightweight compliments, coming from an act that had created unprec edented enthusiasm among their fans when they first visited England in 1958, and whose heartfelt singing and stylish picking had then so deeply affected one group of youthful English musicians that they called themselves "the Four everlys." Later these same lads changed their name to the Beatles.
Another view of Bo's first tour was provided by none other than the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones whom the New Musical Express, Britain's other major trade paper, had had the foresight to engage as a colum nist. In his eager prose, the most enigmatic of the five Stones told what it was like to play alongside the very people he was attempting to emu late.
"My first reactions of the tour are this is really the tour to be on. The boys and I cannot get over this opportunity to be working with such greats not just from one side of the 'pop' field, but from both. Bo Diddley, the exciting, off beat, zany but very hip king of R & B, and Don and Phil [Everly], the epitome of polished performers in the white pop field. Bo is much more 'primitive' (I'm sure he won't mind me saying this) than I expected. But it's a great shame he hasn't a com plete band with him. As it is, he augments some of the Flintstones with the Duchess and Jerome, whom he brought over from the States with him. Bo is a gas to work with and is always laughing about and cracking jokes, and is one of the nicest people I've met in the business.
"Anyway, at the moment we're rooting for our new record ['I Wanna Hold Your Hand'] and the boys are screaming for me to get back to work, so I'd better wind it up. Sometime during the next five weeks the show will be coming your way, so give it a look in. Next week, Mick, our singer, will be writing for you that is, if we can teach him to write in time!"
Bo was particularly impressed by Brian Jones, and by his girl friend Linda Lawrence, and they became immediate friends. Bo told Jones' biographer, Mandy Aftel: "When I met Brian, he was playing slide guitar and harmonica. His slide guitar was great. Especially to be as young as he was. Brian was a little dude that was trying to pull the group ahead. I saw him as the leader. He didn't take no mess. He was a fantastic cat. He han dled the group beautifully."
"Linda Lawrence came on the tour and did my sister's hair. Brian was the only one that had his girlfriend there. They were planning on getting married."
Said Linda, "Bo knew that we were in love. He was upset when we split up. Bo was so beautiful to Brian. He was getting off on teaching Brian things. Bo would say, 'You move like this when you're on stage.' And he showed Mick how to move his legs. This was during their rehearsals. That's when I thought everything was great; when Brian met the people like Bo Diddley whose records he had listened to over and over."
As the tour was about to get under way, the Stones announced that out of respect to Bo they were dropping all of his material from their routine. "It won't be a case of pupils competing with the master," Brian Jones told the press. "He's been one of our biggest influences." As a supporting act on the tour, the Stones were only accorded two, at most three, numbers a show. Usually they started with "Come On," the Chuck Berry number that had served as the A side of their first single and that Mick Jagger would rather coyly intro duce as having "been nice to us." Then they might move on to what was to be their second release, "I Wanna Be Your Man," which came out shortly before the tour conclud ed. Playing bottleneck, Brian Jones stamped the recorded version of this number with what Stanley Booth later described as "an eight bar break like nothing ever before played on a re cord by an Englishman."
Booth also noted that as they travelled the country, the Stones fed their idol ization of "Bo Diddley and especially Jerome Green, his maracas player, and spent as much time with them as possible." It is not insignificant, therefore, that Brian Jones' astonishing studio performance was laid down on the Stones' first day off, exactly eight days into the tour, and after exactly nine days spent in the continuous company of his musical idol, Bo Diddley. "Brian got into Bo Diddley," Keith Richards told Mandy Aftel, "which I think was the best thing he ever got into on guitar. . . . I never heard anybody before or since get that Bo Diddley thing down. Diddley him self was astounded. Bo said that Brian was the only cat he knew who'd worked out the secret of it."
Although they were already accomplished musicians, the Stones had yet to build a clear public image as a band. At the commencement of the tour they wore matching houndstooth jackets with velvet collars, evidently taking their cue from some of the better known Merseyside bands for whom a uniform was de rigeur, but sloppy habits and a visceral dislike for regimentation saw them finishing the tour in their street clothes. From then on individual expression in fashion would be their infinitely variable trademark. The nature of their approach to the audience changed too. "This was our first contact with the cats whose music we'd been playing," said Keith Richards. "Hearing Little Richard and Bo Diddley and the Everly Brothers every night was the way we'd been drawn into the pop thing. . . . That was when Mick really started coming into his own. . . . Mick had always dug visual artists himself. He always loved Diddley and Chuck Berry and Little Richard for the thing they laid on people onstage."
But the Rolling Stones were not the only ones taking pointers from the impres sive sights and sounds of this Diddley Dash through Blighty. Among British youth who later became performers themselves and who were inspired or otherwise touched by that tour were Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Ginger Baker, Rod Stewart, David Bowie (who traces his fascination with glitter rock to that event), Alan Price, Long John Baldry, John Mayall, Eric Burdon, and Manfred Mann. Traces of Bo's influence would be apparent in the musical careers of all of these artists, perhaps no more immediately so than in the case of Manfred Mann's swinging "Doo Wah Diddy," a song about a girl singing a song by songster Bo Diddley, which turned out to be one of the biggest non Beatles hits on either side of the Atlantic in 1964.
In addition, the Yardbirds (first with Clapton, and later Jeff Beck), the group who replaced the Stones in their famous residency at the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, recorded a speededup version of "I'm a Man," as well as "You Can't Judge a Book" and "Who Do You Love." Taking their name from one of Bo's hits, the Pretty Things (who included second-generation Stone, Mick Taylor in their line up), put out an album on which one out of every three tracks was a Bo Diddley num ber.
But in the case of the Rolling Stones, Bo's influence was deep and abiding. As Mick Jagger and Keith Richards progressively developed songwriting skills of their own, they moved from making direct covers of the best of the American rock songbag from Bo's work these were such numbers as "Cops and Robbers" and "Pretty Thing" (regrettably to be found even at this late stage only on Stones' bootleg is to working their way through a sort of mod ernized English folk phase with such songs as "Lady Jane" and "Dan delion." Yet they returned in spurts to Bo like rockers such as "Nineteenth Nervous Breakdown" or "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love." Beyond that Bo's influence continued to be long lasting. "Midnight Rambler," for example, inherited the bolds strokes, the solid licks, and the compelling pauses of "I'm a Man." "Empty Heart" went heartbeat to heartbeat with many a Bo rocker, while the precursor of the lateera "Black Limou a timeless song, and perhaps the saddest Jagger ever sang is surely found in Bo's eerie "Call Me." And who can overlook the obvious lyrical connections, if nothing else, between the Stones' phantasmal "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and Bo's fantastic "You All Green"?
I was born in a barrel of butcher knives,
Trouble I love, and peace I despise.
Wild horses kicked me in my side;
And a rattlesnake bit me then he crawled off and died.
When I was seven, I went to Spain;
I put the thunder in heaven
And the rain in chains.
I'm 'You All' Green,
I'm from New Orleans:
I'm about the baddest hombre that you ever seen.
Equally to the point, the Stones' first significant dent in the record charts came in 1964 with their cover of Buddy Holly's, Diddley derived, "Not Fade Away." Where Buddy Holly had been content simply to capture the rudiments of Bo's unique "double rhythm," in their version the Stones sought to come as close as possible to Bo's original sound. Thus, they invested the number with a pungent, pounding Bo beat that English critic, Roy Carr, has described as having "all the subtlety of a steamhammer experiencing a cardiac arrest." According to Carr, this was a case of ". . . the Stones taking their obsession with Bo Diddley to the zenith. By doing so, they brutally defined their aural and visual image until one year later when they hit a more swag gering macho attitude with 'The Last Time.'"
"Not Fade Away" was the Stones' stateside debut, and it was here, back home, that Bo first heard it. In the beginning, he wasn't too happy. "I thought my jug bud dies had ripped me off, the first time I heard them doing 'Not Fade Away,' because that song was just like one of mine. Then some time later I found out it was a Buddy Holly song. He was the dude responsible!"
That record could well be regarded as marking the turning point for the Stones, doing for them what it had done for Buddy Holly but in fuller measure. Said Keith Richards in his interview with Stanley Booth: "'Not Fade Away' came out, and it was just like the Beatles again Stonemania, incredible scenes every night. We would never finish a gig. It was im possible . . . the minute you walked on stage, they'd be ripping you to pieces. You took your life in your hands just to walk out there."
To understand what triggered these audience responses and to get an idea of just how good the Stones were in their prefame and breaking days as R & B practitioners, just listen to "Not Fade Away," or to their whiplash invoking, Berry style rendering of "Route 66" (Jon Landau, the trail blazing "Dean of Rock Critics" and the present manager of Bruce Springsteen, has rated Keith Richards' soloing on this record as "his best hard rock perfor mance" ever), or, more important yet, try sampling their cover of Bo Diddley's mag nificent "Mona" (U.K.: The Rolling Stones; U.S.: The Rolling Stones Now).
For some it is primarily the performance of Mick Jagger that makes the Rolling Stones' "Mona." "Listen," says Landau, "to how. . . Jagger yells the name the first time and then almost oozes it the second time." Even more lavish is the assessment of Paul Williams, the founder of Crawdaddy magazine and the self described "essential Sixties rock music fan," who describes "Mona," Stones style, as "about as magnificent an evocation of the next last trembling second of recorded time as anyone could ask for." To which he adds, "Bo's original is almost equally primal, if you can lay your hands on a copy." Great as the Stones' cover is, it might be fairer to say that it approaches the original, but Bo's original still remains the standard of measurement. Dave Marsh, Bruce Springsteen's biographer, would include Bo's "Mona" on his wishlist if stranded on a desert island: "no one has improved on Bo Diddley's original," he writes, "except possibly Bruce Springsteen, in his epic onstage performance....This is Bo's beat at its heaviest, and also a superb precoital fantasy."
"Mona was a shake dancer we had with us on the show," remembers Bo, with a chuck le. "I made that record as the Bside of "Hey Bo Diddley" in about 1957. I liked the way the Stones did it. I liked it because it helped me and made me feel good to know that people thought enough of me to copy my material, and that's beautiful." Sung over a lazy Bo beat pursued by light but fantastic fibrilations a distinctive Diddley stylism the original "Mona" is one of Bo's prettiest songs, total rock, total raunch, yet possessing an endearing and romantic simplicity: "Tell ya, Mona, what I'm gonna do/Build my house next door to you." Its most remarkable feature is Bo's popping enuncia tion of the choric "Mona" and the trembling quality of his re sponses: "Canncome out on thuh front/Listen to muh heart go-a bumpety bump?" (This was yet another of his mannerisms eagerly, and overtly, appropriated by Elvis Presley). By comparison, the peculiar distinction of the Stones' version is the syncronicity of Brian Jones's tremoloed guitar and the tomtom underpinning provided by drummer Charlie Watts at that time, and still, the most musically gifted of the group next to Brian Jones. Nor does it hurt that Jones modifies Bo's original solo with some finely executed quotes from Bo's "Mumblin' Guitar." Fine and impressive as this is, however, one misses the lushness, the deep Mississippi emotion of the original and the crystal clarity of Bo's true tones, both of guitar and of voice.
When that momentous 1963 tour of England was completed, then, the Stones had been launched on a high flying trajectory: and it could well be argued that Bo Diddley had served as their catapult. In befriending them so readily, without preju dice or calculation, he had nurtured their abundant and emerging talent and had reinforced their growing self confidence as a band. From then on they would cut loose and fly in any direction their considerable gifts commanded. It is small wonder that today rock critics often refer to Bo Diddley as "the true father of the Rolling Stones."
Since those days, Bo and various members of the group have touched base from time to time: Keith Richards has always sought to catch Bo's act whenever opportuni ty permits in Los Angeles, maybe, or in London and the Stones invited Bo to open the show on alternate nights on one of their massive 1970's American tours (the invitation for the other nights went to Bo's long time friend, B. B. King).
While he drew immense satisfaction from his 1988 89 "Gunslingers' Tour" with Ron Wood, the third generation Stone, Bo would like to have done more with the group as a whole.
"They've used a whole lot of my licks," he says, as he looks back at the stupen dous progress of his young English friends, "but I guess because we were pretty tight I never said anything about it. Sure they made a few changes, but they didn't make themselves a laugh ing stock by doing that.
"I've tried to get something together with the Stones many times, but I could never catch up with them. It was a matter of catching up with 'em, you know, 'cos those dudes were moving fast, faster than a roadrunner!
"And something else: they've helped keep Bo Diddley's music alive. They've played a whole bunch of my songs, and they've kept my name known to their fans. I'm grateful for that."
Perhaps the story told by Henry Manning owner of the famous Manny's Music Store on 47th Street in New York best exemplifies the present relationship between Bo and the Stones, which could be characterized as one of friendship and respect.
"Bo started in with us years ago," says Henry. "Came in and said he was Ellas McDaniel. That meant nothing to me until we started to talk and I found out he was Bo Diddley, and now, I mean, he's a legend. Today, he's more of a friend than a customer. Buys everything here except his guitars, which he has made up to order.
"One day we had Mick Jagger in here, and David Bowie with him. A few minutes later, Bo walked in, and Mick and David they went to him! He didn't go to them. I mean, it was an amazing thing: the Superstars went to him, because they're up against a Super Superstar! In this store a lot of celebrities come in among the regular musicians, and they don't go running over like that. I can't think of that happening any. . . other. . . time."
When Bo returned from that tour of England in 1963, he was in an exuberant mood. The trip had gone well and he had made friends with some "swinging" new kids over there. He thought he might have some fun and at the same time give these Limey "offspring" of his a little boost, if that were at all needed. The fun centered on a little piece of social satire he had concocted that he called "The London Stomp."
"The boys in the band, the Stones that is, they kept on askin' me did I know the Beatles, and I said, 'No. I ain't never heard of 'em.' They told me it was a group from Liverpool. So when I got home I went straight into the studio and did this little song I'd played around for them backstage. I based it around that number the Stones were doing onstage every night 'I Wanna Be Your Man,' I think they called it but they never told me where they got it from! See, by me playing what I thought was the Stones' riff, I was letting the Liverpoolians know that they had their own sound down there in London, too."
Bo opens the lyrics to "The London Stomp" with a wicked impersonation of a British accent, "I say there, old chap, can you do the Lon don Stomp?" which he follows with a lusty R & B holler: "Hey Liverpool! We got the London Stomp." It's clear he means to tell those Beatles a thing or two. But it is really the preceding intro that is the grabber, for there, now positively dripping in Diddley funk, is a 16 bar sampling of the magnetic Brian Jones' lead-in to "I Wanna Be Your Man." But what Bo didn't know was that "I Wanna be Your Man" had been com posed in a quick huddle at a Stones' recording session by no less than John Lennon and Paul McCartney, two of the Beatles, the very people he was addressing him self to in this battle of musical one upmanship and that, in a gesture of Liverpudlian genity, they had permitted its use when the Stones found themselves momentarily looking for a marketworthy song.
So far as is known, these 16 bars of funk drenched R & B are the sum and total of Bo Diddley Plays The Beatles. "They got me good," concedes Bo, laughing off the misfire of his anti Beatles, proStones statement. "That's what you call the Diddler diddled!"
In retrospect, this episode seems more than simply a case of a joke subverted; it was a symptom perhaps of something larger, of some thing unexpected and yet inevitable. For everything seemed to change in the fall of 1963. Just as a heroic president was dead and the nation was in grief, so too American rock and roll, it seemed, was at an end. Bo's cohorts were dropping by the wayside: Chuck Berry was in jail and had not recorded for two years, Little Richard had barely gotten over getting religion, while Elvis, the uncontested king, had gone to self imposed exile in Hollywood and Las Vegas.
As for himself, Bo had been on a wave of fame for an uninterrupted eight and one half years. No question that it had been good, but the wave had crested and he was about to find himself struggling in the afterwash.