Fact #160296
When:
Short story:
Bo Diddley and The Associates are both interviewed by Johnny Black in London, England, UK, Europe.
Full article:
OLD ENOUGH TO REPAY, YOUNG ENOUGH TO SELL
Johnny Black interviews Bo Diddley and The Associates.
Now there was a funny day - Friday March 5, 1982. At two o'clock I was chatting to Bo Diddley, a man who has been paying dues since 1955, and by five o'clock I had travelled a quarter of a century through time and was trading incomprehensible wisecracks with The Associates, who are about to start learning how to pay dues.
There are a number of essential difference between Bo Diddley and The Associates. For starters, they know who he is, but he's never heard of them. They're white and he's black. He has influenced a thousand imitators, while they are still the sum of a thousand influences. Maybe strangest of all, they have a Top 20 hit single, while he doesn't even have a record deal.
In 1958, a black American doo-wop group, The Monotones, had a huge hit with Book Of Love, which asked the age-old musical question, 'Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-bomp?'. The answer could well be Bo Diddley, because he had employed exactly that rhythm for his first hit, the modestly titled Bo Diddley! That rhythm, nicknamed the Hambone, became as integral a part of rock as the electric guitar, and was enthusiastically adapted by Buddy Holly for Not Fade A way, while dozens of other groups pounded it out, performing cover versions of Diddley hits like Who Do You Love and Mona.
Sitting in a string vest, with his wife Kay beside him, in a London hotel, Bo Diddley spoke in slow and measured tones of the process by which he has found himself an outsider in the business he helped create, even though he feels his music now is infinitely superior to his early work. "I've been up here 27 years, but the people who run this business don't know I exist any more. They're into disco, punk, heavy rock, anything but rhythm and blues.
“I was an overnight success. I had been playing my songs in Chicago for a number of years, but when I made my first record, it was an immediate hit. My career went up from there until the time when producers started telling me to record other people's songs.
“The worst thing was at RCA, when we recorded my twentieth anniversary album. They hired two New York dudes to play on it, great musicians, people I would be proud to play with on my own terms but the producer, Ron Terry, wouldn't even let me play on my own record. I don't play the kind of music on that record, never did. Then there were staff changes at RCA and the people promoting my record were removed, so it got no attention. Now maybe that was not a bad thing, because it was a terrible record but, on the other hand, word went round that Bo Diddley's Twentieth Anniversary record was a stiff. Now I don't smell too good to some of these new people.
“I'm 53, not 21 no more, so they figure I won't excite nobody, but when I look at my audience, when I talk to them after the shows, they're young kids, not fifty year olds. These kids were not born when I started."
A subsequent charade in which another record company, for which he had just recorded, went bankrupt before his record was released, didn't help his bad reputation. Despite his tales of woe, he and Kay have always been prudent with his earnings from live appearances, so he is more than comfortably off, living on his Florida ranch. "I'm no longer the easiest cat in the world to rip off, and I do see signs that the record business is becoming more legitimate and things are getting better again, but I have no wish to re-record my old hits. I have new songs, I'm writing every day."
He's also diversifying his interests into video, and his own family is providing him with a renewed interest in young music. "My two daughters, Tammi and Terri have formed a group called Offspring, and they'll be touring England later this year." The last time he was in England he made the acquaintance of The Clash, and his attitudes to new music are healthily tolerant. "I think they're too loud, but every generation has its new bag of tricks. People gave me a chance when I started, but now it's time for something new. I'm lucky to still be around and accepted as part of it."
Among the kids who were "not born when I started" are Billy MacKenzie (24) and Alan Rankine (23), collectively known as The Associates. After a string of largely ignored singles, their Party Fears 2 shot them into the charts, and their new album, Sulk, bristles with musical references from opera to Bacharach to Bowie - musical mayhem set in a production junkyard that is to Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound what the Great Wall Of China is to Hadrian's.
Despite the aforementioned obvious differences between this pair and Bo Diddley, there are equally as many parallels. They come from Dundee, Scotland's closest thing to Chicago - a cold, windy, corrupt city. Bo Diddley's great musical love is white country music, theirs is black soul music. Bo Diddley doesn't like the fact that his voice is high-pitched, while Billy MacKenzie feels the same way about his.
Nevertheless, two decades of refinement of rock ideas and ideals lie between their musics and their attitudes. Bo Diddley's deliberation, born of years of experience, has not yet settled on The Associates, who think fast and talk faster, confident in their new-found success, as he must have been at their age. Considered journalistic probings are dealt with mercilessly in a stream-of-conciousness approach to interviews. "We're influenced by television theme songs, Readers Digest boxed sets of Nana Mouskouri, Sparks, The Mamas And The Papas, Burt Bacharach…"
The list goes ever on, in sharp contrast to Diddley who, when asked about his influences, considers first of all that he was entirely self taught, but eventually acknowledges that he had heard things by John Lee Hooker, Louis Jordan, and various friends from the Chicago streets. In his day, music was a personal experience, usually in strictly defined genres. Today, the technology explosion has brought music of increasing diversity from every time period and every corner of the world to the ears of the young. Most music now comes out of wireless loudspeakers, one stage removed from the intimacy of individual live performances.
So there is a certain truth in The Associates' seemingly flippant responses. Even the idea of what constitutes a group has changed since Diddley first took the stage. In his time, he was the mainman around whom revolved a gradually changing unit of musicians. In the sixties, the emergence of The Beatles signalled the arrival of the group seen as a single working unit, irrespective of who might be the creative head. Today, The Associates are expressing a fairly prevalent idea when they say, "There are between two and nine of us, depending on what we want to do. It might be just an acoustic guitar and vocal, or it might be a brass section, back-up vocalists, extra percussion, keyboards." In the studio Alan usually plays all the instruments required, multi-tracking them into a richly textured, dense sound around Billy's vocal interpretations of his own lyrics.
Their level of studio sophistication was undreamed of in the back-room one-track recording days of 1955 Chicago but, while their records lack the immediacy of early rock, they have lost none of the power, as their new single Club Country clearly demonstrates. Asking them to define their musical intentions results in the predictably irreverent, "Light, bumpy, abstract pop."
So far, nobody has knocked the edges off The Associates. They have youth, talent and the beginnings of success. They have not yet been kicked in the eye by the record company. They don't yet know if the royalties will come in. Only time can establish whether they will thrive beyond their wildest dreams, disappear without trace or survive tenaciously like Bo Diddley. Right now, they don't even have a manager.
"I'm not really money-minded," says Billy Mackenzie.
"I'm the nearest thing you'll ever see to a dollar bill," says Bo Diddley.
A chronology of rock from the beginning to the present day might well start with Bo Diddley and end with The Associates, and it is fascinating to see them neatly poised to make all the same mistakes he ever made, all over again. Maybe Elvis Presley had his priorities right when he sang, 'Well, it's one for the money, two for the show' but it did him no good in the long run. But, hey, it's only rock'n'roll.
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Johnny Black interviews Bo Diddley and The Associates.
Now there was a funny day - Friday March 5, 1982. At two o'clock I was chatting to Bo Diddley, a man who has been paying dues since 1955, and by five o'clock I had travelled a quarter of a century through time and was trading incomprehensible wisecracks with The Associates, who are about to start learning how to pay dues.
There are a number of essential difference between Bo Diddley and The Associates. For starters, they know who he is, but he's never heard of them. They're white and he's black. He has influenced a thousand imitators, while they are still the sum of a thousand influences. Maybe strangest of all, they have a Top 20 hit single, while he doesn't even have a record deal.
In 1958, a black American doo-wop group, The Monotones, had a huge hit with Book Of Love, which asked the age-old musical question, 'Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-bomp?'. The answer could well be Bo Diddley, because he had employed exactly that rhythm for his first hit, the modestly titled Bo Diddley! That rhythm, nicknamed the Hambone, became as integral a part of rock as the electric guitar, and was enthusiastically adapted by Buddy Holly for Not Fade A way, while dozens of other groups pounded it out, performing cover versions of Diddley hits like Who Do You Love and Mona.
Sitting in a string vest, with his wife Kay beside him, in a London hotel, Bo Diddley spoke in slow and measured tones of the process by which he has found himself an outsider in the business he helped create, even though he feels his music now is infinitely superior to his early work. "I've been up here 27 years, but the people who run this business don't know I exist any more. They're into disco, punk, heavy rock, anything but rhythm and blues.
“I was an overnight success. I had been playing my songs in Chicago for a number of years, but when I made my first record, it was an immediate hit. My career went up from there until the time when producers started telling me to record other people's songs.
“The worst thing was at RCA, when we recorded my twentieth anniversary album. They hired two New York dudes to play on it, great musicians, people I would be proud to play with on my own terms but the producer, Ron Terry, wouldn't even let me play on my own record. I don't play the kind of music on that record, never did. Then there were staff changes at RCA and the people promoting my record were removed, so it got no attention. Now maybe that was not a bad thing, because it was a terrible record but, on the other hand, word went round that Bo Diddley's Twentieth Anniversary record was a stiff. Now I don't smell too good to some of these new people.
“I'm 53, not 21 no more, so they figure I won't excite nobody, but when I look at my audience, when I talk to them after the shows, they're young kids, not fifty year olds. These kids were not born when I started."
A subsequent charade in which another record company, for which he had just recorded, went bankrupt before his record was released, didn't help his bad reputation. Despite his tales of woe, he and Kay have always been prudent with his earnings from live appearances, so he is more than comfortably off, living on his Florida ranch. "I'm no longer the easiest cat in the world to rip off, and I do see signs that the record business is becoming more legitimate and things are getting better again, but I have no wish to re-record my old hits. I have new songs, I'm writing every day."
He's also diversifying his interests into video, and his own family is providing him with a renewed interest in young music. "My two daughters, Tammi and Terri have formed a group called Offspring, and they'll be touring England later this year." The last time he was in England he made the acquaintance of The Clash, and his attitudes to new music are healthily tolerant. "I think they're too loud, but every generation has its new bag of tricks. People gave me a chance when I started, but now it's time for something new. I'm lucky to still be around and accepted as part of it."
Among the kids who were "not born when I started" are Billy MacKenzie (24) and Alan Rankine (23), collectively known as The Associates. After a string of largely ignored singles, their Party Fears 2 shot them into the charts, and their new album, Sulk, bristles with musical references from opera to Bacharach to Bowie - musical mayhem set in a production junkyard that is to Phil Spector's Wall Of Sound what the Great Wall Of China is to Hadrian's.
Despite the aforementioned obvious differences between this pair and Bo Diddley, there are equally as many parallels. They come from Dundee, Scotland's closest thing to Chicago - a cold, windy, corrupt city. Bo Diddley's great musical love is white country music, theirs is black soul music. Bo Diddley doesn't like the fact that his voice is high-pitched, while Billy MacKenzie feels the same way about his.
Nevertheless, two decades of refinement of rock ideas and ideals lie between their musics and their attitudes. Bo Diddley's deliberation, born of years of experience, has not yet settled on The Associates, who think fast and talk faster, confident in their new-found success, as he must have been at their age. Considered journalistic probings are dealt with mercilessly in a stream-of-conciousness approach to interviews. "We're influenced by television theme songs, Readers Digest boxed sets of Nana Mouskouri, Sparks, The Mamas And The Papas, Burt Bacharach…"
The list goes ever on, in sharp contrast to Diddley who, when asked about his influences, considers first of all that he was entirely self taught, but eventually acknowledges that he had heard things by John Lee Hooker, Louis Jordan, and various friends from the Chicago streets. In his day, music was a personal experience, usually in strictly defined genres. Today, the technology explosion has brought music of increasing diversity from every time period and every corner of the world to the ears of the young. Most music now comes out of wireless loudspeakers, one stage removed from the intimacy of individual live performances.
So there is a certain truth in The Associates' seemingly flippant responses. Even the idea of what constitutes a group has changed since Diddley first took the stage. In his time, he was the mainman around whom revolved a gradually changing unit of musicians. In the sixties, the emergence of The Beatles signalled the arrival of the group seen as a single working unit, irrespective of who might be the creative head. Today, The Associates are expressing a fairly prevalent idea when they say, "There are between two and nine of us, depending on what we want to do. It might be just an acoustic guitar and vocal, or it might be a brass section, back-up vocalists, extra percussion, keyboards." In the studio Alan usually plays all the instruments required, multi-tracking them into a richly textured, dense sound around Billy's vocal interpretations of his own lyrics.
Their level of studio sophistication was undreamed of in the back-room one-track recording days of 1955 Chicago but, while their records lack the immediacy of early rock, they have lost none of the power, as their new single Club Country clearly demonstrates. Asking them to define their musical intentions results in the predictably irreverent, "Light, bumpy, abstract pop."
So far, nobody has knocked the edges off The Associates. They have youth, talent and the beginnings of success. They have not yet been kicked in the eye by the record company. They don't yet know if the royalties will come in. Only time can establish whether they will thrive beyond their wildest dreams, disappear without trace or survive tenaciously like Bo Diddley. Right now, they don't even have a manager.
"I'm not really money-minded," says Billy Mackenzie.
"I'm the nearest thing you'll ever see to a dollar bill," says Bo Diddley.
A chronology of rock from the beginning to the present day might well start with Bo Diddley and end with The Associates, and it is fascinating to see them neatly poised to make all the same mistakes he ever made, all over again. Maybe Elvis Presley had his priorities right when he sang, 'Well, it's one for the money, two for the show' but it did him no good in the long run. But, hey, it's only rock'n'roll.