On his fortieth birthday, December 30, 1968, an unseasonable heat-wave hit the Valley, and Bo Diddley got drunk.
"One of the kids mixed up some rum punch--Anthony, I think it was. I never shouda touched that stuff, but I had to go and drink that mess. It was hot that day, and I climbed up onto the top of my Chevy truck, God knows why, and then it hit me! Everything started spinning around, and I fell straight off the truck dead into the fish pond! They said it looked like I'd been pole-axed."
Getting drunk was not Bo's usual habit. All his life he has had a natural energy level that, to normal folk at least, seems inordinately high, and he customarily avoids artificial stimulants. But that week he was despondent. Tanya had just delivered her second baby, and though Bo was happy to have a second grandchild, there was now another mouth to feed, making his extended family eight in all. By contrast, work had been slow. Three weeks earlier, Bo had watched Elvis Presley, the man who "stole" his wiggle and who had long since assured himself a life of luxury, further secure his future with an appearance in the now-famous NBC-TV "Comeback Special," singing songs drawn from the same pool of music in which Bo himself had once dipped his musical genes. He had also learned that in two weeks his English friends, the Rolling Stones, would be returning to the States, this time as headliners of their own tour. While he was pleased for them, it seemed to Bo nonetheless that there was little fairness here, for while others prospered, he was struggling hard, harder perhaps than at any time since entering the music business.
"Right now I'm not really in debt," he told Michael Lydon at the time, "but I wouldn't say that I was out of debt either. I'm putting food on the table and that's all." Another time he said, "I opened the door. Everyone ran through. Now I'm left holding the goddamn doorknob."
Bo was telling his neighbors that he was thinking of quitting the music business and maybe going into house moving or car repair. According to Kay, however, this was a perennial false alarm. "Bo has been talking about quittin' the music business ever since I met him," she has said. "I think he wants to go and live on a tractor, or something. But he needs the security of a band, whether or not he's making money; I have no doubt in my mind that Bo Diddley will die on stage!"
But there was a ray of hope that things would change. As always with Bo, even in his bitterest moods, a segment of his mind is pumping out optimism, and on this occasion that optimism was focused on his new-found manager, Martin Otelsberg.
"I felt you couldn't beat Marty as a manager," he says, as he thinks back on their twenty-three year relationship. "Our association was held together by nothing more than mutual faith and a handshake. Me and Marty became real close over the years. It was more than just professional. We pretty near shared the raising of our kids--he hollered at mine, and I hollered at his!"
"I first met Bo in ë69," recalled Marty Otelsberg, speaking a year or so before his death. "I had booked Bo many, many times when I worked for Universal Attractions in New York. I was always so involved with Bo Diddley's beat that Bo Diddley really became my idol as far as rock ën' roll was concerned, and I don't think in my mind anything could've beaten that beat, no way, no how.
"I remember when Bo Diddley was on the charts, listening to his music, never ever having dreamt that I would be involved with Mister Bo Diddley, ever. But then I left New York in ë69 and opened up my own agency in Hollywood.
"I had a kid working for me by the name of Chet Copland, and he said to me one day, ëWhy don't you go over and see Bo Diddley? He's working at the Antique Mirror in Chatsworth tonight.' I went over there and really enjoyed the performance. Bo was working with Connie and Dr. Boo, and his show was really, really good. He turned everyone on; in fact he destroyed the place, but he was earning nickels and dimes, and it seemed to me that it was a real shame for a man of his talent and his knowledge of rock ën' roll to be nowhere at that time.
"We struck up a conversation and the vibes were really, really good. Bo had just split from his manager, John Burton, and Bo and I had a conversation as far as us being together. So we struck up a deal that I would handle him without a contract, on a basis of anytime he wants to get rid of me, that's cool; anytime I want to get rid of him, that's cool, too!
"Bo said, ëOkay.' We shook hands and it's been that way ever since. And Bo's the kinda guy who doesn't trust anybody or anything. And for me to think that I could lock him in, managerial-wise, was out of the question. So I didn't even try."
"The first thing that Marty did," says Bo, "was to go back to ARC Music for me. They were the dudes I sold my songs to, the publishing arm of Chess Records, y'understand. But when Len died and Chess was sold, ARC got sold off, too. It went to Gene Goodman, that's Benny Goodman's brother. When Marty went to him, Gene did the right thing and came up with some decent money for my songs, double what Chess had given me."
What appealed most to Bo about Marty was Marty's background. Marty was Jewish, of Eastern European ancestry. As a black man, Bo saw a common history of injustice in their ethnic histories. Furthermore, like Bo himself, Marty had come up the hard way, as hard as anyone can. He had lost relatives and friends in the Holocaust, had emigrated as a youth to America and grown up in war-time New York on Brooklyn's tough streets, and had reached the rank of Sergeant in the U.S. Army ("My men had to shine their boots so I could see my face in them!"). Then after his tour in the service Marty had worked in the music agency business, all the while raising a family with his beautiful wife, Lila, before eventually moving to California in the sixties.
It wasn't until many years later, however, when they were all on tour in Europe in the mid-eighties that Bo was to see the full, stark truth of Marty's family history. They were on a trip through Austria and Poland and Marty asked the driver to take them to Auschwitz.
Lila Otelsberg recalls the occasion. "When we got to Auschwitz, Bo didn't want to get off the bus, and neither did the boys in the band. They were all afraid of being overwhelmed. But the driver had been there before and told them that he had gone out of his way, and since they were there they should go in and see the Camp. Then Marty made Bo get off the bus, and we walked around that place and, of course, it's a chilling sight to see. You see things that. . . it breaks your heart. . . babies' things, and children's things, and old people's things. . . . It's an unbelievable experience.
"We got back on the bus, and for a whole half hour you could have heard a pin drop--there wasn't a word--nothing, absolute dead silence. Then all of a sudden from the back of the bus one of the band members uttered an expletive. I wouldn't repeat it. He let out all of the steam, all at once. What he called those Nazi camp guards! It was as though everything had been let loose all of a sudden.
"That's when Bo broke down. He sobbed and sobbed. He was inconsolable; he was so truly touched by the horror."
At the beginning of their association, Marty and Bo had some occasional difficulties in getting the ground rules understood and observed. As Marty recalled, "The one thing I said to Bo at the beginning was: ëYou cannot book yourself. You have to allow me to handle all that!' But there was one occasion when Kay booked him without my knowledge, and I found out about it. I got really upset on the phone, and I must've used some sort of language that offended him, that I directed at Kay! Now, I lived in Woodland Hills, and he lived in Granada Hills, which is ordinarily a forty minute drive, but Bo was at my house in thirty minutes flat! Bo was coming to punch me out! ëThat's my wife you were talking about,' he says.
"I'll never forget that. So then he and I got into the nitty gritty as to why I felt the way I felt. ëEither we're gonna do it right, or we forget about,' I said. I wasn't scared, because I was justified. ëYou don't do that,' I said, ëIt's an unwritten law. Because if I don't know what you're doing, how can I handle you right?' And he sorta agreed, so eventually we had an understanding, but it took me a while to cultivate it to where he understood he had to let me know what he was doing.
"I didn't really know Bo well at that time. It took me a while to understand him and to realize what a truly amazing person he is in many respects. He is one hundred per cent creative! He has to have something to do wherever he is. We're taking one of our first tours, and he sees this compact electric organ in the store window, and he wants it. So we buy this machine, and 5:30, 6:00 o'clock, the next morning he's playin' it, loud. I'm in the next room and it wakes me up. So I take a shoe and throw it up against his door and say, ëLower that goddam sound!' And you can hear the sound going from high to low, but then gradually back up to high again! So after that whenever we registered into a hotel, I just made sure my room was not next to his.
"Sometimes I thought he was odd, at first. Here's what blew my mind. He used to love to stay at a certain hotel in New York. To me it was a slum: you couldn't open the windows because the paneling would fall apart. Once he'd been ripped off there when somebody got into his room. But he still loved this place. Then when he was playing Las Vegas, I booked him in at the Hilton where they gave him a suite on the top floor with a bathtub you could fit ten people into, and the first thing he did was to turn the water on and run it into the bathtub to see if it worked! I went to his room and I said, ëWell, Bo, what do you think?' And his comment back to me was, ëIt's alright.' So I said, ëBut Bo, how can you say it's only alright? Look how it compares to that hotel in New York, that slum you like so much!' So it blew my mind that he wasn't enthused about the most luxurious accommodations you could get versus something you wouldn't even put your foot into. But the thing was I didn't realize that it wasn't the hotel per se that he was objecting to; it was being on the top floor! I didn't understand that he likes to stay on the ground floor, close to the exit. He wouldn't explain that to me either. And it took me a helluva long time to figure this thing out, that he was being extra smart. In case of fire, he's the first one out!
"At the beginning the immediate need was to get him work--before we could even start to plan his career--to get him going, because he had a family to feed, and bills to pay. So for a while anything that came along was acceptable within reason.
"And Bo wanted to work. I soon found out that it was important to him psychologically, as well as financially. And that was because when he was a kid he was an earner. He needed to earn money; whether it was a dollar or two, or a quarter or a dime, he had money that he earned with his own hand. It comes up in his conversation all the time. And so today he's a doer, entirely self-motivated. That's why his song ëI Don't Want Your Welfare,' on his New Rose album is part of his make-up. And he doesn't see this drive in today's youth, the way he would go out and hustle for a dollar, and that disturbs him."
One of the earliest calls that Marty took when he first began to manage Bo's career came from as assistant to John Lennon. It was the late summer of 1969. The Beatles, the mightiest of pop groups and once a fabulous, cohesive foursome, were rapidly falling apart. At least, John Lennon seemed to be walking away from the other three (the Beatles would in fact formally disband as a group the following year). But one thing was certain: with his Japanese-born wife Yoko Ono, Lennon was now a musical free-lancer, and among his many projects was a plan for a gala show that would gather together the founding rock pantheon--Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bo Diddley--so that, in the words of one publicist, he "could at last introduce Yoko to the heroes of his childhood." Would Bo be willing to step things off with some of his hits, Lennon's office wanted to know. John himself would be performing in the show with the Plastic Ono band, they said. He would be joined by Eric Clapton, and the whole event was to be captured on film for possible release as a movie.
Bo had little hesitation in saying yes; the gig--to be called the Toronto Peace Festival--was in a town he liked and knew well, and besides he would welcome a chance to meet John Lennon and maybe get a clearer understanding of some of his more puzzling music. But when the concert date came, September 13, 1969, Lennon hardly had time to say more than "Hi" to Bo--he was too involved in a stand-up row with Little Richard, right up until the last minutes before showtime, about which of the two was to have the official status of headliner. While Lennon won this particular tussle, later not even he could believe the grossness of his run-away ego. "My head was full of shit," he was reported to have said. In his time, Bo had broken up many a back-stage fight, but he decided to stay out of this one.
Sweet Toronto, D. A. Pennebaker's film of that Lennon-inspired concert, is valuable footage if only because it provides a unique opportunity to compare the stage skills of four of Rock's founders some fifteen years down the road from the point of beginning. There were those who felt at the time that in contrast to Bo's exuberant opening set, Jerry Lee Lewis sounded positively flat-footed, while Chuck Berry's offerings came off as thin and tinny. Only Little Richard's rendition of "Lucille" managed in any way to capture the back-beat brilliance of its original. Then came the set by the Plastic Ono Band, something of a mixed blessing to be sure, for while Peace should be given its chance, so also should Tunefulness and Harmony. Lennon, then at his hairiest, achieved a competence on "Blue Suede Shoes," and a bright-eyed Eric Clapton rocked up Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance" with burning licks. However, it is unlikely that there will ever be requests for Yoko Ono's "Wailing Song," nor for Lennon's final suite, which consisted of a single guitar left propped alone on stage and tuned to produce perpetual feedback.
"Right now we're gonna take you back to the year nineteen hundred and fifty-five," Bo had announced as he opened the show and launched into one of his thrashing, copulative, rhythm-fests as Connie and Boogaloo danced an impromptu Lambada, Connie beating Boo's butt with her tambourine, Boo reaching around Connie to play his bass behind her back, sight unseen. If this was a Peace Festival, then sex could be a part of it too; and if this was a Revival then Bo, Connie and Boo showed that in truth no one had ever really expired.
Bo's opening words were, in fact, a timely statement. It was a going back, a returning, and there was now indeed a senior generation in rock ën' roll. Bo himself was, after all forty years old; Chuck Berry was forty-two, and Jerry Lee and Little Richard were also soon to break that two-score barrier. The map of rock and roll had changed; the shoreline was no longer where it once was as the alluvial deposits of various musical eras had washed over it. As with many a process of change, the lineaments of the earlier stages were still there, and Bo and his buddies were in a good state of preservation. It was only a matter of time, therefore, before Richard Nader, first geologist of rock, should come along and invent the phenomenon known as the Rock ën' Roll Revival Show.
"See, nobody wanted to be involved in the good old rock ën' roll at that time," says Bo, "the true rock ën' roll music, until Richard Nader came along. In my book he will always be a great person. What Richard Nader did was something that nobody wanted to be a part of, ëtil they saw he was making money, then every little daggone promoter around the nation started jumping up on their own, trying to say, ëWell, let's do a rock and roll revival show!' But when we came to town that first time with Richard, he lost his drawers, his booty, and everything else, because nobody believed in it. Then he said, ëBo, I'm going for broke. I'm, going back out again.' He took me and a bunch of other acts back out on the road again and everybody started saying, ëHey, they ain't dead! They really are here. That's the real Bo Diddley. Wow, that's Chuck Berry,' you know, and so on and so on. ëDamn! Bill Haley? Where's he been?' Ain't been nowhere--just sittin' in his house--but everybody thought we just died off on the wayside.
"We did not die off; we was shut off! When the Beatles came in here with that ëHard Day and Night' stuff--least I think it was the Beatles--they came in with that and everything started getting f-u-u-nny.
"But Richard Nader was the man who took the chance, you know, I like the idea that he had the faith to know what was happening. Now I don't like some of the things that Richard says sometimes! You know, like telling me, ëBo, you're getting too expensive!' Heh, heh. No, Richard Nader is a very good person."
Richard Nader's formula was simple: find the best rock artists of their time, book one or two of these performers as top-billing artists, then fill in the remaining line-up with stars of lesser stature--re-assembled groups perhaps, or one-hit artists who had long vanished from the scene.
"I wanted to give these performers their true limelight," Richard Nader says today, "to give them a forum where their skills could be truly appreciated."
There was little doubt that after some initial faltering his formula proved highly successful and Nader was able to parlay the "Revival" into an amazing twenty-year phenomenon by the end of which period its appeal appeared to have finally run its course. Nor is there any doubt that he "revived" some genuine talent in his shows: all of the major figures of rock's first spawning, for instance, together with premier groups such as the Coasters, the Shirelles, the Marvelettes, Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, and--working his way down the line into the sixties' roster of artists--Ronnie Spector, Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers, supergroup Blood, Sweat & Tears, and, in one unfortunate instance, rocker-turned-country-singer Rick Nelson, who was booed off the stage by revivalists who resented his encoring with such unacceptable contemporary fare as the Rolling Stones' "Honky-Tonk Woman."
Richard Nader was a sophisticated Lebanese-American who had first cut his teeth with Armed Services Radio in Vietnam. He planned his venues and concerts with strict attention to detail. His first contracts, for instance, stipulated that the artist "agrees to perform such material as the Employer may designate," and that the artist "agrees not to ad lib or do any ëmugging' or to gesture, grimace, move or act in any way differing from the material and format approved by the Employer." The penalty for deviating from these terms was that the employee's compensation would be reduced to "minimum union scale applicable to his services." These were tough conditions, resented by some (BS&T's David Clayton-Thomas remarked once before working a Nader show, "This is just another gig. We won't change our show for it"), and there must have been some close calls in shows with Little Richard, say, or Bo Diddley, whose performance styles rested strongly on vigorous and spontaneous audience interaction.
Bo very soon became a cornerstone of these shows. Says Nader, "Whenever I've called Bo and told him about an upcoming show, he's always said, ëI'll be there! Because I love everybody else on the show, and I love doing your things.' And he's done some real, old-time rock and roll for us, I'll tell you. And of all the artists I've engaged Bo is the only one who acknowledges to this day that I started it all."
A typical review of a Diddley set was the one that appeared in the February 9, 1972, issue of Variety, when the Revival had reached its eighth edition. "Bo Diddley again overpowered all in Richard Nader's Rock and Roll Spectacular at Madison Square Garden, New York Friday. . . . Diddley, as exciting with his guitar as with his voice even attracted a ëBo Diddley for President' banner as he continued his string of solid hits in this series."
There were those, however, who wondered what exactly was being revived and for whose benefit. Andy McKaie, then a music writer and presently the Vice President for Catalogue Development at MCA Records, brought a skeptical eye to the scene. He sensed a promotion ploy, and questioned the validity of the Revival in a long article in the November, 1972, issue of Crawdaddy magazine. Hadn't the "primal force of rock ën' roll remained solidly in control of progressive rock music," asked McKaie, thus making the concept of a revival a redundancy? And he suggested further that "perhaps the only valid reason for the [Revival's] continued existence is as reparation to the Fats Dominos, Chuck Berrys, and Bo Diddleys previously lost in the ë60s shuffle." Nader, for whom this was as much rock and roll social work as business, had no problem with the argument. "These concerts have gotten quite a few performers back on their feet again," he said flatly.
But Andy McKaie did have a revealing observation about the audiences at these events: a major portion of those attending, he noted, were under twenty-five, and of these many were under twenty. At one concert he witnessed, McKaie reported that "the nostalgia crew" (the over twenty-five's) walked out when Bo and Chuck Berry started to jam "leaving the kids to dance in the aisles to the real rock ën' roll."
What had emerged then, was a whole new generation of fans for Bo Diddley to foster and cultivate, and to judge from their reaction, they were lapping him up. With the Bobby Comstock Band behind him, Bo would pump out his rocking hits with the fury of an artillery barrage, interspersing each song with comic-book monologues, like, "This is the part of the show where I crawl into your mind, pull up a chair, and play with the back of your eyeballs!" Or he might make a comic act out of "I'm a Man," going into a slow-motion splits with his guitar reproducing the sound of joints painfully creaking and groaning as he dipped lower and lower into his squat (see picture section). Often he ended the show with "Bo Diddley-Itis," a compelling mÈlange of rhythmic effects, guitar drumming, and assorted stunts where--if it was Madison Square Garden, say--the audience of 32,000 stomped slavishly in time, shaking the rafters (or whatever in modern buildings equates to rafters) as an immense conga-line of tuned-in teens wound its way around the upper balconies.
By 1973, the "Revival" phenomenon and Bo's place within it had become legion, so much so that it was committed to film in Let the Good Times Roll, a Columbia Pictures "rockumentary" by Sid Levin and Bob Abel, which received praise not just for the level of the performance it captured but also for the quality of its filmmaking. Much of the movie consisted of divided-screen montages, in the style of the French filmmaker Abel Gance, a fact that did not escape the notice of film critic Jon Wilkman, who wrote, "Let the Good Times Roll is consistently inventive, brilliant, and beautifully put together," and he singled out the footage of Bo's performances as the centerpiece of the film's technical and thematic spirit: "The Bo Diddley segment is the most effective, most elaborate use of split-screen and helps create the film's most exciting sequence. The screen becomes a kaleidoscope of images as Bo's hard driving blues builds vibrant new pattern contributing to and conveying the energy of the music."
And yet there was, by design, no artifice in the shows themselves, just basic, head-on rock and roll, for Richard Nader had discovered that his "antediluvian" formula appealed to fans throughout the country, as well in Canada and, on one occasion, the U.K., where Bo, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry and Little Richard played to 60,000 fans in London's Wembley Stadium. At that same moment back in the States, England's Rolling Stones were thrilling equal numbers of American fans on their fabled 1972 American tour. To many, that seemed a fair exchange.
In time, Nader's Revivals became Spectaculars, which in turn gave way to Extravaganzas. By 1978, these shows had entered their "Ninth Anniversary Edition," in what was billed as Volume 25 of the original format. In the stadium lobby you could buy a lapel button declaring the endearing message "God Bless the Rock and Roll Revival." But despite this spiritual encouragement, there was some mortal uncertainty about the enterprise since Richard Nader never knew for sure until the "take" was in whether the series would be able to continue. However, from Bo's point of view the shows had brought something that for a performer is (almost) as good as money: recognition of what he was all about. Perhaps the reviewer for Variety, catching that year's show at the Long Beach Arena in L.A., put it best.
"Diddley was in rare form. . . unchanged by the demands of time and taste. Not too surprisingly, the pendulum has swung far enough back to make Diddley sound as fresh as some of today's top stars. His throbbing, gritty guitar style, snatches of which can be heard coming from almost everybody in rock today, blended with his unrepentantly earthy stage manner, was a delight, and a fitting reminder of the debt most musicians owe him."
When Bo returned to his dressing room after coming off stage that night, he found on his guitar case a playbill on which Richard Nader, thinking this show might be his last, had written the following note: "Bo, Your contribution to the success of these concerts will never be forgotten. From the very beginning you have been a true friend of the ëRevival' and the ëSpectacular.' Cordially, Richard," If Nader was going down, then he was doing it in style and giving credit where credit was due. As it happened, his fears were unfounded: he successfully promoted concerts of this type for another fifteen years or so. His last production was given at Madison Square Garden on November 12, 1994. Bo Diddley was in that one, too.
How Bo maintained his optimism through the rough times that preceded the Revival is perhaps best illustrated by his first album of the seventies. While he had been described during these years (usually by those of brief acquaintance) as "sour," "bitter," "a difficult cat," Bo has never taken self-pity to his music. It is as though such emotion were forbidden in the halcyon, Elysian realms of rock and roll where, for Bo, instinct propels him to concentrate on his "happy thing." Such is the case with The Black Gladiator, which he recorded in January, 1970.
The Black Gladiator shows Bo at the crossroads, both musically and personally. It is the first Bo Diddley album to offer an overtly Black perspective in some of its songs, and it is the last to be recorded under the auspices of a member of the Chess family, in this instance Phil Chess, whose thoughts at that time must have been more on retirement than on gladiatorial pursuits. Whatever the political or social meaning of Bo's titles and songs such as "Black Soul" and "Elephant Man," the album is overwhelmingly upbeat and positive, earnest and energetic, the musical expression of Bo's musings on life, religion, and--as you would expect--himself.
That self has always stood tall and firm. Bo has never debased the essential integrity of his character and identity as a native-born American black man: he has seen no need to, no cause to, no reason to. He has remained through varying fashions his own man, unaffectedly black. If for that reason alone he deserves hallelujahs and respect from the African-American community that has so frequently ignored him.
Thus, The Black Gladiator is an attempt at articulating Black Pride, but without the politics. In explaining the title he told an interviewer, "Man is supposed to be built. Look at the gladiators back in Roman times. These cats could walk up and hit a mule, deck a horse by cracking him on the jaw. Man is getting out of that; try it today and you break your hand. We are living too fast. We are using the knowledge box more, doing less of a physical thing."
This sense of losing touch with our physical nature and replacing it with intellect (to our considerable loss) is perhaps why Bo opens the album with "Elephant man." It is among his most powerful songs: a mythopoeic wonder, four and one-half minutes of pure, zestful invention, framed with licks massive enough to inspire the belief that he plays on guitar strings ten feet long. Lyrically, "Elephant Man" is in the tradition of the tall-tale telling of the New Orleans drinking dens. These tales, or "toasts," are admired more for the teller's linguistic and dramatic dexterity, than for the sense they make, and so in the process of creating his anatomically correct elephant Bo steers the song towards a final couplet in which "grass" rhymes with "ass." The deliberate undercutting of mythic power is a perfect parody of the boastful masculine tradition.
In "You, Bo Diddley," he enlarges another myth, that of the "Bo Diddley Man"--as lover, he-man, heart-throb ("Who's the loveliest man you've ever seen/A young woman's wish, an old woman's dream?"); he's a black gladiator with turned-up levels of testosterone. "Hot Buttered Blues" is a history lesson, taught in the language of blues ("When the bluesman left the cotton fields/You know Chicago blues was right behind"). "Powerhouse" is about sex, a blunt warning not to let your "baby's fire go out," while "Shut Up, Woman" and "I Don't Like You" (where Bo gets positively operatic at times) are demonstrations in Cookie/Bo banter of sexual politics, low and dirty. This last feature was something that in their live shows Cookie and Bo were particularly fond of taking to its highest, or depending on your view, lowest level, much more so that they could ever attempt on vinyl: Cookie (disgusted): "Look at you standing there in your $400 suit, and your $150 shirt, and your $50 tie, and. . . no. . . underwear!" Bo (slyly): "I left it at you Momma's house!"
Black Gladiator is completed by the highly distinctive "Funky Fly" and "If the Bible's Right." "Funky Fly" consists of a splendid groove played on a deep-throated guitar that only once or twice saw public service (back-up by organist Bobby Alexias is equally marvelous), with lyrics about a fly that places it among Bo's songs of looney cartoonery ("Watch it power-dive," he yells with perverse delight).
"If the Bible's Right" is Bo's first recorded gospel number. The surprise is that he had not done more gospel material. "He could do a whole album of gospel, if he wanted to," insists his eldest daughter, Tanya. Says his brother, Kenneth, "He was in the church all his life; Momma Gussie saw to that. It was only when he started to get out on his own, like every other teenager, that he slacked off a bit. But he's deeply religious now, no question. I've heard him sing amazing proclamations of faith to the Lord." "Bible" is a simple declaration of Christian love: if "we're all brothers and sisters/Then we got to love one another," wails Bo, as he renders "love" with a delicious, drawn-out melisma.
Of the five albums of original material that he produced between 1970 and 1974, the years of GRT's ownership of the Chess label, The Black Gladiator received the most consistently favorable reviews. Dave Thomas of the Chicago Daily Defender commented: "Black Gladiator consists of ten tunes which could stand alone as smash hits but when [placed] together paint a picture of phenomenal talent." Norbert Hess of Living Blues compared the album to Chuck Berry's Back Home, also from GRT and released at the same time: "While the unchanged style of ëChuck's beat' can become tedious after so many recordings, Bo has changed his sound at the right time to a more soul-y beat. . . and he's a master." And Ramparts' Michael Lydon wrote, "Black Gladiator is Bo Diddley at his very best, not a revived memory but an artist at the height of his powers." In that period of Bo's life, only the London Bo Diddley Sessions received praise of a comparable nature.
Bo's engagements in those days were not confined solely to Revival-type productions. In fact, Marty Otelsberg saw to it that Bo received as wide an exposure as possible, but ensuring that turned out to be a full-time job. Said Marty, "As soon as I saw Bo was going to be a hit on the Revival circuit, I decided to give up my agency and just concentrate on Bo Diddley entirely, because I saw the great potential of Bo Diddley eventually becoming what he deserved to be, a major star."
Strangely, by the time the 1970's came around and the first flush of psychedelia and hippiedom had passed on by, Bo was being espoused again as a creative founder of modern music by members of the very segment that had once rejected him as being conservative and square. This new association with the counter-culture was a distinct counterbalance to his work on the revival scene, which seemed directed more towards a middle-class audience relishing conformity and nostalgia. Bo performed innumerable gigs and short tours with several of the better known West Coast groups. By the late sixties he had already toured with the Byrds, the quintessential folk-rock group, but it was the musicians and audiences of the San Francisco area, then a hotbed of rock activity, who in particular were discovering a new appreciation for Bo's talents. Bo made frequent appearances at the exciting Fillmore West concerts that were flourishing in those days under the inspired and quixotic direction of Bill Graham, sharing billing with such vanguard groups as Big Brother and Holding Company, the Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead. In 1971, he toured with the then hottest of San Francisco hitmakers, Creedence Clearwater Revival.
Marty Otelsberg filled in the background to some of these match-ups.
"Quicksilver Messenger Service was a Bill Graham deal. Bill Graham was a tough promoter, very tough, and in my opinion you have to respect that. In fact Bill and I went way back, and there was a considerable rivalry between us at times. This was when we were both working as agents in New York. He wanted more and more bookings with Bo Diddley, but I was sending Bo to play with the Grateful Dead, and with Chuck Berry, and B.B. King. And one day Bill came into my office to argue with me about this, and first we started yelling and then we were pushing one another, and before you know it we had gotten into a regular fistfight! Some other people in the room separated us, but I think maybe Bill won the fight; he got in some good licks before they pulled us apart! Two weeks later he apologized and we had dinner together, and for five hours I told him everything as to how I operated. Shortly after that Bill moved to the West Coast and became super successful. So what can I tell you!
"But anyway, to Bo, these concerts with Creedence, with Quicksilver, and so on, were just a gig, y'know. Bo doesn't know the hassle some of the deals take, and that's fine. All I wanted him to know is where to play and when. All I wanted him to do was get on that stage and work to the best of his capabilities. I would take over all of his responsibilities, and make sure that he's got a clear head when he gets up on that stage and goes to work. Those were my aims then, and I strive for them today.
"That's because Bo's a happy-go-lucky type of guy and everything is a laugh to him. Everything. He finds it difficult to approach problems. I wanted him to be free of problems. I wanted him to be free of mortgage payments or alimony or child support or anything. I felt: ëLet this be my responsibility, and he'll continue being happy.' Because the happier Bo is, the better he is in his show up on the stage, y'know. And it turned out to be so.
"I put the Creedence tour together with Frank Vito of Associated Booking. He offered me the tour. Bo enjoyed the Creedence Clearwater Revival--they were really up to par as far as he was concerned--and he always, always enjoyed working with groups that were first coming up, or were relatively new on the scene. Creedence sorta regarded Bo as someone they could look up to and respect."
For all their fame, such outfits as the Byrds and Creedence were comparatively short-lived, and both groups broke up in 1972. For CCR this was an especially precipitous end since it had only been a few short years since such numbers as "Green River," "Proud Mary," and "Bad Moon Rising" had kept them continually at the top of the charts. Their tour with Bo was in fact one of their last full-length acts as a group (founder John Fogerty had already departed by this time), and if the closing concert of that tour at the Forest Hills Stadium in New York on July 17, 1971, was anything to go by, then Bo's contribution that night may well have inadvertently hastened their demise.
Certainly it was the sort of occasion that memories are made of: a clear, amber evening with the setting sun glinting rosily on the underbellies of planes moving in and out of nearby J. F. Kennedy Airport, and all the gardens of Eastern Queens pumping out midsummer fragrance with all their over-fertilized might. Bo came on stage, and from that moment on the evening was entirely his. He gave an immense set, and when it was over, not even Creedence's string of familiar hits could bring the crowd around again.
Bo started in his customary fashion, wielding the oblong Hawk through a high-power selection of those chording rhythms of his that break down barriers. What invariably happens when Bo starts to play is that his music becomes a canal out of which pours a damned-up reservoir of restraint, restriction, and respectability--all those day-to-day conventions that keep us in line and bring us a paycheck at week's end. Some attendees at Diddley concerts are more quickly affected by this phenomenon that others: the charge to the stage that night was led by a young man in a bright orange jump-suit who skip-hopped down the aisle, his long fair hair bouncing around his shoulders. It was a fine sight--spontaneous, adolescent, flower-powerish--the spirit of youth drawn irresistibly toward the magical Pied Piper. And when a great laughing cheer broke from the crowd, the mood was on.
Then half-way through his set Bo put down the Hawk and picked up a new guitar, a strange guitar, a pear-shaped instrument that no one had seen before, and from it there issued the Hardest of Hard Rock sounds, Bachman-Turner Overdrive perhaps, or Led Zeppelin say (and why not: hadn't Led Zeppelin's lead guitarist Jimmy Page been a member of the Yardbirds, and hadn't the Yardbirds been one of the British groups that had studied under the shadow of Bo Diddley?), and for thirty, forty minutes Bo Diddley rode down the sunset with all the abandon, energy and insolence that epitomizes good rock and roll. Reported Mike Jahn of the New York Times, "Old rock stars tend to repeat, often dully, their original sound. But this man has grown a great deal, and created a powerful blues rock of great imagination."
"I remember that gig" says Bo delightedly. "I burned up the stage!"
How could a performer remember a single show among a lifetime of shows, any more than a teacher, say, could recall a single lesson from thousands he or she might have taught, or a carpenter recall the framing of a particular room? "That was just after I moved from L.A. to New Mexico. See when I moved to New Mexico was when I started with the hat thing. Kay found an Indian pin--it was made of amethyst--that fit just perfect on the front of my hat, and that gig was the first time I wore it.
"But I played two guitars that night, my regular design, and a new one I was experimenting with. Now that pear-shaped guitar was a Vox. You don't see any guitars that shape, do you? That's because I own that design, too! I recorded a few numbers on it--ëFunky Fly,' I think, and maybe ëBo-Jam,'--that's the nearest to what I was playing that night. I wore out that guitar after a few sessions--the electronics couldn't stand up to my playing!
"Yeah, I remember that gig. I was feelin' good that night, man. Things were working out swell with Marty, my new manager. I had a new home out in some beautiful country. Heck, I even had a brand-new hat!"