Some called it "Beatlemania." Others called it "the British Invasion." Bo Diddley called it "the Rock and Roll Crisis."
The phenomenon in question was, of course, the wave of American musical sounds imported back to their native shores within the varied styles of English rock and roll. This so-called invasion would sweep the U.S. in the mid-sixties and put in jeopardy the fortune and popularity of many American artists. In the most twisted of ironies, it was Bo Diddley and other key performers of the American musical scene who were the direct cause of it all, they who had spent years fighting for acceptance and legitimacy only to watch fearfully as their own product, refitted in new clothing, was embraced as an overnight sensation. There was a bitter subtext, therefore, in an exchange between a television interviewer and Paul McCartney at New York's Kennedy Airport on February 7, 1964. The occasion was the Beatles' arrival for their first concert tour of America, the indisputable date of the invasion's beginning. Who did the Beatles most want to meet during their stay, the interviewer had asked. "Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley," offered Paul. The interviewer, bemused, asked who and what they were. "Don't you know who your own famous people are here?" McCartney had replied.
It would be quite a while, in fact, before American youth would have quite the same flowing appreciation for native-grown talent as they would for the Beatles and the other Britons who followed in their wake. Who, after all, could resist the Beatles when they wanted to hold your hand, when they asked you to love them do, when they had put in such a hard day's night?
"When the Beatles came over," says Bo with an air of finality, "I felt like I'd been led to the slaughterhouse. I told Kay: ëBaby,' I said, ëI think we're in for some real stormy weather, and I'm going down the drain.' Because I had seen ëem on TV in England in a repeat of Sunday Night at the Palladium, or something, from the week before my tour began--the Stones had told me to watch out for the Beatles--and when I saw them I knew they were gonna catch on. No way they could lose. So I started preparing myself, and sure enough when the Beatles came over that was the end of Bo Diddley on the radio."
Not even in his most pessimistic moments could Bo have envisioned how long that radio "embargo" of his material would last, for the Beatles were but a single, though central, component in a widespread onslaught upon American musical allegiance. Whereas John, Paul, George, and Ringo possessed an undeniable genius--in songwriting, in spontaneous self-promotion, in tapping the tenor of an age and the emotive spirit of transatlantic teens--other British groups evidently had something to offer too, and Americans were quick to respond to the adolescent charm of Gerry and the Pacemakers ("Ferry Across the Mersey"), the London flash of the Dave Clark Five ("Glad All Over"), the goofy good-humor of Herman and the Hermits ("I'm into Something Good"), the dark intensity of the Rolling Stones ("Time is on My Side"), and the pure, animal magic of the Animals ("Got to Get Out of This Place"). By 1964 the rock and roll crisis was well underway.
One who shared Bo's view that this British stuff was not all good news was the late Wolfman Jack. An emerging deejay of his time, with his growling and howling style and a distinct flair for voicing the delights and torments of youth, Wolfman was capturing the imagination of the after-hours crowd with his radio and TV shows that went by the title of "The Midnight Special." Wolfman, who would claim his association with Bo "goes back to before I was born," recalled the impact of the invasion on stars like Bo and upon deejays like himself who had been prime boosters of original American music. As he orchestrated his regular afternoon show from Los Angeles, where, by some electronic sleight-of-hand, the signal is first beamed to Mexico then deflected back to points throughout the U.S., Wolfman Jack offered a visitor his views on the early sixties scene.
"As I see it, music was better before the Beatles'," he says flatly. "That wouldn't be a misinterpretation. They went and screwed up our music. Not that the Beatles weren't good--but we started all this music, started it from the raw roots of the South country, and the black folks made it happen, and it came to the cities and it became rock and roll. And Bo Diddley was right at the heart of that.
"I first heard him when I was a kid in Brooklyn when he first made the record ëBo Diddley' and I used to be a goffer for a lot of jocks in New York--always knockin' on people's doors and such--but I didn't meet him until I started doing my own thing, and started doing shows with him. That's when the real thing happened, like between ë52 and ë63; that's when the real music was going.
"I realized then that Bo Diddley was just a ball of pure unadulterated talent, one of the folks who began it all, one of the great rock ën' roll stylists. Lord knows how many songs came after him that were copies of his style, right up until today. It must reach hundreds! And then when the Beatles came in everyone started to copy them instead, and we lost it.
"Unfortunately, because of the way everything runs, Bo's never had the opportunity to develop more new music. He's tried, but it's never worked out for him because he's never had the right people to work with, because he got screwed so many times when he was a younger man. So he doesn't trust a lot of people and that's part of the reason he never developed further than he has. I think the Beatles stopped a lot of the action of the great performers from continuing on, from developing more and more new things. I was never big on the British Invasion. I thought it just killed us there for a while."
Not all the constituents of the rock and roll crisis were foreign-born, of course. There was a home-grown entity emerging at that time known as folk music, a rigorously acoustic, purely intoned form that, having no real roots or antecedents in the culture of the American folk, might more truly have been called folksy music. Peter, Paul, and Mary, and the Seekers--forerunners of the later and distinctly more inventive Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and the Byrds--were its chief exponents. As Peter Guralnick details in his superb book Feel Like Going Home, there were times when the folk movement considered it had the High ground of Purity all to itself, especially when compared to artists like Bo Diddley who performed with that modern monstrosity, the electric guitar:
The first time we saw Bo Diddley he was appearing at Boston College in 1964 in an afternoon concert. Receiving equal billing with him were The Rooftop Singers, who had recently had an enormous hit with a very innocuous version of Gus Cannon's "Walk Right In." Just as the concert was due to begin, The Rooftop Singers announced that they would not go on. Bo Diddley was a rock ën' roll singer, and they were folk artists dedicated to their art. The start of the show was delayed about an hour, and eventually it had to be announced that the programme was worded wrongly, that two separate concerts were to be given here today, the first by The Rooftop Singers. Then, leaving no room for doubt, they did a full concert performance, and Bo Diddley did not go on till after five, when he responded with a two-hour show of his own.
It didn't matter that Bo Diddley proved infinitely more entertaining to the audience and that The Rooftop Singers were heckled off the stage. What was at stake was Integrity, and, difficult as it now is to believe, integrity was thought to reside entirely within the acoustic guitar or banjo or stringed instrument. . . . As for us, we dreamt of a day when all musics would be equal, even as we envisioned the dawning of a new era of equality and social justice.
The bitter truth was that under other circumstances (absent the Beatles, absent folk rock), 1964 had every likelihood of being a stellar year for Bo. Just to indicate that he was not entirely forgotten, there was even some belated tribute-paying by fellow American artists. The Shadows of Night, a San Francisco garage group best remembered for their # 10 hit, the earthy "Gloria," took Bo's early "Oh Yeah" which describes a chilling face-off between a suitor and the suitee's parents (it wouldn't take much guessing to figure that this was Bo trading off with Toots's folks) and rewrote it turning Bo's defiant challenge into a Beatles' "Yeah, Yeah, Yeah" hook. It went to # 39 on the Billboard Hot 100. But perhaps the most winning encomium of all came from Sonny Curtis, a former Buddy Holly sideman, in a cunning Liberty Records' release called "Bo-Diddley Bach," where Curtis tells with hip country drawl how one "Bo Diddley," a cute grade school kid with "golden, curly locks,"(!) could trace his family tree "to the great musician Bach," and how eventually becoming a big music star who "made it to the top," he would go down in history as "Bo-Diddley Bach."
But these were mere side shows to Bo's own recording history, which was marching on in significant manner in 1964. Early that year, for instance, Chess finally got around to releasing Bo's first "live" album, Bo Diddley's Beach Party,, and they followed this with a release that fans of both Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry had long been waiting for: an album of Bo and Chuck jamming together, the two pre-eminent guitarists of rock and roll's first decade going head-to-head and lick-to-lick in a musical slanging match that would fuel the songbooks of copycats for years to come.
It may be thought that the beach-party theme was a case of Bo Diddley attempting to cash in on the surfing-song craze inspired at that time by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, among others, but in reality the Beach Party album was a continuation of Bo's fascination with things Hawaiian that had begun after his first trip to the Islands in 1962. That brief tour had resulted in Bo's unique single, "Surfer's Love Call," a number that he composed and recorded several weeks, possibly months, before the appearance of the Beach Boys' smash-hit, "Surfin USA" in the spring of 1963.
It's at this point that an objective critic of Bo's output over a period of thirty-five years might start to wonder why certain of his songs, gems of compositional wit and skill, never made it to the charts. One would definitely have to place "Surfer's Love Call" at or near the top of this list of the Great Unknown Diddley Tunes.
Recorded on March 12, 1963, "Surfer's Love Call" was, to that time, the most commercial of Bo's waxings with its full-production treatment incorporating tenor sax, strings, and vocal group. A sensuous, rich bass refrain of "A-loh, a-lo-ha, baby" underpins the sweeping, resonant guitar moves, themselves a new dimension in Diddley. Bo has really never sung again in quite the same vein as he does on this record. He adopts what can fairly be described as a melodic Hawaiian keening, a sort of sustained yodel, that is deeply exotic when heard against the ground of the sonorous male harmony group and his own chunky, surf-like guitar chording. The overall result is an exceptional performance by Bo and the other players: an immense wall of Hawaiian sound, rich and magical, that carries the listener along on waves of luxurious harmony. Whether this record's failure to sell was a matter of timing--could it have been a month, a week, a day, before its time?--or whether it was too uncharacteristic a piece to be taken seriously by Diddley fans, one will never know. But the fact remains that after a few years Chess took this magnificent recording and buried it, quite literally, in an album consisting of a few Bo numbers loosely related to one another by aquatic titles ("Low Tide," "Old Man River," etc), hitched these to eight mediocre tracks by a little-known surf group called the Megatons, and released it under the implausible title of Surfin' With Bo Diddley. Artistically speaking, Bo was never more poorly served by the Chesses than on this occasion.
Yet for Bo, "Surfer's Love Call" has a particular significance. "For a long time I had been leaning toward Tahitian-type music. Then I went over to Honolulu, heard ëem singing over there, and came back and tried to do it. My head was full of that beautiful sound.
"I wrote ëSurfer's Love Call' the way I write a lot of my songs. If I play every day, I never come up with a new song. I gotta stop, forget about what I just got through playin', sit down for two or three days, even a week or so, and all of a sudden, boom, here come a new song. But if I just keep working, my mind doesn't have time to click into a new concept. So after a few days break after I got back from Honolulu, the song started shaping in my mind. And when I feel that new song coming on I try to find me a tape recorder real quick before I forget it! Sometimes I can't hold on to it, and it's gone!
"But it's a tragedy, man: that Hawaiian music ain't there now. Hawaii's been so Americanized that it's ridiculous. You have to go all the way back in the daggone hills, looks like, if you want to hear any genuine Hawaiian music! Wouldn't it be nice if we Americans went some place, but just left it alone, left the people to their culture? It's a shame."
In contrast to the synthetic packaging of Surfin' With Bo Diddley the Beach Party album was the real McCoy--the real McDaniel. This superlative live performance (all Bo, the Duchess, and Jerome--no Megatons in sight) was recorded at the Independence Day celebrations at the Beach Club, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, before an audience of around two thousand. It is unique among his records, not so much as a live performance (there would be several other live issues of Bo's in the seventies and eighties), but as a permanent example of the kind of flamboyant stage presence he was capable of creating and the nature of the audience reaction generated. It's amazing that only two thousand people and a single lead performer and his band could make so much spirited noise (one unmoved British reviewer referred to the event as "so much Diddley din"), but the truth is that the recording of this event represents the capstone of Bo's first decade as a rock and roll star. The astonishing blend of power in his dancing and playing, his kinetic and sonic explosiveness, the reciprocity he achieves between himself and the audience, and the gradual orchestration of his act towards its magnificent finale is not only Bo's achievement but also his legacy to the performance-style of many of the newer and younger musical artists of the sixties and seventies.
On the A side, Bo is heard bursting forth with a knee-wobbling version of Chuck Berry's "Memphis," while he exhorts each of his fans to "Work out, work out, like a champ!" Then he stir-fries his audience with a high-power menu of "Gunslinger," "Hey, Bo Diddley," and "Bo Diddley's Dog," the latter complete with doglike yips, yaps and woofs that would fool the most ardent caninologist. On the B side, he starts out slowly with "I'm All Right" ("a little communion service," as he tells his audience, "where everybody can clap his hands and stomp their feet"), then warms things up with the remarkable "Mr. Custer" (later, turning an historian's eye upon the Sioux and the Cheyenne and the events of 1876, he would say, "Custer was crazy, man. He never shouda gone fuckin' with them Indians!"). Then he catches his breath for a few moments with the slower "Crackin' Up," before finally slamdunking his audience with a dazzling rendition of "Roadrunner" that comes with a comic prologue about how this pesky bird found its way into his life. This was a bravura performance, and if there is film of it somewhere, it should go into a vault reserved for national treasures. It could be labelled "Bo Diddley and the Commedia del Rock."
There is something appropriate in the fact that the engineer for this live date was Marshall Chess, Leonard's son, who at that time was being brought into increasing prominence in the firm. There has been no better symbol in the history of rock and roll of the passing of the flame from one generation to the other that the contribution of Marshall to this album, for within a few years he would go on to found the record label for Bo's "progeny," the Rolling Stones, and a whole new chapter in rock and roll history would begin. As Marshall himself put it, "Chess was an era. An era of Blues, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, the Moonglows, the Flamingoes. It was a period of tremendous creativity and change in the music. But it ended. I hope we're starting into a new era now."
It is also fitting that so excellent a show should have been one of Bo's last before a segregated white audience, for shortly he would be as he liked to say, "Everybody's Bo Diddley." At least, that was Bo's ardent desire, but as he once told the famous musicologist, Arnold Shaw, it was many years before things worked out as he had expected. "You know, something really hurt me [in the mid sixties]. When I was coming along, all of my black following kinda dropped off. When the de-segregation thing started--I don't know what happened--everybody was saying: ëWell, wow, he's playin' music that's puttin' us back fifty or seventy-five years.' It hurt. I couldn't see it. I was only playing music that was native to me. . . . Lately, I began to pick up a few more of the brothers. It took them a time to figure out that I was really doing our music. It's something I felt out of my background, out of my bringing up. But nobody recognized it because I mixed two or three things together, two or three rhythms."
Even today, Bo worries about the failure of large segments of black youth to take an interest in the origins of their own music, and he is concerned about the generational enclaves that have grown up within rock music. "I used to hear all of this crap. All of us rock ën' roll cats was supposed to have been a disgrace to the race for playing the blues--or in my case, something that came out of it. The jazz cats used to be like that: they used to look down on us rock-n-rollers. But I could never understand that. The rock-n-rollers never looked down on the jazz cats! And now we hear it from the kids: ëIt's Uncle Tom music,' and all this. But they're full of crap. It's their heritage, you understand? You wouldn't call the African's music--all the little chants and all that--Uncle Tom. But the average black dude today is trying to be African, yet that's where they say the blues came from in the first place. They don't make no sense."
Bo plugged away, "shooting for the other side of the fence," as he called it, and resigning himself to expecting only a limited black following, believing, as he explained to Thunder Road's Lou Cohan, that lack of interest in the blues on the part of young blacks really stemmed from lack of want. "I put it this way and this is the only way I can sum it up. Young blacks turn their back on the blues because they don't understand it. They never lived it. Kids today ain't been hungry, man, in America. All they do is go into the kitchen and throw open the Frigidaire and get what they want. They ain't got it at your house, the next door neighbor got it: go over there and eat him out of house and home, y'understand? They don't have no concept of what the blues portrays. Now my interpretation of the blues is when you ain't got your rent money in on time and the landlord is talking shit. You're starting to get the blues because your insurance is due, your car note is due. You're trying to hide your car from the snatch man, and the dude at your job done told you that you're going to get laid off in two weeks, they're going to close the factory for a month, you understand. Then if you're in trouble with your old lady, you got alimony, you know. That's the blues. That's. . . what. . . we. . . call. . . the. . . blues!"
While Bo Diddley's Beach Party was, in a sense, a farewell to a particular Diddley style--a gutbucket, gutbusting type of guitar theatrics and maybe also the last great album of pre-Beatles rock--Two Great Guitars with Chuck Berry ushered in something entirely new and at the same time demonstrated how far Bo, and Chuck too, had travelled from basic rhythm and blues.
It would be hard to name two guitarists who have had a greater combined impact on rock and roll than Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley. Lonnie Mack, Scottie Moore, Ike Turner, Carl Perkins, Mickey Baker, all were great rock guitarists of this era, but the sum total of their output pales in comparison to the many prototypical and monumental riffs of Chuck and Bo, and the Two Great Guitars album is testimony to that. This fine collaborative effort took place in the early summer of 1964, when the Chess people were apparently looking for material to round out two albums-in-progress, Chuck's topically named St. Louis to Liverpool and Bo's Hey Good Lookin'. Bo was already at the studio one day working with his girl-group, the Bo-Ettes, on a not particularly inspiring number called "Let's Walk Awhile." It wasn't going too well, and Bo was running over his allotted time. At that moment Chuck Berry walked in to get started on some work of his own, only to find that Bo was still in possession of the studio.
"I was asked to sit down and play some stuff to give Bo some ideas," Chuck told Griel Marcus almost exactly five years later when he was addressing a group in the student lounge at UC, Berkeley. "I thought I was just giving ideas; I was just running through a lot of riffs and so forth, you know."
It would be difficult to tell from this unassuming account that something momentous was building from this simple beginning, but that was exactly what was happening. As Chuck picked out the opening chords to his timeless "Memphis, Tennessee," Bo hooked in with some chugging variations of his own, then Ron Malo threw on the switches at the recording console, and the first Chuck and Bo Jam was under way. When it was all over some sixty minutes later, there was one of those rare occurrences in the business-like Chess Studios: sustained applause from all those present--session musicians, staff and engineers--and Ron Malo, already delighted with being the first American to tape a promising new English group called the Rolling Stones just one month before, now had on his oversize reels two distinct tracks of unquestionably seminal rock and roll. Malo decided to call these tracks "Chuck's Beat" and "Bo's Beat" after their respective opening riffs, but the curious feature about these twin pendants of instrumental improvisation is that "Chuck's Beat" belongs to Bo, while "Bo's Beat" belongs to Chuck. Each guitarist seems to understand brilliantly where to step in, where to place an inset, where to embellish an original line from the other's playing, and the results are two classics of rock ën' roll extemporization.
"Chuck's Beat," for instance, is a veritable feast of guitar play with Bo's supple, vigorous solos sliding around, beneath, and above Chuck's more regulated figures. Scratches, snarls, and other Diddley distortions enlarge the original crafted chords of "Memphis," and then "School Days." Midway in the course of the ten minute, thirty-five second jam, Bo throws out an astonishing incremental zoom that resembles the take-off of a Titan rocket, thunderous in its initial power, then fading away into distant skies. He follows with a sequence of mumbling guitar, wraps it up with a series of forceful, raspy notes never ever heard before on the electric guitar, before finally complying with his cardinal rule to "always return to the melodic line." If it is true as rock critic Robert Palmer claims, that Bo Diddley is "the father of Heavy Metal," then Bo's work on "Chuck's Beat" must surely be considered the motherlode of that genre. Certainly, some primal forging of metal took place that day upon the anvil of rock. These, coupled with his rocking arrangement of "When the Saints Go Marching In," the three minute "filler" for Side Two, present proof positive that Bo Diddley is a master of improvisation in rock guitar.
"Bo's Beat" is only marginally less successful. Chuck's superb electric tones, vigorous and evocative, are dominant, together with that chirpy, elastic, honky-tonk sound that is indescribably his own. On this, only his third recording session since his completion of a period of inspired self-education at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, Chuck appears uncomfortable at times in handling the Bo Diddley riff, even though Bo plainly stands aside from time to time and invites him to come in and syncopate a little.
Minor reservations aside, the two numbers nevertheless serve as a virtual primer for all future rhythm-based rock and roll. Yet to hear the artists tell it, neither took any special measures in this session nor tried anything they hadn't already done before. "I just did my thing," Bo says modestly. "There was nothing big to it, in my mind. Chuck walked in there, we did it, and he walked out! Me and Chuck weren't enemies, but we weren't real good friends either. But we're real good friends now. Back then, I just went on about my business of making music, and left him alone."
Chuck Berry's recollection of the session, however, is more distinct: he thought this was simply some musical brainstorming. "I was unaware that it was being cut for publicity," he told Griel Marcus, in what appears to have been his most willing interview on record. "These ëideas' [I mentioned] were drafted and published. . . . Incidentally, you can't always tell a recording company not to do this and not to do that, because they have a little authority over the product they put out, and if they feel it's commercial, they can take your name and turn it inside out, like Buck Cherry! . . . I would have called it ëSausage' if it would've been my song." We'll probably never know whether Chuck's last statement was a Freudian slip, or an open acknowledgement that this was Bo's album more than his, but he certainly makes it sound as if it were the latter.
Back on the domestic front, Bo and Kay had a decision to make. Things were getting pretty intense in Washington. As the sixties got into full swing, the capital was becoming a focal point for disorder: race riots, youth riots, anti-war riots--they were all there, virtually at Bo and Kay's doorstep. The situation with police surveillance had become especially grim. Bo and Kay had good reason to be fearful, for as any informed jurist will tell you, it was not until 1967 that the Supreme Court struck down laws against co-association, or miscegenation as it was called in some quarters. The saying today may be that Virginia is for Lovers, but back then, in a peculiar coincidence of terms, it was Loving v. Virginia that was drawing attention. This was the name of the case that resulted in the Supreme Court sweeping away Virginia's ban against interracial marriage, and therefore those of all other states along with it. The Court held that the racism of Virginia's law violated the Equal Protection Clause, and also deprived the Lovings--who like Bo and Kay, enjoyed a common law "mixed" marriage--of due process, by denying them the "freedom of choice to marry" that had "long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men."
Unaware, of course, that such legal changes were only just around the corner, Bo and Kay moved to Chicago around 1964. Everything seemed to point to the need for it: the pressures in Washington, the chance for his children, Tanya and Anthony--both of whom had come to live with them--to finish high school in their native city, and, finally, the fact that Momma Gussie, although still a comparatively young woman, was ailing. Bo had a great love for Momma Gussie, but as he is often eager to point out, she had raised him "by the iron hand," and his feelings for her, though deep, were ambivalent. Sometimes it was difficult for Bo to visit Gussie in the hospital; often Kay, or once or twice Kay and Bo's brother, Kenneth, would go in his stead. But Bo was there when she passed on, and he remembers her last words to him. "Momma Gussie told me what she always liked to tell me as a kid, ëBoy, don't put all your eggs in one basket; somebody'll come along and break ëem all!' Then she told me that she didn't care for what I was doing--the rock ën' roll thing, you know--but that she was proud of me, and to be the best at it that I could. And I've always followed that advice."
However, Bo did not go to Momma Gussie's funeral. His sister Lucille explains: "My mother was very devout, very religious, and that is why she couldn't really cuddle up to Bo's music because that is not the Baptist music. But I don't ever say she wasn't proud of him; she was proud of him. And when she was sick, anything he could do, he'd do. But he wouldn't come to her funeral, even though he was in Chicago at the time. He didn't come to our brother Willie's funeral either. When it's someone he loves, that's something Bo just can't tolerate to do. It is just too painful. Kay was there, his kids were there, but he couldn't be there. And when we found that out, we didn't bother him about it."
Bo and Kay were ready to get married. Now that they were in Chicago, they wanted to bring Tanya into their household, and Anthony too, so far as he would permit it. At that time Anthony was entering the throes of youthful rebellion, and his father was having what he understatedly calls his "little troubles" with him. Tanya and Anthony had already bonded with Kay, having spent several good summers with her at the house in D.C. "We loved her from when we first met her," says Anthony of Kay. "We probably would not have the education we have today if it wasn't for her. She took us to the museums, showed us how to use encyclopedias and dictionaries, and how to make it through the world."
But it was not going to be an easy task for Bo to get custody of Tan and Anthony. First, he had to obtain his divorce from Tootsie, and Tootsie was making some pretty heavy demands trying not to be outwitted by the man whom she regarded as having "wicked ways."
"In essence, she sold them to me," says Bo of the final custody settlement. "She told her lawyer that if I didn't put down $22,000 cash--$10,000 for each of our kids, and a little bit more--there wasn't gonna be no divorce. I borrowed the money from Len and Phil Chess, which took me from now on to pay back. See, somebody had told Tootsie that I was making all sorts of bundles of money. She acted on that, but it was misinformation; I was watching my coins real close at that time. But my mind is at ease that I did the right thing."
Being one of the bargaining chips in these curious proceedings, son Anthony puts a slightly different angle on things, however. "Chess Records maneuvered my Dad's life," he says. "When he divorced my Mom they capitalized on his disaster. Chess Records said, ëYou want the money? Okay, we'll give you the money, but you sign over the rights to your songs.' Ain't no secret; he sold his future. So when you hear the song ëBo Diddley' on a Sonny Spoon episode, say, or ëI'm a Man' as the theme song for ëHill Street Blues,' he's not getting paid for it. It's like the man who invented Superman: the concept's making millions, but he's not making a dime. This was a time of need for my Dad--he wanted us, me and Tan--Chess had the money to give him, but there was something to give up in return, which was his songs. He sold out for us. That's why I love him now: because I was beginning to run around at that time, and he was in my corner when nobody else was."
Kay, meanwhile, was able for the first time to observe close up Bo's relationship with Chess, and she wasn't too impressed. "I met Bo too late to help him with his difficulties with Chess," she recalls. "Once we were in Chicago, I could see that they had a stranglehold on him. Not only that, he was mentally glorifying them while giving them the opportunity to rip him off! Bo sincerely felt that he never would have had a chance to be who he was if Chess Records had not done that first song. Which may be true, but you don't owe your life to someone that gave you an opportunity to make money. He was afraid to rock the boat. Only when they started buying out his songs did he get smart enough to figure out he was getting ripped. He's always been his own worst enemy as far as any business is concerned."
At the same time that Kay was coming to these conclusions, the rock and roll crisis was relentlessly deepening. Even though Bo continued to produce new albums and was in fact Chess Records' most reliable studio artist, outproducing his compadre Chuck Berry, by a ratio of three to two, his market share was dropping significantly as America continued to pursue its Beatles fixation and its passion for a new generation of musical idols. At that time the current musical star system seemed to favor groups rather than individual performers, no matter how well known. Of the twenty top-selling singles of 1965, for instance, only three were by artists recognized primarily as solo performers--Petula Clark, Elvis Presley, and Roger Miller--the remainder were by group acts, such as the Four Tops, the Rolling Stones, the Supremes, and the Beatles, or, in the instance of the number one record, by a group with a lead singer working under a fictional moniker, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs.
It is perhaps regrettable that just at a time when his audience appeal was declining, Bo was entering an intense period of songwriting, one that marked a new phase of creativity. His songs of this period were good songs, songs about almost anything that happened to him. On May 12, 1966--when he was 37 and she 25--Bo and Kay got married, and he wrote a song about it, "We're Gonna Get Married," a song with as robust a rhythm as was ever invented, the be-all-and-end-all of the Bo Diddley Beat. He got sick and wound up in the hospital, and he wrote a song about it, "Pills," as witty a ditty as he had written in ten years ("She gave me pills for my heart to put me at ease/That rock ën' roll nurse shook me dead to my knees"). He got robbed on the road home from Las Vegas, and he wrote a song about it, "Somebody Beat Me," a merry piece of resignation couched in the argot of the sixties ("somebody beat me for my bread, they beat me").
Elsewhere on wax, he embroidered his own legend ("500% More Man"); celebrated his stomach ("Soul Food," "Greasy Spoon"); paid homage to his ancestry, at home ("Root Hoot"), and abroad ("Africa Speaks"); joined the folk movement ("Bo Diddley's Hootnanny"); sang for the enjoyment of his own kids ("Rain Man," "Let the Kids Dance"), and for the education of others ("Back to School"); revealed his love of nursery rhyme ("Brother Bear," "Red Riding Hood") and his favorite TV viewing ("Yakky Doodle"). Nursery rhymes and cartoons? Well, it has to mean something that the late rock guru Lester Bangs cites "Yakky Doodle" as one of those "slices of timeless musical merit" with which "the unquestionably authentic and righteous bluesbustin' dad of rock ën' roll Bo Diddley . . . has filled out his albums."
By mid-decade the Bo Diddley Band--at that time the longest continuously performing rock and roll group in the nation--was thinning out. Four of Bo's personnel--Jerome Green, percussionists Frank Kirkland and Clifton James, and bassist Jesse James Johnson--had been with Bo almost right from the beginning. Others, like Lady Bo (Peggy Malone) and the Duchess, had signed on in later years. But by the time Bo and his band appeared in The Big TNT Show, a 1966 concert film that was the brainchild of rock whiz, Phil Spector, Jerome (and Johnson) had already gone for good, and the Duchess, visibly pregnant in her figure hugging, ankle length silk sheath, was taking her leave to attend to marriage and motherhood.
"Me, Jerome, and Clifton were real tight," recalls Bo of his original band. "We put some miles behind us, that's for sure. When I lost Jerome he was going with a girl named Margaret, and she told him she wanted him. And, man, she wanted him bad. One night we came into Pittsburgh, but no Jerome! Clifton and me, we stood around hours waiting for him, then someone said they seen Jerome get into a car with a tall chick. I said, ëOh my god, that sounds like Margaret! She got him, man. She got that dude!' And I ain't seen Jerome since; that dude just disappeared off the face of this earth!
"Since then I've heard that he's ceased, but I wish he was still here. I think the last number that he recorded with me was ëYou Ain't Bad (As You Claim to Be)'--at the tail end of ë64 that was--and that number about summed him up. Jerome was a bad dude, always finding mischief someplace or the other! One time he came to me and said, ëSay Bo, I want you to meet so-and-so. He's in show business too.' I said, ëOh yeah? What's he do?' Jerome says, ëWell, he eats glass.' I said, ëWhuh? Ain't nobody eats glass, man,' and I walked off. But Jerome was determined to show me that this dude eats glass, so he brings him over one day on our day off. And he says to the guy, ëSay man, why don't you show Bo how you eat glass?' Dude says, ëI don't eat no glass less I'm paid for it.' So I says, ëYou eat some and then I'll pay you, then I'm gonna sit around and wait for you to drop dead so I can get my money back.' I pull out twenty bucks and hand it to the dude, and Jerome goes and gets a coupla Pepsi Cola bottles, breaks ëem up, and the dude takes the big pieces, puts ëem in his mouth and starts chewin' ëem up! I'm waiting on him to keel over so's I can get my money back. The guy says, ëThat's nothing. Why don't you come and see my act tonight: I bite the head off a live chicken!' I told him I'd done seen enough; I was already getting nauseated, but Jerome was just dyin' laughin'. That's the sort of cats Jerome would turn up with.
"Heck, Jerome must've been on all of my recordings from 1955 to 1964, and he wrote some of ëem with me too. Yeah, I wish he was still here today: ARC Music has money belongs to Jerome, and they're not gonna turn it loose unless someone comes and asks for it."
For all Jerome's immense contribution to the band--his tremendous rhythmic skill with the maracas, his foil for Bo's badinage, and his svelte showmanship--the Duchess, Norma Jean Wofford, had also offered something special of her own. Apart from her natural beauty and friendly manner ("Norma was always so elegant, like royalty," remarks Tanya to whom she was a special friend), the Duchess's greatest asset was the funky and exotic accompaniment that she provided to Bo's lead and rhythm. She had a key hand in all of his classic tracks of the mid-sixties, and is especially effective on such exquisite mid-phase Diddley rockers as "Let Me Pass," "La, La, La" (the title hook of this song spawned a minor sing-along craze), and "Greasy Spoon." She also seems to carry entirely the basic track of "Corn Bread," a fine instrumental from 1965, as Bo careens off into a long series of integrated "effects." Her little-girl singing voice, however, was something of a drawback, especially in an era of such powerful female singers as Mary Wells, Martha Reeves, and Cher Bono. Nevertheless, her public appeal was considerable, particularly in Europe, where as late as 1980 her photograph continued to appear in promoters' ads for Bo Diddley concerts even though she had long since left the band. Prophetically, the Duchess's last recorded performance with Bo was in May, 1966, on "We're Gonna Get Married." Muses Bo: "Yep, I taught her all that stuff. I teach ëem, then they leave me. I hate that! But ëDutch' went where her heart was."
After the departure of the Duchess it took Bo a little less than a month to assemble a new group. First he called in Chester Lindsey for bass work; Chester (nicknamed "Dr. Boo, the Ladies' Man"), had been a session man in D.C. for several years, and knew all of the traditional blues as well as current R & B and soul licks. But it proved impossible to find a woman guitarist with a style and presence comparable to the Duchess. His thoughts turned immediately to Peggy Malone, his first female accompanist, but Peggy at that time was repeatedly on the move trying to outpace her vicious ex-husband. "I searched all over for Peggy," says Bo, "but no one could find her for me." So instead of pursuing the old formula, Bo decided to enhance his stage act by adding an all-girl trio, one that could both sing and dance, that could do something along the lines of the Ikettes of the then-famous Ike and Tina Turner Revue. Bo had already used such a trio, of whom the Duchess formed the lead, but this time he wanted good voices and girly action on the stage. "I had plenty of flower up there from time to time. I had some daffodils, and I had some poison ivy. This time I wanted a bouquet!"
In those days of the folk boom one of the hottest places on the Hollywood Strip in Los Angeles was the Troubadour Club. In view of the sort of allegiance its name and clientele espoused, the Troubadour hardly seemed the best place for Bo to debut his new rock and roll group; nor was his confidence bolstered by his erroneous billing under the title, Bo Diddley and His Chicago Blues Band. ("I never was a blues band," asserts Bo angrily). Nevertheless, it was there on July 13, 1966, that, as chance would have it, Bo, Chester, and the girls made their first appearance together to a packed house. As though to lend solidarity, Keith Richards was there in the audience. Also in attendance was one "Joex," of Variety magazine, who one week later was able to provide readers of the reviews column with a first-hand glimpse of Bo's reformulated group. This folktunery hasn't rocked the way Bo Diddley and his Band rocked it opening night since the last earth tremor shook up the nabe. Guitarist-singer Diddley took mikes from supporting act, Dick Glass, at midnight and didn't let go until two a.m. closing--and then only because of the law.
Billing himself as "the King of Rhythm," he made believers of everyone in the near-capacity house (unusual in itself for a late set) in the first few minutes. Without identifying tunes nor sidemen, he takes a full half-hour just to instill the beat. By 12:30 crowd was tapping, clapping, even humming along, galvanized by Diddley's antics on guitar.
He's a bag all his own instrumentally. Customers get the impression he can do no wrong on guitar, in spite of fact he continually tempts fate by juggling it, tossing it, side-strumming it--doing everything but handstands--while simultaneously serving up tasty r&b licks. Vocally Diddley is a combination of Ray Charles and Joe Turner--and that's about as good as a blues belter can get. He's abetted by an all-business drummer, an electric bassist who occasionally gets into a conversational feud (instrumentally) with Diddley for wow results, and a femme trio which does nothing but gyrate to the feverish rhythms for the first hour. Threesome didn't show vocal wares until well past 1 a.m. when they wailed in a brilliant, torrid, revivalist rendering of "Everybody Needs Somebody--But Me."
Spot is in good hands for duration of two-week stay.
Judging from the remarks of Joex (any connection to Joe Tex?), this seemed like an auspicious re-emergence. Could it be that Bo would escape the worst effects of the rock and roll crisis after all? For a while he was encouraged to think so, especially when precisely two months later he took the group into the studios in Chicago and, with the expert production of Marshall Chess and Esmond Edwards, they emerged with what appeared to be a winning song.
This--Bo's first visit to the charts in five years--was a number entitled "Ooh Baby," a wickedly amusing saga of Tootsie perhaps, or at the very least a Tootsie sound-alike, "all packed and ready to go," dishing it to Diddley in the final moments before she leaves him for good:
Here's the key to your Cad-il-lac,
Got my own parked right out back.
Got my own place with some brand-new locks
I'm gonna tell the mailman I've got a brand-new box!
Though it rose no higher than number 17, this durable little tune stayed in the R & B listings for nine weeks at the beginning of 1967 and was on the Billboard Hot 100, where it attained the # 38 slot, for seven weeks.
While "Ooh Baby" was nicely enhanced by the sonorous spice of Eddie Drennon on the electric violin (said to be Marshall's idea), it was obvious right from the introduction that in addition to Bo Diddley someone else on that record had an extraordinarily powerful voice. That voice belonged to Cornelia Redmond, Connie, to whom Bo gave the stage name Cookie Vee. It was her group that Bo had hired back in mid-summer after the Duchess had left and that, in conformity with his naming of Connie, he called the Cookies. Though seen to bang a mean tambourine from time to time, Connie was strictly a vocalist. Her true mÈtier was the blues--later recordings would reveal a distinct Bessie Smith quality in her voice--but for the present she was a rock and roll singer and dancer, and it was the sheer naked power of her voice that impressed.
"Connie came from Cumberland, Maryland," remarks Bo. "She was brought to my house by a young man named Scoopy while I was living in Washington, D.C. She was real young, and he figured I could give her some singing lessons. But when Norma left, I had the idea of sticking her up on the stage with me straightaway, if her mother would let her go.
"Connie's mother was Mrs. Elizabeth Redmond. And she made me sign a paper saying that I wouldn't let anything bad happen to her daughter. And you should've seen me, man! I had to guard her like I was guarding the Mint. There were dudes all over the place trying to get to her, she was so pretty. But I was dead on her tail--we'd have fights about it--because her momma had already told me, ëDon't let anything happen to my daughter, ëcos if it does you're dead, Bo Diddley!' And I believed her; the lady would've hurt me!
"So I brought Connie along, her and her partners, Gloria and Bebe. But Connie stood out. She had an excellent stage presence; she knew naturally how to handle the audience. And she stuck with me when times were really hard, came and lived with me and Kay, and she'd just say, ëGive me enough to buy some powder and lipstick--that's all I need,' while the others would be bitching."
The comparative success of the Connie-enhanced "Ooh Baby" inspired Bo to do a number of songs in similar vein. "Wreckin' My Love Life," another Marshall Chess/Esmond Edwards production (songwriting credits are given to Kay and Clifton James) again utilizes Eddie Drennon's spikingly haunting violin. But the refrain is even more noteworthy. Here Bo provides his answer to his woman's dismissal in "Ooh Baby." At first he pleads his love, then it dawns on him that a third party is involved: "Some-one is wreckin', wreckin' my love life," he sings with typical reduplication of the key word, then lamenting this recognition with an astonishing rapid-fire elision (something he does better than any other artist on record): "Don'tyouknowitwhenyouseeit/Can'tyoutellitwhenyoufeelit!" On the B-side of "Wreckin' My Love Life," is a solid-funk number called "Boo-Ga-Loo Before You Go," another mock tragedy devoted to the theme of infidelity and notable as the only one of his records to mention the real tragedy then being enacted in American lives: "You done me wrong while I was over there in Vietnam/You didn't know that I was coming home/You kept him around when he shouda been gone/You did me wrong when I was over in Vietnam."
That Bo himself thought highly of "Ooh Baby," "Wreckin' my Love Life," and "Boo-Ga-Loo" is surely indicated by the fact that when Brian Epstein, the suave, "with-it" manager of the Beatles, engaged Bo for a single matinee performance at London's Savile Theatre in September, 1967--part of an ongoing series showcasing American stars--these three songs formed the nucleus of Bo's program for a magnificent show.
This was a rare opportunity to see what Bo Diddley was like, sans Jerome, sans the Duchess, sans any of his customary group, while performing as a solo artist with only the backing of the house band. There were to be no special effects that day, just pure, straight-ahead Diddley--song, dance, and guitarism at its rock and roll finest, as Bo drifted from side to side of the stage in a continuous fleet-footed dance, his glittering royal-blue grosgraine reflecting the spotlights, the red Cadillac guitar flawlessly answering its master's every command.
Nor should another aspect of this booking be overlooked, for this was also a genuine gesture of recognition on Epstein's part. Brian Epstein knew as well as anyone what the highly lucrative British rock scene owed to its American Founding Fathers, but his own charges, the Beatles, were straying further and further into quasi-rock territory with their pretentious, provincial, but immensely popular Sgt. Pepper album--like Bo's Gunslinger, the concept album of its day. Was Brian Epstein trying to make a point with John, George, Paul, and Ringo? Many years later Bo remarked on this aberrant branching of the Tree of Rock and Roll. In a widely read interview he said simply: "I never understood what the Beatles was doin'. They had music you couldn't really dance to!"
Once back in Chicago after his memorable performance at the Savile Theatre, Bo went straight on to record what proved to be one of Chess Records best received productions, an album that went by the name of Super Super Blues. This was a case of Bo doing obeisance to his own roots, for the album was a collaboration with the stand-outs of Bo's teenage enthusiasms, the great Muddy Waters, and Howlin' Wolf, the eccentric, unpredictable master of electric Delta Blues. This album was itself a follow-up to an earlier collaboration between Bo, Muddy Waters, and harmonica virtuoso Little Walter that had taken place at the beginning of 1967. That first effort had been called Super Stars Join Forces. Both albums were Bo's idea.
"I came up with the concept one day when I was in the studio for a session. I said, ëLet's do something different--get Muddy Waters and Little Walter in here--call ëem up before I come into Chicago, and arrange a session with the three of us. All the other companies are doing collaborations--how come Chess and Checker can't get something going like that?' So they sat on it for a while, and then they figured out there might be something in it.
"Muddy and Walter jumped at the idea. Muddy just sat down there, and talked about what numbers we'd do, and then Walter suggested a couple, and we just ran straight through with it. Walter's voice had pretty much gone by then, but you just couldn't beat him on the harmonica. He told me a long time ago he played the harmonica like you'd play a sax. See, that was his secret, the thing that made him the greatest."
On Super Stars Join Forces Bo sings along, as he so often does, with a chuckle in his voice. Most of the selections are from his own material, and Muddy and Walter are no more than guest stars. Though Muddy does some slicing axe work on "Who Do You Love," the album as a whole can be rated as no more than simply enjoyable. But the idea of an intergenerational, cross-genre match-up was a good one, and it was to find its fruition in the Super Super Blues Band (Checker LP 3010, 1967). Richard Meltzer, a reviewer with the newly-founded Crawdaddy! The magazine of rock wrote: "Too many collaborations of music giants turn out to be bummers where either the forces nullify each other, or only the mere fact of collaboration, and not the end product is what matters. This collaboration is no bummer. It is, in fact, the paradigm meeting of titans on record. . . . The blues is all. And Muddy, Bo and Wolf are the blues. They are even the Nietzscean multiple divinity at the very least."
Well, a few seconds of "Little Red Rooster," one of Howlin' Wolf's trademark songs, tells you what happens. Wolf starts off in his usual sledghammer manner, pent-up aggression bursting from his throat, pounding the ivories as though their mere existence were an affront to his dignity. "Watch me howl," he yells. But by the time Wolf's lupine cry is halfway out his mouth, Bo has already bounced in with whip-cracking skids and reverbs. Wolf doesn't like it: "What you tryin' to do, take my howlin' from me?" he growls. Bo backs off. "Go ahead, Uncle Wolf," he chortles. "You've got more soul than I've got on my shoes!" Tensions subside, but only for a brief while. Bo invites "Daddy Muddy" to try his hand at "Ooh Baby," but Wolf takes issue. He could do it just as well, he asserts. Each starts pointing the finger of blame at the other. The electricity is downright audible.
Ricky Jolivet heard and saw it all. Ricky was Bo's "nephew," had grown up in the upstairs apartment when Bo was at 4744 Langley Avenue in Chicago, and learned guitar, quite literally, at Bo's knee. "I was about five or six years old. I used to slip down there into his house where Bo kept his guitars in the closet, and I would go behind the clothes, and I'd be sittin' on the floor playin' his guitar in the dark. That's where they'd find me.
"He used to have jam sessions over at the house, with Jerome, and this cat called Peanuts. I didn't know how to play at all but I wanted to get involved in his music, and so I began by scraping the rhythm on the side of a bottle with a button! Bo used to dig that: any percussive sound. Used to sound like a washboard and I used to keep up with him. I thought I was a musician! Later Bo started to give me real lessons. Eventually he took me on the road with him. But before that happened he took me down to the Chess Studios and told me to keep my ears and eyes open. It was the Super Super Blues session.
"I was a young cat at the time: sixteen or seventeen years old. Phil [Chess] came in and said, "C'mon, you all, let's do it." Everybody was walkin' around there, and I was to play second rhythm. I had been in the studio before, but being around all these amazing guys, I didn't know what was going to happen, y'know. Bo said, ëRick, do this: ding-ding, ding-ding,' or something, and it started to happen! The songs were all from the same pool of music, the blues, r and b, Muddy's songs, Bo's songs. Wolf came in there, and I recall the instant friction. It was an experience just to be there--it made me, that session itself, put my feet on solid ground. But what happened there was a lot of friction there. Muddy was Muddy, Bo was Bo, and Wolf was Wolf and that's the way they wanted to play. You had three heavy dudes there, they were very serious about that, and it was hot. One had an attitude with the other, or was jealous of the other's style--the real ego problem was Howlin' Wolf. But who's to influence Bo? No one, no one at all. Only he could give his music that special accent it has, just a downhome feel. But it all worked so well. It was a big day."
A big day and also a day of passage. When Bo next walked into those same studios to cut a full album package in January 1970, Leonard Chess would be dead, the company would belong to the GRT corporation, a tape manufacturer (though young Marshall Chess would still be at its helm), and Bo, now a resident of California, would be working in those studios for the last time. Thus, the Super Blues session marked the end of a certain way of doing things, the end of a certain dynamic between Bo and those he had come to know well over a period of twelve years. Even though Bo's relations with the Chess Company would end acrimoniously, there had been times when he felt he had been in a good situation. In 1969 he told bluesologist Bill Dwyer, "Probably no performer's stayed with one label as long as I have. I have a thing about that. I wanted to stay with Chess Records from the beginning to the end. I feel that we were like a family. I felt I was for them and they was for me and we were for each other. . . . Chess Records, they're beautiful people but, uhhh, you know, I have recorded twenty-seven albums, but I wouldn't say that I got paid for twenty-seven albums. . . . How would you feel [when they tell you] all you earned for record sales last year was only five hundred dollars? You can sell five hundred dollars' worth in Detroit alone. If they said five thousand dollars, it wouldn't bother me so bad. I can sell pop bottles and get five hundred dollars right quick!"
Seen from today's perspective, the Chess name has deservedly earned a secure place in the history of the recording of popular music. Fortunately, after much wandering the label's massive, invaluable catalogue has finally found a secure home among the many holdings of the MCA corporation, and MCA has pursued the business of preserving and reissuing these treasures withÅ responsibility and skill.
Up to the point when Chess underwent its transformation in ownership and personnel in the late sixties, Leonard and Phil Chess had given twenty tireless years to the task of finding and developing new musical talent. In this they were hugely successful. From their beginnings in 1947, as a struggling blues label, they had by the mid-fifties become a national independent record company with extensive connections in the radio and entertainment industry. Their roster of artists, ranging from the famous to the little known, was considerable. Yet, in all their many thousands of issues, rarely did they market an artist who was without genuine talent or promise; indeed, their exacting standards may well have led to their missing a few, such as Elvis Presley, for example. They became a significant factor in the popularization of rock ën' roll, and while this product was initially intended for an all-black market, it was through rock and roll that they became a major conduit for presenting to the white America beyond, the special facets and glories of a black music that was either unknown, ignored or, at best, underappreciated. This is the undeniable contribution to American cultural history of Leonard and Phil Chess.
Of course, like anyone with the entrepreneurial spirit, the Chesses' initial motivation was to make money. But an observation by Marshall Chess to Peter Guralnick suggests that there was more to it than this: "You see my father was a music lover in a strange way. People used to talk, they'd think he was a kind of a freak, because all he'd ever want to do was to go to these funky clubs that no white person would ever dream of going to, to hear new acts, to buy new talent. I don't think he ever thought of himself as a music lover, but he was in his own way."
In any case, there is no doubt that by hard work and dedication the Brothers Chess profited handsomely from their enterprises. One story that is universally held to be true is that when Len Chess bought radio station WVON in Chicago in 1963, he paid in cash, one million dollars in ten-thousand-dollar bills, right on the nail, and when the company was sold in 1969, it went for a cool ten million dollars. Nor is there any doubt that Len and Phil's management practices, though dependable and honest, presented serious and even insuperable disadvantages for those who recorded for them. Of the pitifully small royalty percentages they offered, for example, the greater part might well be re-absorbed by the company to defray the expense of session musicians, arrangements, and copyists. An artist's primary job, as far as the Chesses were concerned, was to take advantage of the higher personal appearance fees that their promotion and exposure of his product were affording him. It was not an entirely equitable system, but it was the one in effect when Bo and his contemporaries were taken on. The failure of Chess artists to understand from the outset the nuts and bolts of this system, combined with the Chesses' refusal, or reluctance, to change these practices, especially when the industry was becoming economically more liberal in the mid-sixties, may well have been at the bottom of the friction between Chess and so many of their stable of stars. It may also help to explain why when one links the name of Bo Diddley with those of Phil and Leonard Chess, it produces that mixture of positive and negative reminiscences, with the negative predominant, with which Bo has become unhappily identified.
Near the end of 1967 Bo and Kay moved to California. The few years in Chicago had not gone well. After intensive effort, Kay had begun to open Bo's eyes as to the weakness of his position viz-a-viz Chess Records, and thus Bo was now coming to be regarded as "difficult" to work with. In addition he had income-tax problems, the result of neglect by a previous management. Also, additional alimony demands seemed to be pouring in. He depended more and more at this time on Kay. "She was a helluva woman. Took all of this alimony nonsense in stride. When I was sick and couldn't work, she borrowed money from her mom just to keep my booty out of jail."
Meanwhile Tanya had become pregnant-she was then only fifteen--and Anthony had, for a while at least, been lost to the streets. Better to take the whole crew, Kay, Tanya, Terri and Tammi, singer Connie Redmond, and all of their pets, to the sunshine of California and the relative security of a middle-class community in suburbia. Even Anthony, Bo thought, might eventually follow.
Researching this, as she did every other purchase, in her usual thorough fashion, Kay had found a pleasant ranch-style development in the San Fernando Valley, northwest of L.A., in a community called Granada Hills. Home was now the 17-500 block of Minnehaha Street. For the first time in his life Bo was surrounded by mostly white neighbors. They seemed to welcome the novelty of a black celebrity in their midst. While Tanya looked after her baby, Terri and Tammi went to elementary school and then to junior high where they began to receive training as the quintessential Valley Girls they would become.
In California Bo felt physically and emotionally renewed--at least for a while. With the help of his lanky Kay ("Bo Diddley's girl is six feet tall/She sleeps in the kitchen with her feet in the hall"), he landscaped his property, built retaining walls, a fishpond, a studio, a wading pool. He turned Minnehaha Street into a paradise, especially for kids, his own and the kids from the neighborhood. They would hang out on the porch, watch TV in the living room, fool around in the pool, watch Bo jam in the studio or sometimes join in. It was the beginning of a sort of bohemian lifestyle that Bo pretty much follows to this day.
Once, when Bo and his family were back in McComb for a visit, Momma Ethel had given one of the girls a baby rooster thinking that the name Granada Hills meant that they now lived in the country. "That rooster caused a heap of trouble. It was a white-legged rooster. We took it home and raised it--raised the durn thing. We called it ëCheep', on account it went around going ëcheep-cheep, cheep-cheep!' It never crowed, man! And so we got this rooster in the house, but we wondered why we weren't getting any mail in our mail slot. The mailman was leaving the mail out in the planter by the street, wouldn't deliver it to the house. Now this chicken had got spurs on him about three inches long. One of the kids went out and saw the mail layin' in the planter, and there was a note attached to it. It says, ëRefuse to Deliver Mail. Vicious Chicken.' He was chasin' the mailman. I called up my mother. I said, ëMomma, would you believe this bitty chicken you gave the kids chased the mailman down the street?' She said, ëI meant to tell you--that's a White-legged.' I said, ëWhat's that gotta do with it?' She said, ëThere's two kinds: the Red ones and the White, and the White are mean. They're territorial; you gonna have to kill him.' And sure enough, I gave him to my cousin, and they poured some dumplings on him, baby!"
There were some merry moments, but behind the confines of his meticulously laid cinder-block walls the Pied Piper of Minnehaha Street was being forced to face a new challenge. If the rock ën' roll crisis had a bottom for Bo Diddley, then that bottom was reached during a two-year period beginning at the end of 1967 and lasting until midsummer 1969. In moving to California Bo had inadvertently walked into a condition of near obscurity. In a bizarre coincidence the Musician's Union in San Diego actually put out a report that he was dead: "I wonder how many bookings I lost because of that." Even though his California performances at this time at the Hollywood Bowl and the Fillmore West were legion, there was no denying that his appearance schedule had big gaps in it.
One contributory factor certainly was the popularity of divergent forms of rock music such as acid rock and psychedelic rock. These were the years when Jimi Hendrix, Cream, the Turtles, and the Doors were all at their peak, and when alternative lifestyles were in. Bo saw some good things in the hippie philosophy, the brotherhood, the absence of prejudice, the questioning of blind authority, the challenge to the rank abuse of power, but his abundant common sense and long cherished values told him that drug-taking, an accepted feature of this lifestyle, was "dangerous shit." As a result, he did not remain silent about the abuses he was witnessing.
He produced the first of his anti-drug songs in 1968, a piece called "I'm High Again," where the high is produced not from drugs but from nothing more innocuous that his "baby's kiss." This "reactionary" attitude, however, stirred disdain among some in the music industry, a fact that is most tellingly illustrated when one considers that Bo Diddley was not an invitee to either of two landmarks events on the counterculture calendar, the 1967 International Pop Festival at Monterey, and the Woodstock Festival of August, 1969. Yet, "Magic Carpet Ride," a lyrically psychedelic number that utilized an exceptionally pronounced, unadulterated Bo Diddley beat, was selling a million copies for Steppenwolf in 1968.
Bo expressed his feelings about drugs as a feature of the hippie lifestyle in an interview conducted about this time. "People say about me, ëWell, he's a square.' They're upset because I don't do any of these weird things. If you don't smoke joints and sniff and all this kind of stuff, you're a square. But I don't dig it. How am I gonna teach my kids the beautiful things of life if I do that? It's my belief that you don't have to do all of this to be beautiful.
"I used to dig Jimi Hendrix--some people say I influenced him musically and that's cool. But here's a man that was a groovy cat and black, had everything in the world laid out for him, plus he blew himself. He just copped out."
And more recently in an appearance on the Howard Stern Show on New York's K-Rock radio station, he recalled for his host, the brilliant and controversial social humorist, how he saw both Hendrix and Janis Joplin go down the tubes. "I was on a show with the two of ëem at the Fillmore West, early 1970. I could see what was happenin' with Jimi. I said, ëHey, man, you better quit what you're doing, or you ain't gonna be around long.' He didn't make any comments. He told me he knew what he was doing; he could handle it! And in a coupla months he was gone.
"And then at that same show Janis came in the back door and she ran up to me, and she said ëBo!' I knew Janis from when she first got started, did a lot of work with her and her band, Big Brother and the Holding Company. But when she ran up to me, I looked at her and I didn't even recognize her! This girl was kinda hefty built, but she was down to one hundred pounds, something like that. And I said, ëWhat are you doing with yourself?' And she told me she had to find herself, she had to find out who she was. She didn't leave herself much time, ëcos she was dead within a week. Back in those days there was a lot of people running around like that, hurtin' themselves, and it was tough to get through to them."
So this was the way Bo Diddley approached the close of the sixties: out of favor and largely out of work. When writer Michael Lydon, surely the ablest of Bo's commentators, stopped by to visit with him for a few days, he described him as a man living in a state of exile and frustration. Bo Diddley is "a protean genius and as great an artist as any who has graced America's shores," wrote Lydon, ". . . Yet in a perfectly simple way he is without honor in his own land." For honor and its trappings Bo would have to wait a considerable while. At the present moment the necessities of life were what he most urgently needed.
Fortunately, Bo's crisis--the rock and roll crisis writ large--was about to end. Helping hands were on the way. One of them was offered by Martin Otelsberg. In Marty, Bo was to find a new manager, and a new friend. Usually, entering into an agreement to manage a rock music star means drawing up some pretty sophisticated contracts, but in Marty and Bo's case all it took was a handshake. The validity--and the warmth--of that handshake would last for twenty-five years, to be broken only by Marty's death in 1992.