Oh Man. That Bo Diddley Beat

They call it the Bo Diddley Beat. That’s Bo Diddley doing the Bo Diddley Beat. Bo didn’t want you to get confused about who was doing what, and let the audience know right off who was who. Hey Bo Diddley! If Bo ever had a publicist, I’ll bet he didn’t have to work overly hard. Bo was always a vertically oriented entertainment complex all by hisself.

That beat has a lot of names. Many people call it: shave and a haircut, two bits. If you’re playing in a band below the Gulf of Mexico, er, America, um, well, south or east of the Bay of Campeche, anyway, you might call it the clave rhythm. Some people call it The Hambone. It’s basically straight out of Africa. Others might have done something like it before him, but Bo made it his own thang, and rode it for all it was worth. He was the iPhone and the kleenex and the frigidaire of the beat.

Lots of other guys mined the same ore. There are too many to list. Here are some notable ones.

Buddy Holly

Johnny Otis:

The Miracles:

It’s even buried in the middle of these two, though you have to listen a little harder to hear it:

Bo had unusual tastes in guitars. He played cigar box guitars at first, and made them himself. When he got some notoriety, he started having others made for him, including a “twang machine,” built in the same square shape, but from a solid piece of wood with a neck bolted on, and a regular pickup configuration. I was in Gruhn Guitars in Nashville back in the day, and they had one of his twang machines for sale. If I’d have bought it, I could sell it and retire tomorrow. I think it’s in the Metropolitan Museum of Art nowadays. I bought a Stratocaster instead because I was a broke-ass loser.

The guitar Bo’s playing in the video is his own design as well. Eventually, he had a guy who was laid off or retired or quit or fired or something from Gretsch guitars build the guitars for him. They had custom bodies with Gretsch necks bolted on, and Gretsch hardware. He called them Jupiter Thunderbirds. Bo gave one to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, and you can often spot him playing one. Although I doubt he’s still playing the original much. In 2005, Billy convinced Gretsch to throw in the towel and started making Bo’s design in their factory. They call it the Billy-Bo Jupiter Thunderbird.

That’s Norma-Jean Wofford playing her own Jupiter Thunderbird, singing, and shimmying in the Bo Diddley video up top. Somehow I’m reminded of this quote: Remember, Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did, but she did it backwards and in high heels.

The Nashville Sound

Some old school Country, with more than a few hints of what was to come. Dolly Parton at around 7:00 piled up the hair and sang it straight. She’d wander onto the pop charts, bigtime, a little later, with the crossover sound that fell out of the old country music tree.

Rock music had already worked its magic on country music. Up until the late fifties, pop music was very wide-ranging and catholic. Elvis and his cohort had one foot still in country, for instance, but they started the deluge of rock or nothing that found everyone shifting over from whatever genre they inhabited before. When Bobby Darin starts trying to sing rock music, things have truly shifted for good. Eventually, in 1964, the Beatles wiped the charts clean and scrawled their name all over it. Country music had an identity crisis.

This video is a museum exhibit of the end of the original Grand Ol Opry movement. Shortly after this, the Opry moved to a new venue. It didn’t look down-home anymore, and the acts moved into New Country, and various forms of crossover styles. In some ways, it isn’t a long trip from this video to stuff like the Eagles, or Eddie Rabbitt, or BJ Thomas, or Charlie Rich, or Kenny Rogers, or Dolly Parton’s transformation, or the Bellamy Brothers, but there’s an oceanic gulf between the styles. It’s nice that someone pointed a camera at the dotted line that divided the eras.

I’m In Love, Eternally, With Concrete and Clay

Concrete and Clay was a #1 hit in 1965 on the UK Singles Chart. It made it to a respectable #28 on the US Billboard chart. Just popular enough, but obscure enough, to interest someone like Wes Anderson. Here it is, along with a protozoan-era music video:

Ya gotta love Unit 4+2’s vibe. By the look of them, they’re obviously going to do the record producer’s taxes after the session, or maybe do some retirement planning for elderly couples in Tunbridge Wells. It demonstrates ably that the sixties was two different decades wrapped into one. The first half looked like this, and the latter part was all feather boas and paisley shirts and satin carnival uniforms.  The song itself is seriously sprightly. It’s got a slightly exotic Brazilian beat, a copious amount of rebar on display in the video, and absolutely the correct amount of cowbell.

The band was called Unit 4 for a while, until they decided they could really use a guitar player and a drummer, hence the +2. The +2 turned out to be Russ Ballard and Bob Henrit. You think you don’t know who those two guys are, but you sort of do if you’re my age. They later hooked up with the keyboardist from the Zombies and made this earworm in the ’70s:

Yes, hair and clothing styles for performers had changed in the interim.

Anyway, let’s get back to Concrete and Clay. I was tickled when my sons started banging it out in their rehearsal space. My brother gave my son a cowbell for Christmas, and they immediately knew exactly what to do with it. I wish I had recorded it before I sold their practice room, mostly because it was attached to the rest of the house. But it was a song with legs, if you ask me. It’s peppy and obscure enough to be interesting, but familiar enough for people to respond to it when you start in with the cowbell.

Right? Isn’t it? Am I wrong here? I have my doubts now. I went looking around for covers of Concrete and Clay, but they’re vanishingly rare on these here intertunnels. Has my thinker upper failed me on this one? Let’s see who’s executing the song on the WooTube:

Whoah. A lot can be explained by the fact they’re German. Our Deutsche freunde are rarely noted for their cooking, but they’re really not noted for their sense of humor. Here’s a German joke:

Judge: So you had a disagreement with your neighbor over a parking space. You accosted them in the street, cursed at them, drove them into a forest, and beat them with a tree limb! Don’t you think that was taking things a little too far?

Defendant: You’re right, your honor. I should have beaten them right there in the street.

Oh well. Let’s head further north, and see How Ilkka & LPX paid homage to the tune:

The late sixties also introduced a lot of people to psychedelic drugs. But WooTube beats magic mushrooms, hands down.