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Two Great Guitars/The Super Super Blues Band,Bo Diddley

- Two Great Guitars/The Super Super Blues Band
- - 5,275 plays
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Bo Diddley
Released 1996

Spoonful
04:12
77 plays

Medley: Ooh Baby/Wrecking My Love Life
06:32
77 plays

Long Distance Call
09:14
56 plays

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songs

- 1
- Liverpool Drive
- 02:56
- 31 plays

- 2
- Chuck's Beat
- 10:39
- 19 plays

- 3
- When the Saints Go Marching In
- 02:52
- 4 plays

- 4
- Bo's Beat
- 14:08
- 21 plays

- 5
- Long Distance Call
- 09:14
- 56 plays

- 6
- Medley: Ooh Baby/Wrecking My Love Life
- 06:32
- 77 plays

- 7
- Sweet Little Angel
- 06:39
- 47 plays

- 8
- Spoonful
- 04:12
- 77 plays

- 9
- Diddley Daddy
- 05:11
- 52 plays

- 10
- Little Red Rooster
- 07:26
- 246 plays

- 11
- Going Down Slow
- 04:50
- 4,645 plays

album review

The linking theme behind this two-LP-on-one-CD compilation seems to be the fact that, on both Two Great Guitars and Super Super Blues Band, Chess Records was trying to coax or force collaborations between the company's established stars. Two Great Guitars was the more spontaneous and inspired of the two albums, coming about on a day when Chuck Berry happened to turn up at Chess when Bo Diddley was cutting a session, and they decided to try and cut something together -- the result was a pair of superb extended guitar workouts that were unique in their time; no rock & roll record had ever featured jams of this length, or showcased the bags of tricks of a pair of axe-men like this. Although the usual assumption is that the featured guitarist on each of the tracks got the spotlight, the fact is that Bo Diddley holds his own even on the Chuck Berry piece "Chuck's Beat," providing a relentless, sometimes thunderous and sometimes shimmering rhythm guitar backup to Berry's lead guitar that's a show in itself. "Bo's Beat" features the piano nearly as prominently as either of the guitarists, and Berry wanders through some intelligent variations on his most familiar licks, part of a very busy band. The Super Super Blues Band album was more problematic, being a company-dictated collaboration between Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, and Bo Diddley that never quite fits together -- Muddy and the Wolf never got along sharing their repertory, and Bo Diddley seems caught in the middle of a nasty argument a lot of the time; sadly, Chuck Berry wasn't on Chess at the time, or else he might've been here in place of the unwilling and unhappy Wolf. There's occasionally some interesting playing or singing, and it's always nice to hear more Holwin' Wolf (nothing here is as awkward as Wolf's work on the infamous "Howlin' Wolf's New Album" of the same period), but it's not a prime example of the work of anyone involved. The BGO disc is a fresh remastering of the original albums, which date from the late 1980's in their American CD editions and sound a lot better here, and it may be worth owning for anyone wanting the pyrotechnics of Two Great Guitars -- it doesn't have the two Bo Diddley bonus cuts from the U.S. version, however. ~ Bruce Eder, All Music Guide