Pardon the very slight necropost, as well as the emotional outpour that is about to ensue.
I have been gone from the Inter-nets and therefore the world ever since returning here, but my dad called me about 20 minutes after I had finished my shift at work to tell me on the day it happened. I've been in shock ever since. I knew it would happen, and I had braced myself, but it was entirely ineffective.
Unlike Gaz, who was never so fortunate as I to meet him, I was directly influenced by Bo Diddley in a way that I will never forget. I met him when he played at the county fair near my hometown (no small gig, either, it's the same county as Oakland and Berkeley). I by chance happened to have my guitar, so I figured what the hell, I'll bring it to the gig. He saw me playing along in the crowd, and when I went up to the stage to ask him to sign it, he pointed me backstage.
I hung out with him for a half hour. He and I traded guitars and riffs for a few minutes (he creamed me in that battle, no wonder considering his decades of guitar playing and my having played for less than a year at the time). And as he signed my guitar, he told me that although the people in the music industry had certainly screwed him over something horrible, he loved his art more than anything else. And while our sounds are almost nothing alike, he and I have that spirit in common. Ever since, the only things I have ever thought about in any detail at all have been something involving the making of music.
Bo Diddley showed me what I wanted to do with my life. He gave me a sense of direction when my life was so horribly fucked up that I had almost slit my own throat the week before I met him. He showed me how much music meant to him, and it rubbed off on me in full force. The news of his death has literally made this one of the shittiest weeks I've known in a long, long time.
The man is my musical father, and I've lost him forever. God rest his soul.
