When I listened to Bo Diddley, I didn’t know what
he was saying, whether it was “My baby, she was
a bird’ or ‘My baby, she was murdered.”
It didn’t make any difference. It moved me.
Paul Simon
Bo Diddley passed away last week, and anybody who tapped a toe or shook a tail feather, should take a moment to thank him. For it was a beat, his beat that helped set Rock n’ Roll as the music to get you up and moving. From Buddy Holly to Bow Wow Wow, Diddley’s beat influenced a wave of musicians to where I can even hear echoes on this album.
The first time I saw Mike Doughty he was playing as the front man for Soul Coughing. It was one of those musical festivals that lasted all day with dozens of bands, and in between Garbage and the Goo Goo Dolls, Doughty and his crew amped their equipment and blew the audience away. It wasn’t so much as loud as it was the fat bass which literally passed right through me. And as song after song began to shift around major organs in my body, I knew this man was heavily invested in a solid beat.
Doughty’s latest solo release, “Golden Delicious” can best be described as infectious. With the help of Semisonic’s front man, Dan Wilson, as producer, Doughty makes a deliberate attempt to shed his baroque, sometimes impenetrable past to create a more friendly sound. Some may call it a sell out, but I think any album that contains a song called “More Bacon than the Pan Can Handle” deserves a listen.
Overall, this is an upbeat album even if some of the material may not be. I like the way Doughty let’s the sun shine in by way of interspersing the melody from the musical “Hair” on his anti-war anthem “Fort Hood”. Clearly, he wants to create an album that keeps us dancing as in my favorite, “Put it Down”, which reminds me of one of his more popular hits with Soul Coughing, “Super Bon Bon.” But no longer is there a Kaleidoscope of sounds crashing from every direction. Instead, there’s a beat, and that beat wants me to put down this pen, get up and get moving.
