Interviewer:
Tell me how you first met Bo Diddley? How he
happened to come to Chess and you recorded him.
Phil:
Well Bo Diddley used to play around the corner on 47th and just west
of Cottage Grove. He used to play for nickels and dimes, you know, a bunch
of young kids, him and boy by the name of Jerome, a one armed kid. And, ah,
he said, I talked to him one day he said, yeah, I got some good stuff. So I
said, well, come on by. And he, he came by. And he played Bo Diddley which
actually if, if you know Bo Diddley, do you remember a song called "Ham
Bone"? Ham Bone where you been? Been to your house and going again. That's
what Bo Diddley is. so, ah ...
Marshall:
Didn't
have that beat though.
Phil:
So, ah, ah, it, ah,
he, he recorded, ah, Bo Diddley and I don't know if Sam Evers was in the
studio with him at that time. You remember Sam don't you? And, ah, then he
did a, the back side then he did a, was it "I'm A Man?" "I'm A Man". Yeah,
he, ah, he was a good boy but he was a country kid, a Chicago boy but he
actually was, he was more like a country boy.
Marshall:
But he was totally, his guitar style was ...
Marshall:
Like we
never heard before.
Phil:
He made his own guitars
too you know. Bo Diddley made his own guitar.
Marshall:
That was the thing you first had to notice.
Phil:
The beat, the beat was there, yeah, it was something
he never heard before.
Marshall:
Something you
never heard before, which at Chess meant your ears perked up. It was
something you never heard before. We wanted to dig into it 'cause we knew
that things you didn't hear before had a good chance of selling.
Interviewer:
Did it seem like
that would appeal to the kids?
Phil:
Put it on the
radio one day and it drove, man, it would drive all, all the record shops
were driving us crazy. We made records on it.
Marshall:
I don't think at that time we ever thought like, we didn't sit
around and say, this will appeal to the kids. It was a fresh, original new
kind of sound worth taking a shot with to see if you got reaction and that
was a quick reaction, quick, quick, quick.
Phil:
Anything different you know draw your attention and that was different, you
know.
Marshall:
Our formula was look for original
different things rather was, look for original different things rather than
look for what someone else is doing.
Phil:
A, a
good example is Les Paul and Mary Ford when they did that, that was
different, that drew everybody's attention right away.
Interviewer:
What do you think it was about Bo Diddley that made him
great? Made him important in Rock and Roll history?
Marshall:
His
originality.
Marshall:
He did not follow. He, he didn't. He did not
follow.
Phil:
He was not a follower. The after,
after that he, Bo Diddley could not write a lot of songs. He wrote but what
he always got back was always, I love my baby my baby loves me. So he had to
have somebody to write for like Willy Dixon wrote "Can't Judge A Book By The
Cover". It took about two months for him to learn it but he learned
it.
Marshall:
That was much later.
Phil:
Oh yeah but he wrote quite a bit of things "Mona" and
"Dilly Daddy".
Marshall:
But he had a great
...
Interviewer:
That beat people copied over the
years.
Marshall:
He had a beat and,
and for instance he had in his original band, Jerome Green who played
maracas, a, total, again a totally original song to have that in, in, in a
rhythm section like that. What was the drummer's name, name? The heavy set,
ah.
Phil:
Bright eyed kid, oh, damn, he, he
...
Marshall:
Bo Diddley he didn't, he was an
original guy. He had women in his band. Duchess, Cookie, Cookie, he had
different instruments. He had electric violin in his band. He had maracas in
his band. He wasn't afraid to experiment.
Phil:
He
had a squeeze box too, what do you call that?
Phil:
Accordion, yeah, an
Accordion in his band.
Marshall:
He was different
than the average blues guys. He could do blues but he, he, he was taking it
somewhere else.
Phil:
He was, he was actually a
young, well, let's say, he's like a, a young kid that came from the Delta
because he was, I don't think he was too well educated but he was, you know,
he was, he was, he was street-wise. He, he wasn't book-wise but he was
street-wise.
Interviewer:
When he went on the Ed Sullivan
show. Tell me about it.
Phil:
Oh, that's a
classic.
Interviewer:
Not about what he played as opposed to
what he was supposed to play but was that kind of a breakthrough getting a
rhythm and blues player on the Ed Sullivan show. Tell me that
story.
Phil:
Well, I don't remember how we got the
call. We got a call from NBC I believe he was on, NB…
Phil:
Yeah,
some network and they wanted Bo Diddley 'cause it was a big record. And, ah,
he was ...
Marshall:
And it was selling white,
that record sold white and black, both. One of our first records that sold
both.
Phil:
And he went up to New York and, you
know, it's strange for him, I don't think he ever left Chicago before. And
he went up there and he, I'm sure you're aware the story about what Ed
Sullivan wanted him to play and what he played which, you don't want me to
repeat that, that story do you?
Interviewer:
So tell me
about Bo on the Ed Sullivan show, what that meant for you and what that
meant for R and B around the country.
Phil:
What
it meant for us actually was for, for the first time an independent to get a
network shot of an artist which is a breakthrough because automatically it,
you can look for up to ten-fold sales.
Marshall:
The next day the phone will be screaming from everywhere in the country. We
never had that before.
Phil:
Yeah and so that,
that would, it meant to us and, ah, like, ah, my nephew said, that was
really a breakthrough of actually a first for the white kids to really go
into buying our stuff.
Marshall:
Or just black
music in general.
Phil:
Black music in general,
yeah.
Marshall:
Black music wasn't exposed to
white kids.
Phil:
No, no jockey would play it, you
know. No white jockey would play it.
Marshall:
There was racism on the radio, full.
Phil:
I, I,
ah, this doesn't fit in there but I, I took a record up to Boston your town
one time, I won't mention the jockey's name but I gave him, I gave him about
ten records when I was on a road trip. He looked through them, this I play,
this I play and he took Howling Wolf record, I don't play this. What do you
mean, you don't play it? You haven't listened to it. I don't play black
shit.
Interviewer:
Let's talk about Chuck Berry for a
minute. Tell me when you first met him and how you came to record him the
first time at Chess.
Phil:
Well Chuck Berry walked
into our studio at 4750 Cottage, 40, 4750 Cottage, ah, and he walked in with
a little tape, demo tape. And then he had, we listened to the sides and it
was different.
Marshall:
Again,
different.
Marshall:
"Wee Wee Hours" wasn't, "Wee Wee Hours" was the
blues.
Phil:
Blues, that was the blues side. But
the other side was different.
Marshall:
"Ida Red"
it was ...
Phil:
No, it wasn't. "Ida Red" was a,
was a big hillbilly hit years ago.
Marshall:
Isn't
that what "Mabelline" was first called?
Phil:
No,
it was taken from, really. So, ah, ah, we listened to it and Leonard said,
he said, I like the thing but he says, can you change the lyric a little
bit? So he said, yeah, I'll be back in a couple of weeks. And we thought
he'd never come back. And he came back. He was at Mercury and they turned
him down. And then he went across the street to VJ at that time. They turned
him down. And he came to us. And we were the ones that told him, or my
brother did, told him go ahead and work with it a little bit come up with
different lyric. And he did and I was, I was away to see my daughter in camp
at that time in Eagle River, Wisconsin. And I hear this record "Mabelline".
I knew we cut it. And I, I called my brother. I says, when I heard it, he
said, you better get your butt back here, he said, we got so much order we
don't have any records. He said that the, the, the phone is going off the
hook.
Marshall:
Remember he took it to Al Freed in
the car I remember that. He drove it to New York to Alan Freed. Then again
Alan Freed was exposing black music to white kids and ...
Phil:
Alan Freed, Joe Finean, Micky Shore, at that time, it
was just starting to break. You could, you could see what by the trend and
what they were playing that the white kids were starting to going for this
stuff. Not the, not so much the Muddy Waters stuff yet but the up tempo
stuff, you know, like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley.
Interviewer:
What did you hear in Chuck Berry when he first came to you that made it
sound different.
Phil:
Different, it was just
different. It, it's something that you're, I mean.
Marshall:
His guitar playing was different, the back beat was different. It
was the birth of the beat, you know. We didn't know what it was then it was
just again, that same Chess formula, here's something different, here's
something fresh.
Phil:
In fact the, the beat
wasn't heavy enough. My brother went out in the studio and got a phone book
and took a gum, gum stick and was beating, banging it. He wasn't keeping
time but he was just banging it just to, to get the beat heavier. I mean we
did all kind of crazy stuff. We get, our piano was old ...
Marshall:
It was an old roller
piano.
Phil:
Piano roll piano, we took out the
rollers. That was, that was what we made "Mabelline" on.
Yeah, tinkly sound.
Interviewer:
Was there something a little bit country about that Chuck Berry sound that
appealed to you. Talk about that.
Phil:
Yeah it
had a country feel to it. It doesn't have the country feel that country got,
that country is today but at that time what the country feel was, it had a
lot of country in it.
Marshall:
But we didn't
analyze songs like that.
Phil:
It was different.
It's hard for me to explain why we wanted it but.
Marshall:
Gut feeling, we, we all, all of our records were based on gut
feeling not intellectual at all, the opposite of intellectual.
Interviewer:
Did you encourage him in the direction of "Mabelline"
rather than a "Wee Wee Hours" kind of blues? Didn't he come to you mostly
singing the blues?
Phil:
He came in with two
sides; "Mabelline" ..
Marshall:
And "Wee Wee
Hours".
Phil:
And "Wee Wee Hours" and "Wee Wee
Hours" in itself could have been a hit ...
Marshall:
That was good blues.
Phil:
Couldn't
have been a "Mabelline" but it could, it could have been a, a blues hit.
And, ah,
Marshall:
I think he really wanted to be
a blues singer.
Phil:
Oh yeah. His real name was
Chuck Beryn. B-E-R-Y-N. That's what he had when he brought me the tape in
that time but.
Marshall:
But he was also an
exceptional lyricist.
Phil:
Yeah, very, very
good.
Marshall:
He didn't start writing those
other, those kid lyrics till after "Mabelline". I remember he had a notebook
like this full of them.
Phil:
The second record
was what, "Sixteen"?
Marshall:
"Sweet Little
Sixteen" or "School Days".
Interviewer:
We were starting to
talk about Chuck Berry as a writer, a lyricist and his lyrics appealed a lot
to the teenagers that were becoming your big market. Talk about that a
little.
Marshall:
Well he always had a spiral
notebook he would show me with song after song after song and written in pen
or pencil very crudely and very teenage oriented. He must have liked a lot
of, you know he must, ...
Phil:
Girls, he liked
cars.
Phil:
He’d take, what's that car, running down that highway
and ...
Marshall:
Yeah, Cadillac. He loved
Cadillacs.
Marshall:
Cadillac is doing about 95, bumper to bumper,
yeah that one.
Phil:
Yeah he liked cars and, ah,
...
Marshall:
And he liked girls.
Phil:
Well we all do, that's, that's normal but he's a,
he's a very clever fellow. I mean as a lyricist I think for that, at that
time I think he was one of the greatest for that kind of music, you know,
for a young, a pretty young kid he, he really had it.
Marshall:
He had great intuition to what young white
teenagers, ah, their lives. I mean he, he wrote about their experiences and
what was going through their mind. He's very, very…
Phil:
You, you remember when, when he was away for, for a
while and he came up and...
Marshall:
Nadine
immediately.
Marshall:
Back in the U.S.A. too.
Phil:
Came back and right up he was gone, when he come
back.
Interviewer:
What did you think of him when he first
came to you? What were your first impressions of him as a person and as a
musician?
Phil:
He was like a, I'd say, ah, he
was always a very nice person. He's quiet, no profanity. Didn't drink or
smoke, never did. I still think he doesn't drink or smoke. Does
he?
Marshall:
As a
kid there I always thought he was the, you know I didn't even know what the
word eccentric meant but I thought he as very strange. We used to go across
the street to Bat's restaurant. I would go with him. He'd say, come on. And
he would order strawberry short-cake to start then a pickle. He would order
the craziest combination of, of foods you know. He was always and he was
also very, you see with my father and him, really, really close with my
father.
Phil:
Very close with my
brother.
Marshall:
Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry
were so close to my father they were like, you know, just like family during
that period.
Interviewer:
What about his guitar playing,
that was really pioneering kind of rock and roll guitar, wasn't
it?
Phil:
Yeah like I think you mentioned
earlier, it had a lot of country feel to it.
Marshall:
But we didn't, we didn't, ah, we didn't think that's rock and
roll. We said, this guy plays a different style, let's feature it. It must
be selling. That's one of the things they like. And we would push him
because the way we made records at Chess was to get the best out of an
artist. That was what we would do. That's what my father and uncle taught me
to do in the studio was to get the best out of them. And if we saw that a
guy played good guitar we'd make sure he played good guitar and if a girl
could sing, you push him to sing the best, you know, over and over, take 1,
take 2, take 3.
Phil:
You know it, it mainly was
rapport you had with artists at that time because we'd get in the studio in
the three hours of it, there was more mothers and sons and that said in that
three hours than you could say in a year. I mean but that was the
closeness.
Marshall:
We'd push artists.
Marshall:
It was
pushing, much more than, than now a days where they do over-dubs. We would
push to get a performance. We'd get as much as we could out of three hours.
We had a three hour union contract a lot of times.
Phil:
Yeah, always had a three hour, but you see.
Interviewer:
Tell me about that and the cultural changes that
happened.
Marshall:
Well I had the lucky
experience, I was born in 1942 so in 1955 during the, like the beginning of
rock and roll I was 13 years old so I had the great experience of being
brought up in this great music family also being a teenager myself, also
knowing these black artist from the time I was born. So in looking back and
having thought about it a lot laying in bed late at night, I often got the
feeling that, ah, here you had blacks coming up from the South really from,
you know, connected to slavery, coming up from the deep South to Chicago.
Getting jobs in Chicago and Detroit in factories making money for the first
time, buying cars. Then you had this whole young white population of
teenagers who were coming out of really a lot of repression from the early
Fifties. And all of a sudden the beat and lyrics joined up and they, they
sort of joined together the black energy and the white and the young white
teen energy to cause the birth of rock and roll. They would, they rode, they
rode each other right out. And then it sort of split up later into, into Mo
Town into R and B. But there was that brief period where the black music
just totally pumped up the beginning of rock and roll with the white
musicians and it just, it was, it was just a great time for change with
blacks and whites. And rock and roll was one of the vehicles for
it.
Interviewer:
One last thing, can you give a short
answer, who started rock and roll? How did it begin.
Phil:
I wouldn't say it was Elvis.
Marshall:
I would say rock and roll was started by a
cultural need for change. It just happened by itself. Thing, things of that
magnitude happen by themselves. There wasn't any one specific person it was
just blacks, whites, America and that's the great thing about America, you
know, especially at that time. It was like a volcano ready to explode and,
and rock and roll just, just was born. It was a vehicle for, for change and
it still is a vehicle for change.
Phil:
You,
you're not discussing what artist started rock and roll, are you? What
artists? I, I might be prejudice but I think Chuck Berry did. I believe he
did even though the credit is given to Elvis, I don't believe so.
Interviewer:
Can you tell us about how Chess made inroads into the
English market?
Marshall:
Well I was a young guy
in my twenties and I really wanted to go to Europe. And, ah, so I convinced
my father and my uncle to let me go revamp our distribution. At that time we
had a deal with Decca Records, London Decca.
Marshall:
Yeah, Sir Edward Lewis. And, ah,
I went over and through a music attorney in New York I went to see a guy
named Louie Benjamin. Louie Benjamin was the head of Pie Records. And that
was the first, ah, contract I made on my own. I made a contract with Pie
Records for the Chess distribution in England. And it all started from, from
then. We even had on Pie we had Howling Wolf even on the chart, Smoke Stack
Lightening was on the white charts. And Pie became a very hot record
company, one of the new English record companies and we sort of rode along
with it. And, ah, the English discovered Chess really. The, the real
fanatics always knew it but the mainstream English music lovers discovered
it.
Interviewer:
Were you aware that there was an import
market for Chess records?
Marshall:
I was aware
because I was getting many letter, letters at that time from England and I
was getting visitors. The Vernon Brothers who had Blue Horizon Records, they
came to Chicago. There was a Chess Records Appreciation Society. We couldn't
even, we couldn't believe that. They would come to Chicago and want to see
our master book and it would be like we were bringing up the Dead Sea
Scrolls you know the English are so eccentric. They would look at these
books and they would tremble when they opened them up. We were, we were
aware of it. And also I, I was quite shocked because when I, my, first went
to England I was being asked from interviews from BBC from all kinds of
music papers. And it was shocking to us to see that people understood all we
had done.
Interviewer:
Were you aware that Jagger and
Richards were brought together through their love of Chess?
Marshall:
Not really at the time although I was told that
later on. On those first few trips, no. I didn't meet Jagger and Richards
till the Stones had had some initial success and then came to Chicago to
record at our studios. I think it was their second album.
Phil:
London Records… It was London Records, they came in,
well, it's like everybody in world, the world loves a winners. Chess Studios
was hotter than hell and everybody wanted to come to Chess.
Marshall:
But they wanted the Chess sound, you know, they,
they, they started out doing all Chess sounds and I always used to say that,
ah, they wanted to mimic, they wanted, they would have loved to have done
Chess Records to be exactly like the originals but it came out like the
Rolling Stones which was great. And from there they went on their
own.
Phil:
Yeah, in fact they put 2120 as one of
the titles in, in the album, our address.
Marshall:
They named the song after our address and I remember that was the
first time we had experience with groupies. Remember they painted all over
...
Marshall:
…the back of our building.
Phil:
They
had a Mandetta, manager somebody ...
Marshall:
Andrew Olem was their manager.
Phil:
That's
right, that's right he came with them. It was on a Saturday in the I had my
daughter down there and I had your sister down there at the time and they
took pictures with them and oye.
Marshall:
Still
the Stones and Beatles had began, I mean that was already a happening thing.
But I'll tell you in Chicago in the heart of the Midwest we hadn't seen
people, to look, acted like the Rolling Stones. They were real characters.
Again after coming from Chess Records where you had Howling Wolf, Sonny Boy
Williams and, you know, all those kind of people, they were, we weren't that
shocked at being, but they were much different than most white people that
you saw at the time; their hair the way they looked. They, they were
drinking hard liquor out of the bottle. That wasn't really happening very
big in Chicago at that time.
Interviewer:
They said they
were received a very friendly way. Muddy Waters even carried their gear into
the studio.
Phil:
Yeah, Muddy was
there.
Marshall:
Well we really wanted to get
them to do our songs. We got Willie to come by hoping that they would do
some of our songs.
Phil:
They did a good a bit of
our songs.
Marshall:
Yeah they did over the years
they've done many of our songs but, ah, we treated them.
Phil:
They had this other fellow, the one that died or
something.
Marshall:
Brian Jones, he was the one
I brought back to the office. I brought, I remember bringing Brian Jones
back to my father and uncle into their, they, they used to share an office
in the back of the building and then I packed each of them up a big box of
Chess records to take with them.
Phil:
My brother
looked at me and I looked up and said, who are they?
Marshall:
That's true, who are those freaks?
Phil:
They looked like freaks.