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More on Bo Diddley in Rolling Stone:
• The Indestructible Beat of Bo Diddley by Neil Strauss (RS 981, August 25, 2005)
• The 100 Greatest Artists of All Time: Bo Diddley by Iggy Pop (RS 946, April 15, 2004)
• Photo Gallery: Shots From Bo Diddley's Five Decade Career
The litany of Bo Diddley's great hits is one of the fundamental incantations of original American rock & roll. From the characteristically self-celebratory "Bo Diddley" in 1955 (which featured "I'm a Man" on the flip) through "Diddy Wah Diddy," "Who Do You Love," "Hey! Bo Diddley," "Mona," "Crackin' Up," "Say Man" (his pop peak: Top Twenty) and into the early Sixties with "Road Runner" and "You Can't Judge a Book by the Cover," Bo's music is one of the true wellsprings of rock.
If Bo Diddley were in his artistic prime today, with sharp lawyers and management, he might well be — like so many fey pop youths of the moment — a very wealthy man. Instead, one of the fathers of rock & roll lives in a trailer at the end of a long and bumpy white-sand path deep in the woods around Archer, Florida, about half an hour outside of Gainesville. Pulled up in front of the double-width mobile home is a gold-toned Ford pickup with a brass duck mounted on the hood. Parked off to the side is a long, white '64 Cadillac in some disrepair ("It's an antique," Bo says). A small but clamorous pack of semidomesticated dogs guards the trailer's entrance — souvenirs, like Bo's Aussie-crafted guitars, of his world travels.
Inside, all is tidy. There's a sofa covered with a flower-print quilt, side tables neatly decked with towels and a coat stand topped with a collection of Bo's trademark lids. On the floor are two disconnected TVs and a VCR, all blown out in a recent electrical storm. Nearby lies Bo's guitar case, encrusted with Coors-beer stickers and road mottoes along the lines of "Girls Wanted." The square-bodied Kinman guitar inside is tuned, of course, to an open chord. There is a large Bible, opened to Job, and on the walls a scattering of posters emblazoned with slogans: "Beam Me Up, Scotty, There's No Intelligent Life Down Here." And "If You Think Rock & Roll Started with Elvis, You Don't Know Diddley." Bo's girlfriend, Marilyn, a cheerful, thirty-year-old white woman, sits at a dining table near the kitchen, sipping a Pepsi.
It is still morning, but Bo has been up since daybreak and has just returned from a maintenance visit to the seventy-two-acre piece of property he owns in Hawthorne, about forty miles away. Until recently, he lived there, in an elaborate log cabin, with his second wife, Kay, who is also white. But after some two decades of marriage, they've just divorced, and now Bo has to sell the Hawthorne spread. He's still too pained by the split to say much else about it. He is wearing work pants and a pair of dusty brogans, and his full, graying hair is swept straight back on his head. He seems weary as he takes a seat by Marilyn at the dining table, although whether from his morning's labors in Hawthorne or from the general weight of his fifty-eight years is not clear.
Bo says he lied so much about his age when he was young that he's sometimes forgotten what it actually is. He agrees that he was in fact born on December 30th, 1928, in a house in McComb, Mississippi — deepblues country. His father, about whom he knows little, was a man named Bates. His mother was named Ethel Wilson. She couldn't afford to keep her child, so in a scenario common to rural black life at the time, she placed her eight-month-old son with her first cousin Gussie McDaniel. Thus, says Bo, his full legal name is Ellas Bates McDaniel.
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Gussie's husband, Robert, died when Bo was little. At about age seven, Bo moved with Gussie, her two daughters and her son to Chicago, to live with an Uncle Herbert and Aunt Janie — the latter a churchgoing woman who took the boy on regular visits to the Ebenezer Baptist Church. Those were the Depression years — "hard times," Bo says — and the family scraped by on occasional stockyard jobs and government relief. When he was about eight, Bo saw a man "dragging a stick across some strings" and decided that he, too, wanted to play the violin. The congregation at Ebenezer Baptist took up a collection to buy him one, and soon he was studying with the church's musical director, Professor O.W. Frederick, from whom he also learned trombone. "I used to read all this funny music, like Tchaikovsky," Bo says. "But then I didn't see too many black dudes playin' no violin."
His nickname, Bo Diddley, was given to him by grammar-school classmates, he says; he has no idea what, if anything, it means. In the early Forties, he taught himself to play guitar the easy way — open tuned — and began performing on street corners with guitarist Earl Hooker, a fellow student at the Foster Vocational High School. Bo wrote his own tunes even then — songs with titles like "Hey, Noxzema" and "Dirty Muthuh Fuh Yuh." He left school at sixteen, and between jobs at a punchboard factory and as an elevator operator at a seat-cover company (along with occasional amateur boxing matches), he continued playing the streets through the end of the Forties with a group that included Little Joe Williams on second guitar, a washtub bassist named Roosevelt and Jerome Green on maracas. ("Jerome couldn't carry a tune in a bag," says Bo, "but that sucker could shake those maracas.") He also married a woman named Ethel Smith, with whom he had two children, Tanya and Anthony.
By the early Fifties, with the now legendary Chicago blues scene exploding all around them — Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin' Wolf — Bo and his band had moved off the streets and into the city's booming South Side clubs. In 1955, he was signed to Checker Records, a subsidiary of Chess, the renowned blues label run by brothers Leonard and Phil Chess. His classic Checker sides — not just the obvious hits but such terrific nuggets as "Diddley Daddy," "Hush Your Mouth," "Bring It to Jerome" (with Green singing lead) and the moody blues-violin opus "The Clock Strikes Twelve" — revealed Bo to be a raw and powerful talent. There were Latin and even African elements in his music, but his roof-shaking vocals were straight out of the Delta-blues tradition. He was a rock & roll hitmaker before Chuck Berry — a Chess stable mate — had even released his first record.
Along with the classic singles came a series of classic albums: Go Bo Diddley; Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger; Have Guitar, Will Travel. The titles occasionally alluded to transient musical trends — Bo Diddley's a Twister, Surfin' with Bo Diddley — but the music remained, even through the Sixties, inimitably his own. By 1967, however, when he scored his last entry in the pop Top 100 with a song called "Ooh Baby," the glory days were over. He relocated to Los Angeles and then — at the suggestion of his pals the Everly Brothers — to New Mexico. There he settled in a town called Los Lunas and even became a deputy sheriff for Valencia County. By the end of the Seventies, though, he'd moved to Florida, where, when he's not on the road — as he pretty much still is most weeks, flying off to play with pickup bands across the country — he's content to remain.
Bo is a bitter man in many ways — bitter about what he sees as the financial injustices he suffered, first at the hands of Chess Records, then at the hands of the New Jersey-based Sugar Hill label, which bought the Chess catalog in the mid-Seventies. Like many black artists of the Fifties — Chuck Berry, for example, or Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, acts that sacrificed songwriting credits to the white DJs and label executives who helped make them stars — Bo feels he was exploited throughout his career.
Was he? Details are difficult to come by at this remove. Leonard Chess is dead, and his brother, Phil, who lives in Arizona now, was unavailable for comment at press time. According to Marshall Chess — Leonard's son, who grew up around the Chess studios from the mid-Fifties — Bo was "always coming in every three weeks for advances. He was one of those guys who would five-hundred you to death; then, at the end of the year, he'd see a statement where he owed $30,000, and he'd say, 'I don't owe that.'"
Marshall acknowledges that "black artists in that era had a problem" — record-company royalty payments were generally low, from two to four percent and only half that much for foreign sales. But, says Chess, "we never cheated any artists. We weren't that kind of company. I'm sure that Bo got paid on every record sold, minus returns." The Chess catalog was sold in 1967 to GRT, a tape-retailing company that has since gone bankrupt. Sugar Hill Records bought the catalog in 1974, but Joe Robinson, head of Sugar Hill, declined to discuss any Chess-related business while he is embroiled in a civil suit against MCA, the company that entered into a distribution agreement with Sugar Hill in 1983 and now owns the Chess catalog. Bo hopes that MCA, at last, will "do the right thing" and pay him the royalties he feels he's owed. Says an MCA spokesman, "MCA is paying royalties whenever a contract calls for it."
To straighten out his tangled business affairs, Bo has retained the services of the New York-based Artists Rights Enforcement Corporation, which also represents such other dissatisfied Chess acts as Etta James.
In the meantime, Bo continues to crank out albums on his own. One, Ain't It Good to Be Free, has been released on the French New Rose label, but Bo is unable to get a U.S. recording deal. He remains a marvel in performance — as raucously riveting as ever — but he is frustrated by the tastes of today's kids, who, he feels, have never known real rock & roll; they seem to prefer the screaming guitars of modern rock and perceive his music, if at all, as simply old-fashioned. "I feel like I'm bein' led to the slaughterhouse," he says grimly.
But Bo Diddley is a survivor, still the same man who sang, a quarter of a century ago, "You got your radio turned down too low — turn it up!" The message remains the same, and just as salutary, however many people are still able to hear it.
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The Forties and early Fifties, when you started out in Chicago, were the years when Muddy Waters was electrifying the Delta blues and playing around town with people like Little Walter. What was that scene like?
I knew 'em all. They used to play the 708 Club all the time. At first, when I was still a teenager, I used to sneak in and hide behind the cigarette machine, and the bouncer would catch me and throw my tail in the streets.
But you'd sneak back in?
Yeah, because I figured, you know, Muddy Waters had somethin'
goin', and, man, I was tryin' to find out what it was. Muddy Waters
had everything sewed up around Chicago — I mean, sewed
up. Big time. I liked what him and Walter was doin'. Walter
... there'll never be another harmonica player like Little Walter.
He created something that will live on.
Were these guys nice to you — a young kid sneaking
into clubs to catch their sets?
Nope. I'm not gonna lie about it, no. Muddy wasn't an easy guy to
learn about, you know? He had his thing, and he didn't associate
too much with cats like me.
What about when you made it into the clubs
yourself?
No. See, everybody had a little bit of professional jealousy
— they felt, like, threatened, you know? They were blues
cats; I was a little bit different. So we didn't hang together,
'cause if you played some other kind of music, you didn't hang with
the blues dudes, you know? Because you didn't have anything in
common. Anybody came along doin' something' new was almost like a
threat. But in reality, it wasn't a threat. It was just a new dude
came along with something — this is the way you keep the
bandwagon rolling, you know? So they thought I was the weird one.
But I was the one that nobody wanted to go onstage behind. They'd
say, "Man, I don't want to follow you." I'd say, "Well, bring your
fire extinguisher onstage with you, 'cause I'm gonna set that
sucker on fire. You put it out."
When did you come up with the Bo Diddley
beat?
Oh, in 1952, 1953, something like that. It was just something that
I put together. Everybody tried to give me this bullshit that "Bo
Diddley" is public domain. They tried to say it was "Hambone"
— "Hambone, Hambone, have you heard/Papa gonna buy me a
mockin' bird." But "Bo Diddley" ain't that. And they say you can't
copyright a beat. But "Bo Diddley" is not just a beat; it's a
melody and a rhythm pattern. The same as "Harlem Nocturne"
or anything else. So what is this bullshit everybody tries to tell
me?
How did you hook up with Chess Records in
1955?
I went to Vee Jay first, with this song I had, "Uncle John." Vee
Jay was across the street from Chess. And they didn't like the
song. They said it didn't sound right — said it was "jungle
music." So one day I was breakin' bottles in the alley over there,
and this cat opened a door and was throwin' old broke records out
the back. And I says, "Is there a record company up in here?" He
says, "Yeah — Chess Records."
So you were ushered in to see the Chess
brothers?
I wasn't ushered. I walked in there. I said, "Man, you all
make records in here?" And Phil was there, he said, "Yeah, whatta
you want?" I said, "Well, I got a song." He said, "Let us hear it."
And when I started playin', Phil called his brother Leonard in and
said, "Listen to this."
Did they take you right into the studio to record
it?
Uh-uh. They told me to rewrite it. The words was a little rough. It
had lyrics like "Bowlegged rooster told a cocklegged duck/Say, you
ain't good-lookin', but you sure can... crow." The old folks didn't
understand that. It took me about seven days to rewrite it, and
that song became "Bo Diddley."
What about the flip side of that record, "I'm a
Man"?
That took about thirty takes. Because they wanted me to spell
man. We'd get to that spot in the song, and they'd say,
"Okay, now spell it — m-a-n." Real quick, like that —
you know how some white guys is out of time? They couldn't tell me
exactly what the hell they were talkin' about. So I said it the way
they had: "M-a-n." They said, "Goddamn, just spell it." This went
on all night. Finally, I was getting tired, and I said it real
slow: "M...a...n." And they said, "That's what we're talkin'
about!" I said, "Why in the hell didn't you coulda told me that the
first?" That's the truth, I ain't lyin'.
"Bo Diddley" went Top Five on the R&B charts and got
you onto Ed Sullivan's TV show — where I gather Sullivan
wanted you to sing "Sixteen Tons," a big Tennessee Ernie Ford hit
that you were performing onstage at the time, and you
refused.
Ed Sullivan did everything in his power to shut Bo Diddley down,
because he claimed that I double-crossed him on that song. What
happened was, they had my name written on a piece of paper; my name
is Bo Diddley, and I had a song called "Bo Diddley." He heard me
singin' "Sixteen Tons" and wanted me to sing it on the show. So I
thought I was supposed to do two tunes. I went out there and sang
"Bo Diddley" first — that's what I was there for,
y'understand? — and he got mad. He says to me, "You're the
first colored boy ever double-crossed me on a song," or a show, or
somethin' like this. And I started to hit the dude, because I was a
young hoodlum out of Chicago, and I thought "colored boy" was an
insult. My manager at the time grabbed me and said, "That's
Mr.Sullivan." I said, "Who is that?" I didn't know who the hell he
was, man. Shoot.
When I did the Ed Sullivan show, they gave me a check for 750 bucks. CBS cat say, "You gotta sign it, but you gotta give me the check back. This is a formality." I says, "Uh... Formality — who's that?" He says, "We get you on the show, but you gotta kick the check back." I said, "What kind of crap is this?" I done signed my name to that sucker, you understand? Who was gonna pay taxes on that? But all right, I gave him the check back. Then a few years later I picked up a book and read where they paid Elvis Presley, for his first appearances on Ed Sullivan, $50,000 — and I got sick.
That told me what was happenin' — what rock & roll really was, and rhythm & blues. Rhythm & blues was for me — "ripoff & bullshit." It was to keep me from gettin' my hands on any money, and anybody else that looked like Bo Diddley — meanin' black cats. Elvis himself didn't have anything to do with this — he was only takin' whatever he could get comin' up. But, see, the people that was dealin' in this was much older. And they'd say, "We're gonna take him to the back, but we're going to take him to the front," you understand? We were dealin' with this type of thing. So rock & roll was for the Caucasians, and R&B was for the black cats. And I was black, so I got hung up in the R&B, which.... the money wasn't the same. If you're R&B, you don't make the big money. If you're rock & roll, you make all the money, or your price is a lot different, one way or another. It was basically all the same music, but if you could get a white boy to record it, certain stations would play it. "We'd break it if you get a white boy to do it" — some radio-station people told record companies this.
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How about on the road — what kind of money could
you make touring back in the Fifties?
Would you believe — hold on to your ass — would you
believe I made as low as $375, and I had the biggest fuckin' record
ever? This is 1955, 1956. Who got the money? Somebody got
the money, but we didn't have any way of knowin' it. Say a club
owner wanted me in a club. The booking agency might say, "Yeah, we
got Bo Diddley. He's gonna cost you $1250." And they'd send me,
say, $550, you understand? When I started catchin' dudes doin' this
kind of stuff, they didn't want no more to do with me, you know?
And this hurt.
What about those big package tours they had back
then?
Oh, man. They didn't pay us nothin', you know? We were told the
budget was so-and-so, the man's got six acts, he can't pay no more
than that. And nobody never walked up to us and said, "Hey, man,
the tour was great, I made a little money, here's a thousand
dollars." Or, "Here's $200." Or, "Here's $50 for you and the band."
Not a fuckin' quarter. Nothin'.
The music business is a good business, but why do we have to have all the fuckin' thieves that rip off cats? We have it bad enough runnin' up and down this damn highway, ridin' these airplanes, stayin' up all times of night, tryin' to get to a gig to make people happy.
What about record sales? Did you see much money from "Bo
Diddley," for example?
Say what? Shit. I got a brand-new Chevrolet station wagon, two
door; it cost $2800, and I think I paid for it about three times.
The car was an advance on royalties. I think I saw another check
for about $1200.
Did you ever ask Chess about your record
sales?
I got some counts, but I know damn well they wasn't right. But you
didn't ask questions. If I'd have asked questions, I would not have
lasted this long. They would have figured out how to stop me right
there, before I got started. "You're gettin' too smart," you know?
"We're gonna shut you down, pull your plug." And then they'd shut
off your juice, you understand? And that means you ain't workin' no
more. So I just shut up, played it smart and learned all I
could.
What did you think of the Chess brothers?
Well, they gave me a break. Me and Chuck Berry, Little Walter, John
Lee Hooker — we was Chess Records. We were the
beginnin' of rock & roll, and Chess Records should be labeled
as that — it deserves that honor. People wouldn't even bother
with no stuff like "Bo Diddley" and "I'm a Man" and stuff like that
ten years earlier, or even a year earlier. Then Leonard and Phil
Chess decided to take a chance, and suddenly a whole different
scene, a different kind of music, came in. And that was the
beginning of rock & roll. I thought Leonard and Phil were very
nice until I found out what I found out.
Which was?
Well, Bo Diddley ain't got shit. My records are sold all over the
world, and I ain't got a fuckin' dime. If Chess Records gave me, in
all the time that I dealt with them, if they gave me $75,000 in
royalty checks, I'll eat my hat. Boil it and eat it.
Somebody got some money — everybody in this business
has big mansions and stuff, you know? I got a log mansion. When I
left Chess Records, they said I owed them $125,000.
How come?
That's what I'd like to know. How? And whatever it was, it should
have been paid off in, say, two years. It don't take eight years or
somethin'. My stuff is selling all over the world —
everywhere. Where is the money? Bo Diddley did not get it. I would
like for the government to find out: Where is the money? Now, if
the publishing company got it, that's cool, because I sold all of
my catalog to the publishing company, Arc Music — that's Gene
Goodman, which is Benny Goodman's brother. He's the publisher. Gene
has been pretty nice. But there were things that went on that Gene
can't explain, because he wasn't involved — it was Leonard
Chess. And Leonard Chess is dead.
Why did you sell Arc your song rights?
Because I didn't have no money — this was back in the Sixties
or Seventies. And since I was in show business, the only place I
could get any money from was the record company or the publishing
company. I should have been getting it from the record
company. I should have had checks. But I didn't And they
wouldn't lend me none, so the publisher jumped up and said, "We'll
buy your catalog." So I said, "Okay, I'll write more songs." You
dig? You get into trouble, you got two or three kids to feed, you
don't think about nothin'. Everybody says, "You did the worst thing
in your life, sellin' your songs." Well, I couldn't find
these people that's tellin' me that when I had two or three kids
with their mouths running and openin' the refrigerator and there
ain't a goddamn thing in there to eat. You'll sell the shirt off of
your back if you're tryin' to feed your kids and pay your rent and
everything else that's goin' on. You'll do it to keep from goin'
out and blowin' some sucker up, turnin' into a criminal. This is
what you will do.
What kept you going?
Well, you know, some people say to God, "God, you said you'd be
with me if ever I needed you. You said if I made a step, you'd make
a step. Well, where was you yesterday, when I was sick and down and
out? Because there wasn't but one set of steps, and I didn't see
yours." And God says, "Well, that's when I carried you on my back."
You dig? And I think God's been carryin' me a long, long time. I
think he made it possible for me to be Bo Diddley. Now, a lot of
people jump up and say, "But you play the blues." But why couldn't
it be God that gave me this talent? Why does it always got to be
the devil? I've heard that from some of my own people. But I think
my music is God's gift. Because I am not a highly educated person,
and I was trying to figure out how to survive in this cruel world
that I was comin' up in.
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"Bo Diddley" was released three months before Chuck
Berry's debut single, "Maybellene," which, unlike your record,
became a Top Forty pop hit. Were you and Berry already friends
then?
No, no, lord, we wasn't friends right away.
Why not? Was there a rivalry?
No, we wasn't enemies either. We just didn't have nothin' in
common. At one time, somebody wrote up that we had a feud goin',
and that was the biggest lie ever told. It was a feud we didn't
know about. We've always been runnin' buddies ever since we kind of
got to know each other. Chuck and I are different, but he's a very
nice person, and he's a good friend of mine, and I hope that he'll
always be a good friend of mine. But Chuck has his ways, just like
I got mine. No two people are alike. I don't care if they're twins,
you know?
One of your strangest records was "The Clock Strikes
Twelve," recorded in 1958, on which you played violin. What did the
Chess brothers make of that?
Freaked out. See, they didn't know I played violin. I just brought
it in there and did it. I've always got a secret hid somewhere. I
keep a secret weapon.
Oddly shaped guitars have always been your trademark.
When did you come up with that idea?
I just started designin' 'em. Gretsch was makin' 'em at first. Tom
Holmes, in Nashville, makes my guitars now.
Do you still use the fur-covered one?
Somebody ripped that off. That wasn't nothin' but rabbit hair, but
who ever stole it, I guess they thought they had some mink. It
tickles me that they got a damn bunny rabbit.
Sylvia Robinson, who was part of the duo Mickey and
Sylvia back then, told me that she got "Love is Strange" from you
— the song that became a Number Two R&B hit for them and
that also went to Number Eleven on the pop charts.
That's right.
She said she and Mickey Baker, her partner, wrote the
words for it, that it was originally an instrumental called
"Paradise" that your guitarist, Little Joe Williams, would pick out
at —
Backstage. Yeah. They called it "Paradise." I wrote the
words, and I named it "Love Is Strange."
Leonard Chess didn't want you to record it
yourself?
No. He told me I thought I was Perry Como. That's why Sylvia got
the song. I let her record it, and I published it under my first
wife's maiden name, Ethel Smith, to keep Leonard and them from
messin' with me about it. And they still tried to get it.
I got some change off of that. I get BMI money off of it now, every
once in a while.
Did you encounter much racism in the early
days?
In the Fifties, you ran into some ignorant people down South
— down behind the ignorant curtain, I call it. You was a sad
son of a bitch if you couldn't fix you own car then, 'cause if it
broke down, you'd be sittin' off in the bushes, and the
service-station cat would just be sittin' up there lookin' at you.
The crap that we went through to try to bring rock & roll to
people. And all these dudes that's running around now tryin' to
claim the shit — they ain't got no business claimin'
nothin',' cause they didn't do it. We were the pioneers, and we
went through hell and high water to make this shit happen. We went
through some heavy changes. I had guns put up to my head, man; run
out of town, and I still don't know why.
Where was that?
Right goin' into Arkansas, the day after President Kennedy got
shot. We were runnin' out of gas, so we parked at this gas station
at night and we were waitin' for it to open up in the mornin'. So
by 7:30 or 8:00 there were four or five white guys standin' on the
corner, like they were waitin' on somebody to pick 'em up, and we
were sittin' there in this big, long, stretched-out Chevrolet with
eight doors on it. They ain't botherin' us, and we ain't botherin'
them. The gas station still ain't open yet, so me and the driver
decided to mosey across the street to look at this thrift shop over
there. Just about the time we got to the middle of the street, I
heard this guy hollerin', "Hey, you! Whatta you lookin' at?" I
looked around and didn't see nobody, so we went on across the
street. Then we walked back, and just as we got maybe ten feet away
from the car, we could see this old man run-nin' out across this
field and down this hill, hollerin', "Hey, you all, what choo doin'
there? What're you lookin' for?" So I stopped and looked at him,
and I pointed — "Me?" He said, "Yeah, you. Wait a minute."
And when he got there, this old man pulled out this great big old
gun and stuck it up to my head. Now, if you've ever had a gun put
up to your head, the barrel of a .38 looks like a wind tunnel or
somethin' when somebody stick it in your face — it gets
real big, you understand? And this old man told me, "I
want you to get out of town. Ain't none of y'all around here, and
y'all get a-movin'."
See, again, that was a time when God carried my booty on his back. Because this was the most horrible experience a man could ever have, for no particular reason. Nothin' should have been that bad. But, see, people back then, this is what they thought — they were taught this. They were raised that way. They didn't know. They thought they were right. It's different now. The people down here in the South now is got their shit together. Everybody's fine; everybody gets along beautiful, and I'm so happy that that's what's happened. But you can always find a fool — you can find a fool in church, you understand? And there's some running' around right now, man, that's still fucked up, and it shouldn't be. I don't see color, you know? But that was the thing we had to go through. And not just black people; white people, too, if they let their hair grow long or something. I don't understand why Americans do this — they love to pick at one another, you know? I think we'd be better off if we exercised the idea that that man's a free man, just like I am, and if he want to wear his hair down to his asshole, that's his business. It ain't botherin' me — I ain't gotta sleep with him, you dig? Leave him alone. And if you don't want him in your house, just say, "Hey, you can come in, but the hair gotta stay out."
One white person who didn't share those prejudices was
Elvis Presley, who's said to have once caught your shows at the
Apollo Theatre in New York for a whole week
straight.
Oh, yeah, that I know about. I didn't know who in the heck he was,
but him were there. He wasn't there a week, though, not that I know
of. He'd have had to be crazy — to come into Harlem,
bein' white, in 1955, and hung around there for a
week? No way. I was there for a week and was scared to
death, and I was black. Because I wasn't from around
there, man, you know? And if you don't walk like them dudes in New
York, they know you a stranger right quick, see, and they look at
you funny. So I know doggone well that Elvis wasn't there for a
week.
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One white act that did see a lot of you — because
you toured together — was the Everly Brothers. Phill Everly
once told me that of all the original rockers, you were the most
amazing live performer.
Those are my buddies, man — the Everlys, Frankie Avalon,
Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vee, Freddy Cannon....
All the white teen idols? That's strange.
Well, we just spoke the same language. Even Jerry Lee Lewis. And
Bobby Rydell, all of them, yeah. Fabian [laughs] —
that's my pardner.
Fabian?
Yeah, [sings] "I'm a tiger....[laughs].
In the fall of 1963, you toured Britain with the Everly
Brothers on a bill that also featured the Rolling Stones, making
their first tour of their homeland. What were they like
then?
They were good people. They treated me like a king. Good people. I
never will forget that.
Was their music at the time pretty close to what you
were doing?
No, no, no, no. They were playin' like Muddy Waters then. They
played so good that I thought it was Muddy. They was not
doin' anything like BoDiddley at all. That didn't come till later,
after I went over there, and they found out what I was
don't and decided to copy it. I think they did "A Hard Day's
Night"...no, wait a minute — that was the Beatles.
Ever meet them?
No. I never really wanted to, because I never understood what the
hell they was doin'. They had music that you couldn't really dance
to. I still ain't figured out what it is. They just caught the
fancy of a generation. It was almost like me, but I was ten years a
head of myself, you know? I had to back up, slow down and then come
back around.
Your music has certainly been influential. It was even
featured on the soundtrack of Ralph Bakshi's 1971 animated film
Fritz the Cat.
I had nothing to do with that, never seen no money from that. I
freaked out when I heard it. I was in the theater, settin' up there
lookin' at it, and all of a sudden — ching-a-ching-ching,
a-ching-ching. I said, "Wha'? That's me." [According to one of
the film's producers, all music rights were duly contracted for at
the time.]
You were also featured in a somewhat classic 1966
concert documentary, The Big TNT Show, along with such pop acts as
the Byrds, the Ronettes and the Lovin' Spoonful.
Yeah, that's another rip-off. I don't even remember how much they
gave us to do that thing. It's just rip-off, rip-off, you know?
Look at this album I ran into. [He pulls out a reissue EP featuring
old Bo Diddley and Billy Boy Arnold tracks on the British Red
Lightnin label — titled, ironically, It's Great to Be
Rich.] Now, who had the nerve to do this? I ain't never seen a
fuckin' dime from it. [Peter Shertser, head of Red Lightnin, says
the tape of Bo's performance was legitimately acquired; that the
records has sold minimally to date; but that when royalties do
accure, they will be paid.]... See, my fans think they been buyin'
a product from Bo Diddley; they don't know I ain't got a dime of
that money. I have so many copies and bootlegs out on me. I thought
bootleggers were supposed to go to jail, but they don't. But if I
did something wrong, like a traffic ticket, there'd be twenty cops
at my door tryin' to lock me up. I'm terrified, man, about what
happens to you when you work your ass off to try to become
somebody, and you got a son of a bitch sittin' around the corner
rippin' you off.
What do you think should be done?
I feel there should be a special court that knows about the music
business, a special judge that nobody can buy and lawyers that
watch other lawyers and make sure the shit come out right, you
understand? Because I feel I deserve that. But there's one bad law
in this country — the statute of limitations. That's a
damaging thing to a cat like me, or the Coasters or anybody else.
These cats all know they been ripped, but they can't get no lawyer,
because they ain't got no money to hire one. I ain't got no
$10,000, $20,000, to cough up to a lawyer, or $5000 to give him as
a retainer. I ain't even got no parts of it, you dig, to
give him to go to bat for me and start searchin' for stuff. And
then, ten days later, he needs another $5000. I don't have
this. So in the meantime, statute of limitations is creepin' up on
my booty, you understand? And before you know anything, seven years
is there, and you still ain't got no money. So
you in a trick bag — you just fartin' in the wind. And
they know — when Chess Records decided not to pay me
and a lot of other artists, they knew what they were doing'. If you
ain't got no money, you can't fight them.
But I'm goin' to court If I don't go, my kids are goin'. Because, see, the money belongs to them. They have been deprived of college, when I made enough money that they could've went, you understand? And I got grandkids now that needs to get ready to go to college. Maybe the kids didn't make it, but maybe I can get the grandkids through, you dig?
See, I'm tired of havin' a big name and nothin' to go along with it. I am a monument without a pedestal to sit on; a millionaire without a dime. I'm fifty-eight years old. I might die. I want what was due to me thirty years ago — and I want the interest off it. I done waited half my motherfuckin' life, you understand? Ain't no more dummies, man. I used to be scared, but I ain't scared anymore.
Bo, if someone from Mars came down to Earth and wanted
to know what rock & roll was, how would you define
it?
What did you say?
If someone from Mars wanted to know what rock & roll
was, what would you tell them?
That's what I thought you said.
What I mean is, What is rock & roll in your
opinion?
It's music, baby. Happy music. And classical music is music-music.
In other words, classical music is the stuff by cats that have
deceased, but their music lives on. Rock & roll is the other
range, the other step. And I feel like my music will live on after
I decease, too. But wait a minute — I ain't plannin' on goin'
nowhere too soon, you dig? 'Cause I'm feelin' like the
Rock of Gibraltar, brother.
[From Issue 493 — February 12, 1987]