Buddy Holly: Biography (19 page)

Carl Perkins and Buddy met in Oklahoma City, spotting each other backstage, Perkins later told British DJ Stuart Coleman. In conversation Perkins found Buddy to be humble and soft-spoken, but the minute he went onstage, “he was
fire,
” Perkins remarked to interviewer Wayne Jones in 1980. Buddy was aware, Perkins added, that he’d invented his own sound, one that was quite different from the Sun sound, and he was intent on developing it and growing as a songwriter.

Perkins was having a hard time in his personal life in 1957, following the success of “Blue Suede Shoes” the previous year. “You can’t take the strain without a crutch,” Perkins said. “For me it was booze—I’ve seen the bottom of a lot of bottles. I was a mess, a wreck for years.”

The Feld tour came within 209 miles of Lubbock when it played Wichita Falls, Texas, but, amazingly, Lubbock didn’t book the show. As Clyde McPhatter once said, “You can’t even draw flies eating watermelon around your hometown.” Waco, with a population well under one hundred thousand—about half the size of Lubbock’s—managed to get the show in October, as did numerous other Texas cities, including Fort Worth, Dallas, San Antonio, Corpus Christi, Houston, Austin, and El Paso. Larry Holley has some scathing observations on Lubbock’s indifference to its most famous son:

“There’s nobody in Lubbock that’s interested in him. I’ll tell you the actual fact—if Buddy was to be alive right now [1992] with his fame and we decided to have a concert here in Lubbock, and they did not let anybody know about it but the people in Lubbock, there wouldn’t be a thousand people comin’ to it. It’s just Lubbock, this area—they could care less. They’d rather go to a basketball game or a rodeo. Now if there was going to be a [tribute] concert with everyone he influenced [for example, the Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Clapton, Dylan, Ronstadt], and they let the word get out to the world, they’d come in from every direction. But if it was just exclusively for Lubbock, they wouldn’t have a thousand people. I wish you’d put that in your book.”

While they were in Waco for an appearance at the Heart of Texas Fair, Buddy and Niki discovered that they were third cousins. “There were about thirty-five people in the audience for the afternoon show and they were all related to me and Buddy,” Niki recalled in a 1995 interview. “We treated it like a jam session. No one was at the matinee because of school, I guess. But they showed up for the evening show, which was packed.”

“Peggy Sue” hit the charts while they were in Texas in October 1957, making Buddy the only star on the tour with two smash records. Oddly, the Crickets were still hurting for money. “Norman Petty was actually taking their money,” Larry said in 1992. “Buddy told me, ‘I can’t even tithe because I don’t have any money for the church.’ Norman told Buddy, ‘Well, I’m tithing with ya’ll’s money here at our church and it goes to the same place.’ Which it don’t. Norman kept them broke all the time, havin’ to ask for money. He got all the money in, did what he wanted to with it. He built that big pipe organ in that church up there [in Clovis] with some of the money.”

Niki confirmed, in a 1984 interview with Jack Miller, that their financial issues were one of the factors behind his quitting the band. Niki’s father tried to get to the bottom of it, going to Clovis and asking to audit the Crickets’ account. Petty said the books were with his accountant. Niki’s father returned to Clovis with the same request, but Petty again found some excuse to conceal the books from him. Following Mr. Sullivan’s inquiries, Petty made no efforts to shore up Niki’s position, which was already shaky due to personality conflicts in the band, according to Petty’s interview with Brooks and Malcolm in 1983. Niki later told interviewer Steve Bonner that he saw the handwriting on the wall before the end of the tour and that the only thing he missed about being a Cricket was getting to meet people like Chuck Berry, one of his favorite performers.

After Texas, the tour moved west, bound for California. The road unwound endlessly as they crossed the New Mexico and Arizona wastes, where the spaces are so immense and empty that, on a perfectly clear and sunny day, you can see a weather system miles ahead as it bumps into a mountaintop and cascades down the ridges, spewing rain and hail. As Tom Snyder writes in Michael Wallis’s
Route 66: The Mother Road,
“By the time we reached the rimrock country of New Mexico and Arizona … everything seemed connected in some intangible way. I sensed something resonant in the cliff faces, in the sky, in the endless run of highway beneath. Something that seemed to be in me, too.”

Don Everly received tragic news when they played the Catalina High School Auditorium in Tucson, Arizona, on October 10. His wife, Mary Sue, had given birth to their daughter, Mary E. Everly, but the infant died on the same day and was interred in the Everly family plot in Central City, Kentucky. Ironically, at the same time, the Everlys’ “Wake Up Little Susie,” released over the objections of producer Archie Bleyer, who warned that the record would be banned because it sounded like Susie and her boyfriend were making out at the drive-in—hit No. 1. “Wake Up Little Susie” went on to become their second million-seller, but, sadly, there would be no waking up little Mary Everly.

When they reached the West Coast, major changes were made in the cast. The Bobettes, the Spaniels, and Johnnie and Joe dropped out. Eddie Cochran, Buddy Knox, and Jimmy Bowen and the Rhythm Orchids took their places. Cochran’s friend Johnny Rowe later revealed in Alan Clark’s
Tribute to Eddie Cochran
that Frankie Lymon and Buddy were the performers Cochran was especially drawn to in the “Biggest Show of Stars for 1957” package. Connie “Guybo” Smith, Cochran’s stand-up bass player, remembered riding on the same bus with Holly and Cochran and was present when they jammed during off-duty hours on several occasions. Cochran was happiest when surrounded by musical friends, trying out lyrics and arrangements for new songs or simply picking together. Afterward, he would stay up late with his friends, talking and flexing his wit and intellect, like bright young people have always done. Buddy later told his mother that he and Cochran became intimate friends and made some recordings together, though these tapes have never been released.

Both Holly and Cochran carried pistols. For Cochran, it was just a matter of fun; he liked to practice his draw when he got bored during tedious tours. For Buddy it was a practical matter; he acquired his gun when he started collecting the Crickets’ performance fees directly from the promoters, some of whom were shady characters and might require coercion. It was a not uncommon practice among performers in the fifties. Brenda Lee, who toured with Elvis, Chuck Berry, Patsy Cline, and J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, once said that you must always get a “first count”—that is, go to the box office for your money before the show—or the promoter would slip out the back and you’d never be paid.

Buddy proved more efficient at collecting the Crickets’ money than he was at distributing it, doling out cash to his musicians at whim. Inevitably the Crickets’ finances ended up in a mess. In his own way, he was acting rather like Norman Petty, but Jerry later insisted to Goldrosen and Beecher that Buddy was too decent to have been capable of exploiting or cheating the Crickets. Nonetheless Jerry also stated that Buddy probably owed them money; he withheld their share at times, but at other times they received an amount in excess of their exact percentage. Financially, it was a pretty hopeless situation.

On the road, Buddy concealed his .22 in his shaving kit. Cochran, a crack shot, was bolder, brandishing his gun in hotel rooms. “He was … into quick-draw and loved to practice out on the desert,” Eddie’s sister, Pat Hickey, told
Albert Lea Tribune
reporter Lauri Winters in 1994. While on tour, Cochran would often stand in front of a bureau mirror, joking about how he could beat himself to the draw. He gave a gun to Jack Scott, a musician who toured with him, and the two of them tried to outdraw each other. Scott confirms that Cochran was probably the fastest gun in rock ’n’ roll.

Playing with guns was the undoing of another rock pioneer, twenty-five-year-old Johnny Ace, who shot himself in the mouth during a game of Russian roulette at a Houston concert in 1954. His posthumous hit “Pledging My Love” became one of rock’s first anthems. In the early 1950s young people had no idols, and Johnny Ace was the first in a succession of blood-smeared heroes who made death look cool. With twenty-four-year-old James Dean’s fatal car crash just one year after Johnny Ace died, a strange cult developed. Danger and death became essential ingredients of the rock-generation ethos from the start, infusing young people with a sense of tragedy. Until the great liberations of the sixties, death seemed the only exit from the conformist, materialistic world of the fifties, which seemed to snuff out the sensitive and gifted, like poet Sylvia Plath, or drive them to nervous breakdowns, like Seymour Glass and Holden Caulfield, the doomed fictional heroes of J. D. Salinger’s novels and short stories.

Besides their penchant for guns, Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran had many other traits in common. They were both homeboys who loved their mothers’ cooking, and they’d probably have gone rabbit hunting together under circumstances less confining than the tour. Cochran referred to his mother, Alice Cochran, as “Shrimper,” and each time a tour ended, he’d call her and say, “Shrimper, I’m coming home. Put on the pan of cornbread and beans,” Mrs. Cochran remembered in 1991. Like Holly, Cochran at first struck many people as socially recessive, listening quietly at parties as people revealed themselves to him. He wasn’t shy; he was simply deciding whom he wanted to focus on. Once he liked someone, he let them know it in subtle, quietly endearing ways. As Dick Clark put it, “Reserved, intense, he can stare you down with a look that, I’m told, makes a girl’s knees go weak.”

In buses caked with desert dust, the tour party approached the sprawling, arid basin of Southern California in October. They arrived in Los Angeles on the fourteenth and were greeted by hot Santa Ana winds that blew grit into their eyes. In the fifties, L.A. was a collection of seedy towns like Hawthorne, where the future Beach Boys were growing up, and Pacoima, where young Ritchie Valens was still singing Mexican
corridos
at gang dances. The
corridos
were traditional folk ballads, updated to embrace contemporary themes. Around L.A. Valens was known as the “Little Richard of the San Fernando Valley.”

The fledgling L.A. rockabilly scene included Ricky Nelson, Lorrie Collins, Wanda Jackson, and songwriter Sharon Sheeley. Earlier in 1957 Ricky had become a teen idol, singing and promoting his record “I’m Walking” on his parents’ TV show,
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
Ricky had fallen in love with Lorrie Collins, who, with her little brother Larry, sang rockabilly as the Collins Kids on the popular L.A. Saturday night
Town Hall Party
C&W television series. Ricky and Lorrie wanted to get married, but Lorrie was only fifteen, Ricky was seventeen, and their parents objected. The romance ended abruptly when Lorrie married a man nineteen years her senior. Ricky was devastated. “Rick Nelson was like the heartthrob of the world,” Lorrie said. “Poor me. I just adored him. It was pretty awful, and it was my fault.” Buddy Holly and Ricky Nelson would meet later on, and Ricky would cover many of Buddy’s songs, including “Rave On” and “True Love Ways.”

Buddy knew Wanda Jackson, a brunette beauty, from the Hank Thompson tour the previous year. She had been one of Elvis Presley’s girlfriends, and Elvis had urged her to sing rock ’n’ roll. In 1957 she returned to L.A. to record “Let’s Have a Party,” “Fujiyama Mama,” and other rockabilly classics. “West Coast rockabilly found its fullest female expression in Wanda Jackson,” wrote authors Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann. “With her snarling, powerhouse singing, Wanda Jackson captured the elemental, low-class wildness of this music better than any other female of her day.”

The L.A. that Buddy and the “Biggest Show of Stars” tour discovered in 1957 was at its height as a supermarket of cockeyed metaphysical urges; a neon sign on La Brea advertised “Car Wash and Mind Control.” It was also Shelley Winters and Marilyn Monroe lunching at Schwab’s Drug Store; Frances Fay headlining on the Sunset Strip; Mildred Pierce–type restaurants with hostesses who showed you to numbered booths; and nice apartments on Holloway Drive that could be rented for $227 a month. The glamour of the fabled movie studios was quickly vanishing; the ground beneath them was now worth more than their productions and would soon be turned into real estate. The movie executives of the future would not be studio chiefs in the tradition of Louis B. Mayer and Darryl F. Zanuck, but builders of plastic palaces for kids, like Disneyland, which opened in Anaheim on July 17, 1955.

Buddy checked into the Hilton Hotel with the tour party and played the Shrine Auditorium the following night. Standing backstage, songwriter Sharon Sheeley fell in love with Cochran at first sight. To Sheeley, Cochran was a golden-haired Elvis Presley who projected a ripe sensuality. Phil Everly told her to get over Cochran as quickly as possible, mindful of Cochran’s prodigious sex life. It was useless; she was hooked. She became Cochran’s girlfriend and co-wrote his hit “Somethin’ Else” as well as Ricky Nelson’s first No. 1 hit, “Poor Little Fool.”

The tour’s in-crowd included Gene Vincent, who sparked much of their fun, especially in New York and Los Angeles. Vincent’s second record, “Hula Love,” went to No. 9 in the fall of 1957. The gimp-legged, alcoholic Vincent, one of the most talented of the first-generation rockers, best known for “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” was a last-minute addition to the Irving Feld tour. The strenuous pace—seventy one-night stands in three months—took a heavy toll on the original cast, some of whom succumbed to physical and nervous exhaustion.

The tour promoter, Irving Feld, was about forty at the time. “Irving and Izzie Feld were druggists and sold records retail and then toured rock,” Frank Fried, a concert promoter who’d later handle the Beatles and Frank Sinatra, said in a 1994 interview. Feld had been president of Super Enterprises before founding General Artists Corporation (GAC) with two business associates. The rock package shows of the fifties were largely Feld’s innovation; their all-rock-star rosters distinguished them from their British counterparts. In England, where there were fewer rockers at the time, rock tours were made up of traditional music-hall variety acts with perhaps a single rock attraction on the bill.