Buddy Holly: Biography (22 page)

Running through January 5, 1958, the Freed show was the biggest hit in town, breaking the attendance record set by Sinatra fifteen years previously. The scene at the stage door was pure chaos. Shrieking, pushing, stamping fans mobbed the rock stars, ripping their clothing to shreds. Running for his life, Terry Noland noticed that the girls were so hysterical that they were attacking the stagehands and anyone else who emerged from the backstage entrance. Bristling with macho magnetism, Don Everly was the darling of the fans. New York cops, who disdained rockers as juvenile delinquents, stood by idly while Don was jumped on by a gang of girls determined to tear off pieces of his flesh as souvenirs. Though Don could have been killed, the police laughed and refused to intervene, an Everlys biographer, Consuelo Dodge, wrote in 1991. Don and Phil’s clothes were destroyed so regularly that they had to keep identical outfits on hand.

Joe B.’s memories of the Paramount run center on Eddie Cochran. The Crickets, who were rooming with the Everlys and Terry Noland, stayed at a hotel directly across the street from the theater. Between shows, they partied in Cochran’s suite. When it was time to go on, they left Cochran’s room in plenty of time to get to the theater. Cochran always waited until the very last minute, having calculated the precise amount of time required to walk from the hotel to the stage door. He’d be drinking and talking with Buddy, glance at his watch, and remark that it was time to head for the Paramount. Then he’d reconsider and announce that he had another thirty seconds. They’d talk some more and finally Cochran would rise and say he was going to work. Joe B. made the trek from the hotel room to the Paramount stage with Cochran a couple of times. Cochran never broke his stride from the moment he left the hotel elevator. As he entered the backstage area, the announcer was just finishing his introduction. Cochran proceeded to the microphone and began his act, wowing the stagehands with his perfect timing.

The Paramount show was the pinnacle of Freed’s stormy professional life, which was about to take a disastrous plunge as a result of the payola scandal that would burst into the headlines the following year. Payola was a practice by which radio DJs accepted money and other favors from record manufacturers and distributors in return for playing their artists’ new releases. Indeed, some record companies were so corrupt that they gave DJs cowriting credit on recordings for promising sufficient radio airplay to boost those records onto the Top 40 list. Though Freed’s name appears on hit recordings such as “Sincerely,” “Nadine,” and “Maybellene,” he had no more role in their composition than Norman Petty had for “Peggy Sue.” When Freed pushed Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene” for two hours one night on his “Rock ’n’ Roll Party” radio program in 1955, the record shot to fifth place on
Billboard
’s pop chart and sold over a million copies. Not until Berry received his first royalty statement did he realize that Freed “had written the song with me,” Berry later remarked in his memoirs.

Like Freed, many of the performers on the Paramount bill, including Terry Noland, Jerry, and Joe B., regarded the show as the culmination of the their careers. All his life Joe B. had been told he’d never amount to more than “a cotton farmer from Lubbock, Texas,” he related to Bill Griggs, but now “we were on Times Square in New York and it was Christmastime.” Nowhere is Christmas observed with more panache than in Manhattan, where, in Rockefeller Center, a block-long row of silver angels trumpets their welcome all the way from Sak’s Fifth Avenue to the huge Christmas tree in the skating rink underneath the RCA Building. In the windows at Lord & Taylor’s department store, animated puppets re-create familiar fairy tales and Yuletide stories. Well-heeled shoppers flock to Tiffany’s, Cartier, Bendel’s, Bergdorf-Goodman, and Brooks Brothers. Parents take children through the ultimate toy store, F.A.O. Schwarz. Flagship department stores like Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s transform themselves into winter wonderlands. Midtown street vendors hawk succulent roasted chestnuts in front of the Public Library, where regal stone lions sport red Christmas wreaths around their manes. Salvation Army Santas stand on every corner, soliciting contributions for the needy. Skyscrapers sparkle late into the evening as workers celebrate their annual office-party revels. Up and down Fifth Avenue, the
Messiah
wafts gloriously from churches. Thousands of worshipers pack the city’s Gothic cathedrals, St. Patrick’s and St. John the Divine, for midnight services. In 1957 Abercrombie and Fitch, now long gone, still offered pricey items such as a leather-upholstered hippopotamus for the person who had everything, while the economy-minded shopper could seek out bargains at Korvette’s (the forerunner of Kmart), Gimbel’s, B. Altman’s, and Stern’s, now also gone. At City Center, a venerable mosque-turned-theater, the New York City Ballet staged its spectacular
Nutcracker
before its move in the sixties to the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Catching New York’s Christmas spirit, Buddy bought himself the present of his dreams, going into Manny’s and selecting a Guild F-50 Navarre acoustic guitar with a sunburst spruce top. The Guild sound was big and bright. It can be heard on “Well All Right,” recorded by Buddy the following year. Some of his guitars were only briefly in his possession. He enjoyed giving them away to young rockers who couldn’t afford them. Joe B. says that Buddy was the most generous person he’d ever encountered. One day at the Paramount a youth approached Buddy and said he really admired Buddy’s guitar. “Here, man, you keep it,” Buddy said, adding that he already had his eye on another one at Manny’s. According to Joe B., Buddy felt that his goal in life was to bring happiness to the world wherever he could.

But he was no longer as much fun as in the old days, both Jerry and Joe B. later told Goldrosen; fame had altered him somewhat. Buddy seemed moody and egotistical. He wouldn’t horse around anymore. Up to his old shenanigans, Jerry once almost knocked Buddy’s glasses off. Buddy told him to cut it out. During a pillow fight that involved three bands—the Crickets, Dickie Doo and the Don’ts, and Danny and the Juniors—Buddy ordered everyone to behave themselves. As in the lives of all celebrities, a chasm had opened between the new star and his lesser-known associates that nothing would ever bridge. Buddy’s musicians could indulge in asinine antics to their hearts’ content and no one would notice or care. But Buddy was in the spotlight, a position he’d sought all his life, and he quickly embraced it, relishing the dignity and perquisites of stardom.

A complete physical makeover was one of his first priorities. He underwent plastic surgery to remove his acne scars. According to Jerry Coleman, the Lubbock DJ, “When Buddy went to New York he had his face redone with acid or scraped.” Dermabrasion, the medical term for scraping, is a painful process, resulting in inflammation and swelling. A rotating wire brush is used, and the procedure lasts one hour, causing a few days’ soreness. The other treatment for acne is known as chemosurgery, involving application of a caustic solution, phenol, which creates a mild burn. The skin sloughs or peels off, revealing smoother skin underneath. The fee for chemosurgery, in 1990, was $1,640; in the fifties it was probably more like $750.

Whatever the cost, it was worth it to Buddy, who was in the process of reinventing himself for stardom. He was more and more in demand for public appearances and television shows. On December 28, he appeared with the Crickets on NBC’s
Arthur Murray Party,
a variety show named after the founder of a chain of dancing schools. When the band arrived backstage before the show, they mingled with the star-studded cast, which included theater legend Tallulah Bankhead, movie stars Farley Granger, June Havoc, and Gloria DeHaven, jazz singer Sarah Vaughan, television personalities Gertrude Berg and Paul Winchell (with puppet Jerry Mahoney), actor Walter Slezak, and screen-siren Hedy Lamarr. Hostess Kathryn Murray scurried about, greeting the lineup for her sixty-minute special. Dressed in elegant tuxedos, the Crickets had a new, soigné look. An impudent spit curl in the middle of Jerry’s forehead offered a daring foretaste of punk, though it also made him look like a member of the Addams family. Fortunately a kinescope survives of the Crickets’ performance. Buddy maintains an attitude of regal cool while pounding the audience with the potent and intoxicating sounds of “Peggy Sue.” The frenzy and momentum of rock ’n’ roll were new to the Arthur Murray dancers, who’d just completed a waltz and remained on stage in full view. Still as statues, they clutched their hands in front of them, quietly grooving.

On New Year’s Eve the Crickets were still in the middle of their run at the Paramount Theater, located directly across the street from the Times Tower, the focal point of the biggest New Year’s celebration in the world. Buddy, Jerry, and Joe B. stood on top of the Paramount and gazed down at the multitude in Times Square. At ten seconds before midnight the giant ball on the facade of the Times Tower began to descend. In a moment it was 1958. In one sense, Buddy’s life was already completely fulfilled—all he’d ever wanted, as he’d often stated, was to make his mark and be remembered. Before him lay a privileged existence as one of the world’s elite, loved and revered by the remarkable generation that he helped to define.
Time
magazine called them the Silent Generation, but they were far from silent—indeed, had anyone ever turned the volume up higher? Born in the Depression, they were bent on liberation, and in their music there was a blossoming sense of people coming into their own. Though it has never been so christened, surely this was the Rock Generation. Black and white, they were creating the anthemic music of our time. By 1958 it was growing more popular daily and had already leaped the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Rock ’n’ roll was civilization’s wake-up call, and its pioneers, like James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, were—wittingly or unwittingly—forging in the smithy of their souls “the uncreated conscience” of their race. But its immediate future in 1958 was rife with so much hatred and hostility from society that it’s remarkable that rock ’n’ roll managed to survive at all.

On the deepest level of his life Buddy was troubled and unfulfilled. Like many in his circle, he was headed for misfortune. Cochran would soon come to grief. Don and Phil would hit bottom from drugging and drinking. Little Richard renounced rock ’n’ roll to become a Seventh-Day Adventist minister. Jerry Lee would be drummed out of England for marrying a minor, his thirteen-year-old cousin and child bride, Myra. In the coming year Corporal Elvis Presley would make a pass at a ninth grader, Priscilla Beaulieu, and give her Dexedrine pills, beginning a relationship that would end in frustration and divorce. For Buddy, life on the road offered no opportunity for meeting the kind of girl he wanted to marry. Echo McGuire was now engaged to the Nebraska classmate she’d been dating, although the breakup with Buddy hadn’t been easy for her. Echo still loved Buddy—indeed, she would never stop loving him. She simply could not see herself as the wife of a rock ’n’ roll star. Buddy, the young man who genuinely loved “good girls,” found such girls even tougher to meet as a famous rocker.

He began the new year as Decca’s leading recording artist. The company that had gone to such lengths to disavow any association with him, consigning him to obscure subsidiaries, announced that his next release, “You Are My One Desire”/”Love Me,” would bear the Decca label. The company’s top executives regularly showed up backstage at the Paramount, courting his favor. One of them was Dick Jacobs, Jackie Wilson’s producer, who suggested that Buddy make a recording with violin accompaniment as a way to propel himself out of the rock ’n’ roll market and into the pop mainstream. Like many people, Jacobs did not yet accept that rock had replaced pop as the mainstream music, but his idea of a string session would lead to some of Buddy’s best recordings. Though mixing violins with rock ’n’ roll was a radical idea, Jacobs had already punched up Jackie Wilson’s R&B hits “To Be Loved” and “Lonely Teardrops” with lush strings. Buddy loved Wilson’s big, rich sound and was fascinated to learn from Jacobs that violins had played a substantial role in its creation. In the coming months, when Buddy and Petty were in and out of New York, they would often joke about doing a session with a violin section.

If Buddy had any resistance to violins, it was because Petty had been nagging him to jettison rock ’n’ roll and start cutting pop records. Rock stars, Petty kept harping, were dumped by the public and the record companies after two years. He advised that Buddy change his singing style and get accepted in a more durable market so his career wouldn’t vanish with the demise of rock ’n’ roll, which Petty warned was imminent. Ultimately he envisaged Buddy as a Vegas nightclub act, crooning to drunks and gamblers, and cutting Sinatra-type lovers’ albums. “Naw,” Buddy said, “I don’t dig it.”

With simultaneous hit records, he could now be more confident about rock’s future. Just a few months ago, it had appeared that rock ’n’ roll was in a decline. Only three rock records had been in the Top 10—Presley’s “Teddy Bear,” the Everlys’ “Bye Bye Love,” and Marty Robbins’s “White Sport Coat.” Then a confluence of events—the Everlys’ four-week chart-topper “Wake Up Little Susie,” Jerry Lee Lewis’s stunning debut, and Buddy’s string of hits—had injected a shot of propulsive energy, enough for the new music to rock on, possibly forever.

For many people the new year brought bad news—Elvis was inducted into the Army; Khrushchev threatened to bury capitalism; Elizabeth Taylor escaped death in the air crash that killed her husband, Mike Todd, when she decided to stay home with a cold; Governor Orval Faubus shut down the public schools in Little Rock, Arkansas; and the world’s scientists warned of nuclear holocaust—but for Buddy Holly, 1958 began auspiciously. “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy” remained in the Top 10 in the United States, England, and Australia. Fans throughout the English-speaking world were clamoring to see him in person. International tour offers were beginning to materialize. It was the last full year that he would live.

Brilliant new singles rolled out one after the other. The hard work he’d done in Clovis in the first six months of 1957 was paying off. Before fame he’d written and recorded enough hits for a lifetime. His assault on the charts in 1957 made him the darling of the music press. Critics heaped praise on his newest single, “You Are My One Desire.” How quickly the review press changes! Critics are like lemmings. Having ignored the obvious signs of genius in his early work, they automatically endorsed everything he did once success bestowed its imprimatur. “Kid’ll flip over this one,” rhapsodized
Cash Box
on January 4, describing “You Are My One Desire” as “an emotional love story chanted with great feeling.” The B-side, “Love Me,”
Cash Box
endorsed as a “swinging rock-a-billy jumper.”