Buddy Holly: Biography (12 page)

In the following days Buddy concentrated on holding together the band he’d assembled for the Clovis session. He enlisted Niki Sullivan, who’d sung backup on “That’ll Be the Day,” to play rhythm guitar in his new band and he wanted to keep Jerry as his drummer. Larry Welborn, the bass player, was getting tired of working for no pay—especially since he never received any recognition for his contribution.

There were other problems with the band. Between Jerry and Niki, the nucleus of what would shortly become the Crickets, there was no love lost, Petty later confided to interviewers Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm. Jerry made Niki feel unwelcome, perhaps because Jerry found it difficult to share Buddy with anyone, man or woman. Also, Niki was good looking, had stage presence, and attracted adoring glances from the girls. Though Niki stayed on, he would never be included in the special camaraderie Buddy and Jerry enjoyed.

Larry Welborn was the first to cut out. He and Buddy were “getting cross” with one another, Jerry later told Griggs. Welborn returned to a Lubbock group called the Four Teens. A few days later Buddy and Jerry dropped in on a Four Teens dance at the boxing arena on First Street. Besides Welborn, Jerry Allison knew another musician in the band, a pint-sized, Nordic-looking blond whom Allison used to cut study hall with to smoke cigarettes. His name was Joe Benson Mauldin, though everyone called him “Joe B.,” and he was the Four Teens’ bass player. Between sets Buddy approached Joe B. and asked him if he wanted to play in Buddy’s band. Joe B. would be glad to, he said, if it didn’t create any conflicts with the Four Teens.

The next day—March 2, 1957—Buddy and Jerry roused Joe B. out of bed and asked him if he wanted to play a gig that night in Carlsbad, New Mexico. What sort of performance would be expected of him, Joe B. inquired. Buddy assured him that he would be allowed to express his feelings freely. Joe B. liked the sound of that and told Buddy to count him in. Later that Saturday, in gloriously typical Texas spring weather—sixty-two degrees—they drove 181 miles west to Carlsbad, site of the famous limestone caverns. Like Clovis, the town is nondescript, engulfed by endless space and sky, but the gaping black hole that leads into the apparently bottomless cave is an awesome sight, especially at sunset, when a million bats fly out for the night. That evening the as yet unnamed Crickets played their first gig together, a four-hour dance at the Elks Club, for $65. It was the defining moment not only in their lives, which would be inextricably entwined from now on, but, to an extent, in the history of rock ’n’ roll, for this was the prototypal band that helped invent the sound of rock. Slapping his King acoustic bass, Joe B. pulled the Crickets sound together, cushioned it, and added a new depth. What he left out was as important as what he put in. “I was very basic in what I played, usually just hitting on the first and third beats—you know, half notes,” Joe B. later told William Bush. Gone was the jagged edge of Buddy and Jerry’s visceral rockabilly, but Buddy now had the professional sound he’d dreamed of.

They rocked Carlsbad that night, launching into the risqué “Birthday Song.” Like Elvis Presley, Niki had an educated pelvis and could be quite uninhibited onstage. “It brought the house down,” Niki says.

On the drive back to Lubbock, Buddy attempted to persuade Joe B. to join the band as its permanent bass player, painting a rosy picture of the success they were going to achieve as big-time recording artists. Joe B. had heard that kind of bragging from a lot of musicians around Lubbock and wasn’t impressed. Personal ambition was beyond his ken. He expected to end up a shoe salesman. But when Buddy kept promising big money, Joe B. finally asked him how long it was going to take to break into show business. Buddy uttered the magic words
Elvis Presley,
pointing out that stardom had come fairly quickly for Elvis, and Joe B. finally relented. That night Joe B. informed his mother he was joining a rock ’n’ roll band. Her response was typical of middle-class contempt for rock at the time. She told Joe B. that she hoped he would have to work his “fingers to the bone” for the remainder of his days and that he was going to regret his decision for as long as he lived.

The Crickets’ lineup was now complete—two guitars, bass, and drums; it would serve as the model for rock bands for decades to come. Buddy said he needed a name for the group, something to put on the demo of “That’ll Be the Day” before he sent it off to Roulette Records in New York. He would have put his own name on it, but by contract he was forbidden from rerecording “That’ll Be the Day” as Buddy Holly. He called Paul Cohen and asked Decca to waive the clause, but Cohen refused.

Buddy and Jerry considered several names for the band, including the Scoundrels. Ideally they wanted something blue-collar and gritty, a name that would announce the arrival of a new generation with radically different values from those of their parents. The World War II generation had dreamed of glamour and romance, two-stepping to the strains of Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians and jitterbugging to the Andrews Sisters. Buddy wanted something that would reflect the up-front, let’s-fuck attitude of R&B records like “Sixty Minute Man”—impudent, down-to-earth, proletarian, and, above all, black.

“Witchcraft,” a record by the Spiders, was a favorite of Buddy’s, and he suggested they find a name like the Spiders—some kind of insect. Finally they consulted an encyclopedia at Jerry’s house. Niki remembers that someone proposed the Grasshoppers and then the Beetles, but Jerry complained that beetles were the kind of bug people like to squash. Jerry later denied that they ever considered the Beetles; they chose the Crickets, he told Griggs in 1982, because they were insects that made noise. Niki’s memory of the episode is more colorful; he told Goldrosen that Jerry liked crickets because they “make a happy sound by rubbing their legs together.”

On March 12, 1957, they made their first recording as the Crickets, cutting a couple of tunes to send to Roulette along with “That’ll Be the Day” and “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love.” One of the cuts was “Maybe Baby,” a song Buddy wrote in collaboration with his mother. Though it was a promising tune, the Clovis cut of “Maybe Baby,” unlike the hit version made later at Travis Air Force Base, didn’t come off any better than the Nashville cut of “That’ll Be the Day.” It fell flat, especially the ineffectual backup vocals. They also recorded a song composed by Joe B., “Last Night,” a jilted lover’s lament, heavily influenced by the Platters’ 1956 hit “My Prayer.”

Finally Buddy dispatched the 78-rpm demo of “That’ll Be the Day” and the other songs to Roulette, hoping to fare better with Gary Tollett’s connections there better than Tollett himself had. In New York, Roulette’s Morris Levy promptly turned down “That’ll Be the Day” and added insult to injury by trying to acquire “That’ll Be the Day” for Buddy Knox to cover. Buddy Holly said no, even though almost any record by Buddy Knox at this point would have been a surefire hit; in March Knox’s “Party Doll” passed the million mark and continued to outsell every other record in the United States. Roulette’s attempt to preempt the song for Knox underscored Holly’s certainty that the song contained the magic and the energy that would propel him to the top of the charts if only he could continue to hold on to it and get a reasonably decent rock ’n’ roll version of it on tape. Obviously Holly valued his integrity and sense of responsibility toward his talent and career above money.

When the Roulette deal fell through in early 1957, Petty offered to take the demo to New York himself and offer it to his contacts at the record companies. His terms were exorbitant, as usual: Petty wanted a cut of writer’s royalties in return for sharing his New York contacts. “We couldn’t lose,” Buddy later told DJ Freeman Hoover. “We were about as far down as you can get already.” As Petty departed for New York, Buddy told the Crickets that stardom now lay just ahead. None of them believed him. Niki says no one in the band expected “That’ll Be the Day” to go over the top—except for Buddy.

Petty arrived in New York and began to pitch the Crickets to the industry’s artists and repertoire men, the record-company executives whose job is to scout new material and artists. He called on Columbia Records’ Mitch Miller, the bearded A&R man who’d been responsible for signing Petty’s “Mood Indigo.” Rock ’n’ roll was about as welcome in his office as dog meat. Though his A&R job had once been exciting—matching artists like Frankie Laine with material like “Mule Train”—rock ’n’ roll had radically diminished his role. A rock group like Buddy’s wrote its own material and did its own arrangements, leaving A&R executives like Miller, who’d once dictated material and reigned over recording sessions, out in the cold. The joke in the industry was that A&R now stood for Arguments and Recriminations. Miller was out of touch with new trends. Recently he’d passed on Connie Francis. “The girl has no distinctive sound,” he said, according to Connie’s autobiography,
Who’s Sorry Now.
Shortly thereafter she became the richest female singer in the world. Predictably, Miller turned down “That’ll Be the Day.”

Though Petty later denied it, Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler and RCA’s Joe Carlton were the next industry wise men to pass up the Crickets, according to the authoritative
Rolling Stone
history of rock ’n’ roll,
Rock of Ages.
Having run out of all the majors except for Decca, who’d already fired Buddy Holly in Nashville, Petty finally appealed to Murray Deutch of Peer-Southern, the music publisher who’d handled the Norman Petty Trio’s song “Almost Paradise.” Petty’s Nor Va Jak music-publishing firm was affiliated with Peer-Southern, which acted as sole selling agent for Nor Va Jak, handling all its sheet-music sales and promotion of record releases. Deutch wanted a fifty-fifty split on the publishing rights of “That’ll Be the Day” if he could swing a record deal for the Crickets. Though the terms were gluttonous, at least Deutch had the gumption to spot “That’ll Be the Day” as a winner. He rang Bob Thiele, Teresa Brewer’s husband and the A&R director of Coral Records, a Decca subsidiary. According to Thiele, Deutch called him and offered the demo, explaining that although it had been rejected by RCA, Columbia, and other companies, he thought Deutch would like it. Thiele invited Deutch to bring the demo in and play it. Afterward, Thiele received a call from Norman Petty. Years later Thiele revealed in
Reminiscing
magazine that Petty pleaded with him, saying, “Please, I don’t want any money for it. Just get this record released.” Petty could have obtained a better deal for Buddy by not showing his hand. As soon as Thiele finished listening to “That’ll Be the Day,” he said, “Let’s go! It’s great!” Petty practically gave it away, selling the demo for “$150 per side and a royalty on every record sold,” Petty later admitted to writer Helen Betty in
New Mexico
magazine in 1960.

What did Thiele see in Holly that all his colleagues in the record industry had missed? In an interview with author and record executive Joe Smith, Thiele said, “I like to think of myself as maybe different from Milt Gabler, Mitch Miller, and those guys. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever made a record I didn’t personally like.”

Petty couldn’t believe that Thiele was willing to release the demo and insisted on going back to Clovis and putting together a good master recording of “That’ll Be the Day.” Thiele wouldn’t hear of it—the record was perfect, he said. Petty kept arguing that it was merely a demo. But Thiele steadfastly maintained that he had exactly what he wanted “right here on this tape.” Petty finally left the demo with Thiele and returned to his hotel room to wait for the contract. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t that simple,” Thiele revealed in his liner notes for the album
Buddy Holly.
The minute he tried to get the approval of his Decca superiors, president Milton Rachmil and vice president Leonard Schneider, he ran into a brick wall of opposition. They scorned “That’ll Be the Day” as “junk,” dismissing it as “a joke,” Thiele later stated in Goldrosen and Beecher’s
Remembering Buddy.
Coral, the Decca subsidiary Thiele worked for, was better at handling artists such as the McGuire Sisters and Lawrence Welk, the Decca brass argued. Brash rockers like the Crickets might offend Coral’s roster of stars.

Recalling the controversy, Dick Jacobs, another Decca executive, said that Decca’s top officers considered Thiele to be insane for trying to sign up an artist who’d already been fired by Decca’s Nashville office. But Thiele wielded sufficient clout at the company to get his way. In his interview with Joe Smith, Thiele said that, in the crunch, he sometimes put his job on the line, saying, “Fuck it … fire me, but I’m going to make that record.” Finally Decca told him that he could put the Crickets on Brunswick, a kind of trash-basket label in which Decca dumped its undesirables.

Petty returned to Clovis in triumph, acting as if he’d pulled off the deal of the century. Though he did not tell the Crickets, he left the impression in New York that he was already in complete control of Buddy and the band. He struck Deutch as officious, as someone with a stranglehold on his clients, whom no one could talk to without first going through Petty.

When Buddy learned that his new label, Brunswick, was a Decca subsidiary, he chuckled and said it was “kind of like going out the front door and coming in the back door.” Hi Pockets and Jack Neal were appalled when Buddy confessed that he’d cut Petty in on songwriting credits. Neal angrily exclaimed that Petty was usurping credit for Buddy’s songs. Buddy shrugged it off as the price he had to pay for a shot at stardom. When the stakes are big, he told Neal, you always have to invest some of your own money. There was some truth to this but also more than a little youthful gullibility. Petty misled the Crickets into thinking he’d give them a share of his company if they produced a hit record. On hearing this, Joe B. glanced around Petty’s studio, which was crammed with expensive equipment, and assumed that he was now a shareholder, that he’d finally arrived. Joe B. let Petty take equal songwriting credit, which Joe B. would later regret.

Excited over his new Brunswick contract, Buddy dropped in to KSEL to share the news with DJ Jerry Coleman. Buddy often came by KSEL to listen to and study its extensive collection of Little Richard and Fats Domino records. On this occasion he appeared at eleven
P.M.
“He sat there for hours and sang along with Little Richard and Fats Domino,” recalls Coleman. Buddy, who was now twenty, complained to Coleman about his acne. “He had a terrible complexion,” says Coleman. Like his chronic nervous stomach and his ulcer, his skin condition was exacerbated by alcohol consumption, smoking, and a rich diet. “He liked pizzas real well,” Ella Holley told Griggs in 1977, adding that when he came home late, around midnight, she’d always fix him a peanut-butter sandwich. Steak was another favorite food of Buddy’s, but the dish he loved above all others was okra dipped in a cornmeal batter and then fried in grease. Though it was a typical diet for a Texas boy in the fifties, before people realized the danger of eating fat, it was not one designed to soothe a digestive tract already traumatized by ulcers. Buddy told Coleman he’d heard about a scraping process that would smooth out his acne scars, and he decided to undergo the operation as soon as he could afford it.