Buddy Holly: Biography (15 page)

Petty was busy in the control room, pushing the on and off signals to the echo chamber in time with the music. Petty also jiggered the volume on Jerry’s mike, which gave “Peggy Sue” its erotic throbbing sensation. Niki was so occupied with helping Buddy out that he finally gave up trying to play his guitar. On the first cut, Jerry made a mistake and either Buddy or Norman told him to shape up or they’d reinstate the title “Cindy Lou.” They got “Peggy Sue,” one of the most exciting and durable cuts in rock ’n’ roll, on the next take. Only twenty minutes had elapsed since they’d begun. Years later, in his book
Rock ’n’ Roll: The 100 Best Singles,
critic Paul Williams wrote:

There is something
perfect
about the sound of “Peggy Sue.” It gets into the blood. Buddy Holly could have been a country singer, or pop crooner, could have and probably would have fitted his talent to whatever music was happening in the world when he came along. It happened to be rock ’n’ roll. But it only fully became rock ’n’ roll the day Buddy Holly started singing it.

Though Petty horned in on the “Peggy Sue” songwriting credit, Niki later told Griggs that Buddy and Jerry cowrote it. In all the collaborations in the studio, Buddy generated the song ideas and contributed the most to their composition, Niki added in Goldrosen and Beecher’s
Remembering Buddy.
Norman Petty, in a long interview in 1983 with Brooks and Malcolm, did his best to minimize Buddy’s contribution and inflate his own, claiming that Buddy dropped off the first part of “True Love Ways” one day on his way to Portales, New Mexico, to visit an aunt with his mother and father. According to Petty, Buddy told him to write some lyrics and a bridge. The Crickets tolerated Petty’s attitude because, according to Niki, they were vulnerable, unsophisticated youths and didn’t concern themselves with business since it never occurred to anyone they’d score a hit.

The same late June–early July sessions that produced “Peggy Sue” also brought forth “Listen to Me,” “Oh Boy,” and “I’m Gonna Love You Too.” From the opening riff on “I’m Gonna Love You Too,” Buddy’s vocal encompasses a remarkable succession of situations and feelings. The singer enumerates the delicious things his girl is going to do to him, even though another boy has stolen her. The song carries a powerful message to teenagers lost in their own confusion and sadness. Here’s a guy who could be wailing the blues but instead he’s rocking out, overflowing with good humor and joy.

As the Crickets recorded “I’m Gonna Love You Too,” a real cricket trapped in the echo chamber started chirping. They went into the echo chamber and tried to rout the cricket, but it managed to evade them. Finally they gave up. The cricket can be heard quite clearly near the fadeout of “I’m Gonna Love You Too” on the LP
Buddy Holly
(MCA Records-25239) and the cassette
Oh Boy
(MCA-20425).

A more deliberate auditory innovation occurs in “Listen to Me,” another Holly song influenced by Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love is Strange.” Buddy somehow makes his guitar sound like a plugged-in harpsichord. Overdubbing his vocal, he sings a duet with himself and achieves some memorable pyrotechnics. His voice rises suddenly over the eerie instrumental, whispering urgent intimacies. The effect is at once startling and moving. At exactly one minute and fifteen seconds into the cut, the same cricket heard on the previous song starts chirping again—in tempo. (“Listen to Me” is on the same LP and cassette mentioned above.)

In “Oh Boy,” a tune by Sonny West and Bill Tilghman, Buddy introduces some of rock ’n’ roll’s most familiar sounds, his falsetto trills and feral growls. Originally entitled “Alla My Love,” “Oh Boy” opens with the exuberant boasts of a red-hot lover, bursting with animal pleasure. Both of the song’s composers were deliriously happy when they first heard Buddy’s cover. “Oh Boy” was so effective in its spontaneity that Petty decided to leave the take completely intact, including Buddy’s cough, which is audible just after the guitar break, at one minute and twenty-three seconds into the cut (on the MCA-20425 cassette
Oh Boy
and the Coral 57279/757279 LP
The Buddy Holly Story
).

By early July, Buddy was anxious and depressed. He was working with Larry on a city health unit building on the outskirts of Lubbock. The midsummer heat was blistering. Around three
P.M.
Larry noticed that Buddy was dejected and asked him what was the matter. Buddy replied that he was revolted by the whole process of making records, that it had been almost two months since his exhausting labors in Petty’s studio, and he despaired of ever hearing from Brunswick. He was still convinced that he had the ability to go all the way to the top, but he felt that luck was against him.

Larry suggested they knock off work for the day and call the record executives in New York and threaten to withdraw the record unless it was released immediately. When they got home and made the call, someone at Brunswick excitedly blurted that Buddy should see what was going on in New York. “That’ll Be the Day” was going to be a million-seller; people were humming it on the streets of Manhattan. According to Bob Thiele, no sooner was the record issued than Philadelphia snapped up sixteen thousand copies, a sure sign of a monster hit.

If the record was such a big success, Buddy said, Brunswick could afford to forward him a check for $500. He explained he needed it to cover some urgent expenses. When Buddy got off the phone, Larry asked him which song they’d been talking about, and Buddy replied that “That’ll Be the Day” was taking off. But surely that was the B-side, Larry said, reminding Buddy that he’d spent much more time on “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love,” which was supposed to be the A-side.

When “That’ll Be the Day” had been released on May 27,
Billboard
failed to recognize the future hit, according it a low 72 rating and a tepid review, noting, “Performance is better than material.” Gary Tollett’s record “Pretty Baby” came out at the same time and
Billboard
rated it 76, just four points behind “That’ll Be the Day.” This was proof positive, Tollett reflected, that critics didn’t know how to spot a winner.

One morning after a long session, Petty woke the Crickets at eight
A.M.
and informed them he had some amazing news. He read them a congratulatory wire from Murray Deutch, who said “That’ll Be the Day” had sold fifty thousand copies and that Petty should get the Crickets ready to fly to New York. The Crickets had scored a bull’s-eye with their first record. Buddy tried to share his excitement with them, but, according to Niki, they were too groggy and tired to display any emotion; they all turned over and went back to sleep.

Though “That’ll Be the Day” sales were promising, the Diamonds’ cover of “Words of Love” beat it to the
Billboard
chart, zooming into thirteenth place. Buddy had dreamed of stardom as a singer but his first hit was as the songwriter of “Words of Love.”

Offers started coming in. The Crickets were in demand for tours, record-store promotions, and TV and radio appearances. When Petty advised them to hire a manager, Buddy said, “We’ve got a manager,” Petty later told Brooks and Malcolm.

“Oh? Who is it?” Petty asked.

“You are,” Buddy replied.

Later Petty patronizingly referred to managing the Crickets as a “glorified babysitting job,” but he was so eager to take control of their lives that he immediately exceeded his authority, demanding to know if the Crickets were dating girls and warning them that if they wanted to be major rock stars like Elvis Presley, they’d better not get serious about anyone and certainly not get married. Such intrusions were unsolicited and resented by the Crickets. Later Petty admitted that he had been too strict. But in a profoundly disturbing sense, Petty was exactly what they’d been looking for. Overgrown children in many respects, they often depended on Buddy’s father to tote them around to gigs and recording sessions. Buddy had always been surrounded by people who enabled him to avoid the responsibilities of growing up; first his family—and now Norman Petty.

They might have been playing “That’ll Be the Day” on the streets of New York, but they certainly weren’t playing it in Lubbock. Other than the $500 he’d finally managed to extract from Brunswick, there was no visible evidence in Buddy’s world that he’d cut a great record. Snuff Garrett, a DJ on Lubbock’s KDUB at the time, claims to have been one of the earliest DJs to spin “That’ll Be the Day” on the air. Snuff played it as soon as he received the demo. It didn’t catch on at first with most DJs, which meant that there was more than a little hyperbole in Bob Thiele’s claim of instant success. As the summer of 1957 wore on, “That’ll Be the Day” languished in the record bins, at least in the stores of the American Southwest. If Buddy had depended on his hometown, or even his home state, to jump-start it, “That’ll Be the Day” would have died a quick death. Like the blue northers that swept down the plains from Canada, fame would descend on him from the north.

Chapter Seven

On the Road

Buddy Holly entered show business in the heyday of the great rock ’n’ roll and R&B package tours. Nothing like them exists today. Planned and mounted like military campaigns, these all-star caravans swept across the country in buses, playing as many as seventy cities in eighty nights, featuring rosters of recording stars such as Clyde McPhatter, LaVern Baker, Eddie Cochran, Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers, Gene Vincent, Paul Anka, Jerry Lee Lewis, and on and on. Each performer would do a fifteen-minute turn and then clear the stage for the next act. To grasp how extraordinary this was, one only need imagine a tour in the 1990s including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Crash Test Dummies, U2, Pearl Jam, Metallica, and Van Halen. Other considerations aside, no one could afford to mount such a show. But in 1957, rock ’n’ roll was new and the performers seized the opportunity to sing the controversial new music in public, often enduring harsh and abusive conditions on the road and working for a fraction of what rock stars receive today.

The Crickets’ first tour was an all-black package that played the “Around the World” circuit, a string of theaters in eastern U.S. cities that catered to black audiences and featured R&B acts. Their inclusion on such a tour, where they were not welcomed at first by either their black co-stars or their New York audience, was a managerial gaffe of colossal proportions on the part of Norman Petty. He failed to advise them that they were the only whites involved, leaving them completely unprepared for the inevitable crises that awaited them when they began three-week-long engagements at black theaters in Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and New York City in August 1957. Petty delivered them into the hands of Irving Feld, the tour promoter. The Crickets remained unaware that the black audiences in the theaters they’d be playing—the Howard, the Royal, and the Apollo—were expecting to see black acts and might be out for the scalps of any honkies who dared show up on their stages. For Buddy, the tour was a catastrophe.

It was also a bust financially. The Crickets received $1,000 per week. After Petty’s commission and the union’s cut, each Cricket received a little more than $200, hardly a princely sum, considering travel expenses. In Petty’s next managerial mistake, he advised the Crickets to discard their punk attire—the jeans that Buddy’s mother had been pegging—in favor of square-looking suits. When they emerged from the Lubbock dry-goods store Petty took them to, they looked like a two-bit lounge act, Buddy in gray trousers and a white linen jacket and the Crickets in funereal gray suits. On the threshold of a major recording career, they needed and deserved a big-league agent and instead they got a nanny. As they boarded the 6:30
P.M.
flight from Amarillo to New York on July 28, 1957, to face the hard-boiled, greedy world of professional showbiz, they were armed with a list of instructions from Petty to carry $30 or $40 in cash and the rest in traveler’s checks and to take along copies of their record, plenty of clean underwear, twenty-four Dramamine tablets, twenty-five feet of extension cord, a shoe-shine kit, telephone and hotel credit cards, and a Bible. Not bad advice, but the sinister implications in the final suggestion in Petty’s nineteen-point memo—to forward all their earnings to Clovis—would not become evident to them until it was too late. Sending money to Clovis was like dropping it in a bottomless well, for all the Crickets would ever see of it again.

In New York they stayed at the Edison, an inexpensive hotel off Times Square. They were due in Washington a day or two later. For years the only documentation of their New York stay was a telegram from Petty, sent from Miami Beach, in which he congratulated them on their arrival in the big city, signing the telegram “Papa Norman.” Then, in a 1995 interview, Niki Sullivan provided an account of the Crickets’ first experience of New York City. They took a look at the Brill Building at 1619 Broadway, the fabled headquarters of tunesmiths and song pluggers, and then ate at Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant in Times Square. “The Crickets had their first drink together at Jack Dempsey’s,” Niki says. “Cocktails—bourbon and Coke, which drew howls from the waiter and bartender. Coming out of a dry county, we had no experience in drinking anything but beer, at least legally. We were over our heads in New York, totally green, but we snickered and made fun of everything around us.”

The trip was planned by their music publisher and record company as a “kind of a heros’ welcome,” Niki explains, “to meet everyone who’d had a hand in what we were doing. There was a writer and artist at our publishers, who showed us how songs are plugged at a publishing house.” Next they went to their record company. “We were introduced to the head of Coral Records, Bob Thiele,” Niki continues, “and he invited us to his home in upstate New York, a beautiful place with two-inch-thick carpeting. There were about six to ten people at the party, including Steve Lawrence, but mostly Coral-Brunswick. Met Teresa Brewer, who was pregnant, a dainty, cute, wonderful, polite, sincere person—a doll; we all fell in love with her. We were asked to perform and did a four-piece vocal of an old song. Norman Petty had given us this barbershop quartet song, something like ‘O Baby Mine,’ just to prove that we were a group and could sing together. We did it without any instruments. Whole bunch was nice people, so comfortable and pleasant, but New Yorkish, elite enough to be upstate for relaxation.”