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SG: Dance music?

BD: You can’t dance with some of the music that’s come along. What helped me is that I’ve got two teenage daughters and they tell me right quick “Dad, pick it up just a bit. That’s what they’re dancing at now.” They would stand out on the floor and do their routine to it and I’d see. So now I pay attention to the way kids are dancing today. I watch Dick Clark’s American Bandstand and then I write close around it. I don’t stand far off anymore like I used to because I haven’t got ten years to play games with the public like I did when I first started. I didn’t know I was going to have to play a guessing game with the sixties. I’ve recorded stuff that is just now beginning to be recognized. I don’t want to have to die to be famous, but that’s what it looks like. We have this real bad in America. We don’t recognize what we have right on our own doorstep. We’ve got entertainers here that are bad! musicians, I mean good ones! We don’t give them a chance, like England don’t give their people a chance. Why is it that countries don’t recognize their own musicians first before they recognize somebody else?

SG: Because the industry releases too many meaningless records and floods the domestic market?

BD: That’s one of the things. Out of twenty six almost twenty seven years that I have been blessed by the Almighty I have been loved throughout the whole twenty six years that I have been affiliated with music by the public. I want to say God bless everybody who had a hand in making Bo Diddley what he is today. What I mean by that is buying my records, listening to them, and if you never bought a record you came to the shows. You have a lot of people who follow you around but don’t have any records.

SG: Do you know where I can get some records?

BD: SugarHill Records in Englewood, NJ. They bought the whole Chess catalogue.

SG: What about royalties from other artists’ renditions of your songs?

BD: I haven’t seen a royalty check for quite a while. I’ve got so much money around and can’t get my hands on it. You’re looking at a multi-millionaire with a few thousand dollars. It shouldn’t be that way. I’m one of the nice guys and I think this is one of the reasons I got fucked around. But you catch the cat who throws bricks and dynamite he’s the one who gets recognized. I watched this. You have never heard anything dirty about me anywhere, while just about everyone else in the business has had something to read about. The only bad thing I used to do was a lot of women. And I’m going to keep on Rockin’ and Rollin’.

SG: Who was Mona?

BD: : I knew a chick named Mona and I only met her twice. She was a forty five year old shake dancer that had a body, Goddamn! Oh man she looked good! Forty five years old. She used to stand on her head in a chair on stage, with her bottom in the air and make the chair move across the stage. I started singing and told her I was going to write a song about her. A year later I ran into her in San Antonio, Texas at the Eastwood Country Club. This was a big club back in the sixties where everybody worked, BB King, Jr. Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland, everybody. I was on a rock and roll tour and saw her name up at the Eastwood. I went back to the hotel and she was staying next door to me so I gave her the record. I met her in a plain show bar in Detroit where she was working and wrote the song Mona. Turned out to be a son of a gun, and it was just something I was just doing.

Seville Hotel 1981

That evening Bo Diddley closed out a three hour set at the punk club Privates with the Jon Paris Band as his able and energetic backups. Bo received the familiar woo hoo yells of a very appreciative and totally satiated crowd. The black clad punky waitress came over with the bill and I asked her “How do you feel about the music?” She said “It’s too repetitious.” I said “But it’s very sexual isn’t it?” She smiled and a said “Yes, definitely!”

Bo Diddley sadly passed away June 2, 2008 at 79 years young. We have lost an American Hero and a friend to all who knew him. Listen and Learn! Bo knows!

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