Buddy Holly: Biography (13 page)

On Coleman’s nineteenth birthday, Buddy returned to the station with the Crickets and presented Coleman a sterling silver lighter engraved, “To Jerry from Buddy Holly & the Crickets.” Though DJs as a group were doing nothing at this time to promote Buddy’s records, Buddy cultivated them because he liked them and knew their goodwill would one day pay off.

The Crickets received their contract from Brunswick on March 19, 1957; it was simply a letter of agreement giving the company the masters of “That’ll Be the Day” and “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love.” In effect, Buddy was now an independent producer, free of studio interference and in complete artistic control of his sessions. It sounded good, but in reality it left Buddy and his band penniless, with only a promise of royalties if the record sold. To make matters worse, Petty strong-armed them into donating a whopping 40 percent of the royalties on their first record to the Baptist church. They all joined hands and prayed before signing the contract.

Larry Holley helped the Crickets out of their financial bind, hiring them as construction workers. He put Buddy, Jerry, and Joe B. to work grouting—filling the spaces between tiles with white cement. Showing up on the job unexpectedly one day, Larry discovered everyone goofing off except Buddy. Jerry was lolling on a slab of cardboard, and Joe B. was beating out a rhythm on a box. Larry told them he was firing them, but Buddy convinced him to give them all one more opportunity, and they’d promise to do better. Larry always found it difficult to say no to Buddy and agreed to put them to work digging a storm cellar. After a few days, the Crickets developed blisters on their hands and started sloughing off again. Hearing of their plight, Petty gave Buddy some indoors work, lining the walls of the large echo chamber next door to the Clovis studio with ceramic tiles.

Construction work made Buddy acutely aware of his physical limitations. Determined to build some muscles, he joined a gym and started lifting weights. Though still slender, he eventually developed well-defined pectorals, biceps, stomach muscles, and powerful thighs and calves. As he grew stronger, he was able to take a job as a truck driver in Larry’s business. According to Larry, Buddy knew how to handle a truck. During a long haul to San Angelo in an eighteen-wheeler, Buddy and Larry decided to stop for a hamburger just outside the city limits. Not until they were seated in the restaurant did they realize that they’d stopped in the black section of town. The customers as well as a small band playing blues music were all black. Buddy, who was wearing Levi’s, T-shirt, and moccasins, talked to the band during a break and ended up playing “Sexy Ways” with them. News quickly spread through the community that some “ofay cat” was fracturing his fuse box. Soon the joint was packed. Buddy later told Larry that this was the moment he decided to devote the rest of his life to entertaining people.

On the strength of that conviction, new creative energies poured through Buddy and he started working on one of his most memorable songs, “Words of Love.” The Crickets were rehearsing one day at June and Nig Clark’s house when a tornado alert was announced over the radio. A twister was tearing through the South Plains near Lubbock. They dashed to a neighbor’s cellar and stayed there for two hours as the tornado bounced around the prairie. Recognizing the musicians, some of the neighbors started complaining to them about all the noise they’d been making, especially the drummer. Confined in such close quarters, Buddy and his musicians had little choice but to promise to stop making so much racket. Subsequently, they asked Petty if they could use his studio to practice in from now on. Petty agreed, and soon they were practically living in Clovis, using the little apartment in the rear portion of the studio, which had all the comforts of home—refrigerator, stove, couch, and a fireplace. With its Scandinavian decor—blond wood furniture and Scotch plaid upholstery—the apartment was the fifties version of a bachelor pad.

The Crickets often crashed there after working all night. Buddy was an inveterate night owl, and so was Petty. Their metabolisms were synchronized, reaching their peak from three to six
A.M.
From a technical standpoint it was the best time to record—there was less traffic noise from the eighteen-wheelers that hauled feed during the day to cattle on the grazing fields around Clovis.

If the studio was booked by other musicians when Buddy arrived, he’d play as a sideman on their records. His voice and guitar can be heard on the recordings of Jack Huddle, Jim Robinson, Fred Crawford, Ray Ruff, and many other musicians in the Tex-Mex circle. Soon they were all helping each other during their recording sessions in what Petty once described as a big, joyous Tex-Mex family.

Reporting for work in the morning, Norma Jean Berry, Petty’s secretary-assistant, often found the Crickets sprawled over the sofa and chairs. They’d rub their eyes, rouse themselves, drink their morning coffee, then swarm into the studio to record the brilliant songs Buddy was composing in early 1957. He was on a fantastic creative roll, turning out “Everyday,” “Words of Love,” “Listen to Me,” “Tell Me How,” and “Peggy Sue” in six months.

Petty expected them to keep the place in order, including weeding the rose garden and mowing the lawn in back of the studio. Working and sleeping together, the Crickets grew to be as close as brothers. Though Buddy was indisputably the star, he was generous and egalitarian to a fault, insisting on an equal split when Petty introduced the subject of record royalties. “Share and share alike. There’s four Crickets so everybody gets the same cut,” Buddy said, according to Maria Elena Santiago, the girl he’d marry the following year. Petty reminded Buddy that
he
was the star; the others were only sidemen who could be put on salary. Buddy said he would never treat his musicians like dogs; they would all get equal shares of their earnings, and that was that.

Suddenly altering his strategy, Petty conceded the four-way split on live performances but held out for a better deal for Buddy on the recordings. Most artists hire musicians for recording sessions, paying them union scale and excluding them from participation in royalties, Petty pointed out. Finally Buddy agreed on a 65–35 percent split, in his favor, on records. Petty continued to demur, implying that hacks could easily be enlisted on a per-session basis for recordings. Buddy refused to budge, and the Crickets’ percentages remained intact.

Ray Ruff, a musician who recorded in Clovis, once said that Buddy was so generous he would give you the shirt off his back if you asked him for it. According to Ruff, enjoying life and having fun were more important to Buddy than money. Women were quick to recognize and appreciate Buddy’s aura of virility, which promised sexual stamina and a good time in bed. Unlike many of his peers in the uptight fifties, he never had to struggle for sex; women came on to him. One of them was Vi Petty, Norman Petty’s wife. Often Norman was absent from the studio, making out, according to Niki Sullivan, with a male lover who was a business associate. One night, when the Crickets had been recording late, Norman suddenly left the studio with no explanation. After a while, Vi smiled provocatively and motioned for Buddy to join her in the Pettys’ apartment nearby. Later, when Buddy returned to the studio, he told Niki, “I can’t believe it. I made love to Vi.” In a 1995 interview, Sonny Curtis called the story “ludicrous. Guys tell each other things like that, and I would have known about it.” Though Sonny was familiar with the Clovis scene, he was not, at this particular time, a Cricket.

As Buddy worked on “Words of Love” that spring, he spent many nights listening to a hypnotic recording called “Love is Strange,” a 1956 hit by Mickey and Sylvia; he wanted “Words of Love” to have the same mesmerizing quality. His mother would call him in to dinner, and he would eat his meal as if in a trance. Then he’d go out and sit in his car for hours, letting the lyrics to “Words of Love” form in his mind. Finally he’d go back in the house, head straight for his room, pick up his guitar, and perform whatever portion of the song he’d just composed. When people heard him sing the finished work, they were speechless, caught in the spell of a great song. At once sensual, meditative, and spiritual, “Words of Love” is an enduring love song, most likely inspired by intimate exchanges between Buddy and Echo in their years together. The lyrics, mellow and beguiling, suggest the late-night murmurs of lovers who’ve just been inside of each other—body and soul.

The Crickets recorded “Words of Love” on a sunny, warm day in April 1957. The marathon session began on Wednesday the seventeenth and continued well into the next day. On Thursday morning a fatigued Joe B. put down his bass, assuming they’d finally finished. Not quite, according to Buddy, who announced he wanted to try something new. He started overdubbing his vocal, using a second machine, harmonizing with himself. Due to the loss of fidelity with each successive generation of dubbing, Jerry’s drums came through as a faint but compelling background pulsation. They spent more time on “Words of Love” than on any song they’d ever recorded, and it was worth it. Buddy’s vocal stands out in high relief over distant but still distinct and strangely compelling sounds, recalling the Mickey and Sylvia hit that inspired it but at the same time achieving a quality all its own.

Joe B. found the process by which the song gradually evolved into a masterwork nothing short of miraculous. Rock critic Richard Goldstein once said that to hear Janis Joplin sing “Ball and Chain” is to have been “laid, lovingly and well.” Buddy’s meltingly warm delivery of “Words of Love” indeed has the same effect.

Though exhausted, they remained in the studio long enough to slap together the flip side, “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues,” getting it in three takes. Buddy did it as a favor for Bob Thiele, his champion at Decca, who’d written it expressly for Buddy, with Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz. Buddy and Deutch had needed to humor Petty into making the record. Thiele once told Griggs that Buddy was a sensitive artist who would have preferred fewer business pressures.

In “Mailman” Buddy stretches the intensity of the blues past the breaking point. He begs, he pleads, he’s down on all fours, he’s out for the count, but the cut is a tour de force, staggering in its ambition and difference, not at all like any other song. Niki Sullivan calls it “horrible” and says that if it had been the Crickets’ first record, they’d have been washed up as recording artists. “Mailman” anticipates wild-eyed crackup songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Scattered,” Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart,” and Four Non-Blondes’ “What’s Going On?” and established Buddy as rock’s foremost vocal contortionist. His bizarre performance wrecked the neat conventions of establishment pop and the slick sentiments they represented.

Instead of sending “Words of Love”/”Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues” to Bob Thiele at Brunswick, Petty dispatched the demo to Deutch at Peer-Southern, which would prove to be a costly mistake. Although “Words of Love” was the superior cut, it was “Mailman,” according to Niki, that finally convinced Southern Music that the Crickets were an important group and that they should put all their clout behind Buddy Holly. As a result, Buddy would not score a hit with “Words of Love.” Someone at the publishing company gave the song to a rival group, the Diamonds, who’d just had a million-seller with “Little Darlin’.” The Diamonds’ cover of “Words of Love” was rushed out; it would clobber Buddy’s original the following summer. Deutch and Peer-Southern collected their royalties no matter who recorded their songs.

Months passed and still there was no word from New York regarding a release date for “That’ll Be the Day.” In New York, Bob Thiele ran into one obstacle after another from Brunswick Records’ parent company, Decca, which was reluctant to associate itself with rock ’n’ roll. Murray Deutch kept pressuring Thiele to make at least a token release so that Peer-Southern could begin collecting royalties. Decca finally agreed to let Brunswick press a mere one thousand units.

Meanwhile, the Crickets were broke and had to go back to gigging around Lubbock to survive. Despite his penury, Buddy managed to acquire a used red Cadillac, having worn out the Olds while driving the Crickets around Texas and Tennessee. Larry helped Buddy secure financing to purchase the car by cosigning the loan papers. The Crickets were as hard on the Cadillac as they’d been on the Olds. Larry maintains that the car held up only three months under the beating it received from Buddy, Jerry, and Joe B. before it started falling apart. Buddy returned the Cadillac to the used-car lot, parking it when the owner wasn’t looking. The next day the owner showed up on Larry’s doorstep, demanding the rest of the payments. Larry says his hair started turning gray as he tried to keep Buddy and his friends, all of whom were starry-eyed with ambition and not very realistic or responsible, out of harm’s way. In the end, Larry made the payments so Buddy could keep his Cadillac.

On May 11, 1957, Buddy was scheduled to audition at 3:45
P.M.
at KFDA television studios in Amarillo for the
Arthur Godfrey Talent Scouts
TV show. Godfrey was a redoubtable starmaker, responsible for the discovery of Julius LaRosa, Pat Boone, Patsy Cline, Shari Lewis, the McGuire Sisters, Carmel Quinn, and June Valli. The public loved Godfrey’s deep, warm voice and his relaxed, low-key, straightforward manner; his shows accounted for twelve percent of CBS’s television revenues. But in the fifties, the wracking pain he suffered as a result of injuries sustained in a 1931 automobile accident led to a series of on-camera outbursts that cost him his reputation. His treatment of LaRosa, whom he fired in the middle of a telecast, and musical director Archie Bleyer, whom Godfrey also fired, seemed unduly abusive and branded Godfrey as a difficult neurotic with a mercurial and explosive temper.

The Godfrey office instructed the Crickets to perform one nonoriginal song and to have plenty of additional material rehearsed and ready to perform if necessary. They were also told to provide one eight-by-ten glossy photo. Dreaming of national television exposure, the Crickets made the three-hour drive up the Panhandle to Amarillo. When they went before the judges, they performed a Little Richard song and some of their own compositions. When they finished, the Godfrey scout uttered a mild expletive and expressed concern for the future of music. If it was any consolation, Godfrey and his scouts were hardly infallible; they’d rejected Elvis in 1955. As values and styles rapidly changed in the late fifties, Godfrey and his pop-oriented show seemed increasingly old hat. His popularity on the wane, he made a tearful farewell speech and retired from television in 1959.