Buddy Holly, rock n' roll lives on

To Doxie Weber

“Something touched me deep inside the day the music died.” -- Don McLean

“Buddy Holly's everywhere. Every time a kid plugs a Fender guitar into an amp, he's there." -- Chris Morris, senior writer, Billboard magazine

Back in the early ‘80s before DVR or even VHS recording, my Uncle Dave waited two weeks to see the ABC TV movie of the week, “The Buddy Holly Story.” I talked to him about it afterwards. I was only about 13. “You think about it, if he would’ve lived, he might’ve outdone Elvis Presley,” my uncle said.

Phillip Norman makes a convincing case for that in his 1996 biography, Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly. Elvis was a dynamic performer, but as Norman brings out, he was a rock n’ roll “transient” who made some historic rockabilly recordings, rode the wave for awhile, then forsook it for ballads and schlocky movie musicals. In popular music as a whole, Elvis may be The King, but in the history of rock n’ roll, posterity and long-term impact belongs to guys like Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry.

Radiohead. The Foo Fighters. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs. We take it for granted that these and a million other bands were inspired by the Beatles, but without the pioneering Buddy Holly there would not have been a Beatles or Rolling Stones. He had a four, later three-piece rock n’ roll band, he wrote his own music, played the guitar (a Fender Stratocaster) expertly and experimented inside the recording studio in ways, avant garde for a rock n’ roller in the late ‘50s. Notably, he used a little known instrument, the celesta -- a distant cousin to the harpsichord -- in his hopeful song, “Every Day.” And he was the first rock n’ roll musician to use an orchestra -- in his recording of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

We all know about “American Pie,” the so-called Day the Music Died - Feb. 3, 1959, now 60 years ago -- and how the glasses wearing early rock n’ roller, Buddy Holly (along with emerging rock n' roll stars Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper) died in a plane crash in an Iowa cornfield. Yet to most of us, Holly remains a mystery, an enigma stuck in a time gone. With his evocative writing and journalist’s eye for detail, it’s as if Norman pried open a crack in the window of time and suddenly Buddy is live flesh and bone again. A tall, gangly kid in Levis and a white T-shirt, unhappy with his short curly hair and wire rim glasses walking the dusty streets of Lubbock, Texas, helping his older brother (and hero) Larry lay tile in the daytime and playing with his band at the Hi-de-Ho Drive-In before the movie shows at night.

Norman writes like the beautiful, frenzied dream trailing the Cadillac fins. You may know him for his 1981 biography, Shout: The Beatles and their Generation, the definitive biography of the Fab Four. Norman, who like the Beatles, grew up in post-war England, was a journalist with the London Sunday Times Magazine when Beatlemaina hit, and he wrote that impressive book with a certain journalistic detachment. But in Rave On, there is a unique poignant, personal quality not found in his other work. Norman grew up with Buddy Holly and while the book is no whitewash, Norman makes no secret of being a fan. He even includes himself in the story when writing about Holly’s 1958 tour of the UK, as well as including the youthful pre-giants of rockdom.

Mick Jagger was in the audience for a Holly concert in Woolwich. Back in Liverpool, teenage aspiring rock musicians John Lennon and Paul McCartney couldn’t scrape together enough money to see Buddy perform, sadly keeping their paths from intersecting. A few nights before his death, Buddy played a show in Duluth, Minnesota attended by a teenager named Bobby Zimmerman, later to be known as Bob Dylan. In his final months, Buddy was living in New York near Greenwich Village, talking to beatniks and intellectuals in coffeehouses. If he’d only lived a couple of more years, he could have met Dylan. What if?

The stories are a gem.

Buddy invited Little Richard to his family home in Lubbock, Texas for dinner. His dad, a segregationist, didn’t want to let a black man into the house. Buddy said if Richard wasn’t allowed in, he would never step foot in the house again. A compromise was reached in which they all sat down to a backyard barbecue.
In Buddy Holly and the Crickets first professional publicity shot, his drummer and best friend, J.I. Allison has a black eye, the result of a fight he'd just had with his guitarist, Niki Sullivan.
Phil Everly, of the Everly Brothers, advised Buddy to dispense with his wire framed specs and buy the horn rimmed glasses that would become synonymous with him.

You’re with Buddy and the Crickets as they shoot 90 mph in their red ‘55 Cadillac, upright bass strapped to the hood, along the two-lane blacktop from Lubbock to the nondescript town of Clovis, New Mexico to cut demos at Norman Petty’s recording studio. You see the red and white 10 cent Coke machine. You sense Buddy, always in a hurry, always feeling time is short, taking off, driving mysteriously into the night and returning with song lyrics in his head. You get a feel for the old fashioned mores of 1950s West Texas when tithing to one’s church was everything and when a boy who attended the Tabernacle Baptist Church, like Buddy, dated a girl from the Church of Christ, like his high school sweetheart, Echo McGuire, there was a little controversy.

Norman describes the long journey to fame in making Holly’s first big record, “That’ll Be the Day,” a hit. Business and legal hurdles had to be jumped over to even get the song released. Then it took around half a year to catch on. Today, “That’ll Be the Day” sounds like standard rock n’ roll, but teenagers in the ‘50s, thought to be juvenile delinquents with the new rock n’ roll craze, were actually pretty square. It wasn’t a fast, danceable song, but it wasn’t slow either. It wasn’t exactly a love song nor a break-up song and it contained some raunchy guitar at a time when the guitar, impossible as it may seem today, was declining in rock n’ roll. But think about it. The top selling recording act after Elvis wasn’t Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis or Little Richard. It was Pat Boone.

By the time “That’ll Be the Day” hit, Buddy was already advancing in other directions as a musician and songwriter. With outside temperatures of 106 degrees and a sand storm raging, Norman takes you into the Clovis studio where rock n’ roll’s greatest heroine was born. On the suggestion of his drummer and best friend, J.I. Allison, Buddy changed the name of his song, “Cindy Lou” to “Peggy Sue,” after the svelte, blonde high school girlfriend of Allison, watching and listening in the studio that day.

Buddy Holly and the Crickets were fortunate to have unlimited access to Norman Petty’s Clovis recording studio where they had artistic freedom. But it came at a price as Phillip Norman shows in detailing the nasty, business side of the recording racket. Petty was withholding money and profits from Buddy, leaving him and his new and pregnant wife, Maria Elena broke. There was a lot of legal wrangling in those final days and Buddy felt forced to go on a miserable winter “dance party” tour he didn’t want to go on. Everything that could go wrong did. The buses, traveling 400 miles a day across the cold northern Midwest, were freezing and breaking down. Buddy, who loved flying, chartered a private plane operated by a pilot who it turned out had no business piloting in the wintry night conditions. The result was the greatest tragedy in rock n’ roll history.

Buddy Holly, now a rock n’ roll legend, hadn’t even begun to become a superstar. A methodical artist, wise beyond his years, the full scope of Buddy’s talents had yet to bloom. Inspired by his Puerto Rican wife, he planned to record an album of Latin American songs, a jazz album and a gospel album in which he hoped to enlist the talents of Mahalia Jackson, the great black female gospel singer. Always a bridge builder, Buddy dreamed of making an album with Ray Charles at a time when the thought of blacks and whites recording together was unheard of. He wanted to write movie scores. He wanted to act in movies -- not doing the kind of musical exploitation films Elvis was doing, but really acting. During his final months in New York, Buddy was taking acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Academy where Marlon Brando and James Dean had studied method acting.

It’s easy to see Buddy Holly, had he lived, working with such artists as Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond and/or Elvis Costello. Perhaps, as McCartney did several decades into his fame, Buddy would have written a classical music score -- something else he had his eyes set on. Had Buddy lived to a ripe old age, he would have been to rock/pop music what James Dean would’ve been to acting if he’d lived a full life. He would’ve been like Brando. Buddy, like McCartney and Elton John, would have become an elder statesman of rock/pop music.

There’s so much that was, could have been and will never be. The only certain thing is that Buddy Holly’s music never died. In his deft writing style, Norman writes of how ‘50s orchestra leader Mitch Miller, “the singalong prince of darkness” hated “That’ll Be the Day” and wrote off rock n’ roll as a passing fad. But all these years and decades later, who under age 80 even remembers Miller? Everyone, however, has heard of Buddy Holly and rock n’ roll. It’s clearly here to stay. Rave on. Not fade away. The music makes you happy and will live on and on and on.