Review: Bo Diddley - In The Spotlight (1960)

Tracks: 1) Road Runner; 2) Story Of Bo Diddley; 3) Scuttle Bug; 4) Signifying Blues; 5) Let Me In; 6) Limber; 7) Love Me; 8) Craw-Dad; 9) Walkin’ And Talkin’; 10) Travellin’ West; 11) Deed And Deed I Do; 12) Live My Life.

REVIEW

Perhaps it would be unfair, after all, to poke fun at Bo Diddley for letting his creative well of ideas run all dry when the clock struck twelve on the last day of the previous decade. It’s more like he was not too quick to grasp the true potential of this new LP medium. Imagine this — you used to enter the studio to record just two songs and be done with it, and now they’re expecting you to enter the studio and cut twelve of these fuckers! Even if you stretch it out (In The Spotlight was actually comprised from eight months’ worth of various recording sessions), you can’t really be expected to be creatively inspired every time you drag your ass to the studio, right? I mean, even Mozart and Beethoven wrote shitloads of variations on their own themes, so give The Originator a break here.

At least, unlike Have Guitar Will Travel, In The Spotlight has one unquestionable absolute classic on it. Taking the original riff of ‘Lucille’, slowing it down and removing one note at the end to give the thing a bit more gravity and heaviness, Bo comes up with perhaps the greatest ode to motorbiking written up to date — using the Road Runner character from Looney Tunes (with his trademark beep beep!) to draw you in. The actual musical — or, perhaps more accurately, sonic — hook of the song is that entrancingly odd effect of the guitar string being «skinned alive» as Bo imitates the sound of a motorbike dashing past the listener, over and over, a classy gimmick whose smooth transition into the song’s riff probably made many a British kid at the time pick their jaw off the floor; it is, in fact, one of the most vivid exploits of the electric guitar’s world-building potential prior to Hendrix, and pretty damn difficult to pick up properly.

(The Rolling Stones, for instance, never learned to do it; their unreleased version from 1963 instead features a rather measly «up-the-stairway» progression which does indeed prove that they can’t keep up with the fastest in the land. Nor could The Zombies, for that matter, who try to wiggle their way out of it with a set of distorted trills, getting a little closer to the required goal but still stalling and spluttering. Only The Animals, back in the day, receive an A+ for effort — and with the addition of Alan Price’s organ and Eric Burdon’s vocals, come up with the definitive cover; although, in terms of sheer noise and ruckus, you can hardly beat the classic Who live version from 1975 — who but Pete Townshend, the supreme Grand Torturer of the electric guitar, could properly improve upon the Originator’s engine-in-overdrive thing?).

Mood-wise, ‘Road Runner’ is really the same old shit — hyperbolic, but humorous self-aggrandizing with lyrics working in tandem with the instrumental backing — but it is really the sound of it that counts, that heavy and lumbering vibe created by Bo’s and Peggy Jones’ guitars working in tandem (note that there is no separate bass guitar on the recording! at least I don’t really hear one, and there is none listed in the liner notes), combined with Clifton James’ massive bass drum pounding. This is basically the 1960 equivalent of the massive Led Zeppelin groove of 1968 — not at all the kind of sound typically associated with Bo Diddley, who, up until then, usually preferred to soar up in the air rather than making it feel as if he were trying to drill a hole into the center of the Earth. But even so, this is arguably Bo Diddley’s biggest contribution to the future genres of hard rock and heavy metal, and even with The Animals and The Who rising up to the challenge, the original version still remains the "fastest in the land".

And now the line you’ve all been waiting for: too bad there is absolutely nothing on the rest of the album to even remotely match the power, the fun, and the innovation of its opening title. And this is not an exaggeration — every other track is a piece of filler. Sometimes boring filler, sometimes silly filler, sometimes enjoyable filler, but each and every one of these other eleven recordings is a variation on Bo’s past glories, dragging us back in time rather than beep-beeping us forward like ‘Road Runner’ does. When was the last time you saw ‘Limber’ or ‘Craw-Dad’ or ‘Live My Life’ on a Best-Of Bo Diddley compilation? That’s right — no-when, that’s when.

Okay, correction: most of the Chess compilations actually include at least the original B-side to ‘Road Runner’, called ‘My Story’ on the single release and later renamed to ‘The Story Of Bo Diddley’. (Not to be confused with The Animals’ later own ‘Story Of Bo Diddley’, which would be more centered around the band’s own relationship with the man than his personal biography). However, it can hardly be argued that the song’s only bit of importance is in its autobiographical detail (or, should we rather say, automythological detail — "I come in this world playing a gold guitar" isn’t exactly something that could be properly fact-checked) — otherwise, it’s basically just ‘Dearest Darling’ with a new set of lyrics, as much as I always like to hear Otis Spann add his crystal-clear piano runs to Bo’s jamming.

Elsewhere, we have ‘Live My Life’, which is a new version of ‘Before You Accuse Me’, with fairly appropriate lyrics to boot: "If I could live my life, I’d live it all over again" — Bo states with just a pinch of syntactic inaccuracy and a whole load of commitment to this particular mission, because even before the song gets started, it has already been lived all over again in the form of ‘Scuttle Bug’, an instrumental mix of the exact same performance with wiped vocals and added extra piano lines from Spann. I love Mr. Spann and his piano playing on ‘Scuttle Bug’ is beautiful (some Fats Domino echoes in here, but with a prettier, clinkier timbre), yet really, why put it in our face in such an obvious manner? And does the world really need another sequel to ‘Say Man’ (‘Signifying Blues’)? Around this time, Bo seems to have had enough insults accumulated for a whole book, which would at least mark a more original approach to the matter.

A couple of these things take a little more time to unravel; for instance, ‘Walkin’ And Talkin’ makes absolutely no sense until you realize that it is really Bo’s strange idea of a thematic sequel to the Coasters’ ‘Along Came Jones’ — the original song starts out with "I plopped down in my easy chair and turned on Channel 2", while Bo’s verse changes this "ploppin’ down in my easy chair, tunin’ on Channel 3". Apparently, in Bo’s vision poor Sweet Sue from the original song has developed some sort of Stockholm syndrome and is now actively working on rescuing her former stalker (Salty Sam, though he remains unnamed in this sequel) from legal persecution — I am not sure if there is some moral lesson to be learned from this, but I am sure that by slowing down the tempo, getting rid of the yakety-sax, and adding a new repetitive chorus Bo made the whole thing about ten times less interesting than the Coasters. Oh well, at least this time around he tried to riff on somebody else’s ideas rather than his own.

Another thing that may be hard for us to understand unless we were there at the time is ‘Limber’, which is Bo’s specially curated «uneducated» transcription of ‘Limbo’, the brand new dance from the Trinidad area that was just beginning to replace the calypso craze in the States. Bo would be among the very first artists to capitalize a bit on that craze — way before Chubby Checker’s ‘Limbo Rock’ or Duke Ellington’s ‘Limbo Jazz’ — but, unless I am very much mistaken, his idea of the limbo dance is way different from the fast, energetic representation on, for instance, ‘Limbo’ by Little Anthony & The Imperials. Bo prefers to take it slow and easy, decelerating one of his own rhythms and ultimately presenting the whole thing as more of a send-up of the new fad than a tribute to it. The end result is not so much groovy as monotonous, and not as much funny as annoying.

In the end, the only other track that I find somewhat exquisitely fun is ‘Deed And Deed I Do’, which mainly gets by because (a) it is fast and groovy and (b) I appreciate the contrast between the high-pitched wailing guitar in the intro and the «mumbling» bass-heavy guitar concluding each of the verses. Again, it’s more comical than anything else, but Bo Diddley’s bits of musical comedy, when they succeed, always transcend the silly-novelty stage — the tone, the echo, the energy, all of that stuff just can’t be beat. It’s just that you only find them on two or three tracks here. Perhaps that is precisely what he meant (not really) when choosing the title for the album — there’s ‘Road Runner’ In The Spotlight for you, and then there’s everything else that is, by definition, not in the spotlight.

• Only Solitaire reviews: Bo Diddley