"All that is old and already formed can continue to live only if it allows within itself the conditions of a new beginning."
Bo Diddley: Breaking Through the B.S.
Posted 1:15 p.m., June 9, 2008
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Kevblog Note: Bo Diddley, who died June 2 at age 79, was the subject of one of my favorite interviews, conducted in Solana Beach, Calif., during the summer of 1989 when I was a struggling young journalist (as opposed to the struggling middle-aged journalist that I proudly regard myself as today).
At the time Bo was 60, and was coming off a major star turn in Nike's Bo Knows ..." commercial--still considered the greatest sports ad ever aired. He tried to capitalize on his raised profile by releasing an LP of new songs, titled "Breaking Through the B.S."
The story I was told at the time is that staffers at indie label Triple X Records (home of Mojo Nixon and Skid Roper and an early incarnation of Jane's Addiction) spotted Bo on a steet corner in Hollywood, waiting for a bus. They asked him if he had a recording contract--he didn't--so the worshipful upstarts dragged him upstairs to their offices and signed him up.
Triple X was optimistic and accommodating, and its principals treated Bo like the king he was, but in the end the deal didn't work out. The resulting album, which sported possibly the most amateurish cover art ever consented to by a major recording artist, produced no hits and never came close to charting. Unlike Johnny Cash or Bob Dylan, Bo never enjoyed his desired sunset comeback.
The article that follows, an interview and review of his then-new album written on June 29, 1989, did nothing to help Diddley's cause. Though it was commissioned by the San Diego Tribune newspaper, it was never published. (Instead, a Tribune staff critic soon published a Bo Diddley story under his own byline, which had, shall we say, a passing resemblence to this one.)
It wasn't as though the Tribune didn't have reasons aplenty to reject this piece. It is not my best work. I was a 24-year-old kid, hardly at the peak of my skills. The lead is embarrassingly trite, the "funky Uncle Remus" reference. naively chosen, was questionable then and would be unthinkable today.
What I remember most about that night is those thick glasses that cartoonishly magnified his eyeballs to double their circumference. I remember the familiar black cowboy hat with the gaudy silver phoenix, the outlaw mustache, and the intensity of the man. I remember, too, that my girlfriend at the time excitedly pointed out as we drove home that while I was speaking to Bo, SoCal rock gods Dave Alvin (The Blasters) and John Doe (X) were sitting nearby, waiting for us to finish. I didn't even notice them.
Bo commanded my full attention. He was on a mission--he wanted to rid the United States of the scourge of drugs if he had to do it solo. He had little patience for talking about anything else that night, no matter how much I steered him back to the music. He was thinking at the time of running for sheriff in his local county in Florida. I don't know if that ever happened.
Finally, I remember that he put on one hell of a show that night at the Belly Up.
So here, for the first time in print, is my review of Bo Diddley's 1989 opus, "Breaking Through the B.S.," peppered with a few quotes from the great man himself. I wish I had preserved my notes of the interview to perhaps append some additional quotes to the end of the piece, but those pages were long ago scattered on the Lost Highway.
SAN DIEGO, July 29, 1989 -- Most budding rockers wouldn’t know diddley had it not been for Ellas McDaniel, an obscure 27-year-old Chicago bluesman born in McComb, Miss., who found fame, if not fortune, in a square red guitar, a freaky jungle beat and a crude song that bore his adopted name and sealed his legend. A song called “Bo Diddley.”
That was 1955. Now, after five years without a recording contract and decades without an American audience, Bo Diddley is back with an album laconically titled "Breaking Through the B.S."
There was always something a little odd about Bo Diddley, maybe something a little crazy. It was in the way he held that weird spacecraft of a guitar, making strange new screeching and roaring noises emit from it like it was some undiscovered primordial beast only he could contain. It was in those wild plaid suits, in songs that were at once funny and vaguely dangerous, even brutal. Bo Diddley was truly a street poet, rock’s funky Uncle Remus. A genuine "voodoo chile."
His best songs, ("Who Do You Love," "Bo Diddley," "I'm a Man," "Crackin' Up,") always set to the throb and rattlesnake shake of his infectious shave-an-a-haircut-two-bits beat, were part comic book mythology and part street hustle. Only Chuck Berry did more to fuse rock'n'roll with rhythm and blues. Hardly anybody has had more songs covered by other artists--his influence was pivotal to almost everybody who followed; Buddy Holly, the Kinks, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix and U2 included.
But nobody every played "jungle music" like Bo Diddley. Still don't.
"I just started doing things the other guys were scared to do," he said after a recent Belly Up Tavern gig in Solana Beach, Calif. It was barnburner of a show, held the same day that he and blues legend Willie Dixon (bass player on countless early Diddley tracks) were placed on Hollywood's Rock Walk of Fame.
If nothing on "Breaking Through the B.S." is quite as convincing as his live performance or such seminal albums as "In the Spotlight" or "Have Guitar, Will Travel," and if much of the new album has a slightly homemade feel (it was recorded in Diddley's Florida home studio), there is still plenty of the adventurism that has always permeated his music.
Herein, Bo tackles rap, Prince-fueled funk, soul ballads and his patented rockers with equal abandon, a fact partially attributable to his collaboration on several cuts with his young protégé Scott Free, who also co-produced the new album with Diddley.
"I am a dude who likes to experiment, to find something new in my music," Diddley said. "There is only one Muddy Waters, one Bo Diddley, one Chuck Berry, one Elvis Presley. Let them have their own styles. Ain't nobody else going to have their styles anyway. So I do what I do."
"Breaking Through" shows that Bo has more than loving, gun-slinging or road-running on his mind these days, as angry titles like "Down With the Pusher," and "Wake Up, America" attest. Diddley, exposed to the problems of drugs and crime as sheriff of Los Lunas, New Mexico in the late Seventies, said he nearly lost his daughters to drug abuse, a fact that still has him enraged. Rarely has he dealt as directly with topical subjects such as racism, drugs and poverty in song as he does here.
"It's the only way I can get this message across," said Diddley. "America needs to wake up."
The record is Diddley's first since the 1983 Europe-only release "Ain't it Good to be Free." He said he is satisfied with the new album, both musical and lyrically, saying he intentionally worked the songs to appeal to a mass audience.
"It'll meet everybody," Diddley promised. "Any one of these songs could be a big record."
Well, maybe. Though containing some remarkable moments, "Breaking Through the B.S." remains an uneven affair.
Beginning with the psychedelic collage of "Turbo Diddle," side one is a musical imbroglio. Ranging from an amusing Prince send up, "Bo Pop Shuffle," ("I can shake your whole body body, baby, just like an aftershock") to a stinging rapper ("Down with the Pusher"), to a positively antiquated Diddley-as-Berry-White track called "Slipped-n-Fell-n-Love," its eclecticism is nearly too confusing, obscuring the album's best moments. As the side draws to a close, the disco blunder of "You Tricked Me" nearly blows the whole project.
Side Two saves it. Only "Wake Up, America" disappoints; the instrumentation is flaccid and Bo's croon is languid and tired, despite the inspirational message of the lyrics. With that out of the way, though, Bo lays back and plays what he knows best.
"Jeanette, Jeanette," though little more than a remake of Little Richard's "Jenny, Jenny," is redeemed by its unabashed rocking. "I Broke the Chains" is a groovy blues, a la Slim Harpo, while "R.U. Serious" (did someone say Prince?), is the most solid recording here, a walking blues going 70 mph. Exciting stuff.
The record culminates in the swaggering guitar dogfight "Jus' Like Bo Diddley," which shows the Bo-dacious Diddley in prime form, cool-eyed and leering, bragging and confident. A classic Diddley yarn.
Not perfect, but a fine return. If Bo's willingness to risk occasionally throws him on his face, at least there's no need to accept "Breaking Through the B.S." apologetically, as we did the Traveling Wilburys. Music like Bo's doesn't get old or outdated. As Mick Jagger once mused, it just gets gooder.
"Breaking Through the B.S.," recorded for Triple X Records complete with extended cuts for cassette and CD, is due in stores by the end of July.
Copyright 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 -- Kevin Featherly