Special Edition: A Bo Diddley Addendum

I don’t know what it says about me psychologically, but I’ve always appreciated the little things. I have an inexplicable affinity toward miniatures. I just get a kick out of them.

For instance, I’ve got a nifty collection of super-groovy 1:64 scale cars—I’ll definitely do an entire Cool Stuff piece about them one day—and an assortment of shrunken-down favorite movie and cartoon characters that I display on my dresser and around my writing desk so I have something to aimlessly ponder when I’m at a loss.

My wife says I make altars. I suppose that’s a fittng way to describe it.

I even picked up this scientifically reduced ABA basketball last year. They were priced to move. When I was ordering it, I didn’t know exactly why I wanted it; it’s not like I was a Minnesota Muskies fanatic when I was a kid. But now that I have it on display on my bookshelf, the answer is obvious— I wanted it because it’s cool!

I mean, look at it! See my hand there? Surely you know that a basketball is supposed to be bigger than that!

There’s no smooth way to segue from my love of miniatures to a photo of me goofing around with Bo Diddley, even though the two concepts eventually interconnect, believe it or not. So I’ll just say this is a photo of me and Bo Diddley, one of the key architects of an ancient form of music that historians call “rock & roll”.

It was played by “musicians” on devices known as “instruments”.

Some of you may recall that one of the very first Cool Stuff articles I ever posted, way back on Oct. 24, 2024, described how I kind of...you know...I kind of knew Diddley.

Bo used to rent movies and dig through the CDs at the Turtles Records location in Gainesville, FL, where I was the assistant manager. That photo was taken in late 1989, just a few months before I finally answered the siren call and hauled myself all the way to New York City.

I didn’t, however, include this photo in the original article...

That’s Bo’s guitar. He was famous for his square guitars, of which there were many over the years.

Legend has it, he built the first one out of some leftover wood and a pickup he removed from an old Victrola because he didn’t have the money to buy an instrument at a store! Later on, when he became solvent, he’d design them himself and have professionals build them for him.

One day, Bo and a small band plugged up in front of the store and started jamming. He was ostensibly there to autograph copies of his new, self-produced and pressed record, but whoever was supposed to ship them to us never got around to it. So, with nothing to sign, he decided to play for a while anyway...with “a while” turning into two hours of one of the original inductees into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (even before Journey!!) plowing through his greatest hits on the sidewalk outside a strip mall.

There was a Walmart about fifty yards from where I’m standing in the photo. You get the idea.

Anyway, when I saw Bo take his current square guitar out of its case and prepare to hook a strap onto it, I knew in an instant what I had to do. I asked him if he’d let me get my picture made while holding Excalibur.

“Sure, I don’t care,” he said. Then Bo Diddley handed me his square guitar.

It was shockingly heavy! I felt like I was holding a coffee table! If Pete Townshend had tried to destroy that thing at the end of a Who show, he would have taken the stage apart instead.

(Dissolve to current day)

A few weeks ago I was perusing a site called Axe Heaven. The guys at Axe Heaven make and sell miniature replicas of iconic rock & roll guitars. I’ve purchased copies of both Paul McCartney’s Höfner violin bass and Bruce Springsteen’s famous woodgrain Telecaster from them in the past.

I am not getting paid to plug Axe Heaven, by the way. If only. I’m just telling you this because I really dig their product. They do superb work and have an eye for entertaining details; you can tell they care about what they’re doing and they know their stuff.

Springsteen’s Telecaster, for instance, is beaten to hell from too much Bruce action, just like the one he plays...or used to play, anyway. It now looms large in his legend, so he only drags it out for special occasions. (I’m pretty sure I’ve read before that Bruce intentionally damages the veneers of other Telecasters so audiences will think he’s playing his Excalibur. If he doesn’t, he sure wears them out awful fast.)

Anyway, as I was digging through Axe Heaven’s products, hoping to find the blonde Gibson semi-acoustic that Chuck Berry played in his “Johnny B. Goode” heyday, I stumbled upon their selection of Bo Diddley guitars.

And I noticed this one.

Upon closer inspection, I realized they’d made a replica of the exact guitar Bo handed me thirty-seven years ago! That’s it right there! Those eagles and his signature were on it, too, although you can’t see them because of how I’m cradling it in the photo.

Let’s look again.

Yep. That’s it. According to Axe Heaven, Bo called this one his “Twang Machine.”

You bet I bought it! How could I not?!

If that little thing doesn’t qualify as cool stuff, given my personal history with it, I don’t know what does! It now sits on the printer at my desk, with my copy of Bo Diddley’s 1972 Chess Records compilation, Got My Own Bag of Tricks, framed on the wall behind it.

I didn’t hang the album up after the fact, by the way— it was already there before I purchased the guitar. There’s a story to that, too, but I won’t get into it right now. Maybe one day.

As long as I’m on the subject again, I have one more fun thing to tell you about Bo and me.

Not long before he kindly let me pose with a piece of history, my buddy Alec and I had been listening to the above Diddley collection and were flummoxed by a bit of verbal interplay between Bo and his sidekick/maracas player, Jerome Green (that’s Jerome on the left in the photo. Drummer Clifton James is on the right. There is no truth to the rumor that these guys could only play with their eyes closed.)

“Say Man,” the song that was so confusing us, is one of Bo’s wackiest tracks. To be honest, it’s not even really a “song,” as such. It’s more like Bo and Jerome mocking each other and guffawing while a rhythm plays in the background.

It’s basically a version of “The Dozens,” an oral Black tradition where guys trade escalating comic insults with each other, many of them containing the phrase “your mama,” for the enjoyment of whoever might be around at the time.

Sorry to sound like some dumbass white guy examining the unwritten practices of those mysterious Black people. Obviously, I don’t mean it that way. But that’s The Dozens, if you’re not familiar with the concept, and it was a precursor of modern-day rap and hip-hop beefs, except that now artists can make piles of money if they get memorably shitty enough with a supposed enemy musician.

They insult all the way to the bank.

Even though he was a couple decades ahead of the game in 1958, Bo didn’t make much money from adding The Dozens to his music, just as he pulled in very little from the “Bo Diddley beat” that made him a significant figure in 20th-century popular culture and led to scores of other, often much whiter, musicians getting filthy rich.

But back to that lyric.

Listen to “Say Man” all the way through to hear the entire anti-narrative, then skip back to the 1:50 mark, where Jerome asks Bo, “Where your western boots at?!” Then try to decipher the rest of the exchange.

Alec and I listened to that passage repeatedly, trying to figure out what Jerome says when he cries, “Them ain’t no boots you got on, them BROGAAAAAAAAH!!” We never broke the code.

But then, a few weeks later, I realized, “What the hell— I’ll just ask Bo Diddley!”

Bo explained to me that Jerome says, “Them ain’t no boots you got on, them brogans!” Bo and other poor kids he grew up with in Chicago would wear brogan-style shoes because the soles were so thick and sturdy you could wear them for years before they wore out and you had to somehow find the money to buy new ones.

So the joke was that Bo couldn’t afford fancy cowboy boots. He had to wear “BROGAAAAAAAANS!”

Now you know, even if you weren’t wondering. As always, it pays to go to the source.

Stay cool.