More on Bo Diddley in Rolling Stone:

• The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Bo Diddley by Iggy Pop (RS 946, April 15, 2004)

• Bo Diddley: The Rolling Stone Interview by Kurt Loder (RS 493, February 12, 1987)

• Photo Gallery: Shots From Bo Diddley's Five Decade Career


"You got to get yourself some velcro," Bo Diddley advises.

"What?" I ask.

"For your phone." My cell phone had just slipped out of my hand and landed on the carpet of his room at the Washington Square Hotel in downtown Manhattan. And Diddley is quick to leap into action with a solution. "Yeah, Velcro's got rough edges and you can just attach it to the side of your phone so you can keep your grip on it."

He stretches his legs and points to them. "Look here!" he continues. His left foot is swollen from the amputation of two toes due to recent diabetes complications, and he's fashioned two long strips of Velcro to secure a slipper to his instep.

"That's how it's done," he says, smiling proudly.

At age seventy-six, reeling from diabetes, back problems and a pending divorce, Diddley still brims with life and enthusiasm, displaying the maverick spirit that made him one of the inventors of rock & roll, as well as the square guitar he used to play, to say nothing of the beat that bears his name. Much ink has been spilled in an attempt to figure out just where the oft-imitated Bo Diddley beat came from. But to meet Diddley, who's in Manhattan to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of his first single, "Bo Diddley," is to understand the answer: The man is simply inventive. The Velcro suggestion is just one of several dozen do-it-yourself ideas that Diddley will come up with in the time I spend with him in New York and his home in Gainesville, Florida, where Diddley will improvise the most astonishing private concert I've ever witnessed.

History belongs to the victors, and in the annals of rock & roll, three men have emerged as winners: Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Bo Diddley, a holy trinity who were there at the start. Diddley's importance is acknowledged but less often celebrated. His music strikes many as more simple, more direct than his contemporaries, yet it remains more difficult to categorize, understand or explain. Listen to "Bo Diddley" and you won't hear the teenage fantasy of Berry's "School Day" or the youth-gone-wild adrenaline of Richard's "Tutti Frutti." It is slower and unearthly, with a space-age tremolo guitar rippling through the song, the nervous rattle of constantly shaking maracas and a staggered shuffle-beat that sounds completely primal yet wholly original.

" 'Maybellene' is a country song sped up," says George Thorogood, who has covered Diddley songs on at least half his records. " 'Johnny B. Goode' is blues sped up. But you listen to 'Bo Diddley,' and you say, 'What in the Jesus is that?' You sit there and you get numb listening to it."

Keith Richards recalls experiencing the same shock. "Muddy [Waters] and Chuck were close to the straight electric blues," he said. "But Bo was fascinatingly on the edge. There was something African going on in there. His style was outrageous, suggesting that the kind of music we loved didn't just come from Mississippi. It was coming from somewhere else."