Ellas McDaniel 1928-2008

Bo Diddley is dead. The ever reverent Ted Baron at Boogie Woogie Flu blogged a musical corral of Bo at his very best.

Also, The Hound reminisces ...

1) I was bike messengering in the early 80's and had some time to kill so I stopped into Show World @ 8th & 42nd to take in the quarter movies and get out of the cold. Who should be checking out at the counter but Bo Diddley in a long leather overcoat and cowboy hat. He's got a big bag of video's and I say: "Bo Diddley!, whatcha buyin' Bo"? He pulls the top video out of the bag and shows me Maximum Perversion Vol. 23. Pix of midgets, women w/snakes, etc. all over it. He's got a huge grin on his face.

2) Backstage at Madison Square Garden for some oldies show and there's Bo at the catering table. He gets a huge piece of apple pie and sits down, but before he eats it he butters both top and bottom w/about a quarter inch of butter, then picks it up and swallows it in two bites.

3) In 1985 we went down to Camden, N.J. to see Bo w/the Ben Vaughn Combo backing him up (they were perfect, Bo hated them) so I brought my copy of Go Bo Diddley to get signed. While I was getting it signed Ben asked Bo about the verse in "Who Do You Love" about the ice wagon and what it meant. Bo replied that Leonard Chess made him change the lyric from the original verse he brought in, which was:

"the night was black
the sky was blue
around the corner
a shit wagon flew
a bump was hit
a scream was heard
someone got hit with a flying turd"

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Robert Rauschenberg RIP

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008)

Robert Rauschenberg, the irrepressibly prolific American artist who time and again reshaped art in the twentieth century, died Monday night at age eighty-two, Michael Kimmelman reports for the New York Times. A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer, and, in later years, even a composer, Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. No American artist, Jasper Johns once said, invented more than Rauschenberg. Johns, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Rauschenberg, without sharing the same point of view, collectively defined this new era of experimentation in American culture. Apropos of Rauschenberg, Cage once said, "Beauty is now underfoot wherever we take the trouble to look." The process—an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things—was always what mattered most to him. "Screwing things up is a virtue," Rauschenberg said when he was seventy-four. "Being correct is never the point. I have an almost fanatically correct assistant, and by the time she respells my words and corrects my punctuation, I can't read what I wrote. Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea."

In 1964, he toured Europe and Asia with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, the same year he exhibited at the Whitechapel Gallery in London and the Venice Biennale as the US representative. That sealed his international renown. The Sunday Telegraph in London hailed him as "the most important American artist since Jackson Pollock.'' He walked off with the international grand prize in Venice, the first modern American to win it. Major exhibitions followed every decade after that, including one at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1981, another at the Guggenheim in 1997, and yet another that landed at the Metropolitan Museum in 2005.


"I usually work in a direction until I know how to do it, then I stop," he said in an interview in the giant studio on the island of Captiva, a slender island off Florida's Gulf coast, in 2000. "At the time that I am bored or understand—I use those words interchangeably—another appetite has formed. A lot of people try to think up ideas. I'm not one. I'd rather accept the irresistible possibilities of what I can't ignore."

He added: "Anything you do will be an abuse of somebody else's aesthetics. I think you're born an artist or not. I couldn't have learned it. And I hope I never do because knowing more only encourages your limitations."