Bo Diddley: "The Black Gladiator"

Another album recorded at Ter-Mar, around the time when the studio seemed to be producing records at an infinite rate (’69-’70).  This is grimy, psychedelic, Chicago blues-soul, an attempt to make Bo over in the same fashion as had been tried with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf a couple of years earlier.  Though I love the Muddy and Wolf Cadet-Concept LP’s, I think the stylized transition suits Bo better, as he always landed more on the “rock” side of the equation.  He doesn’t have to reach so far, and the arrangements feel more strident, less forced, although still with loads of overdriven, fuzzy guitar and organ (yes please).  This album jams from the opening bars of the heavy “Elephant Man” to the closing strains of “I Don’t Like You,” with all the stops in between being necessary points of interest.  Bo writes uncompromising lyrics, evident in titles such as “Power House” and “Shut Up, Woman,” in which he essentially lays his own truths down without fear of what the listener and/or audience may think.  Other tracks, like “Black Soul” and “Funky Fly,” catch a glimpse of the unquantifiable advances in R&B that would come in the next few years, sounding more like Sly Stone and even early Funkadelic than the 1-4-5 motions of South Side blues.  On all these tunes, Bo Diddley sings and plays with a rawness that is as bold as it is honest, with his guitar leads sounding especially stinging and vicious.  What the album does as a whole is link two eras together—that of the blues-drenched, chaos-filled, ominous late ‘60’s, and the almost-as-bleak, anything-goes aesthetic of the early ‘70’s, where fresh territory was being explored on a daily basis, particularly in the blossoming innovation of the R&B genre, which was exploding and fragmenting into new forms/hybrids like funk, funk-fusion and funk-rock.  On “The Black Gladiator,” Diddley leaves all the rough edges intact, so as to still expose the roots even as he begins to scale the high branches.