Here, the gods want a mighty groove, wild flight through the landscape, and a plentiful supply of Juju Junkfood. Scripture and sacrifice can be great, but they’re optional. Vestments and shiny implements can have a heady appeal, but likewise they’re not required to trigger my auto-mo-down theophanies.
Flying through the landscape with “Papa Oh Mau Mau” (by the Trashmen), “Flip and Nitty” (by Bob B. Soxx), or “I Want Candy” (by the Strangeloves), blasting from the dashboard speakers, I am the high-speed sorcerer, moving in a cloud of loud pop-cult gibberish. Much slower, winding down a dirt road that leads to nowhere (that once was somewhere), I’m also the pilgrim conjureman, wending my way through a lost and found holy land.
High velocity travel, buzzed on sugar and enveloped in mumbo-jumbo songs: this is my prime occult ritual. What my commonplace car can do is a far more potent magical action than chanting the Lord’s Prayer backward or cutting a cockerel’s throat on some grubby sacrificial altar in a reeking basement. “Motorvatin’ up over the hill,” as Chuck Berry put it, beats bogus devil worship every time. Taking a ride-ride-ride “in my Terraplane,” as Captain Beefheart bellowed, has far more mojo power than red velvet capes, incense, and fake skulls.
Medieval witches flew, chanting their unholy songs, to join the sabbath. Now, an Arcane Auto-American can own a machine that allows him far more miraculous transport than any witch’s flight. Seen and heard by any human before the twentieth century, what my car can do would seem like the most powerful of magics.
Nietzsche knew it: in the mad surge of music, our boundaries dissolve. Voices join, and the gods return. Each of us, in the throes of music, is not one, but many. Though our rational minds insist on telling us otherwise, we are a singing swarm, a choir of fuguing thoughts, memory, impulse, and desire.
Listening with half an ear and a hundredth of the brain to aural ooze-wash is worse than nothing, a numbing narcosis. What I require is the music of sorcery: the mating of reason and unreason, order and chaos, cold craft and overheated emotion. I move back and forth between the two realms. The first is the visible here-and-now, the so-called real world. The other is hidden, nebulous, most times out of reach. Now I see it – now I don’t. Now I’m here – now I’m gone.
Placing twenty-first century highway denizens next to the great minds of the past would make us look like hairless lobotomized chimps. Big deal: I can work a steering wheel and gas pedal, but I can’t manage the secrets of calculus or astronomy. Galileo, Copernicus, Leibnitz, and Kant moved slowly and deliberately, and they opened up the universe to human thought. Still, swept into our highway hallucinations, they would call us magi of the highest order.
If I drove up to Newton’s house, and laid on the horn, the great Sir Isaac would fall on his knees in wonder. Spirited away with Howlin’ Wolf bellowing “Wang Dang Doodle,” he could assume that our next stop would be a wild party in hell. And with Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti! Ah Rootie!” throbbing from the speakers, he’d think himself transported through the Astral Plane to some myth-haunted domain. And he might be right.
I knew that I would never find Atlantis or Shambhala. Likewise: El Dorado, Ultima Thule, Brigadoon, Valhalla, and Nova Zembla were all in the great unreachable beyond. But finding Diddy Wah Diddy – that may have been implausible, but not unthinkable.
“It ain’t a town and it ain’t a city.” If that was so, then what was it? A lost hamlet, a whistlestop on the Hojack Line, a jerkwater burg between Nowheresville and Nothingtown, a dot on the map obliterated by years of folding and unfolding, a crossroads where I could sell my soul? When someone hazards a guess, it’s usually this: Diddy Wah Diddy is rumored to be the last stop on the train to hell. Get off there and you might not burn forever in stinking pitchy flames. Step off the Devil’s Train one station before the terminal and you’ve still got a chance.
But the black hole of Diddy Wah Diddy – that’s another matter. Yet again, I crossed the line to nowhere. I wasn’t lost, but I was gone, a way gone diddley daddy. Yearning fueled my voyage. High calorie snack foods gave me strength for the journey. (Candy cigarettes are at the top of the list, followed by licorice pipes, and then wintergreen bubblegum cigars.) Gibbering singers showed the path.
In the beginning was the riff. Then came the gnomic chorus: Diddy Wah Diddy revealing itself as a song. My initial contact cost me fifty cents.
The first recording I heard, the one that opened up the gates, wasn’t the earliest, the most famous, the blackest, or the best. I’d stopped at a garage sale somewhere in the lost reaches of Wayne County. Digging around in stacks of records, I came upon a cheap-looking disc called A-OK! Astronauts Orbit Kampus. (It was the K in Kampus – ala Kaiser or kamikaze – that caught my eye.) The cover shows five white guys in sleazy Las Vegas shimmer-glimmer jackets, bow ties and neatly trimmed hair. They’re posed on a snowy hilltop. Four of the Astronauts carry gleaming white Fender guitars (plugged into nothing, of course.) The guy with the stupidest grin leans on a stack of drums the color of glittering fool’s gold.
Though there are extensive, crypto-Mormon notes on the back of the cover, (“Let us realize from the very outset that in the Rocky Mountain Empire, the Astronauts are the leaders!”) no mention is made of the band’s original name: the Storm Troopers. “Rocky Mountain Empire”? This could refer to the fascist fantasies of certain L.D.S. leaders. There is another quasi-nazoid picture, on the back of the album, showing the three guitarists and bass player all lined up, gazing with fatuous smiles into some impossible fame-and-fortune Aryan future.
The album was recorded at the Tulagi, then a teenaged hotspot in Boulder. Mostly the band does covers of rock and roller tunes that had been cool ten years before: Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Gene Vincent. But the first cut on side two gave me my first taste, my seductive glimpse, of Diddy Wah Diddy.
For beardless white boys, this is an admirable attempt: loose, unfettered, and riff-driven. The singer manages to transcend his Mormon adolescent nerd status. Though by comparison to other—older and darker—versions it’s not remarkable, still it was exactly the clue and the trigger I needed.
There’s a sugary girl in this mysterious place. “Diddy wah!” the singer cries. “Crazy ‘bout my baby!” And when he praises “how they love,” he’s not talking about Christian charity and fellowship.
The Astronauts, and their earlier stormtrooping incarnation, were a surf band. The Pacific coast was many hundreds of miles west of their home base, but still they rode the imaginal wave, with lots of reverb guitar, pseudo-jungle tom-toms, and oceanic twang. For this live Kampus album they leaned heavily on other people’s crowd-pleasing hits. Why “Diddy Wah Diddy” though? It’s unlikely anybody in the Rocky Mountain Empire audience had caught Bo Diddley’s 1956 version. Other tunes in their set also had nonsense titles: “Be-Bop-A-Lu-La” and “Bony Moronie.” These were, however, fun teenybopper tunes, not echoes from the hoodoo hinterland.
Rock and roll is filled with cryptic sayings: Bang Shang a Lang, Sha La La Means I Love you, Hey Bop a Re Bop, Sha Na Na, Ooby Dooby, Drinking Wine Spodee Odee. Infantile drivel or deep dark incantations? Not or, but and. Both at the same time.
Not all rock musicians (or their predecessors: growling blues men and wild-eyed hillbillies) were selling banal nonsense. In fact, three of the primary Diddy Wah Diddy prophets (Bo Diddley, Captain Beefheart, and Lydia Lunch – all of them with absurd pseudonyms) were hyper-hip musicians, canny operators, and outlived their drug-addled contemporaries by decades.
I sought oracular wisdom and I found it in the grooves, riding round and round, deeper and deeper toward the center. Unlike the little circular label at the middle of most vinyl discs, the one on my copy of A-OK! is dark as night. It’s hard to tell where the vinyl grooves end and the black hole begins.
I didn’t notice that until I’d played the song a few dozen times. What captured my attention were the insistent bluesy riff and the three repeated words – mere idiocy, or an all-powerful occult utterance.
At first, I assumed that Diddy Wah Diddy must have been a place somewhere in a mythical delta Dixie. I thought that steamy juke joints, transplanted African rhythms, and the secret rites of the black conjure-men would be at the heart of such a place. But all it took was a full tank of gas, a tattered map, some licorice whips, a stretch of two-lane blacktop, and Krazy Kool Muzik, to get me within striking distance.
Well-marinated in Diddy Wah Diddy’s too-sweet sauce, I went farther into the past. It took some work, but I did find a much earlier recording, by Blind Blake, with a more cryptic chorus.
There’s a great big mystery
and it sure is worrying me
that Diddy Wah Diddy, yeah Diddy Wah Diddy
Is wish somebody’d tell me what
Diddy Wah Diddy means
I knew that in hoodoo lore, it’s the last stop on the railroad to hell, but—I discovered—it’s also a not-so-secret code name.
Went to church, put my hat on the seat
Lady sat on it, said, “Daddy you sure is sweet.”
I said “Sister, I’ll soon be gone.
Just give me that thing you’re sitting on.”
If you’re riding spellbound on that hell-bound train, the preachers declare (with sweat popping on their foreheads, itchy fingers twitching, banging the Bible, and spewing sermonizing spittle), then you’ve got one final chance to get off before plunging all the way in, all the way down, taking that ride to the black hole at the center of the universe.
One last chance. It’s Diddy Wah Diddy or Hell.
For the true lover of Metzgeriana, the Astronauts’ Album is available here.