I remember it was 1987 when my college roommate asked me straight out: "Why do you like Bo Diddley so much?" We had just smoked a few bongloads and we were engaged in one of our weekly "CD Duels," in which we would square off with five of our recent favorite albums each, playing them in entirety, back-and-forth. My roomie, God Bless Him, kept choosing records that sounded great when you were stoned: XTC's Skylarking, Peter Tosh's Legalise It, The Beatles' Revolver. I, like an idiot, actually choose records I liked regardless of one's mental state. One of them was the Original Chess Masters Twofer of Bo Diddley and Go Bo Diddley. At about thirty seconds into the first track, "Bo Diddley," my roomie looked seriously annoyed at the muffled analog recordings that -- like most of early rock 'n' roll -- sounded like it was recorded in a basement Men's Room.
"There's a whole lotta dead copycats..."
Which is why I loved it. The echo-chamber muzz. The distorted vocals and woozy tremolo. The slashing percussive guitars. The hambone beat. The weirdness. (Album titles: Bo Diddley's a Twister, Surfin' with Bo Diddley.) I loved Bo Diddley because he reminded me of Howlin' Wolf: a true primal eccentric with a strange, private sense of humor and a bawdy twinkle in his eye. His music came out in the 1950s and yet sounds so unlike anything that came out of that period. It didn't sound like Elvis or Jerry Lee or even Mr. Berry. It sounded like Africa. It was music that acted as if the stylistic gentrification represented by Elvis never happened. And who else played electric violin on his records? Who else kept Jerome Green employed for so long? Who else used his half-sister "The Duchess" as a second guitarist? Who else went after Ed Sullivan like a scrappy Chicago street fighter?
"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."
This quote was one of many from a memorable 1987 interview in Rolling Stone (conducted by, er, Kurt Loder), where Bo Diddley sort of became the poster dude for bitter rock legends who got screwed out of royalties as well as respect from those who came after:
"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."
The whole interview reads like an acrimonious meeting between B-Diddley and his financial planner. But it was one of the first pieces I've read that tried to disentangle the claims about the early days of rock and roll and the terrible price played by young black musicians at the hands of savvy record execs. "If the musical copyright laws of the United States more accurately reflected the way American vernacular music is created and disseminated, Bo Diddley would be a wealthy man," critic Robert Palmer wrote in his classic essay that accompanied Bo Diddley: The Chess Box.
But hey, it was always about the music, wasn't it?
HEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BO DIDDLEY!
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BO DIDDLEY!
HEYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY BO DIDDLEY!
OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH BO DIDDLEY!
And last but not least: the great vibraphonist Walt Dickerson, 1928-2008.
Rest In Tempo.
