Buddy Holly: Biography (23 page)

On January 8, the Crickets set out on another Irving Feld–GAC tour, but this one, lasting only seventeen days, was less grueling than the 1957 marathon. Another improvement, for the Crickets at least, was their salary: $1,200 a night as opposed to the $1,000 per week they’d been paid on the fall tour. The tour reunited them with old friends such as the Everly Brothers, Paul Anka, Danny and the Juniors, and Jimmie Rodgers. Around the time they were playing Hazelton, Pennsylvania, a groupie came up to the Everly Brothers, took off her blouse and bra, according to Phil, and asked them to sign her breasts—one for each brother. Reporters from the establishment press often witnessed such scenes and resented them. Throughout the fifties the press remained largely as conservative as the Eisenhower administration and scorned any deviation from the norm. Probably motivated by envy, reporters regularly ridiculed these new stars.

“They thought you were outlandish because of your long hair, you dressed different, and they threw you out of town,” Phil later stated in the
Kansas City Star.
One reporter set up a photo shoot that was deliberately designed to impugn the manhood of Buddy and the Everly Brothers because they’d let their hair grow out. Calling the boys together with a girl group on the tour—the Shepherd Sisters, three bouncy blonds who had a hit called “Alone”—the photographer posed all of them in profile, which seemed odd. The reporter accompanying the photographer asked only one question: How were the singers going to make a living after the death of rock ’n’ roll? Buddy and the Everlys thought there was something suspicious about the shoot and, sure enough, when the picture was published, the caption said: “The Only Way You Can Tell the Difference Between Rock-’n’-Roll Boys and Rock-’n’-Roll Girls Is the Boys Have Longer Hair.”

Don later complained to interviewer Floyd Mattson that the press was fixated on “the length of your hair” and determined to show “how the guys looked like the girls.… And it wasn’t that long anyway.” First-generation rockers “were fighting the current,” added Phil. “All … kinds of pressures and fears … contributed to a lot of the hard times.” Don told Mattson that rock ’n’ roll at first “wasn’t respectable at all.… They really wondered if you were outside stealing hubcaps between shows.” Quipped Phil, “And we all did, occasionally.”

The Everlys’ experience reflects the anti-rock sentiment that was rampant in 1957–58. The
New York Times
quoted a psychiatrist who called rock ’n’ roll “cannibalistic and tribalistic.” The
New York Daily News
spurned it as “a barrage of primitive, jungle-beat rhythms.” From an Alabama lowbrow who said rock ’n’ roll was the “means by which the white man and his children can be driven to a level with the niggers” to the usually sane pundit Dwight Macdonald, who denounced rock in the
New Yorker,
the establishment recoiled from the new music in a manner that smacked of both racism and paranoia. Journalists warned that rock ’n’ roll would lead to a wave of youth crime, but what they really feared and resented was rock’s violation of society’s taboos against racial mixing. As Robert Palmer later wrote in
Rolling Stone,
“Much has been made of sixties rock as a vehicle for revolutionary social and cultural change, but it was mid-fifties rock ’n’ roll that blew away, in one mighty, concentrated blast, the accumulated racial and social proprieties of centuries.”

In an even deeper sense, rock ’n’ roll went against white America’s ingrained fear of sex and pleasure, a joyless legacy of the country’s puritan origins. In the forties and early fifties there’d been a sense of safety in the mid-tempo ballads of Doris Day, Joni James, and Patti Page; all that was completely undermined in 1955 by the steady beat and rhythmically heavier style of rock ’n’ roll, which was derived from the R&B backbeat. The wanton body language of Elvis Presley, the surrender to lust in Buddy’s “Oh Boy,” the contagious eroticism of Little Richard promised more joy than a oppressed, inhibited society could absorb in its initial reaction to rock ’n’ roll. A new, youth-led rock apostolate, sneered at by rednecks, disdained by intellectuals, and infinitely small in comparison with the rock counterculture of the sixties, alone supported rock ’n’ roll and kept it alive, buying recordings, listening to the radio, and faithfully braving the winter winds to attend the rock-package shows.

After their Pennyslvania gig, Buddy and the others stars of the January 1958 GAC tour left for Rochester, New York, which was in the middle of an icy upstate winter. During two shows in the Rochester Auditorium, Buddy befriended a young Brunswick recording artist named Jerry Engler, who had become a target of Communist witch-hunters because of his new record, “Sputnik (Satellite Girl).” Engler had been employed at Kodak in Rochester on October 4, 1957, when the Russians sent their Sputnik satellite into orbit around the earth. Commemorating the event, Engler wrote “Sputnik” in thirty minutes while on duty at Kodak and made a recording of it with his band the Four Ekkos. As Buddy Knox had done before him, Engler asked Buddy Holly where he should record, and Buddy advised him to go to Clovis. Engler then asked Holly how he should cope with charges that he was a Communist. Buddy told him not to worry—“Sputnik” was such a danceable rocker that no sane person would mistake it for political propaganda. Engler’s record was only one of a flock of novelty tunes that proliferated in the wake of Russia’s stunning technological coup, which frightened Americans into beefing up the science curricula of their universities in 1958, lest the U.S.S.R. wrest control of outer space.

As the GAC tour neared its completion in late January, Buddy drowned the pain of losing Echo with the amorous delights of the road. Though he was far from being the best-looking star in the package, he attracted more girls than he could handle and sometimes passed them on to colleagues who might have been handsomer but lacked his magnetism. “Buddy Holly put me to bed with a girl,” Phil Everly told writer Philip Norman in 1982. “And he
laughed.
” Buddy was drinking heavily, Phil added, and asked Phil to tuck him in—alone.

The Crickets returned to New York on January 25 to begin work on their new single, “Rave On.” Six months earlier, Decca executives hadn’t considered the Crickets worthy enough to grace their label, but now Decca was urging them to record in New York, where the executives could court them and control them, rather than in Clovis. The same fickleness and hypocrisy that Decca showed in 1958 holds true today not only in the record business but throughout the entertainment world, which is slow to recognize talent but quick to fawn over it at the first sign of success. The familiar spectacle of executives vying to take credit for the latest hit suggests nothing so much as a pack of hyenas tearing at a joint of meat. In 1994, rock historians Dave Marsh and James Bernard denounced the major labels as “gutless and greedy, disdainful of artistry in the face of the bottom line” and “notorious for not paying artists what they owe them.”

Bob Thiele, who’d championed Buddy from the time he was a complete unknown, was already planning a second LP,
Buddy Holly,
and he made no secret of his wish to personally produce “Rave On,” which was needed to fill out the new album. He naturally wanted the Crickets in New York to maximize his influence over them and urged Buddy to cut “Rave On” at Bell Sound Studios on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan. Predictably, Petty immediately objected, and Buddy told Thiele he’d give the matter some thought. At this point he considered firing Petty outright and hiring his brother Larry. “He called me from New York and asked if he should do this or that,” Larry said in 1992. “He wanted me to be his manager. He offered me a tremendous sum of money just to go with him everywhere and keep him out of trouble, sorta like a bodyguard, but I couldn’t leave. I was running the [tile] business.”

Buddy also called Hi Pockets, saying he was furious at Petty and sorry that he hadn’t followed Hi Pockets’s counsel the previous year and avoided Petty. Though Petty had originally said he was only putting his name on the records to attract airplay, he demanded full royalties once the records hit, insisting that the money be divided exactly as specified in the contract. Buddy was “steaming mad,” he told Hi Pockets. In retaliation Buddy collected and held all income the Crickets received from live performances and told Thiele that he was going to cut “Rave On” in New York instead of Clovis. As a sop to Petty, Buddy let him play the piano on “Rave On” when they recorded it at Bell Sound in January.

Songwriters Sonny West and Bill Tilghman, the same team that had given Buddy “Oh Boy,” had originally conceived “Rave On” as a song about a domestic fight. They’d heard the phrase on a car radio while driving through Tilghman’s hometown, Levelland, Texas, twenty miles west of Lubbock. Petty rejected the first draft and told them to rewrite it as a love song. Two weeks later Sonny West recorded the revised version in Clovis and sent the demo to Atlantic Records, which accepted it, put West under contract, and released “Rave On” in early 1958. West’s version flopped. Buddy’s cover, a blazing dash of musical gusto, was recorded at eight
P.M.
on Saturday night, January 25. He got it in three takes.

“That’s My Desire,” a slow ballad that sold a million for Frankie Laine in 1947, proved to be Buddy’s Waterloo. His worst recording, the song was ill-suited to Buddy’s voice and style. He struggled through two false starts with a backup group called the Jivetones before getting a track down. At two
A.M.
Sunday, January 26, he completed his second unsatisfactory take and gave up, telling Decca not to release the cut. Thiele thought better of moving Buddy to New York. Perhaps he was better off in Clovis after all.

Later the same Sunday, the Crickets returned to
The Ed Sullivan Show
to promote “Oh Boy.” Since the Picks had sung backup vocals on the record, Buddy asked Sullivan to bring them to New York so that the TV audience would hear the same sound as the recording. Unfortunately, the Picks didn’t belong to the musicians’ union, a requirement for appearing on the show, and neither Sullivan nor Petty was willing to pay the union fee. By the time Buddy got to the studio he was dejected and in no mood for yet another setback. During dress rehearsal, Jerry and Joe B. started goofing around as usual and missed their cue. Exasperated, Buddy went onstage without them. Sullivan demanded to be told where Buddy’s musicians were. Buddy shrugged; he didn’t know or care.

Originally they were to do two songs, but Sullivan cut them down to one, adding that they must
not
sing “Oh Boy” because it was too vulgar for his show. Anti-rock bias was so strong that just the previous week, on January 20, radio station KWK in St. Louis, Missouri, banned all rock music from the air; KWK staffers stormed through the station library, systematically destroying the entire rock ’n’ roll collection. In the freer air of the nineties it seems impossible that the repressiveness of the fifties could have reached such violent extremes, but it did, and it was by no means limited to harebrained hooligans from the Ozarks. Rock ’n’ roll had laid bare the moral hypocrisy of fifties society, striking a blow against its racial double standard and its paradoxical attitude toward sex. As reflected in the oblique and tortured plays of Tennessee Williams, the gay writer who held up a mirror to the mendacity of the time, the public was sex-obsessed and lecherous on the one hand and, on the other, secretive and guilt-ridden. To a conservative like Ed Sullivan, “Oh Boy,” which promises the best orgasm anyone ever had, was rock ’n’ roll at its most seditious, surging with powerful rhythms that could arouse uncontrollable passions.

When Jerry and Joe B. arrived at Studio 50 and prepared to go on the show with Buddy, Sullivan asked what they’d decided to substitute for “Oh Boy.” Buddy explained that his friends at home were expecting to hear his current hit and if he couldn’t sing “Oh Boy” he was going to walk out. Customarily deferred to because of his power throughout the entertainment industry, Sullivan resented Buddy’s defiance. He had an animal act waiting in the alley on Fifty-third Street, at the side entrance to the studio, for just such an emergency. A vengeful man, he struck out at any performer who dared to challenge his authority. In 1955 he ordered Bo Diddley to sing the Uncle Tom-ish “Sixteen Tons.” When Bo refused and sang his current hit “Bo Diddley” instead, Sullivan cheated Bo out of the $750 fee they’d agreed on.

As soon as the Crickets went before the cameras and struck up “Oh Boy,” everything seemed to go wrong. First the sound went dead. Buddy tried to compensate by turning up the volume on his guitar. The sound came back on but not nearly at the volume required by rock ’n’ roll. Then the overhead lights went out. The Crickets looked and sounded like a bush-league combo. Backstage Sullivan was perpetrating the fiasco, ordering sound and lighting technicians to wreck the performance. Despite these harassments, the response to the Crickets was so overwhelming that Sullivan had to swallow his pride and invite them back for a third guest shot. When Buddy received the offer, he turned it down. CBS then doubled its offer. Buddy told them to shove it.

His contretemps at CBS can be seen as a classic struggle between art and commerce, Sullivan representing the corporate giant who tries to preempt a new art form in order to dilute it into something bland enough for mass consumption. The temptation for an artist to compromise in the face of a platform as impressive as Sullivan’s—an audience of fifty million—must have been powerful. Buddy’s resistance to Sullivan demonstrates not only that he was growing and maturing beyond the ingenuous youth who’d sold his soul to Norman Petty only half a year ago, but that he now had the courage to remain on the cutting edge of musical and cultural change. CBS didn’t have enough money, he finally told the studio, to buy the Crickets.

Chapter Nine

Life Beyond the United States

Buddy Holly left the United States for the first time in 1958, carrying rock ’n’ roll—the music as well as its highly subversive message of freedom—to the world at large. Though he appears to have had little interest in politics, his music planted the seeds of a larger cultural revolution everywhere he went—from Nashville to Australia, from London and Liverpool to the North Sea—laying the groundwork for the social and political upheavals rock ’n’ roll was instrumental in fomenting in the following decade. The fact that the Crickets’ influence spread so rapidly overseas was remarkable.