Buddy Holly: Biography (14 page)

In May 1957, the Everly Brothers made their debut on Cadence Records, which had been formed by Godfrey rejects Archie Bleyer and Julius LaRosa. “Bye Bye Love” dominated the charts for weeks. Buddy became a fan of the Everlys and managed somehow to contact Don. He was aware that Don was deriving some of his arrangements from Bo Diddley, Buddy said, and offered to write a song called “Not Fade Away” for the Everlys, utilizing Bo Diddley’s distinctive jungle beat. Beautiful singers but not the shrewdest judges of material, Don and Phil Everly turned down “Not Fade Away.” Later Don attempted to justify the goof, saying that he was afraid people would say the Everlys sounded too much like Bo Diddley. Besides, Don added, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant had just given them a terrific song called “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” so who needed “Not Fade Away”? Even so, says Don, “it was nice of Buddy to do that for us.” In fact, Don came to view the episode as a feather in his cap, telling journalist Philip Norman in the 1980s, “Buddy wrote ‘Not Fade Away’ for us. It burns me up when I read
reportedly
written by Buddy Holly for the Everly Brothers.”

Far from envying the Everlys their breakthrough, Buddy took it as a good omen: when Buddy sang, he
sounded
rather like Phil Everly, and when Buddy overdubbed his own voice and harmonized with himself, he sounded like both Don
and
Phil.

Rehearsing the Crickets day and night in 1957, Buddy rented an office on the south side of Lubbock for daily practice. One night they participated in a “Battle of the Bands” contest at a local theater. “Ever’body had their clique there, and the one that clapped and hollered the loudest was determined the winner,” Larry Holley related in 1992. “Buddy was the last on the show. He had somebody with him, but I don’t remember if Joe B. was there. Jerry Allison might have been playin’ drums. Before Buddy came on, a guy named Jimmy Peters imitated Elvis and did a real good job of it and got a lot of applause. Then Buddy came out. He was dressed up, not just his Levi’s but real nice, like a professional musician.” As soon as Buddy appeared onstage, a group at the back of the theater started booing.

“There comes old turkey neck,” someone yelled.

It must have hurt Buddy, but he didn’t let it show. “Lubbock is a very jealous town,” Larry observes. “I didn’t think he was going to win after hearing all them other guys. They was booin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on, but Buddy didn’t let it bother him at all. Of course, I was there and it made me mad, but Buddy got up there just as professional-like and started playin’ and it wasn’t any comparison to them other guys. He started shufflin’ across the floor, not like Chuck Berry where he gets down and squats, but just shufflin’ along like he was playin’ for the King of England and could care less what they thought. He was goin’ to do the best he could, and the crowd went wild, and he won. That’s when I knew that Buddy had the quality that it would take to overcome the hecklin’ and whatever it takes to make it.”

On May 16, 1957, Buddy received an agreement from Coral Records for “Words of Love” and “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues.” Coral, a Decca subsidiary considered more prestigious than Brunswick, had pegged Buddy as a solo singer. Decca had not deemed the Crickets good enough for Coral and kept them on Brunswick, but Buddy’s vocal on “Words of Love” was clearly a star turn. From now on Buddy’s recordings would be released alternately on Brunswick and Coral: Brunswick when the Crickets’ contribution was obvious, Coral when Buddy dominated the record. Buddy’s generosity again asserted itself; on his Coral releases, he gave the Crickets their usual pay.

He finished writing “Everyday,” and recorded it in Clovis on May 29. Between takes he wandered through the studio and came upon what appeared to be a toy piano but was in fact a keyboard xylophone—a celesta. Though it’s widely thought that Vi Petty played the instrument on “Everyday,” Norman Petty later informed Bill Griggs, “Vi only showed me how since I couldn’t read music, but I’m the one who played the celesta on ‘Everyday.’”

Expertly and delicately played, the celesta was the cut’s lead instrument, and its gentle nursery-like chimes would give the record its endearing, soft-textured appeal. Instead of lust and rebellion, the usual ingredients in rock, “Everyday” dwells on the youthful belief that love is right around the corner. Though tender, the song has a relentless, inexorable drive, underscored by Jerry’s subtle but tenacious percussive effects, which were accomplished not by drums but by Jerry slapping on his knees. The resulting sound, a delicate pitter-patter, insistent as the ticking of a clock, drives home the song’s message: that love is not so much a revelation, or something you fall into, as it is a gradual unfolding. In rock critic Jonathan Cott’s words, “Holly’s deepest, wisest, and seemingly least complicated songs express the unadorned confrontation of beauty and love with time.”

“Everyday” also embodies Buddy’s dogged faith that Echo, the “good girl” of every fifties boy’s dreams, or a girl very much like her, would eventually become his wife and the mother of his children. The song always remained one of his personal favorites. Unfortunately, he couldn’t sign his name to it, since he feared that Cedarwood Music would nail him on a technicality that might result in litigation. Cursing the day he’d ever set foot in Nashville, he was forced to use the pseudonym Charles Hardin. Eventually Petty went to Nashville and hammered out a deal transferring publishing rights from Cedarwood to his own Nor Va Jak publishing operation.

The only reason Buddy recorded “Not Fade Away,” which he also cut on May 29, was because the Everly Brothers had rejected it. The Everlys’ loss is our eternal gain: “Not Fade Away” is one of his best performances. Cocky and brash, it explodes like a string of firecrackers. Jerry performs his customary magic, again eschewing drums, this time in favor of a pasteboard box. Syncopated background vocals, overdubbed by Buddy, Niki, and Jerry, turn Bo Diddley’s jungle rhythm into a rockabilly riot. Unlike the lover of “Everyday,” the singer in “Not Fade Away” orders his girl to make love to him, promising she’ll get something bigger than a Cadillac. The relationship of the couple in the song follows the same up-and-down, off-and-on course as Buddy and Echo’s affair, or Jerry and Peggy Sue’s: the singer chastizes his girl for rejecting him, but by the final verse, he’s regained his confidence and is able to assert that the only love that doesn’t die is one grounded in honesty and trust. For a pounding, danceable rocker, the song packs a tremendous amount of meaning.

“Only thing I minded about Norman,” Sonny Curtis said in 1995, “was that he grabbed some songs he didn’t help write. J.I. was coauthor of ‘Not Fade Away’ and Norman grabbed credit and kicked J.I. off.” J.I. was Jerry Ivan Allison, Buddy’s drummer and the true collaborator on “Not Fade Away.”

The demos of “Everyday” and “Not Fade Away” were sent to New York, but neither Brunswick nor Coral announced plans for releasing this pair of classics. Buddy was deluging his record company with tremendous material but Decca executives, oblivious to the gold mine they were sitting on, played it safe. They opted to wait and see how “That’ll Be the Day” fared in the marketplace when they finally released it on May 27, 1957. Obviously they hadn’t spotted “That’ll Be the Day” as a winner or they’d have been pressing follow-up records and albums, which they easily could have done, considering the brilliant demos Buddy kept pelting them with throughout the spring and summer of 1957. At first there was so little action on “That’ll Be the Day” that they wrote it off as a clunker, doing nothing to promote or advertise it.

But nothing could stop the creative roll Buddy was on in 1957. He lived for the hours he could spend in Clovis, where the songs surging through him could be caught on tape. The Crickets were back in Petty’s studio a few weeks after the “Not Fade Away”/”Everyday” session, this time to record “Ready Teddy” and “Valley of Tears.” Niki was sitting on a sofa in the back room, repeatedly playing a catchy refrain, when Buddy wandered in and stood listening to him, fascinated by the riff Niki was working on. “Tell me how,” Buddy said, and a song grew from that simple sentence. Though Niki inspired the song, it was Petty who’d share the writing credit with Buddy and Jerry. Buddy’s vocal seems to dance over the lyrics in “Tell Me How,” pleading for love from a girl who keeps it locked in her heart. Though the Moog synthesizer was not yet in use, there are some unidentifiable, synthesizer-like sounds, due to Jerry’s percussive virtuosity and Petty’s bewitching inventiveness.

“Ready Teddy” was written by Robert A. “Bumps” Blackwell and John Marascalco and recorded by Little Richard in 1956. Elvis also sang it in 1956 on his first
Ed Sullivan
appearance, and it came to be known as an Elvis song. Such formidable precedents not only failed to intimidate Buddy but spurred him on to a powerful rendition. No one could be fiercer than Buddy, so gentle in his ballads, when he wanted to go hell-for-leather in a gutsy rocker. In “Ready Teddy,” he infuses the word
ready
with a gripping carnality. Yelping, growling, delighting in his voice as an instrument of seemingly infinite inflection and suppleness, Buddy proved that he could hold his own with the wildest men in rock.

Buddy’s poignant, uniquely C&W-flavored style reinvents Fats Domino’s little-known “Valley of Tears.” Petty, at his Baldwin electric organ, provides a searing accompaniment.

On June 14, 1957, Buddy Knox returned to Texas to celebrate the chart-topping success of “Party Doll.” Holly and a carload of Lubbock musicians, including the Tolletts, drove up the Panhandle to Dumas, Texas, to appear in a show feting Knox and his group, the Rhythm Orchids. Buddy Knox remembers sitting on the front porch of his house and talking through the night with his chums from Lubbock. Soon Knox was recording in Clovis again. Holly was around the studio constantly, Knox recalls. Often Holly would play rhythm guitar on Knox’s cuts, and Knox would play on Holly’s records whenever needed. In terms of good fellowship and creativity, Clovis was part of rock’s Southern axis, a prairie version of Sam Phillips’s Sun Records in Memphis, where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis all sparked each other.

When “Words of Love” was released on June 20, it came nowhere near the Top 40. The Diamonds’ cover of “Words of Love” had completely stolen Holly’s thunder. The record-buying public also ignored the stunning oddity of “Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues.” Holly desperately needed some good news, but Decca kept him completely in the dark about the sales of “That’ll Be the Day.”

Unbeknownst to its performer at first, “That’ll Be the Day” was flying out of the stores in July 1957, thanks largely to flamboyant disk jockeys in Buffalo and Philadelphia. Georgie Woods of Philadelphia’s WDAS, a black station, played the record so continuously that it became a regional hit, according to Deutch. A Buffalo DJ named Tom Clay, broadcasting on WWOL under the name Guy King, played “That’ll Be the Day” consecutively for twenty minutes one day. Afterward he decided to call Lubbock and talk with Buddy on the air. As Clay subsequently related to DJ Jerry Rio, Clay told Buddy that he might very well have a hit.

“That’ll Be the Day” climbed onto
Billboard
’s regional best-seller list for upstate New York, Boston, and Cleveland. According to Tom Clay, it was not major metropolises like Manhattan or Los Angeles but second-rank cities such as Buffalo and Cleveland that accounted for the initial success of rock ’n’ roll. Still awaiting confirmation from Brunswick that the record had broken out, Buddy drove to Clovis that July in 103-degree heat to cut “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy,” and other gems from his early-1957 songwriting binge, surely one of the most prolific in the history of popular music.

Originally, “Peggy Sue” was entitled “Cindy Lou,” named after Buddy’s niece, the infant daughter of his sister Pat Holley Kaiter. Before the song metamorphosed into “Peggy Sue” while being recorded in Clovis, “Cindy Lou” had a Latin beat, somewhat similar to Harry Belafonte’s 1957 calypso hit “Banana Boat (Day O).” During the session they realized that it was a dud, puny and lacking both style and commercial flair. Jerry suggested a drumroll like the one in Jaye P. Morgan’s “Dawn,” but when they tried it, Jerry drowned out everything else on the tape. Bill Pickering, who had formed a singing trio called the Picks, who’d later work with Buddy, said Jerry “beat the tar out of those drums. He had the fastest hands I’ve ever seen, faster than Wyatt Earp.”

Realizing that they had to get the drums outside the studio, Norman Petty told Jerry to move his instruments into the hallway. Resituated in the reception room, Jerry used the loudspeaker system and headphones to communicate with Buddy. It was decided that Jerry should play paradiddles, a basic exercise used by drummers. The result was the unbroken drumming sound that would ultimately pull the recording together. But first Jerry asked Buddy if they could change the song’s title from “Cindy Lou” to “Peggy Sue.” Jerry and Peggy Sue Gerron had recently feuded and broken up. “Jerry wanted to do something to get me back,” Peggy Sue revealed in 1994. That would take some doing, since Peggy Sue’s parents, convinced she and Jerry were getting much too cozy, had moved her to Sacramento, California, enrolling her in Girl’s Catholic School.

As Peggy Sue later told Dick Clark, Buddy struck a bargain with Jerry: if Jerry could sustain the steady drumming throughout the cut Buddy would agree to the title change. The instrument Jerry used was “a snare drum with the snares off,” he told Griggs in 1978. When they tried the new beat, the song was completely transformed. At first the change in tempo threw Buddy off. When the time came for the lead break, he discovered it was physically impossible to switch from the rhythm position to the lead position on his Fender Stratocaster. The studio became a scene of frenetic activity as Buddy instructed Niki to kneel at his feet and throw the switch of his Strat the instant Buddy gave him the signal (a nod of Buddy’s head). At close range, Niki discovered that the reason Buddy’s guitar playing sounded so lush was that Buddy played all six guitar strings continuously, unlike the majority of guitarists, who usually deal with one or two strings at a time. On “Peggy Sue” he used nothing but downstrokes, refined during years of playing the mandolin. Soon, Buddy’s downstroke strumming technique would become a rock legend; author Jimmy Guterman’s 1992 book
The Best Rock ’n’ Roll Records of All Time
refers to “Peggy Sue” as the “source of the greatest rhythm guitar solo in all rock ’n’ roll.”