Preliminary prologue

In 1958, the history, memory, and truth of Rock and Roll were punctuated by the drafting of Elvis Presley into the U.S. Army. In 1962, Chuck Berry begin a jail sentence. In 1961, the Gibson Les Paul later beloved by Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page was discontinued in favor of the SG-style body. And in 1959, Buddy Holly died in a plane crash. Thus, the decades of the 1950s and the 1960s for Rock and Roll aficionados were separated by a series of voids that over time have slipped from most history and memory, but remain vital to any guesstimates of the truth in that short span of time.

Not Fade Away

He never recorded an “album” as such, releasing only one, a collection of singles, in his lifetime, yet his songs are as cohesive, no matter how you shuffle them (as they have been on the compilation albums issued after his death), as any concept album. Several musicals have successfully incorporated his songs without a hitch, including two devoted solely to him.

However famous he may have been before he died, no matter how many records he sold worldwide, when this “rock star” got up in the morning, he went to work at his craft. A steadily striving, consistent young man, he almost never drank but smoked occasionally, and rarely partied hard or got into trouble outside of collecting enough speeding tickets once to have his license revoked. While he married his wife, Maria Elena Santiago, within weeks of meeting her, previously he had spent five years dating the same girl, Echo McGuire, through High School and afterward.

Well, All Right

Rock and Roll has spawned it’s wild creatures, but this particular one of it’s "legends" was a business-minded fellow who chose his image, songs, and sound with great care, based on years of experience that began with a life in a household filled with musicians (only his father couldn’t carry or play a tune) and a town that gave him co-workers and venues with which to polish his act. He had a business card when he was fifteen. At the time he died, he had toured Canada, Australia and Britain, as well as much of the U.S., and was buying land to build his own studio to record himself and others for a label he’d already created.

Yet, for all the reality of the world in which he walked, at this late date his life and career have been rendered mere shadows of a rubber stamp cartoon image of glasses, hiccough, Stratocaster and the supposed revolutionary nature of his songs and legacy.

Record and movie company hype have never had much to add to the truth of this man’s life, just obscure it in odd wrappings and needless reworkings. Even today, despite the efforts of his band mates, his widow, and Sir Paul McCartney, the cardboard standup Photoshopped from hand-coloured studio photos and poor-quality TV kinescopes raises it’s ugly head in books, documentaries and websites in ad finitum.

In the end, a head cold, a heatless bus, and a load of dirty laundry were the unglamorous constituent elements that lead to a hard death from a small private plane crash in a snow-covered corn field. A flip of a coin kept his band mates from flying with him into that ignoble tragedy and took the lives of two other hard-working stars of the moment, Richie Valens and “Big Bopper” Richardson.

Raining In My Heart

A small catalog of songs, a tiny pile of personal effects, and a whopping juggernaut of a legend are the legacy of a 23 year old Texas man who peered nearsightedly out of massive glasses while manipulating a Fender Stratocaster and singing three minute songs that have never gone out of style. Buddy Holly, once a household name whose few photographs were printed over and over again, is now a footnote in the history of a musical fad whose second and third wave of copycats and innovators are now elder statesmen. Mention the name Buddy Holly to Keith Richards, Sir Paul McCartney, Sir Bob Geldof, Sir Cliff Richard or Petula Clark and you will see their faces light up and you might well prepare yourself for a long reminiscence. His usefulness as a musician, an iconic image, and a tragic figure have not diminished since his death outside of Mason City, Iowa, on February 2nd, 1959.

That'll Be The Day

A tall, almost painfully thin white fellow, Buddy Holly had a voice that approached a cartoon character's in it's distinctiveness. When he sang, there was a hiccoughing quality that approached irritating before his musical sensibilities pulled through and dragged you along... pretty much where ever he wanted to take you. "Rave On", "Peggy Sue", "Raining In My Heart", "It Doesn't Matter Anymore", "Maybe Baby", and "That'll Be The Day" are just a few of the efficently compact songs he helped create that, once you've heard them, you'll be able to hear them in your head for days every time someone mentions the titles. It is possible that you've heard some of his songs on the radio or in movie soundtracks for most of your life but never been able to put a face or a name to the noise. You might be forgiven if you were first aware of some of the songs in some other band or musician's catalog, such as the Stones, Blind Faith, Skeeter Davis, Cheap Trick or Bonnie Raitt.

Buddy Holly's name is often linked with another one, the Crickets, a band that still exists with at least two of the original members, and have rarely been without a gig somewhere since Buddy's death. For many years they played with Waylon Jennings, who was playing bass with Buddy on his last tour long before he himself became famous. (name band members here) But while the Crickets are whom he is most associated with, he actually played with them for a very short time compared with his associations with Bob Montgomery, Sonny Curtis and other local boys. Bob was with Buddy in "Buddy and Bob" for almost five years (check this), with Hip Pockets Duncan as their manager.

Rave On

Since the late Seventies, Buddy Holly's name has been linked with another man, an actor and a musician. Gary Busey starred in a movie called "The Buddy Holly Story" and has been associated with Buddy's music and legend ever since. He sang and played his parts in the movie with enthusiasm and competency. He now owns one of Buddy's acoustic guitars. The movie itself follows an ignoble Hollywood tradition of musician's biographical films that manage to spell the name right and get the correct species, but rarely more than that.

The very alliterativeness of his name, which has a kind of manufactured quality, and the ubiquitousness of his image make it hard to go past the easy categorization of Buddy Holly into the reality of his short and eventful life. Historians, particularly the pop variety, often focus on the fact that his hit status only lasted 18 months before his death. This ignores the fact that he had had an audience since he was 12, when he was playing guitar on the bus to school. This also ignores the fact that he had regular paying gigs and was billed as a name in his hometown, Lubbock, Texas, soon after he graduated from High School and long before he toured Australia and Great Britain. From the time he first began to master the guitar, having been taught his first chords by his elder brother (name)after the sibling's return from duty with the U.S. Marine Corps, Buddy was playing somewhere or with someone as often as he could. He believed in practice and rehearsal. With his various side mates and with other groups that he sat in with, Buddy was willing to play at parties, commercial events, school lyceums, hayrides and talent shows. One former band mate said,"We'd play at the opening of a cigarette pack."

The essential recordings, most of them crafted in Norman Petty's Clovis, New Mexico studio, can stand alone outside the life of Buddy. He had nothing to be ashamed of. Each 3 minute or less episode in his musical anthology has been trimmed down to it's essentials, rehearsed within an inch of it's life, and then edited for clarity, with a very few outstanding special effects thrown in. After his death, Buddy's recordings were re-released, re-recorded, and, in some, cases, over-dubbed and even mutilated beyond recognition. While his publishing list shows a mere forty songs to his credit, the number of albums with his face, name and music on it approaches a hundred. That's not counting bootlegs.

The fact that Buddy came from a small town in Texas is significant for many of his fans. His type of accented English and singing style was rarely heard in internationally-released pop music. It was more often found in Country and Western and novelty recordings. While movies and popular culture were pigeon-holing Texas during the first half of the Twentieth Century as a massive backwards enclave of dust, cattle, cowboys and violence, the city fathers and mothers of Lubbock were busy trying to make their town as modern and as sophisticated as possible, with an opera house, convention center, major medical facilities and the largest technical college in that part of the country. There was nothing cowboy or backwoods about Lubbock, although the tumbleweeds (Since their 1877 introduction into the U.S in South Dakota via a bundle of seeds from Siberia, they had spread to pretty much where ever anything more dominant hadn't taken root.) might be a little hard to miss. Buddy was such an all-American sort of fellow, though, that if you took his biography and inserted the name of any other town in place of Lubbock, with any other state in place of Texas, hardly a thing would seem out of place. He was crowned King of his Sixth Grade class and a photo survives showing him in a suit and tie with an aluminium crown.

He was the youngest of his family. His real name was Charles Hardin Holley.

“Now you go your way baby and I'll go mine

Now and forever 'till the end of time

And I'll find somebody new and baby

We'll say we're through

And you won't matter any more”

“I'm gonna turn you around and put you upside down

If that don't stop your runnin' around

I'm a-going to set my foot right down on you

I wanna stop your struttin', baby, 'til you say you're through”

Contrary to the cotton-candy impression that many casual listeners have of his songs, Buddy worked with a version of what was later called “Three Chords and the Truth” by veteran country songsmith Harlan Howard, inserting all manner of bitterness and hard-edged maturity into his quatrains. Like the original Warner Bros. cartoons, Buddy’s work was not intended for childish audiences, but for adults. It is only time and stupidity that have softened the memories and the perception of both. For most of his public career, Buddy played for the approval of adults, only garnering the attention of youth toward the end of his life when he was reaching a level of physical and temporal maturity himself.

In 1956 Buddy had two very important learning experiences, the first was going to Nashville to record his first session with clueless Decca session workers (foreshadowing the Beatles experience), and the second was serving as a backup musician for two package tours featuring stars who lacked their own bands.

The Nashville fiasco began with the help of the manager of KDAV, (something) Stone
On October 14, 1955 Buddy’s original trio, with his equal partner Bob Montgomery, and Larry Wellborn, played on a show arranged by radio station KDAV, that starred Bill Haley and the Comets as the headliners. Travelling with the show was a Nashville talent agent named Eddie Crandall. He liked what he saw and heard , told the boys to cobble together some demos, and went back to Nashville to talk to the Decca execs.
Old and persistent rumour has it that Elvis Presley and Col. Tom Parker had a hand in the Nashville contract, but although Buddy and friends played the very next night on a crowded show that included Presley, Floyd Cramer, and Johnny Cash, Presley was just a working stiff himself, Parker was not his full time manager yet, and the association between Buddy and Elvis, which is supposed to have included the one showing the other around his hometown before the show (they had met once or twice before) was that of acquaintances, not mentor and student.

For some reason, only Buddy was asked to come to Nashville. Bob Montgomery sang mostly country and Buddy sang "rhythm and blues", rockabilly, covers and their own originals, so it is strange that once Buddy got to Nashville the Decca people wanted him to sound country instead of like what Crandall had heard and liked. Bob was ready to move on, anyway, and Larry Wellborn was too young to travel. Buddy formed a new band to take with him. Sometime in 1955 he had hit his brother (name) up for some money for clothes, a new guitar, and some amps. He asked for a thousand dollars loan, six hundred of which supposedly went for the Stratocaster alone. His brother (name) was glad to oblige, for, as he said much later, he knew that Buddy was serious about his music and that eventually he'd get his money back. This whole bit about the new guitar gets a little weird when Buddy got to Nashville and the engineer wouldn't let him play rhythm guitar while he sang because it might bleed into the mike (a common technique now-a-days) and the session musicians had their own way of doing things. Of course, Buddy wasn't precious about his equipment and he had no trouble handing his guitar to anyone else to use, so it probably made it onto the recordings in other hands.

The first Nashville sessions are wooden and almost useless, but recorded with pristine professionalness in all their awfulness. Buddy sounds either scared or bored and the sidemen sound like they are working in a factory. For the second set of sessions, a couple of months later, Buddy insisted on using his own boys in addition to the sidemen, and the engineer apparently just didn't care, because that time the exuberant and youthful sound of Buddy and his friends was recorded with poor mike placement, careless level control, a poorly maintained tape machine, and what sounds like previously used and then bulk-erased tape. The first sessions pooped out two singles, Blue Days Black Nights/Love Me, and Modern Don Juan/You Are My One Desire that went into the toilet, while the material from the second sessions weren't used for pressing until after the later Crickets recordings began to chart on Brunswick.

In the road show experience,
Buddy, Sonny Curtis, Don Guess, and Jerry Allison (his pre-Crickets band mates) would open the shows with a couple of tunes of their own and then fall back to support the artists who included George Jones, Wanda Jackson, Cowboy Copas, Faron Young and Sonny James. It was a rude awakening in many ways. Sometimes the curtain would raise with Buddy with his back to the crowd messing with his amp.

At fifteen, he got glasses. He tried contacts for a while, but didn’t like them (check contacts availability date), according to the “Remembering Buddy” book, and he played a few shows without his specs, but put them back on after an embarrassing experience of dropping his pick and having to get on hands and knees to find it. He also got into the habit of storing spare picks under the pickguard when he played electric guitar. One of the last picks he ever used was found under the pickguard of his last Strat when it was partially disassembled recently for cleaning.

For many years Buddy's parents kept his guitars and things at their house and weren't adverse to letting anybody handle or play with them. They also had his motorcyle, an Ariel Cyclone, until it was sold and eventually was given as a gift to Waylon Jennings by the Crickets.