THE LEGEND OF JOE DIDDLEY:

When things get hopeless enough, you’ll listen anywhere for voices that tell you what you need to hear: that everything’s going to work out eventually, that the end is not nigh, that ruin is not around the corner, that our best days are not behind us, that we have other choices, and we don’t have to settle for nothing and be thankful. You endlessly refresh your feed, praying that news will come that this nightmare will come to an end, that this was all a colossal farce, an irresponsible blunder that went too far, but reality has a way of reasserting itself. You listen for the tiniest sign of the signal when we can finally leave our shelters, but it never comes.

And yet we listen everywhere. We hear intimations of a ceasefire, and we cling to it. But behind the nostrums, we suspect that the cavalry’s not coming, full employment isn’t attainable, peace in our time seems unimaginable, and we’ll never again live amongst a people who even bother to give a shit about any of this. We listen at the doors of churches, to the opinions of drinking buddies gathered around the TV, to our preferred news mouthpieces. We are either told all of this is nearly over and better times are coming, or, worse, that it’s too late and we need to call off the search party. Hopeless. A terrible way to live all the remaining days of your life.

And yet, and yet, we still listen. Everyday I’m listening, with no expectation of an all-clear. So imagine my surprise when, amidst a thoroughly routine scan with an old radio tuning into a disused military-band radio frequency, I hear a voice, seemingly of another time, wailing out of a long-abandoned setting on the dial:
“GYAAAAAAHD DAAAAAAMMMMIT!!!!”

I started, like out of a half-asleep dream state. There wasn’t supposed to be anything on this band! This was the old frequency for the Strategic Air Command, the force in charge of our Cold War-era nuclear munitions. The people that were going to warn us when the atomic clock finally struck twelve, the warning that would arrive after the word “warning” had lost all its meaning. The reckoning.
But…the Strategic Air Command was dismantled in 1992. And this was coming from the Arctic division! What was this? Had someone left it on as they were leaving the base for good, like those numbers stations that spool off their endless number patterns like so much audial space junk? How long had this been going on?

Along with the rants, I hear what is unmistakably blues music, lyrics and ruminations, snatches of old Cold War programs, a window into another fearful time, when everything again seemed about to be taken away for good. And it’s clearly new…the singer tells us that he prefers “to fall asleep to old American movies/when a game of pool might determine the over/under on your life/and the cars raced through the rear-projected backgrounds of cities I’ll never see/and cliffs I’ll never leap from.” This isn’t a voice that had been on a loop since the ‘50s; it was channeling the ‘50s! The voice sang some old blues (“Last Fair Deal Gone Down”), but wrote in a new vernacular, too, not the hoary anachronisms trotted out by modern revivalists, those lonesome whistles and dark crossroads and cold dark grounds that have been denuded of their ghosts by decades of 12-bar bar bands in cheap Ray-Bans and dark suits. The Voice sang of the absurdity of trickle-down and compared an apocalyptic street-preacher to a steak on the sidewalk. His words were informed by the great North American doomsayers, everyone from Robert Johnson to Neil Young to George Carlin to Alan Bishop, a Noir fatalism reveling in the joy of speaking the truth when all around you is cloaked in false notions of civility and unavoidable austerity.

And that guitar! Is that a guitar? It sounds like less than one guitar but more than a hundred, an example of the classic American impulse to push a huge din through a tiny amp, the pick and the steel reveling in every wild pitch of feedback, steel scraping steel, nerve ending electrified and amplified through the bone and radiating out. It can do it all: “Amazing Grace” massed like the moan of the Scottish dells, criss-cross lines like the Magic Band, skitter-music like termites, accompanied by a blown-out harmonica that immolates its surroundings like the great Hinckley fire-storm.

Having finally heard the voice I was seeking, I needed to make contact. Sadly, the transmission was one-way. The 30 minute program repeated at intervals (eight times per day, 2.5 hours break in between each iteration), but ominously, it wasn’t pre-recorded. Whoever this was was playing this program live, over and over, slightly different each time, sent from an abandoned frequency with no expectation of a receiver on the other end. I listened for weeks, taped many different versions of the show, but didn’t summon the courage until a few weeks ago to write.

To my amazement, a note arrived two weeks later, packed in a box along with a long-discontinued model of Heathkit long-range walkie-talkie, attached with a frequency on which to tune the receiver. Upon assembling the device and tuning in, I suddenly had an audience with The Voice himself. He called himself Joe Diddley and he said sardonically that he was backed up by The Strategic Air Command – his term for the set of relay systems, record players, and sound modifiers he had created for himself and his instruments. Turns out that primitive-sounding guitar is quite primitive indeed – it’s a one-string diddley-bow he made from an old cigar box and plays with the fastener from an old burnt-out radio tube. He said he monitors the goings-on in the outside world, keeps up on the news, but he’s not interested in playing oracle to every new story. Joe said there’s only one story, endlessly replayed through history – the comfortable and coddled punching down and rising up, while their victims are left to paddle their own canoes with broken arms. Joe Diddley’s music is as relevant in 2018 as it would have been in 2014, or 2008 or 1956, and he’s been playing it this whole time, perfecting and refining it every day. His music is modern and mind-bending but it’s as old as the notion of strings stretched taught against cigar boxes, a new voice wearing old threads, a new way to tell the original, cyclical story of civilization.

At the end of our conversation, Joe let me tape one more transmission and gave me his blessing to release it as a cassette, provided I didn’t reveal the frequency where his performances can be found. He said that this music is mostly to clear his own head and keep himself from shrieking and running unprotected into the Arctic night, but he doesn’t mind if a few other people want to hear it, too.

America, I bring you…'BLUES UP YER ASS' from Joe Diddley and the Strategic Air Command.

-C.M. Sienko, the C.M. Sienko Foundation

PRAISE FOR 'BLUES UP YER ASS':

"You may not understand where he is going at first, but it quickly becomes clear that Joe Johnston has two fingers and a thumb on our current collective pulse. The lyrics are somehow contemporary and nostalgic at the same time but they only come after the strings lull you into an otherworldy state.
Don't count on staying there for too long, though. Just when you have settled in, a harmonica with a cliffhanger-beat wakes you back up to uncertainty. The kind of uncertainty where you don't know where you're going but you're ready to go wherever it is with a big eager smile on your face.

Don't worry, you're heading to a good place.

Highlights include Trickle Down Blues, Bottled-In -Bond and Last Fair Deal Gone Down."

-Ernest Worthing (writer/director, 'Logging Town')