When the Grateful Dead backed up Bo Diddley
There were a lot of wild pairings that played with the Grateful Dead over the years. Some names are familiar and understandable, like fellow San Francisco rockers Jefferson Airplane and Santana. For the Summer Jam at Watkins Glen in 1973, the Dead played to over half a million people with The Allman Brothers Band and The Band co-headlining. But those are the standard acts: who were the weird people that the Dead played with?
Well, how about the New Year’s Eve show in 1982, where Etta James and the Tower of Power horn section joined the band? There’s the 1970 show where the Dead played sets in between Miles Davis. If those are a little too standard for your tastes, might I recommend the show from November 21st, 1970, that featured a literal chimp act opening for the Dead in Boston? The fact that I haven’t written about that event is beyond me.
But sometimes, things just line up perfectly. Take a mental trip back to March 25th, 1972. You’re standing in the Academy of Music in New York (later to be known as the Palladium), and the Grateful Dead take the stage. Only they don’t play any of their music. Suddenly, rock and roll legend Bo Diddley hops out front with his signature cigar box guitar and burns through some of his classic material with the band. Oh, and there are also a couple of hundred Hells Angels around you.
Even though it was technically a public concert, the show was mainly a benefit concert for the New York City chapter of the Hells Angels. Promoted as ‘Hells Angels Present: Jerry Garcia & Friends & Bo Diddley’, the show represented another ongoing chapter in the chummy relationship that the Dead had with the Angels. Even though they weren’t technically billed to play that night, the Dead took the stage after the set with Diddley and performed their own material as well.
The night was a legendary one for Deadheads. For one, it represented the first show to feature vocalist Donna Jen Godchaux as an official member of the band. For more obsessed Dead freaks, the show would be the final time that the Dead would play Muddy Waters’ ‘Mannish Boy (I’m a Man)’, which the band had trotted out only a single time the year before with Ron ‘Pigpen’ McKernan on vocals.
For those who wanted to relive the greatest moments of the Dead and Bo Diddley on stage together, the first official release to feature the pairing was on Dick’s Picks Volume 30. There’s a slight misprint on that release: it shows the opening song as being ‘Hey! Bo Diddley’, when the band had actually played the similarly titled ‘Bo Diddley’. Almost exactly two months later, the Dead played the actual ‘Hey! Bo Diddley’ at the Lyceum in London, England, for the first time on May 23rd, right at the tail end of their Europe 72 tour. It would be one of just four times that the Dead would play the song in front of an audience.
Check out Bo Diddley and the Grateful Dead playing ‘Mona’ down below.
