Buddy Holly: Biography (25 page)

Unfortunately,
Cash Box
’s prediction was wide of the mark. Though “Listen to Me” is one of Buddy’s best records, it was undermined by an untimely release. Decca never should have issued another Holly single when he already had so many hits in circulation. DJs are reluctant to play consecutive records by the same artist, so they sacrificed “Listen to Me” in order to go on playing Buddy’s more familiar Top 40 releases. Had Decca waited for his 1957 hits to run their course, “Listen to Me” probably would have succeeded. Though both sides eventually showed up on the U.K. charts—“Listen to Me” cresting at No. 16 in England and “I’m Gonna Love You Too” making it into Australia’s Top 40—neither reached a wide U.S. audience. Buddy’s uninterrupted winning streak on the
Billboard
chart was over—due not to a decline in quality but to an embarrassment of riches.

On February 6, the tour party began the long journey home, stopping over once again in Hawaii. On February 9, Buddy paid a series of visits to Honolulu DJs to promote his records. In a color picture Petty took of Buddy in his room at the Kaiser Hotel, Buddy is shown gazing out over the blue Pacific, his expression reflecting a new maturity and contentment. If he was savoring his moment at the epicenter of pop, he was doing so with remarkable calm and apparent humility.

During the return flight, one of the Constellation’s engines blew a valve and stalled over the Pacific Ocean, as if an omen of things to come. The pilot made an emergency landing on the remote island of Canton, where Jerry Allison wrote a letter home complaining about the delay.

On Monday, February 10, 1958, aboard Braniff Airlines flight 39, the Crickets finally set down in Lubbock. After the summer heat of Australia, the 40-degree temperature seemed arctic. As usual Lubbock took no notice of its world-class celebrity. At some point in that year, Buddy went shopping for a new Cadillac. Mindlessly, he let his father talk him into buying a Lincoln, which he regretted at once. He drove to Clovis on February 12 to cut “Well All Right,” a hard-edged indictment of cynical, jaded grownups who dismiss young love. Jerry’s ride-cymbal figure is the perfect accompaniment to Buddy’s tense, insistent vocal. The Tinker AFB version of “Maybe Baby” was released on February 12, with the equally felicitous “Tell Me How” on the B-side. “Maybe Baby” entered the
Cash Box
chart the same month. Brash, turbocharged, and cocky, with a unique “dot-ditty-ot-dot” backup riff by the Picks, “Maybe Baby” is perhaps the definitive Holly song, a breezy seesaw ride, alternating doubt and hope.

The Crickets were back in the Clovis studio two days later to cut “Take Your Time,” “Think It Over,” and “Fool’s Paradise,” working with a new vocal group called the Roses. Robert Linville, a member of the trio, later described Buddy to Bill Griggs as “a skinny guy with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in his T-shirt sleeve.” They rehearsed everything they were going to cut that day, but when the session started, the Crickets performed without their backup singers. Not until later did the Roses overdub their vocals, which include some of the most inventive doo-wahs to be heard south of the Bronx. Though the Roses’ contribution is crucial in “It’s So Easy,” “Think It Over,” “Lonesome Tears,” and “Fool’s Paradise,” they were paid only $65 each per session.

George Tomsco, a young musician from Raton, New Mexico, who had a band called the Fireballs, was around the studio in 1958. One day Buddy picked up Tomsco’s new Fender Jazzmaster and started playing it. Tomsco, who didn’t recognize Buddy, started to complain, but when Petty informed him of Buddy’s identity, Tomsco’s attitude suddenly changed from irritation to gratitude. He remembers being “spellbound” that day as he watched Buddy record.

The Clovis sessions did not always go smoothly. While Buddy was recording “Take Your Time,” Petty inserted some awkward lyrics that Buddy kept tripping over. Far-fetched and pretentious, the lyrics attempted to evoke an improbable image of hearts and strings. It was an unsingable line and Buddy said it was going to take all night to get it right. On the unreleased tape, Vi Petty can be heard in the background snapping, with mock patience, that they had plenty of time. Buddy warned that he was going to “crap out.” Later, as they recorded another song, “Think It Over,” Vi vented her anger by violently pounding the keyboard during the piano break. When they played it back they realized it was a first-rate boogie-woogie piano solo. Buddy was so pleased that he made Vi an honorary Cricket. It was about time; her contribution in the studio was essential. Since none of the Crickets could read music, she was perpetually on call to play tunes from sheet music until everyone learned them.

“Think It Over” epitomizes Buddy’s “who needs you?” attitude toward women and perhaps life in general. After his relationship with Echo, he developed a thicker emotional skin. Though he maintained a polite façade in public, he became outspoken and sometimes rude with girl fans, whom he and Jerry Allison referred to as “chicks.” On the road, a careless remark from a pushy girl could raise his hackles. Jerry recounted in Goldrosen and Beecher’s
Remembering Buddy
what happened when an unlucky fan asked Buddy why he wore such large eyeglasses. “Hey, forget you,” Buddy said, and kicked her out. Both Buddy and Jerry Lee Lewis, who’d become friends during their shows at the Paramount and in Australia, were sometimes cruel to rock’s first-generation groupies. Jerry Lee punched some fans in the eye when they annoyed him backstage. Those who grabbed at him during performances sometimes got their hands crushed and their arms kicked at. “Animosity toward Jerry Lee’s allegiants,” wrote Myra Lewis, “was the first of many amazing self-contradictions indicating the workings of a troubled mind.”

Phil Everly observed the same ambivalence in Buddy and later described it to interviewer Margaret McNie. On one of their tours together, Buddy was entertaining Phil and a groupie in his hotel room. The groupie wanted to go to bed with Buddy, but Buddy winked at Phil and started playing games, telling the girl that, as Phil’s friend, he had to be mindful of Phil’s feelings. But it was Phil’s impression that Buddy was staging the whole scene as a joke on Phil. “If I asked her to leave,” Buddy said, staring at Phil, “you’d go along, wouldn’t you?” When Phil said that of course he would, Buddy perversely insisted that
Phil
tell her to leave. Phil, who’d been looking forward to partying with the girl, cussed Buddy out. Suddenly Buddy started laughing, stood up, and threw the girl out of the hotel room himself. He was torn between the natural urgings of a youthful and vigorous sex drive—so easily satisfied for a popular rock ’n’ roller—and his yearning for the good girls of home, like Echo, who was now lost to him forever. He longed to establish a home and start a family, but not with the groupies who flocked to him.

At home between tours he discussed his religious conflict with his brother Larry. As they sat in Buddy’s Lincoln Continental, he asked Larry what he should do about his life, which he felt had veered off course. He’d surfaced from agonizing religious raps with Little Richard extremely disturbed. Richard was now studying to become a minister at a theological college in Alabama. Was it possible, Buddy wondered, to be in touch with God’s will and pursue a career as a rock star at the same time? Larry did not answer him directly but pointed out that no higher power could be effective in anyone’s life unless spirituality came first, even above career and ambition. God does not take a backseat to anyone or anything, Larry said. The next Sunday, Buddy dropped a sizable check in the collection plate at Tabernacle Baptist Church and had a serious talk with Reverend Ben D. Johnson. Later he told Larry that he was going to record some religious albums as a way of remaining a singer and a Christian simultaneously and that he intended to keep pouring money into the church.

But he couldn’t buy the church’s approval, and so his religion turned the thing he loved most, music, into a curse. No wonder his life would be increasingly stressful and reckless in the few precious months that remained of it. Sadly, despite all his parents’ support of him, he sensed that they, too, withheld their approval. Since he was still young enough that their opinion mattered, he never quite convinced himself, despite his hit records and superlative reviews, that he had truly arrived. He existed in a state of tension and expectation, wondering how to top himself, how to prove himself to his parents. It wasn’t enough to be creating music and releasing records on a national label; everything he recorded had to be a hit.

In this spiritual crisis, it is to be hoped that Buddy, who knew the Bible well, did not overlook God’s grand synthesis of music, flesh, and the spirit, which is described in the Old Testament, in
The Song of Solomon:

The voice of my beloved! behold, he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a roe or a young hart.… Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.… Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away. O my dove, thou art in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the stairs, let me see thy countenance, let me hear thy voice; for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely. Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes. My beloved is mine, and I am his; he feedeth among the lilies. Until day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my beloved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the mountains …

So many of the conflicts that vex mankind—and bedeviled Buddy Holly—come from religion, not from spirituality or God.

Buddy’s forthcoming trip to England, set for March 1958, at first seemed to him quite the most important event of his lifetime. The challenge of translating rock to the Old World both excited and frightened him. But in a conversation with Larry, he said that nothing would ever be as meaningful to him as the day he was baptized. He reminisced about that time in his youth: he had still been in adolescence but he was already getting into “all kinds of jams,” he said, just beginning his brush with juvenile delinquency. Then one day he realized that although he would never be flawless and could never attain perfection, he qualified as a son of God and he could always trust Jesus to take care of him. He had turned his life and his will over to the care of God on the day of his baptism. Since then, he had not felt that he was leading his life so much as walking in God’s shadow, or trying to.

Unlike many who achieve early stardom, Buddy retained his humility, though he worked hard to do so. Despite being a headliner, he could always be counted on to provide musical backup any time a show-business colleague needed it. On the “Big Gold Record Stars” tour of Florida in February 1958, just before his departure for England, Buddy helped the Everly Brothers out of a bind. They lacked a band of their own, and the booker in Florida had assigned them three high school students. The Crickets opened the show and received a tumultuous ovation. Watching from the wings, the Everlys almost panicked. How could they, with their raggedy band, possibly appear on the same bill with the fabulous Crickets? Their predicament only worsened when Jerry Lee Lewis followed the Crickets and reduced the audience to a state of quivering hysteria. At last it was time for the Everlys to go onstage and close the show, which could be nothing but an anticlimax with their high school band. In desperation they appealed to Buddy, who immediately offered to back them up. A grateful Phil later revealed that “only by the grace of God and Buddy Holly” had the Everly Brothers managed to survive that night. With the Crickets behind them, they came on and created “pandemonium,” Phil added.

A reviewer who attended the second of their two Fort Lauderdale performances in February wrote that although Jerry Lee received a “solid reception for his wild act … the top scorers” with the audience of 3,000 at the War Memorial Auditorium were Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Charging through “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy,” and “That’ll Be the Day,” Buddy proved to be “adept at his medium,” the critic noted, his “slim frame present[ing] a touch of humor … as he struts around the stage bobbing his head back and forth to the rhythm of the music.” Unimpressed by the Royal Teens, who had only “Short Shorts” to “crow about,” the reviewer said they “failed to get into the same league” with Buddy and the Everlys and panned their “fairly nondescript offerings.”

When they played the National Guard Armory in Jacksonville, Florida, Buddy almost had a run-in with Mae Boren Axton, the cowriter of “Heartbreak Hotel,” the No. 1 hit that propelled Elvis from regional stardom to international idol. Axton, who was handling the publicity for Buddy’s Jacksonville appearance, was upset when he failed to appear for a TV program that had been scheduled just before the first Armory show. “Impulsive that I am,” Axton later wrote in
Country Song Roundups,
“I was inclined to berate young Holly somewhat, until I saw the hurt look in his eyes, and heard the quick defense by his companion artists, Don and Phil Everly.” None of the singers had been advised by the tour promoter that they were expected at the TV station, the Everlys told Axton. “Our high esteems of young Holly continued because of Don and Phil’s true friendship of him,” Axton concluded.

After the Florida tour, “Holly and his group rushed to the Miami airport to make connections for their first trip to England,” a reporter wrote. Buddy’s arrival at London’s Heathrow Airport on March 1, 1958, marked a watershed in the history of rock ’n’ roll. The twenty-five-day British tour inspired and molded a generation of English musicians—among them John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Graham Nash, and Elton John—who would spearhead the British Invasion of the 1960s. They would add distinction and depth to rock and take it to a level of cultural influence, political power, and personal wealth scarcely dreamed of by its West Texas pioneer.

England was ripe for Buddy Holly in the late 1950s; Britain’s underemployed and resentful working-class youth had grown restive under an antiquated and repressive caste system which marked people for life according to their lineage and locution. Though London was an elegant and sedate city of green parks, double-decker buses, spotless taxicabs, scarlet telephone booths, and immaculate white town houses, the society seemed as stagnant and arcane as its cumbersome currency system, the last in the world to resist decimalization. The government-owned BBC was the only TV and radio network. Wimpy’s was the sole fast-food chain. Bars serving room-temperature ale and stout closed their doors promptly at eleven
P.M.
, and there was no nightlife; the Underground (subway) closed at midnight. Stores stopped doing business at noon on Saturday and didn’t open again until Monday morning. England was a land still recovering from the trauma of war thirteen years before, and poverty was widespread.