"It won't take us more than forty minutes to get to my other spread over at Hawthorn--soon as I get the others going," says Bo Diddley as he runs the upright vacuum cleaner smoothly and expertly over the tan carpet.
"We had a party here last night. That's why we're behind this morning!" he yells over the cleaner's whine.
"Bo, I'm beginning to think you have a party here every night," jokes his visitor.
Bo emits a cheerful cackle that offers confirmation as much as denial. "When I see ëem carrying on past ten o'clock, doing the monkeyshine and all that, I head straight for bed! I take care of my fuel pump," he says seriously while patting his heart with a powerful hand.
Though he's good-natured on the surface, there's a bristle, a combative edge, to everything Bo says today. He's already bawled out Jansen, Terri's dark-haired boy, for running around outside barefooted. (Objection: danger of chiggers, and sand tracked into the house). But there seems to be something more significant bothering him than minor infractions such as these. At this point, however, he's not saying.
Having safely stowed the "others"--his fiancÈe Sylvia, and a chirpy, unrelated teenager by the name of Mikey-Dee who calls him "Bo Pop"--Bo pulls his Ford truck out onto the rural highway. The truck is dayglo green, and of the Intimidator type, with a king cab and double sets of wheels at the rear. It takes a while to get used to its roar, caused by lack of a muffler, a condition that Bo finds amusing.
"See, one of my kids or grandkids knocked the muffler off of it. I dunno what the hell they did. I let ëem drive it, and when I came back from overseas, all I get is this roaring sound! See?"
Bo induces a gigantic backfire by applying some fancy footwork to the clutch. A flock of birds in a nearby field whirls into flight. Bo cackles with delight.
"This sucker loves gas stations," Bo quips as he starts picking up speed. Bo is a fast driver. Despite his thick glasses he can see well ahead of him, and he gives a warning honk on the horn to vehicles paused at crossroads along the way. After a brief encounter with the outskirts of the city of Gainesville, Bo points the truck out into open country again, past the multi-colored fields of Daylily Discounters (slogan: "Have a Nice Daylily"), past Jimmy Brown's Lumber Yard ("I spent seventeen hundred dollars on lumber there one day and the truck didn't even sag!"). Hawthorn is not far off now.
Soon Bo eases into a turn at what used to be a regular stopping place, a country store, now just a charred mess. Evidently, neither he nor Sylvia has passed this way since the fire took the store down. "Sylvia, look at that. Henry's done burned down! Well they de-served it. See, God don't like ugly. Those people were prej-u-diced." Bo utters the final word in a tone unusual for him, pure disdain.
Somehow the sight of the charred ruin on the corner serves as a reminder to Bo as to what has been burning within him this day. Suddenly, but quietly, he begins to let go. Yesterday, he tells, he had to go to the court and take legal custody of one of his grandchildren. "The judge asked his mother, ëMiss, are you clean?' ëNo, Judge, I'm dirty,' she said. ëThen I'm awarding custody of the child to you, Mr. McDaniel,' the judge says. She looked as bad as some crazy woman you'd see on some street-corner in the city," says Bo with quiet desperation. "And I ain't lyin'."
Gradually Bo reveals that he has been through all the stages usual for a druggy's parent: an initial sense of disbelief, followed by a form of grieving, then a period of co-dependency. "I used to give her money to stop her spreading her legs all over town for drugs," he says. "But I'm through with that now. ëBaby,' I told her, ëyou're in the Lord's hands now.' I've done all I can do for her. I love her, but I could become dumb if I did more."
Bo offers no more details. Silence reigns in the cab of the Intimidator, as he pulls into a country driveway. Bo trundles the truck over a cattle grating, hops out briefly to unfasten a padlocked gate, and then drives slowly under the overhead sign, "MCDANIEL RANCH," with plain letters burned into the wide boards.
"One day I'm gonna write the History of the McDaniels," says Bo with a soft laugh, his mood picking up appreciably. "It's gonna bite a lotta people!"
Slowly the beauties of the place that Bo and Kay built together, then abandoned in separation, come into view. On the left, pastures of native grasses stretch gently towards a sky-blue lake, clean and sparkling, rimmed by stands of bright green pine and live oak. On the right, a wilder landscape: tangled scrub, and trees fallen in criss-cross fashion, with vines and moss covering them, and within this miniature jungle is a pond, the home of alligators. Then around a curve, one sees the house, a thing of natural elegance, man-made yet on perfect terms with its environment: massive logs hoisted into the shape of a mansion with a gambrel roof and generous porches and dormers all around.
Bo leads the way inside his former home. Although shut down for months, the house enjoys natural air conditioning, a result of the giant, shading oaks towering around it. Everything is spacious. There's an east wing and a west wing, a huge den dominated by a stone fireplace, and french windows in the bedrooms leading onto balconies overlooking the crystal lake. "The panorama from these treetop porches would inspire one to wake up singing," wrote the realtor who eventually handled the property. Certainly no argument there. Inside and out, wood is the theme; wooden beams, wooden ceilings, paneled walls, all natural, or clear-sealed, or cunningly scorched by Bo with an acetylene torch ("The insurance underwriter would've had a fit!").
Bo and Kay first arrived at Cedar Lake, as the spread was once known, in 1978, finding to their satisfaction that everything was pretty much as Marty Otelsberg had described it to them. There were barns and paddocks already in existence, so the horses' needs were taken care of immediately. Not that the trip across country had been easy for the animals. What had happened was that Kay and the girls and a few hired hands had set out from Los Lunas at about 2:00 a.m., travelling east in a convoy towards El Paso, Texas, where the girls would have one last stab at a western rodeo competition. Just before dawn, they hit trouble. Listening to Tammi Deanne McDaniel tell the story in her bright, effervescent manner, one imagines the accident near El Paso could have been much worse.
"I was asleep in the car following the horse-trailer, and I woke up and said, ëMom, the trailer doesn't look right,' and she said, ëOh girl, go back to sleep.' I fell asleep again, and the next thing I hear is, ëTammi, Tammi, wake up!' I look up and see the trailer had jack-knifed. My $17,000 horses are in it, and it had fallen into the ditch on this hill! One horse was on top of another horse, and we couldn't get them out because they were over a drain and they'd twist and break their ankles. So we had to put boards over the drain, rope the horses' legs, and drag them out with the station wagon. They were pretty cut up but they survived. We survived."
Despite this setback, Kay, Terri, and Tammi eventually met Bo at the lake. For a while they all lived in Kay's new motor home, a Chrysler "Kings Highway," given her by her mother when Bo had made his debut in Las Vegas with Sarah Vaughan a few years earlier. But the traffic of four pairs of feet was a bit too much for this deluxe vehicle, so the girls were relocated to a trailer home that the previous owner had left behind. The trailer had phone service, the only service to the property for a while, and that suited the girls just fine.
The accident to the horses, however, was but the first of a string of misfortunes that hit Bo and company when they first arrived in Florida. "It would have been better if Mom and Dad had waited a year longer before moving to Florida," asserts Terri Lynne McDaniel, the elder of Bo and Kay's daughters, "because a lot of horrible things happened when we got here. The first thing was that my grandmother died, my Mom's mom. Then I got into a bad car accident. Then after that came Tammi's siege!"
"Yeah, we almost lost Terri that night," says Bo grimly, recalling Terri's accident. That night was April 12, 1979. Terri was on Highway 20, heading to Gainesville for what she describes as "a hot date." Earlier in the day Tammi had had one of her "premonitions" and pleaded with her sister not to go out, but Terri went anyway. Then later Tammi, driving the same route, came across the accident scene. There had been a head-on collision; a blanket covered one victim, while another badly injured individual was being lifted into the ambulance, unconscious but still alive. That was Terri. Tammi sat with Terri on the way to the hospital. Couldn't they drive any faster, she asked the medic frantically. "Her neck may be broken; if we hit a bump, it could kill her. And don't call her name, she might try to raise her head, and that could kill her too."
Though Terri's injuries were serious (the other vehicle was determined to have been "negligently operated," and Terri received a substantial settlement in a resulting lawsuit), they were not as bad as feared by the emergency team, and she regained consciousness in the hospital a few hours later.
When she came to, the first thing she heard was the refrain of her father's "Who Do You Love." Was her Dad in her room playing the guitar? It didn't seem possible, but sure enough that was his music. "I was disoriented," she says, "but I was sure my Dad was there. Then I looked up and looked around the room, and saw the TV, and saw it wasn't my Dad! It was George Thorogood playing one of my Dad's tunes on ëSaturday Night Live'! And that was the first time I'd even heard of George. I've been a fan of his ever since! If the man can wake me up out of a near coma and make me think he's my father, he deserves something!"
Terri had only just recovered from her accident when another dose of daughter trauma came Bo and Kay's way. This time it concerned Tammi, who became the subject of a hostage drama in Gainesville.
"That was straight out of a horror movie, man," says Bo with a shudder. "Now it was Tammi who almost lost her life!
"She was staying with Rodney, her boyfriend, at his apartment in town. And some dude broke in lookin' to rob the place. He shot Rodney point-blank, and held the gun on Tammi for two hours. Then she broke and ran and jumped through the window into the backyard. This cat was crawling around, tryin' to find her, and this little old dog kept giving her away. He'd left Rodney for dead, and he wanted to do the same to Tammi, that was clear. He didn't want no witnesses, see. But the cops eventually cornered him.
"Somebody called the house. And we rushed into town, and got down there and found the police all around, and we got ahold of Tammi and the girl was a nervous wreck, y'understand. She was shaking like a leaf on a tree, I mean, totally freakin' out, and I could imagine what something like that feels like.
"I was flippin, too! Yeah, I wanted the dude, I wanted him bad. When they took him past me, they had to restrain me, four of ëem, because that was my daughter he done that to. I didn't want to kill him, but I wanted to hurt him, and let him know that he's not gonna get off without something happening to him. I wanted to put his lights out!
"Those were two terrible episodes. I think my two girls--these two--lived just a little bit too sure of themselves. And they always said to me, ëDaddy, you're too protective.' I said, ëWell, I can't be too protective, not these days. I'm just tryin' to tell you there's a hole up ahead in the street before you run up there and jump in it!' And one of ëem will say, ëBut I'm grown.' And I say, ëYeah, but I can't stop being a father. I'll still be worrying about you, even when you ain't living under my roof.' You pick up the phone and hear, just once, ëMr. McDaniel, will you come down to the hospital, or such and such,' and you go, ëOh my God,' and you're never the same after you get a call like that, man! Everytime the phone rings you think something's gone haywire somewhere.
"My older kids, Tanya and Anthony, I'm having a mess out of them I don't understand. I think there's a lot of jealousy between my two families, and I don't understand how or why. And that leads me to say, ëIf you can't get along as brothers and sisters, how can you expect to be responsible in other things?' Tanya has stood up on her own feet a long time--raised four kids--and I'm very proud of her for that. My son, I love him too. He don't think I care about him, but I do. Whatever he wants to do, I'll help him, but I'm tired of putting stuff there for him to pick up, and he looks at it, kicks it and walks off, y'know."
The idea of building a log home on the Hawthorn spread came primarily from Kay. She and Bo had seen an impressive example of this art back in New Mexico, near Gallup, and Kay began pressing the idea.
"I figured this was something Bo could get into, working with his hands and everything. And it was. We had a great relationship while it was being built."
"I wasn't sold on it at first," observes Bo. "It took Kay two years to convince me it was okay. I had the idea to build it myself, but when they came with the logs, I saw the size of ëem, and that's when I backed off!"
"We had workmen from Maine put the logs up," says Kay, "then we had a local contractor do all the finish work, which was considerable. But Bo pitched in from time to time.
"I knew exactly what it was going to look like; it was all in my head. I had a storage room made where Bo and I could do pottery and stuff, and I made the walk-out balcony from the master bedroom--that's my old Southern tradition!-- and I enlarged the dormers in the girls' rooms. None of this was on the original plans.
"But see, I had another thing in mind: I intended to grow old with Bo Diddley, and I thought that if we ever got in a position where we needed help in our old age, and the girls were gone, then it could be a duplex with everything separate. I was looking very far ahead. Maybe too far."
Anyone associated with Bo and Kay refers to the mansion as "Kay's Dream," and indeed it stands today as a quiet testament to her determination, no less than to her conceptual skill.
As the house was being built, the McDaniels were blessed with a period of comparative calm, when everyone was looking to the future, to the completion of tasks well done. The girls, to their considerable credit, had stopped a race riot at the high school. They simply refused to take sides. Instead, they had walked out between the lines of the warring factions, after which the momentum for conflict had gone. At their new home, they still worked with the horses, but it was more like dabbling than anything else, a pastime rather than a passion. Their interests had turned to music, and Bo was spurred to turn one of the barns into a studio for his and their work.
Bo himself was home a lot more than was good for a top-name rock and roller. He had slipped into one of those bad patches when things seemed to be on hold for a while. He had seen it with the British Invasion, he had seen it with the Soul Solution, he had seen it with Acid Rock, and he was seeing it again with the advent of Disco. To him, it was yet another storm to be ridden out.
True, some while before, there had been his U.S. tour as "guest star" with The Clash, Britain's wildly popular punk threesome, but the modest performance fee he earned on that occasion could hardly be expected to last for ever, and telling reporters that he thought The Clash played "too loud" didn't help matters much either, even though Paul Simon another man of rhythm, seemed to agree with Bo. Seen leaving the auditorium immediately after Bo's set, when the tour was in Houston, Texas, Simon explained, "I came to hear Bo Diddley, not a bunch of noisy Englishmen."
Nor at this time were record deals exactly pouring into Bo's mailbox. In fact, it might be said that for a period of five or six years after the release of that one and only RCA album, Bo Diddley was quite definitely on the shelf as far as the recording industry was concerned. In 1980, he told Bill Braunstein, then of the Detroit News, "I learned one thing about this industry a long time ago. If I were to change my name tomorrow and I were to start over with a new band, you know what would happen? I'd be an overnight success! But people today try and classify you, try to put you in a category as a has-been, a here-now, a gone. This is one of the things that a cat like me faces at 51 years of age."
This, then, was a period for conserving his following, for concentrating on keeping his name before his public until better times came along. "So I think different," he told Braunstein, "I roll with the punches like when I was fighting. If I fought a dude and he changed his stuff on me in the middle rounds, I had to do something. I had to do something with those punches coming at me. So what do you do? You change your fight plan and fight another way. That's all I'm doing now. I'm remaining with what will be good for me."
"I'm not much in demand," Bo continued, "but I can still play a gig in one place and then go back. I'm lucky. people still recognize me. I stayed a little bit. They say stuff like, ëOh yeah, I remember that dude, I listened to him years ago.'"
Two who had been listening to Bo for years (they could hardly have done otherwise), were his daughters, Terri and Tammi. Young women now, they were coming into their own as musicians. Bo was keen to see them play by ear, believing that his kind of training made for a special type of musician. "I figured lessons would stunt their creativity. See, Terri could read sheet music. She'd play anything you put in front of her, but take away that book and she was lost."
Tammi in particular had always shown early musical promise, and she wasn't bashful ("I was my Dad's go-go dancer when I was five," she says with delight). It came as no surprise to Bo and Kay when she announced to them that while living in Providence, Rhode Island, with her new boyfriend, she had formed her own rock band, Offspring.
Tammi had tried many musical avenues--singing, guitar, flute, keyboards--but her main flair proved to be in drumming. "My Dad always said to me, ëTammi, you're gonna be a drummer!' and that was because when I was very, very little, about five or six, I decided to sit on the drums seat and try and play. Later when I was about nine, my Dad bought me my first professional drum set. "I never had a lesson--my father said it would be better if I played by ear--but my Mom set me up with a teacher. He was a professional musician by the name of Mike Fleming, and he was supposed to teach me. Mike was a real hippy, with long hair and all of it, and my best friend, too. But when it came time for a lesson, he would sit down at my drum set at our house in New Mexico, and he'd shut his eyes and play for three hours, and never even know I was standing there! I would climb out the window and go jump on the trampoline, and listen to him playing drums. So I did learn by ear, and Mike was a great influence, but he never actually gave me lessons!"
In addition to Tammi on drums, Offspring consisted of Terri on keyboards, Scott Deverin Smith on lead guitar, and Ronnie Mack Haughbrook on bass. Scott and Ronnie had each been boyfriends of Tammi, and she had taken them in turn to meet her father. Scott already had a considerable background in music, having worked with Stephanie Mills and Teddy Pendergrass when he came to meet Bo, but he was unprepared for the effect he would feel that night when he and Tammi drove up from Providence to Boston, where Bo was working.
"I was worried about him liking me, because I was dating his daughter. I was in awe because he was so huge, and I was a skinny guy. But then he turned to me and said, ëShe's my daughter, but she's your woman, now!' And he gave me a ring--this big, ominous ring with a fake diamond in it, like the ones he wore, only the diamonds in his were real.
"Then before the show, Bo took Tammi and me to dinner, and while we were eating this cab caught fire outside the restaurant. Went right up in flames, and it was like a signal or something, because when the show began his playing amazed me. He was everywhere: covered every style, every tone, every chord, you ever heard in rock and roll.
"When I first heard Bo play drums, it gave me chills. From that moment on he was my musical father. And working with him for almost ten years now, he has taught me how to love my own father. My Dad has a lot going for him: he was the first black man elected to the Connecticut Assembly, but we never hugged or were warm to one another. But that has changed now, and that's because of Bo.
"I fell in love with what Bo was doing. I knew that what I had been listening to, he was there behind it all. I had played with Chic, and Ecstasy, and I was heavily into Parliament Funkedelic at the time, and George Clinton always talked about how hard it was for a black rock band to be played on white stations, and also how hard it was for a black rock band to be played on black stations. Black rockers were in this middle ground where they couldn't fit any radio format. And I recognized straightaway that Bo was in the same position."
Ronnie Haughbrook came to Bo through the same route: with an introduction from Tammi. He had met Tammi at a club called the Brown Derby in Gainesville, but had trouble believing that she was Bo Diddley's daughter. "You mean, the Bo Diddley?" he exclaimed. "There's only one," replied Tammi. So Ronnie, a self-described "country-boy," from Sarasota, Florida, found himself invited out to the ranch for an audition. When he arrived, Tammi wasn't there, and nor was anything else that Ron had expected.
"I anticipated seeing limos parked all over the place, and security gates. But all I found was this country road, and this half-built house! I saw this big guy up on the second floor. He had on old pants, a T-shirt, and old cap, and was all dusty and dirty from workin' on the mansion! I had to climb up this ladder to get to the top floor. All I could think of as I'm standing there looking at him is, ëThis is the legendary Bo Diddley? Whoah, where's all the flash? This guy's down-to-earth, he's country.' He reminded me so much of home. That was the last thing I expected, and I'm standing there as clean as a whistle, all dressed up for the audition!
"Bo said to me, ëI'll come down and talk to you in a second,' and when I shook his hand, I was like the average fan would be, totally mesmerized,. I was there to try out for Tammi's band; I really didn't know Bo's music. But he took me over to the barn that he had as a studio and started to play. When I stood there and first heard him wailing on that guitar, I knew where all the tunes I had ever heard in the past--from Hendrix, from Santana, and everyone--had come from. Everything was in his guitar: lead parts, the bottom, even the drums. I heard him do three or four parts, all the ground, with that one instrument. The simplicity of his playing is very deceptive because it grows into something complex. I was impressed, totally impressed."
Offspring was Tammi's band, but since they were practicing daily in Bo's studio, and bouncing ideas around with him, it wasn't long before Bo himself began taking a keen interest in this budding group. Chiefly, he enjoyed their versatility. He was impressed with Scott Smith's broad knowledge of the latest developments in music, and his quality experience with well-known artists. And he liked the way Ron Haughbrook played bass; he compared it to the thumping and plucking technique that bothers your mind, the percussive type of play associated with great guitarists like Larry Graham of Graham Central Station and John Entwhistle of The Who. If Bo couldn't change his name, as he had joked bitterly with Bill Braunstein, then at least, he thought, he could lend his services to the efforts of his daughters and their co-musicians.
So when Londoners John Toogood and Pete Jacobs of Stallion Productions suggested a seven-country European tour for Bo for May and June of 1982, Bo was quick to insist that Offspring be booked as his backing group. This wasn't so much a case of rock and roll nepotism, as simply a belief on Bo's part that Offspring had genuine promise. "They played what I call ëpower rock,'" says Bo. "They had lots of new moves, all of ëem knew electronics inside out. They did justice to my music, and I think they did justice to their own music."
In concert, Bo would wait until the end of the show to reveal that Terri and Tammi were his daughters. "I didn't want them to make it on my name. I wanted them to make it on their own."
But Tammi and Terri weren't necessarily convinced that a tour with their father was going to be a good thing. Says Terri, "All we'd ever heard from Daddy all our lives before he went on tour was his bitching about having to go on the road! So we were a bit hesitant at first as to how it would go. We wondered, would he be a grouch all the time? But as soon as he'd get up on the stage, he'd be glowing, and I'd see him so happy, and I'd think to myself, ëWhat are you talking about, mister?!' What it comes down to is, he loves to play, but he hates to prepare."
Road work is tough work. The girls and the others discovered that cardinal rule early on, but they also discovered that Bo was a great morale booster for the group. Just when they were all exhausted, and questioning whether this was really the life for them, Bo would usually come up with something that made it tolerable and worthwhile.
"One time on that tour we were heading down the Autobahn," recalls Ronnie Haughbrook. We're all dead beat and hungry. Marty is in one bus, and Bo's in the other, and we're flyin' down the highway because there's no speed limit, and we're doing about 75 an hour I'd say. And Marty has this bread that he had bought--a long French loaf, hard-shelled, y'know--and he's like cherishing this bread everywhere he goes.
"Now the buses are almost alongside, headin' down the highway, and Marty sticks the bread out his window, teasing, ëOho, I've got some bread and you're all hungry!' He's waving out the window as he passes us. And Bo turns to our driver, Mike Boleyn, and says, ëMike, speed up, man, speed up!' So Mike speeds up and we pull right up alongside ëem, and just as we're passing Marty's still waving the bread, and Bo snatches it at eighty miles an hour, Vroom, and we barreled off down the highway. And we all looked back, and there's Marty screamin', and cussin', and hanging out the window, havin' a fit. And Bo's got the bread, and now he's waving it in Marty's face!
"We stopped a few miles down the road and Marty was pissin', man. He was . . . mad! The expression on his face! ëThat was my bread, Bo Diddley. What if it had fallen on the highway?' he yells at Bo. And Marty made Bo give it back to him; he was gonna kill him if he didn't. Marty was in love with that bread, man! Bo and all of us died laughin' over that one."
The tour had started in Innsbruck and then moved for two nights to Berlin, at that time still a city divided by the Wall. Bo recalls that when Terri and Tammi got back from a brief excursion into the city, he wasn't sure that they would be able to play that night.
"They were so emotionally drained, man. And they were angry. They had seen the kinda things that a lot of young American kids just aren't aware of. I said, ëWhat happened?' See, they'd taken the subway, and all of a sudden they find they're passing stations where you can't get off! The train just kept on going. They'd gotten on the train for East Berlin! Now they finally come to a station where they could get off the train, but you couldn't leave the station without a passport. And there are all these soldiers standin' around with rifles and sniffer dogs and that sort of thing. Then they find out how to get back to the other side, and they go to see the Berlin Wall. And that shakes you, man. A lot of people don't really realize how beautiful it is to be free and living in America. We got the freedom to say what we want. In some countries if you even looked like you were going to say what was on your mind, they'd put you on a chain gang or something."
While the girls of the group were taking their traumatic mini tour of Berlin, Scott, Ron, and Bo were setting things up on stage for that evening's show when, as Scottie recalls, there was an unexpected interruption.
"This German guy walks in the door at the back of the room. He's about sixty years old, and has this big mop of white hair. He runs down the aisle and immediately falls on his knees, and starts crying! And he's calling out, ëBOH DUDDLEY, BOH DUDDLEY,' in this deep German voice, and there are tears all over this man's face! Ron and me, we didn't know what to do. We didn't know if he was a nut or something. It was the first time I'd ever seen anybody cry like that, and the guy couldn't stop the tears from comin' down.
"And at that moment I realized what we had with us, who I was really working with, because this man was worshipping Bo. And Ron says to me, ëWow, man, he thinks Bo is a God!' And the guy was sincere; he'd been waiting all his life to meet Bo, and he was overcome when it happened. And Bo picks the guy up, and shakes his hand, and said, ëHow ya' doin'? Take it easy, man,' and that sort of thing. Gave him an autograph and calmed him down. And he was no trouble; he came back to the show that evening, and Bo acknowledged him, and he just stayed in the audience, enjoying it.
"Bo was used to this sort of thing; he'd seen it all before. But it stunned me and Ron. When the guy walked into that club, man, and dropped to his knees, it scared the shit out of me, man!"
When the show got under way that evening, there were, then, already a number of emotional bruises being nursed by the band. As Bo explains, fate saw to it that he wasn't to be excluded from experiencing his little portion of drama.
"Now that night at the Berlin gig I got a little bit of a shock myself. The promoter is bringing up people for me to introduce. And they bring on this girl singer. Evidently the local people knew who she was, ëcos she had just escaped across the Wall from East Berlin. And after I'd introduced her, she took a bow, then moved back, and I thought she'd left the stage. I started into singing a number, and all of a sudden I'm hearing things I ain't supposed to be hearing! I'm hearin' this voice like Lili Pons or somebody. Way up here, then way down there, y'understand! She had that kinda range. She figured she'd just join in and do her stuff. So it ended up with us doing an impromptu thing, and the people were jumping like crazy. Afterwards they told me her name was Nina--Nina Hagen, that's it. I hope she made it, ëcos that chick had some kinda voice on her!"
Bo and Offspring kept pushing the pace this way for thirty-two days, touching base with rock fans throughout Europe---Paris, Amsterdam, Milan, Zurich, Geneva--and finally London, where they had two dates at Dingwall's.
Dingwall's Dancehall was one of the premier venues on the ever-thriving London music scene, and it says much for British spunk that London music fans were prepared to tolerate the inconveniences of a dark and dingy former horse stable that has been described as like "being in a 200-foot storm sewer." But the place has "atmosphere," as they say, and it would provide a fitting location for the final act of Offspring's debut tour. Robert Plant, the spectral-voiced Led Zeppelinist, was a visitor backstage the first night. "Robert was like real shy, unlike in his videos, very quiet," says Scott Smith. "It looked like he didn't really know what to say to Bo." The next evening that well-known troller of rhythm and blues classics, George Thorogood, turned up. "Definitely loves Bo's style," says Scott. "A genuine fan."
"The shows at Dingwall's were definitely the highlight of the tour," continues Scott. "The fans were ready for us! The London crowd was so receptive, and they gave Bo the response he was after. The sound was incredible. That crowd was so loud that when they yelled the sound went through our bodies. And that's a really good feeling. Bo attracted all sorts of people at that place: greasers, punkers, European skinheads (not to be confused with American skinheads), white-haired people, purple-haired people! And the energy was just jumping off him.
"Y'know, we did a lot of dancing with Bo. Me and Ron are very energetic performers, and we made Bo feel younger because he did what we did. We did the Robot, and the Snake--both were big back then. We did this thing where all of us would be like Robots, and so Bo would let his batteries run low and we'd have to wind him up! And the way we developed this was so natural, it just came out of the routine. The music would stop. I would wind him up, and he would gradually come back up and come to life and we'd go back into whatever we were playing! Tammi could feel when Bo wanted silence, or when he wanted it brought down low. And then she'd pick it up and we'd all come in together.
"Bo got a real rise out of it. When we got off stage, he'd say, ëMan, that was a great show!' I called him Bo-zilla,' because he destroyed audiences. And every show with Bo has been an experience for me, too: he makes me feel I've accomplished something."
It took some time for Bo and the band to recover from what had been an exciting, but very tight and exacting tour. "We must've slept for a week after that one," remarks Bo. Though it had been six years since an album had last been released in his name, certainly his longest ever recording drought, Bo was still in no hurry to put out anything new, not after what he perceived as the fiasco at the hands of RCA in 1976. However, news that Marty received from a fan in Canada sent Bo leaping from his bed and hightailing it into his recording studio.
Bo and Marty had long been aware that there were a number of bootlegged recordings of Bo's concerts in circulation. While illicit bootleg recordings clearly result in loss of legitimate income, they are not necessarily damaging to an artist's reputation. But what the Canadian contact reported was an outrage quite distinct from a bootleg album. A blatantly fraudulent album had surfaced on the Accord label under the title "Toronto Rock ën' Roll Revival, 1969, Vol V: Bo Diddley." Cover notes claimed that the album was recorded "live" in concert," at an "historic" performance in 1969. All of this came with moderately attractive art work, and an enticing list of such apparently unreleased tracks as "Rockin' Bo," "Cracklin'," and "Mess Around." Everything about the album was in fact designed to lead the unsuspecting buyer into believing that here was a Diddley recording coup, some long lost material that could now be savored for the first time. But the truth was that these and other numbers on the disc had been lifted inexpertly from Bo's earliest albums, were then craftily re-titled, and finally wrung through such a hideous process of distortion and overdubbing of crowd noise as to virtually drown out the original recordings. Apart from the legal considerations of such piracy, the real sin here was that some of Bo's finest early work had been tampered with, mutilated almost beyond recognition, and then offered for public scrutiny.
"That's the lowest blow I've ever been dealt, man," says Bo. "That was just out-and-out vandalism. They even scrawled my ësignature' across the cover, like I signed my name to that sucker. If I ever track ëem down, the dudes that put out that thing, they're gonna have to spend all the money they made from it just to keep me from gettin' at ëem!"
Fearing, with every good reason, that record producers, reviewers, and worst of all his fans, would remember him only by this latest bogus product, Bo believed that his only option was to put out something that truly and genuinely was his own. He came to the simple decision to go the independent route, rather than to risk yet another disappointing experience with a major label. He already had a collection of good takes from a session that he had done some while before with his long-time friend Lady Bo and her band, The Family Jewel, at the Ayre Studios in San JosÈ, California. Selections from these cuts would comprise Side B of a new album. Side A would consist of cuts made with Offspring, to be completed at his newly finished studio in Hawthorn, into which he and his technical collaborator, Gordon Mutch, had poured considerable money, time, and expertise. BoKay Productions, the company that he and Kay had originally founded to co-produce Tammi and Terri, would record, press, and publish the product in cassette form. All that was lacking was a title and a title track. Oddly enough, Bo found both in Poland.
"Marty arranged a swing for me through Eastern Europe--Hungary, Poland, places like that. It was beautiful. The kids over there were very into Bo Diddley. But they still had the repression, the police state, and all of that. In Poland, the authorities didn't want me to excite the people too much. I was warned not to have the people stand up. But I raised my hands up in the air--just to say ëThank you' and ëGod Bless Rock and Roll'--and everybody stood up! And I didn't know how to tell them to sit down! I said, ëAw hell, I'm going to jail.'
"Then when they wouldn't let me bring home any of the money I earned in Poland, that got me to thinking: Ain't it good to be free, ain't it good to be living in America where we don't have any of these hassles, and where you can stand up anywhere you want, any time you want? So I wrote this song about it, and called it ëAin't It Good to be Free', and decided to use it for the album title."
Though taped several years apart with different personnel on back-up, the A and B sides of Ain't It Good To Be Free (New Rose Records, 1984), are surprisingly compatible. That's probably because both sessions were done with modern synth, or Moog-enhanced instrumentation, Bo's first extended recording work with these devices. In the San JosÈ sessions with Lady Bo and the Family Jewel, Bo continues to keep his eye on his roots with such offerings as "I Don't Where I've Been," a Kansas City-style jump, and "Evil Woman," a simple but disturbing blues riff brought into a contemporary context.
The A-side, however, resembles more a series of position papers written in funk and r & b. In "Ain't it Good to be Free" the issue is human rights and their connection to a strong defense; in "Gotta Be a Change" Bo gives a gentle chiding to an overgenerous U.S. Government (let's take care of our own first, he suggests); and "I Don't Want Your Welfare" speaks of work and dignity (first voice: "Sorry, Not Qualified"; second voice: "My hands are qualified--I can shovel dirt, wash dishes. . ."). To these Bo adds two numbers rich in Diddley iconography: "Bo Diddley Put the Rock in Rock ën' Roll," which provides the sort of history lesson many wish they'd had at school, and "Mona, Where's Your Sister," a powder-keg of sibling rivalry ("I know your sister makes love . . . better than you!").
Finally, there is a number called "Stabilize Yourself," which not only presents a fascinating, synth-dominated, interstellar sound odyssey, but also points to the essential nature of the songs on side-A of Ain't It Good To Be Free. The backing provided by Offspring is throughout subtle and reserved, a nicely contained, harmoniously balanced funk. Funk shares with rock an infectious beat, but funk is sparse in construction, and allows more room for the beat to slide around. Consequently, this style is not within the range of every musician. But funk can run afoul of electronic gimmickry, and can therefore lack "a stable foundation," as Bo puts it. "Often a musician today doesn't have to rack his brain too much. He hits one button, and turns a knob, and pushes a few sequences, and he's got a machine that will do it while he goes in the back and eats hamburgers."
How did it happen, then, that Bo Diddley, the fundamental, originating rocker, should wind up doing the highly electronicized number "Stabilize Yourself," even playing his own Moog? As Terri McDaniel, co-writer of "Stabilize Yourself," explains, the answer is to be found in Offspring and the retro-influence of her and her sister: "At first we had to trick Daddy a lot because he used to think that he couldn't play on things that are new. ëJust take all the electronics out of it. It's the same thing, believe me, Dad,' I'd say. So what we used to do was to turn everything down and let him play on it, and then afterwards we would go to work and fit things around him. And the end product was a modern sound. When we played it back, he'd get the feel for it in a flat second."
Soon, Bo was telling the press in his hometown of McComb, Mississippi, "It's great to take on new challenges. I've updated everything. A lot of new groups that I work with don't exactly know what I'm doing. See, they think I'm playing this old stuff that I played way back in the 50's and then when they hit the stage with me they say, ëUh-oh, what do we do?'"
"See, they rehearsed all of my old stuff. . . . I can't play like I did in the 50's. Back then, I was basically learning; I was training myself. Now I am way past what I did in the 50s, so far advanced that it's scary!"
With the themes of security and stability running through Bo's musical thinking, it was ironic that in his marriage the very opposite was the case.
"Bo has always respected Kay," says Scott Smith, a close observer of their relationship in its final months, "else they wouldn't have stayed together twenty-five years." Marriages that last a long while and that give all the appearance of permanency, only to fail in their third, or fourth decade, are among the puzzling and perhaps saddest of social occurrences. In this instance, Bo's friends and family wondered: why?
When Bo and Kay broke up back in the eighties, they were fully embedded in middle age. They had raised their children and had fashioned a unique and appealing home that Bo was to refer to as "Diddley's Last Stand" and Kay had envisioned as a happy refuge in old age. Thus, each could legitimately have claimed a "crisis" of biology or temperament. This was the more so since they were task-oriented people, yet finding, in Bo's case, that his career was in a temporary slump, and in Kay's, that she had fulfilled her role as mother and partner.
Bo and Kay had been in the log mansion only a little over a year when their relationship started to fall apart. "You could see the marriage was coming unglued," says Gordon Mutch, who lived on the ranch during this period. "Kay didn't seem to be the same woman anymore. There was this constant tension between them. That didn't sit well with him, because it's an idiosyncrasy of Bo's that he needs an audience, an appreciative audience. He is a natural-born entertainer. So he was always surrounding himself with people, some of them good, some of them not so good. I think it happened in New Mexico, and it happened in Hawthorn. When Bo was away, Kay still had to go on living with these people, whether she liked them or not. And when Bo would come back in, he'd have to change what was going on at the ranch, assert his control over all these hangers-on, some of whom were his own kin.
"But there were other things at work. When Bo's on the road, he's Bo Diddley. When he comes home, he's Ellas McDaniel. Ellas McDaniel wanted to be out on the tractor, and hammering and nailing, and doing all the things he does so wonderfully. But Kay fell in love with Bo Diddley, not Ellas McDaniel. Consequently, you end up with the situation where, as Kay used to call it, ëThe tractor is the other woman!' She didn't fuckin' want to know him. It's that simple. I'm sure that was at the heart of the situation, the disillusion.
"There was also an underlying fear with Kay, as well as with his first family, that if Bo ever got really successful, or had lots of money, that he would leave them. It was an unfounded fear, funnily enough, which almost drove them to drive him away. It's part of the complexity of the star system; there's a syndrome of fear in those left behind."
Neither Bo nor Kay have much to say any more on the break-up of their marriage. Both headstrong in their own way, there is little indication that they made much serious effort at reconciliation when things started getting really bad. Bo claims only that "somehow or the other Kay misread me" and that a year before the break up no one could ever have persuaded him that he was headed for a divorce, "That's why I was so disturbed when it happened. I was that secure."
One thing was sure, as far as Bo was concerned: the road had no special allure. "A lot of the guys came off the road because of problems with their wives not being able to deal with being at home by themselves. But for me, the worst thing in the world is to be away from home. This is the worst feature of my life, sittin' alone in a hotel room."
Kay, however, will go so far as to suggest that there was a struggle of wills. "It was all a question of control," she says. "See, I wrote every check for twenty-five years, and that was a problem. Bo doesn't like to be controlled, or restrained. But he doesn't manage his money real well; he doesn't know where to spend it, where it's beneficial to him. And there's no reason he should get into this: he's got enough to do. But if you're not going to do it yourself, you have got to trust someone else to do it. And because he likes to be in complete control that was hard for him."
And she has another theory, one that most probably points to her own sources of disenchantment. "Bo got into playing with toys more than with creating music around his rhythms. Now, who am I to criticize ëthe legend'? But I think it's true, that in the latter years he lost that spontaneity that made his music work. He used the damned electronic drummer too much, and other technology , and. . . that. . . drove. . . me nuts! Because I was in love with the original Bo Diddley, not this bullshit I think he has bastardized his talent with, and which is a crime. God will punish him for this! If there is another life, he won't have any talent, because he fucked it up the first time around. He had so much, and what he has given is like ten per cent of what he has."
The end, when it came, was startlingly quick. "You want to know how quick it was?" says Scott, who was present at what was probably the culminating event. "Bo's told me the story maybe three times, but he's probably forgotten that I was there myself when it happened.
"I was at the refrigerator on the second floor when Kay came in really stoned. But when Bo passed her on the stairs she pushed by him and said something with explicatives in it, totally disrespected him. And he proceeded to discuss that outburst with her, and Bo was desperate. He didn't understand her behavior.
"Then they took the fight into the bedroom, and I heard Kay crying. Not that Bo had hit her or anything; I would have heard it if he had. What happened next--he's laughed about it with me since--was that he picked up a chair and said, ëI'm sick of this shit,' and I heard the racket as he smashed the chair on the bathroom counter! Kay was really frightened. And Tammi and I ran across the hall and jumped between them. Bo proceeded to take his fist and put a hole through the door. Then he turned around and walked out of the house, and he never slept there again. He lived in the white shack over at the side. Kay left in the motor home the very next day.
"Tammi and I stayed in the house for a while. Bo knew how to hide it, being an entertainer twenty-four hours a day, but it was so painful for him to lose Kay. Then in December, Tammi and I moved to Atlanta. That had to be the worst Christmas ever for Bo."
With Kay gone, and with Offspring apparently disbanding at the same time, Bo found himself alone at the ranch, stepping into the mansion only for a quick meal, or to take calls from Marty in Los Angeles directing him to such and such a distant city for a one-night stand, or a swing through the Southwest. On his return home he preoccupied himself with physical labor, carpentry, auto repair, anything. "You'd find him digging around the bushes," says Tanya, his daughter from his prior marriage, "even though there was nothing wrong with them. He lived with incredible pain."
Tanya herself lived further around the lake at one of several cottages, where she was busy with her active family. In quiet moments, though, she loved to engage in her favorite pastime, composing and perfecting her own gospel songs. One of her songs, "A Time to Listen," is a remarkable piece of work that soars and gleams with intense feeling. "I love the Lord and I recognize him in everything I do," she says in her rich and sonorous voice, without question an inheritance from her father, whom she also resembles in warmth of spirit.
One night shortly after the break-up, with a mist hanging low over the lake, her father came to the door. Ronnie Haughbrook was also there. Bo didn't say much, but walked over to Tanya's Casio synthesizer, sat down, and began to play. What emerged was an unending gospel, an extemporaneous creation, that had a multitude of refrains--snatches of the Bible, diatribes against Evil--and over and over the theme of families ruptured by friction, torn apart by forces they do not recognize:
I don't understand why people can't get along,
Trouble in our streets, trouble in our homes.
Sister against sister, father against mother,
Have we lost touch with God? Have we lost one another?
For an hour, maybe longer, Bo Diddley sang on, his huge fingers somehow finding the right notes among the tiny black and white keys, his immense voice keening out his sorrow, his fears, and his faith, as he struggled to find in music the peace that was eluding him in life.
Then just as the song seemed to have exhausted itself, its questions asked too often to have further meaning, the pace quickened and the singer's voice became urgent and emphatic. An answer had come to Bo, one that allowed at least a moment of temporary consolation, at best a way of permanent guidance. In a moment of gospel atavism he was taken back through the years of his Baptist upbringing in Chicago, and beyond to the dusty lanes of his childhood in Mississippi, where he learned his earliest notions of Good and Evil:
If you ain't careful,
The Devil will control your mind.
He's behind the whole durn thing;
Y'know, the Devil works overtime.
* * *
That was eight or nine years ago. Now, that pain has slipped almost totally into oblivion. For the present moment, Bo's task is to round up the troops. He honks the horn of his bright green truck; it is time to leave the mansion, the Cedar Lake, and the McDaniel Ranch, and to head back to Archer.
"We'd better get going, you all," he says, as he closes the back door of the mansion, while mumbling something about sending someone over to repair a broken screen, a chore that in former times he would gladly have handled himself.
As the truck rumbles down the lane on its return journey, Bo points to a lamppost with its lamp missing. Just a few wires remain, poking out of the head of the post. "Look at that. They done stole it while it was hot-wired!" A little further on, he pauses at the gator hole and claps his hands to see if he can stir up some action. "Nothing doin'. A lot of people are scared of gators, but I ain't. Long as you don't tease ëem, they'll leave you alone." It's as though he's looking for distractions as he makes his departure from this place, as though he's genuinely reluctant to finally turn his back on what was Kay's dream, and on what had quite obviously been his own dream as well.
Now out through the gate, under the sign, and across the cattle grid. Bo jumps out to lock up. "That's long in the past," he declares of his split with Kay. "I could move back here if I wanted. But I'm thinking I might move to New Mexico. Either one."
At last Bo seems glad to be going. Pretty soon he inserts a tape into the stereo. The tape is called "East Bound and Down" by Jerry Reed. It's about moving on, about overcoming adversity. It seems to hit the right note with Bo. Then someone brings out a newspaper clipping containing horoscopes for the year ahead. "Read Bo Pop's!" urges the peppy teenager, Mikey-Dee.
"Jupiter begins a year-long residence in your house of money," reads someone from the entry for Capricorn. Bo's ears pick up. "During this cycle gain is favored. When your inner talents get more of your attention, your self-worth increases. So does your net worth. You hit the Comeback Trail and the ëjingling of the guinea helps the hurt that honor feels.'"
"Hey, I've still got it, see!" Bo declares, his face beaming. "I always look to the future. You wanna know something? I am on the Comeback Trail. Hah!"