Cult heroes: Eddie Bo – the gentleman of soul who never got his due

http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2015/jan/27/cult-heroes-eddie-bo-the-gentleman-of-soul

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Received wisdom suggests you should never meet your heroes but, as I shook hands with the proprietor of the Check Your Bucket cafe in New Orleans one February lunchtime in 2005, that was just one more convention that Eddie Bo upended. As a singer and piano player who came of age in a time and place (after the second world war, in New Orleans) where breaking rules wasn’t enough to make you stand out, Bo, who was as well known for the turbans he wore on stage as for his blistering and individual take on R&B and funk, took iconoclasm to another level.

After a stint in the army, Edwin Bocage studied composition and arrangement, and he spent the 1950s and 1960s turning out singles in pretty much every imaginable black music idiom on a range of different labels, touring the US as a sideman and band leader, and playing New Orleans gigs to make a living in between. For a while, when music wasn’t paying the bills, he went back to his first trade – carpentry. (During his stint at the label Ric, he built them a studio. Check Your Bucket – named after one of his signature tunes – was further evidence of his handiwork).

Related: Cult heroes: Wipers – the sound of emptiness and dread

He’s reckoned to have made more 45s than any New Orleans artist bar Fats Domino, but his easygoing nature and decision to put the music first meant he lost out in business. There was no ruthless streak in him, and if opportunity had come knocking, he’d likely have invited it in for a chat rather than dropped everything to go out and chase it. He died of a heart attack in 2009, cheated out of royalties from the interest that had grown in his music since the turn of the century, but he left behind a peerless catalogue of bewildering obscurity that proves he was as good as any of his better-known contemporaries.

I first heard Eddie Bo in 1991, but it was some years before I realised who he was. The track that had grabbed my attention was The Creator on an EP called All Souled Out by the hip-hop duo Pete Rock and CL Smooth. Some time later, I discovered that the song’s opening horn fusillade and the neck-snapping beat originally came from a 7in single released around 1966 on a tiny New Orleans label called Seven B. After the intro, From This Day On was a two-minute blast of ferocious soul with Mariachi-style horns and a thudding breakbeat – an intoxicating and individual concoction.

“From This Day On had a little South American flavour, a kind of complicated rhythmic pattern,” Bo said, explaining that the song was one of his nods to Professor “Fess” Longhair, who had been a key influence as well as a friend. “Fess wanted a complicated musical mixture: he wanted it put together so it could be something of his own.”

That session, among the thousands, stuck in Bo’s mind for other reasons. At the time, he was in the early stages of a five-year stint as A&R man, producer and arranger for Seven B: the label didn’t release any LPs, and of the 20 or so singles cut during Bo’s tenure, only two of them were distributed outside New Orleans. But he had full control, writing and arranging most sessions, and choosing and directing the musicians.

If he was available, Bo would always hire James Black for drums. Another cult figure largely lost to the mists of time, Black was “one of the most phenomenal drummers that ever lived,” Bo said. “He sounded like three or four drummers all at the same time. He was so profound and relaxed in what he was doing; he knew the music backwards. People like James came around once in a hundred years.”

Black was also temperamental, a drug addict, and not one to suffer fools gladly.

“James was also an accomplished trumpet player,” Bo recalled. “On that day, the trumpet player was doing his part on From This Day On, but it was too complicated. I was getting frustrated with him. In the end, James took the trumpet from him, and hit him in the head with it – bent it. Then he said, ‘Let’s go – I’m tired of bein’ here.’ And he played the trumpet part himself.”

Black was behind the kit on the day in 1969 when Bo cut the brilliant Hook and Sling – a chugging call-and-response funk riff, powered by an astonishing polyrhythmic beat. That record took on a new life in the early part of the 21st century: as “crate-digging” migrated from the basements of Midwest thrift stores to the global bring-and-buy sale known as eBay, Bo’s funk 45s went from being cherished obscurities to international treasures. DJ Shadow and Cut Chemist included his Seven B duet with Inez Cheatham, Lover and a Friend, in their 1999 long-form mix, Brainfreeze, while Robert Rodriguez used Pass the Hatchet, the first Seven B release Bo worked on, to soundtrack a bar fight between Antonio Banderas and Quentin Tarantino in the cult western Desperado.

The story behind that session is typical. The record is credited to Roger and the Gypsies – a moniker used just once by Earl Stanley and the Stereos. The group was working on the track but it wasn’t quite coming out right. Enter Bo.

“Me, Tommy Ridgley and Irma Thomas had gone fishing, and when we came back, we passed by the studio,” he recalled. “We dropped Irma off, and they asked me to come in and see what I could do with this. And me bein’ stupid, I said; ‘Well, I’ll fix it for you.’ So I arranged it, and me and Tommy put our vocals into it, and I told him what to say. It was spontaneous, you know? My name’s not even on it. That hurts.”

Reissue labels began putting Eddie Bo tracks on compilations, but the money never seemed to end up in his hands. He couldn’t prove ownership of anything: all his paperwork was lost in a house fire in the 1990s. But none of this was particularly new to him.

“I had a tune out on Apollo records and Little Richard picked it up, changed it around, called it Slippin’ and Slidin’ – but it was still mine,” he said. “When I cornered him in Kansas City, he said Fats Domino had told him; ‘Man, you did the wrong thing foolin’ with Eddie, ’cos Eddie ain’t got no sense! Eddie’ll come round with a shotgun lookin’ for you!’ So I got half, then over a period of years it became 25%. People go on takin’ your stuff, and they just don’t care if you don’t say anything about it.”

Eddie was in Paris when Katrina hit. Check Your Bucket flooded and never fully reopened. By the time David Simon began working on Treme, the HBO series that would have surely helped revitalise Bo’s career and introduce him to a new audience outside his home city, he had passed away. But his incredible music, filled with the spirit and heart of a true gentleman of soul, lives on.