Diddley serves up funky antics while Petty plays it safe with solid show

By CRAIG HAVIGHURST

To paraphrase George Jones, Bo Diddley don't need no rocking chair, and he doesn't need any Viagra either, if you can take his word for it.

OK, he did use a chair for much of his opening set at AmSouth Amphitheatre on Saturday night, but he said he has got something acting up and that boxy guitar he plays looks to weigh as much as a television set anyway. Moreover, before he was done with his 40 minutes of unbridled entertainment, he had gotten up (sans guitar), played one of his drummer's floor tom-toms like an African rite of passage and boogied enough to show he still had ample mojo at close to or over 75 years of age.

Diddley wasn't last night's ostensible main event. It was a Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers show after all. And that went extremely well, with a precisely played and vibrantly sung tour through his 25-year-old catalog. But on a night of filet-and-spuds rock 'n' roll, when Petty and company had umpteen-thousand heads bobbing, Diddley provided the funkiest surprises and the widest smiles.

Part of the intrigue in the set stemmed from the fact that this week's blackout, Diddley said, had stranded part of his band. So he borrowed the Heartbreakers rhythm section, forcing more on-stage listening and reacting than would have to go on in the rehearsed second set.

They started things off with the beat the artist virtually trademarked, bolstering the signature song that bears his name. He moved from Bo Diddley to Hey Bo Diddley to Roadrunner, while coaxing warbling electric organlike tone out of his guitar with a bare thumb and fingers.

Following his climactic drum solo, Diddley strutted and embarked on a saucy sex god rap in the pre hip-hop manner of Grandmaster Flash. ''Can we do it pretty baby, can we do it?'' he chanted, whipping up the crowd. Then he pushed his heavy horn rimmed glasses up his nose. It was priceless.

Petty looked to be in fighting trim when he whisked onstage at half past nine — clean shaven, clear-eyed and dapper in a black and red chalk stripe suit. The music, beginning with An American Girl and You Don't Know How it Feels, came off the same way: neat as a pin, stylish and put-together. It marked an interesting contrast to Petty's last Starwood appearance, which was reportedly rambling and strung out. As the night evolved, one wished for perhaps a little more of that unhinged feeling, but for those hoping to hear hearty hits well played, there was nothing lacking.

The highlights, as a result, were generally tantamount to the highlights of Petty's recording career — the jangly sway of Free Falling, the patient pulse of Learning to Fly and the organ-saturated artillery of Refugee. The only song from his most recent cultural manifesto of an album The Last DJ was the title track, which blasts homogenization of the airwaves. He offered up a new song of tortured obsession called Melinda, which evolved from dense folk ballad to complex piano solo, showing off the skills of the wonderful Benmont Tench. A sprinkling of blues (Little Red Rooster and a touch of Elmore James) rounded out a consistent hour-and-forty-minute set.

On the way out, some might have been ticking off the hits he didn't play — Breakdown, Listen to her Heart, Don't Do Me Like That and more — and thinking how it could have gone on for a while longer without strain. It was a pretty night that seemed ended prematurely by a noise curfew.