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Features Bo Diddley Tribute Tuesday, June 03, 2008 Brian Wise spoke to Bo Diddley, in what must have been one of Bo's last interviews, prior to last year's East Coast Blues Festival. We pay tribute by reprinting the feature story. You can also listen to the interview.
What Can A Poor Bo Do?
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW AND HEAR SOME OF BO'S MUSIC AT ROOCAST.
Bo Diddley sure enough made the big time
But Bo never saw a solitary dime.
You might laugh but it just ain’t funny
Whatever happened to Bo Diddley’s money?
- Gary Nicholson/Wally Wilson
Not long after I start talking with Bo Diddley I have the eerie feeling that I am in a version of one of my favourite films. It’s The Big Lebowski – you know, the one in which Jeff Bridges plays The Dude and John Goodman is his Vietnam veteran buddy Walter who cannot stop talking about ‘Nam.
In fact, everything in Walter’s life relates back to Vietnam, much to the chagrin of those around him. He even sees a foot over the line in a bowling alley as a threat to Western civilization and promptly pulls a gun and threatens the offender.
In this version, I am The Dude and Bo Diddley is Walter. But Bo has a fixation with money rather than Vietnam. So no matter how hard I try to steer the interview back to his music career, no matter how many compliments I pay him about his influence on rock ‘n’ roll, it all comes back to the fact that Bo has not been paid!
I even become afraid to ask him about the weather in his hometown near Gainesville, Florida, or raise other niceties for fear they might uncover some more sinister gripes. Like Walter, he might turn to his pet subject and there goes our interview.
As it is, we spend barely ten minutes on the phone and most of that is taken up talking about money. (He should try running a music magazine sometime!)
Just like that famous shuffling beat, there is the incessant rhythm of Bo’s complaint and I cannot get out of my head the Gary Nicholson song ‘Pay Bo Diddley’ – performed superbly by Mike Henderson and even better by David Lindley – which reverberates throughout our telephone conversation.
I can’t say that Bo Diddley is an angry man but I can say that he is man who has been done wrong. By the end of our conversation I am even more incensed than he is. He is the musical equivalent of the poor sap who sold his computer operating system to Bill Gates for fifty grand back in the ‘70s.
So, Bo signed away his publishing rights in some shonky deal fifty years ago but surely the man who invented that shuffling beat should be a multi-millionaire? ‘Pay Bo Diddley!’ I say.
“I’m a multi millionaire in my heart!” says Bo. “I treat people like the millionaires would do… with a good heart, kindness. That’s why I’m a millionaire!”
“Unfortunately,” I interject, “being a millionaire in your heart doesn’t pay the rent, does it?”
“No! Hell no!” agrees Mr Diddley.
What can you say about a music industry that would let a legend reach the age of 80 and yet never let him see a royalty cheque? What about all those cover versions of his songs?
“I didn’t get the music man,” he claims, “it went somewhere else and I didn’t get the royalties. It went somewhere else. It vanished. We ran into something here called statute of limitations.”
So he hadn’t he been able to do anything about it?
“Oh, you can’t,” says Bo, “you can’t do anything when you run into that crap in a court room. You have already man, you don’t forget it. You’re just paying a lawyer for what? Talking to you?”
“Might say I was stupid,” he adds, “but hey, when you’ve got managers back there looking after you, not doing the right thing and the record company’s telling you ‘Oh, we’re 45 days behind!’ and all that kind of stuff… and we weren’t making any money after the crap anyway – just two, three cents a song, a record. That was ridiculous!”  You might be forgiven for thinking that Bo Diddley has become the archetypal grumpy old man – and he has gone through some hard times personally and health wise in the past ten years – but there is more than enough evidence to support what he says.
In fact, I have been in the presence of at least one senior record company executive on an un-named continent who told me that he thought the fact that so many black artists lost their royalties or signed them away was their own fault. (I prefer not to name him in case he finds me and beats me up!) It still makes me feel sick to think that the exec is no doubt living in luxury while many of the artists he ripped off are probably living in poverty.
My grasp of the law may be a little tenuous (although I did once successfully get a ridiculous traffic fine on my motorcycle overturned), but it seems to me that Mr Diddley needs a goddam new lawyer, even a team of lawyers – some mean sons-of-bitches (as they say in the US) who can get him every last penny he says he deserves.
Maybe he also needs someone like John Lee Hooker’s manager who doggedly tracked down publishing royalties and enabled the great man to spend his declining years in comfort. Because it is sad to hear someone so legendary feel so bad.
And make no mistake, Bo Diddley is legendary. His self-titled debut single in 1955, ‘Bo Diddley,’ introduced a new beat into rock ‘n’ roll. First, Elvis copied it, then Buddy Holly on ‘Not Fade Away,’ then a whole generation of R&B groups in England brought the beat back to the States – The Rolling Stones (‘I Need You Baby (Mona)’), The Animals (‘The Story Of Bo Diddley’), The Yardbirds, The Kinks, The Who (‘I’m a Man’).
Then American groups such as The Doors (‘Who Do You Love’) and Creedence Clearwater (‘Before You Accuse Me’) adopted that incredibly distinctive beat that was like Bo Diddley’s heartbeat, thumping away for more than half a century, making plenty of money for other people.
Later, The Clash would even invite Bo to open their 1979 US tour and George Thorogood has based an entire career on emulating Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker. Even the Jesus & Mary Chain covered ‘Who Do You Love’!
More than fifty years after that first recording Bo Diddley is still touring. Nearing the age of 80 he has 25 gigs lined up across the globe between now and June.
“I enjoy it, you know,” says when I ask him about touring. “It’s nothing that is stressful to me, I enjoy doing what I do.” 
Bo Diddley was born Ellas Bates in December 1928, the only child of Ethel Wilson and Eugene Bates. He had three half -brothers and one half-sister and he was adopted by his mother’s cousin, Miss Gussie McDaniel who moved the family to Chicago in the mid-‘30s.
Young Bo studied violin until his halfsister Lucille bought him his first guitar for Christmas in 1940. Soon afterwards he became Bo Diddley, the nickname friends at the Foster Vocational High School gave him. After school he formed his first group, The Hipsters and Jerome Green joined him in 1950. Bo’s beat, was born because he claimed he played his guitar like a drum and Green was to give it that distinctive sound with the maracas. Later, Billy Boy Arnold, and his harmonica augmented the sound.
In 1955 Diddley recorded two tracks, ‘Uncle John’ (later to become ‘Bo Diddley’) and ‘I’m A Man,’ which ended up with Chess Records and the rest is history. Bo Diddley’s version of ‘Who Do You Love’ was the template for literally hundreds of cover versions.
Bo Diddley recorded for Chess in Chicago when the label had people like Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Chuck Berry. It was an amazingly fertile time for the blues but Bo is reluctant to talk about his memories.
“Well, I won’t discuss that with you,” he says. “You know, you say something, you slander them or something and I’ll be up in another courtroom, I’m not interested.”
“It’s all right though man,” he quickly adds. “I’m not hungry!”
His recording career faltered after the ‘70s and after a lengthy gap Bo Diddley finally released A Man Amongst Men in 1996 featuring Richie Sambora, Jimmy Vaughan, Ronnie Wood, Keith Richards, Billy Boy Arnold, Johnny Guitar Watson, and the Shirelles.
It amazes me that someone hasn’t got Bo back into a studio to record a new album. You would think producers would be falling over themselves to get some more of that beat. Not only that, it would hardly be difficult to find a few dozen high profile guests to help Bo out.
“Well, I don’t really want to go into the studio with people not paying me,” says Bo. “I did 52 years and I ain’t never seen – this is a bad thing to say – but I ain’t never seen a royalty check.
“You know, I was always thinking somebody’s going to do the right thing you know and it just doesn’t happen. A lot of people got ripped off like I did!”
The latest Bo Diddley releases include another two-CD compilation of Chess material and the Raven anthology Tales From the Funk Dimension, released several years ago. (And by the way, I am positive that Raven would have paid royalties – to someone).
“Never heard of it,” says Bo when I mention the title. “See a lot of times they just took songs and I never knew they mixed them up and put them out there. I don’t know what the heck they’re talking about. Friends say ‘Oh we got the record at home!’ and I say ‘Oh you have? What is it? Where did it come from?’”
“Who do you get mad with? You can’t find anybody!” retorts Bo when I ask him if the whole situation makes him angry.
“I don’t want to get mad, I want some money!”
When I mention that there is some consolation in the fact that so many of his great songs live on Bo is sceptical. I don’t seem to be cheering him up much.
“Yeah, I don’t even sing them any more. I just sing a few and that’s it,” he says. “The bands that I’m using don’t have a clue what they are. Things have changed so much they can’t comprehend the rhythms, the beats all that kind of stuff. So I just pick out a few that I know that they’ve been listening to that other groups covered. That’s the things I do, like ‘Roadrunner,’ ‘Bo Diddley,’ ‘Hey Bo Diddley,’ ‘I’m a Man,’ ‘Can’t Judge a Book By Its Cover,’ - you know, stuff like that.”
Bo uses the Debbie Hastings Band as his backing group and he is even thinking of adding a little sketch comedy to the show.
“Yeah, I’m putting that back,” he says when I ask about the addition to the show. “I’m training a girl now to go and do some comedy with me and I’m putting that back in my music. Because that’s me, because I will do lots to give the people a little more music and lyrics and stuff like that. You learn how to work an audience that way.”
Despite the fact that Bo Diddley might have been short-changed somewhat, there have been constant tributes to his work. He was an early entrant into the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall Of Fame and just last year the BBC ran a series on radio as a tribute to his life and music.
“But I still say that doesn’t pay the bills,” he grumbles. (I am getting the distinct impression that he is a little hard to please and almost impossible to flatter).
“That don’t pay the bills but I’m okay,” he continues. “But that part of the business is really weird, you know. You got people that with a pencil they steal! A guy with a pencil is worse than one with a machine
gun!”
Bo has to cut our conversation short by explaining that he has a sore throat but he is really looking forward to getting back to Australia. I tell him that it will be great to see him back here.
“Ok baby, tell everybody that…” he whispers as he disappears.
I have one thing to add: Please, somebody, pay Bo Diddley!
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