Biography

Born Eddie Diamond in Los Angeles in 1951, Eddie grew up on the meanest streets of the city. His parents separated at the age of one and his mother worked as a waitress at a Thrifty Drug Store lunch counter for most of Eddie’s younger years. Living in a housing project and left to fend for an older sister, he knew gangs at an early age but what made an impression even more was a love of music.

Diamond says he often thought that people should sing instead of speak because it sounded so much better to the ear which would make the whole world an opera. Ed's first memory of performing is playing a set of coconut shells to simulate a horse galloping in his first grade play. Then he attempted cello in the third grade but his mother couldn’t afford the lessons and she felt he needed the tough skills of the street instead of a classical musician. After attending three different high schools in Los Angeles, Huntington Park and Gardena he graduated from Crenshaw High in 1969. A poor student, Diamond didn't really appreciate the value of an education until it he was nearly out of high school. He had a strange epiphany while attending a Black Power rally on the campus of Crenshaw.

A group of students were rallying because the campus was being provided inferior text books while other students in less impoverished districts were receiving the latest revised text. The main speaker with a bull horn was asking that the students march out in protest. That's when Diamond's epiphany occurred. He bolted out of his seat and marched to the front of the bleachers and grabbed the megaphone and implored the crowd to get up, and march out of the stadium into the street and that was the first time he discovered he had the power to move masses of people.

He was voted president of the Black Student Union and so began his self education. He began to cram W.E.B. Dubois. Malcolm X, Langston Hughes, Baldwin and all things black while fighting on the streets of Los Angeles the racist Police Dept. who immediately came out to arrest the students for leaving campus and gathering illegally. Even before Diamond's Black Power period he spent 1968 living with his father Gilbert in Compton. There he met a character named Johnny who smoked pot and listened to the psychedelic records of bands like the Jefferson Airplane , Jimi Hendrix and anything that help take you on a musical and pot fueled journey. That started Diamond's long love affair with rock Music.

That was also the time when Motown started experimenting with rock sounds and the Temptations had a hit with psychedelic shack and cloud nine. Diamond stole a car and drove to Yosemite and met a bunch of hippies and while speeding along the Merced River was arrested with a couple of friends laden with 300 hits of blotter acid. He went to L.A. County to spend six months in lock up and the hippies went who knows where? Diamond returned to Yosemite National Park and bummed around meeting other kids that worked for Curry Co and sold pot and acid around the park. That’s also where Diamond was introduced to the gay scene by some Guys who were living and working in the Park.

That is also where Diamond joined his first band. He met some kids who were visiting the park and playing beautiful guitar in the valley. The sound of a Guild twelve string waffled across the meadow and drew Diamond towards a beautiful long haired youth who lived in walnut creek CA. Diamond joined in song and was invited to visit Walnut Creek when next in the area.
A few weeks passed before Diamond found himself visiting. He remembers playing an old conga drum that one of the boys in the band had on the kids back porch and his mother in the kitchen saying ‘‘that kid sure can play that drum” and was invited to join their band. Diamond worked at a Bank of America accounting center for a couple of months and bought a set of mahogany congas and headed up north. He lived with the group who were heavy in to Jeff Beck and Traffic at the time and wound up borrowing a car and flipping it on a snowy road outside Yosemite. Diamond climbed out thru the front windshield and hitched a ride to the park. The band was so pissed he left the new drums behind and headed back to L.A.

Diamond went on to numerous original and covers bands and recorded original material when could. He ended up at Bolic Sound the notorious recording studios of Ike Turner where he led an original band and became good friends with Turner. He also landed a booking job with Spectrum Talent in Hollywood and met New Birth, Dennis Edwards and Taka Boom, sister of legendary soul artist Chaka Khan. Diamond was later hired as a road manager for Boom who had a couple of Disco Hit’s on the charts. He traveled across the U.S. with a thirteen piece band in a camper only to find them stranded in Tenn. After spending 18 days in the Memphis County jail for delinquent payments on a rented van.
Diamond headed to Denver to join the band and spent two months saving enough to get out of town and back to California.

The gay scene was vibrant in the early seventies and HIV did not exist.
Diamond booked Taka at every gay bar in the city and got a booking to do a float for gay pride in San Francisco for the club I-beam. That got them back to California and on to Tokyo Japan for six weeks. When Diamond returned he met and lived with Taka’s sister Chaka and that lead to a three decade friendship. He even graced the cover of her second solo album Naughty. The songwriting bug was always with diamond and submitted hundreds of songs to publishers and record companies enough to wallpaper a small room, and he did. Soon he got weary of submissions and formed the 40 0z band in Santa Barbara Ca in 1990.
Designed as a college band Diamond wrote material to reflect the wild party scene of Isle Vista the notorious ocean side campus. The album is a classic with all the sex, drugs and rock and roll a young teen could ask for. The band drew thousands of fans the last wild night of Halloween and was shut down by police on numerous occasions. The band went on for ten years and disbanded in 1999. Diamond then focused on his gay opus God is Gay.
It may be the most revealing look into a totally honest artist ever. The album went on to acclaim which lead to interviews on NPR radio and the Howard Stern Show.

Diamond was nominated for a GLAMA award, flown to New York in 2000 for the ceremony.
He visited the Dakota Apartments where Lennon was slain and that inspired the song Dakota on his new release. Diamond credits friends like Sylvester the enigmatic gay performer and Charles Pierce with guiding his formative years. Vicky Sue Robinson and Chaka with lessons on fame. He is reclusive and introspective and most of today’s works involve social political topics like global warming or matters that effect the Every Man. Eddie Diamond is truly everyman and a man for all seasons who has paid his show business dues.