Buddy Holly: Biography (54 page)

Jerry Allison later told Goldrosen that Buddy would have been “terrifically unhappy” to see Norman Petty bobbing up again in his affairs. The Holleys, Jerry explained, distrusted New York record executives and felt safer keeping the control in Clovis. In the deal that was worked out in 1962, Buddy’s record royalties were to be split between the Holleys, Maria Elena, and Petty.

Back in charge of Buddy’s record releases, Petty vengefully excluded the Crickets from participating in extensive overdubbings of Buddy’s unreleased masters, using instead a local band called the Fireballs. Jerry felt that if anyone was going to play drums on overdubs of old Crickets material, he should have gotten the job. By now Jerry was back in the Southwest, often in Clovis, but he was not summoned to the studio. Petty’s preference for the Fireballs shows how sour the Crickets’ liaison with Petty had become—perhaps how cursed it had been from the start. Jerry took it as a direct affront to him and Joe B., convinced that Petty was deliberately trying to wipe out their contribution by dubbing the Fireballs over their old tracks.

It wasn’t that simple. Petty was now managing the Fireballs, who were a far bigger act than the Crickets had ever been without Buddy, scoring hits such as “Torquay,” “Bulldog,” and “Quite a Party.” Jimmy Gilmer joined the band in 1961 and helped make their monster hit “Sugar Shack” the No. 1 record of 1963 (according to
Billboard,
“Sugar Shack” was the only 1963 recording to amass five weeks in the No. 1 position, followed by “He’s So Fine” by the Chiffons and “Dominique” by the Singing Nun, both with four weeks at No. 1).

The first of the Buddy Holly–Fireballs LPs was
Reminiscing,
issued in 1963. A tremendous album, it includes multitracked versions of “Wait ’Til the Sun Shines Nellie,” “Because I Love You,” “It’s Not My Fault,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” and “Girl on My Mind,” as well as the title song. Petty later told interviewers Brooks and Malcolm that “purists” charged that the Fireballs “adulterated” Buddy’s early work. Years later, MCA, which had acquired Decca, released Buddy’s originals—minus the Fireballs’ overdubbings—in an LP called
For the First Time Anywhere,
providing an opportunity for Holly fans to draw their own conclusions about the rerecordings.
Rolling Stone
’s Jonathan Cott dismissed the purists’ quibbles, pointing out that the Fireballs’ overdubbing of the “slow version” of “Slippin’ and Slidin’” is a “sublime masterpiece, achieving a seemingly effortless clarity.”

The album
Reminiscing
heralded a brief Holly revival in the United States, hitting the American Top 40 in March 1963. The following month it zoomed into the Top 5 in Great Britain, peaking at No. 2. Also in April, Buddy’s version of Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” hit No. 3 on the British chart. In July he was back in the U.K. Top 5 with “Bo Diddley.” In September, “Wishing,” an old demo he’d cut for the Everly Brothers, also made the English charts.

A new Holly LP,
Showcase,
came out in 1964 and featured previously unreleased oddities such as Buddy’s one-minute recording of Ferlin Husky’s “Gone,” as well as covers of other rock standards, mostly vintage Holly demos cut in 1956.
Hit Parader
testily and not altogether accurately noted that “Blue Suede Shoes,” “Shake Rattle and Roll,” and “Rip It Up” “were done better by Carl Perkins, Bill Haley, and Little Richard,” missing the pure rockabilly ebullience of Buddy’s covers. Americans ignored the album, but British fans made it a No. 3 smash. Britons venerated Buddy in a way that would never happen in his native country in the sixties. Americans now disdained early rock as hopelessly “square” but went wild over the Beatles, failing to grasp that the Fab Four were simply putting their unique spin on Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis, Carl Perkins, and Little Richard and playing them back to the U.S.A. England’s Buddy Holly Appreciation Society, founded by John Beecher, owner of a record and book business in Surrey, attracted an enthusiastic and knowledgeable membership of three thousand. Typical of the high purpose of the enterprise was Beecher’s publication of Ella Holley’s partial memoirs,
The True Story,
in the society’s newsletter. Mrs. Holley found writing to be “a lot of work” and in time dropped the project when she became “too busy,” she told Griggs in 1977. When Beecher’s fan club folded, it was succeeded by the British Buddy Holly Society, formed by Ray Needham of Rainham, Essex, and Trevor Lailey of Benson, Oxfordshire.

The rock scene finally exploded in England in the early sixties, as spectacular as anything that had ever occurred in show business and fired by a mix of the Holly Texas sound and the confidence and optimism of Liverpool youths. “Musically, the rock ’n’ roll of Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly dominated the repertoire of the hundreds of groups playing in clubs, which sold only Coca-Cola or Fanta, tea or coffee,” wrote Ray Coleman, editor of
Melody Maker
and biographer of Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager.

Both John Lennon and Paul McCartney acknowledged their debt to Buddy, pointing out that the first forty songs they wrote were directly inspired by Buddy. Their first record, a scratchy shellac, featured Lennon singing “That’ll Be the Day” in a small Liverpool studio, McCartney revealed in 1987. “They play and harmonize in tune and tempo,” writes Mark Hertsgaard in
A Day in the Life,
“but there is no real indication at this point of the glories that lay ahead.” George Harrison learned to play the guitar by listening to a collection of Holly records owned by his friend Tony Bramwell, who’d once met Buddy. A $100 Hofner Futurama was the closest approximation of Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster that Harrison could find in Liverpool. “Buddy Holly was my very first favorite and my inspiration to go into the music business,” Harrison said in 1965. “I still think he is among the very best. He was different, exciting, and inimitable!”

The Beatles had a sound “quite unlike anything the 1962 British pop scene was accustomed to,” according to Ray Coleman, later a biographer of John Lennon. “Few artists wrote their own material. There were wafts of original rock ’n’ roll creativity from America (Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, Little Richard). But in Britain, popular music was firmly dominated by carefully honed love songs from professional writers in Tin Pan Alley, virtually a music factory.… The Beatles hated the vapidity of this scene. Their rock ’n’ roll thrust was tilted toward overthrowing the Establishment.”

Buddy’s most profound effect on the Beatles was on Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting, Lennon later told fan Jim Dawson. The prodigious sounds Buddy could wring from just three chords convinced Lennon he could write music, and Buddy’s eyeglasses reassured Lennon that he could be a rocker. Lennon told Dawson that Buddy was the first guitar player he’d ever seen use a capo, a small bar on the fingerboard of a guitar, used to change the pitch of all the strings at the same time.

Lennon suggested to Dawson that he, John Lennon, was the reincarnation of Buddy Holly. Whether Lennon was serious, the statement indicates the unique bond between Buddy and the British, beginning with his appearances in London and Liverpool in 1958, which went beyond mere influence and into the realm of myth. Perhaps what happened between Buddy and the British is best expressed in the Christian concept of transfiguration—the sudden emanation of radiance from the person of Christ on the mountain. The founder had passed the torch to his disciples, the Beatles, who would politicize and transform rock into an instrument of revolutionary social change. Though controversial at the time, Lennon’s remark to Maureen Cleave in the
London Evening Standard
—“We’re more more popular than Jesus now”—was a simple statement of fact. Through the Beatles, and indirectly through Buddy Holly, rock ’n’ roll would be responsible for more positive moral evolution in society in the sixties than the church, the government, the family, and the educational establishment combined. Hearing it nowhere else, a generation looked to its musicians for the truth and found it.

When they were still known as the Quarry Men, John, Paul, and George used Buddy Holly songs for their auditions. They practiced “It’s So Easy” “on the train from Liverpool,” McCartney recalled in
Reminiscing
in 1981. They had just one guitar between them. McCartney and Harrison would stand on either side of Lennon, draping their arms about him “to look a bit like a stage act,” McCartney said. Despite their catchy rendition of “It’s So Easy,” they “failed miserably.” Though much of the music from that period sounds very dated today, McCartney added, “Buddy’s songs still sound good … from ‘That’ll Be the Day’ to ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.’”

Rock manager Larry Parnes suggested they get a better name for themselves, “something … like Buddy Holly’s Crickets,” according to Beatles biographer Philip Norman. After calling themselves the Quarry Men for a while, they were briefly known as Johnny and the Moondogs before becoming Long John and the Silver Beatles, and ultimately the Beatles. “What’s happening in Liverpool to beat groups now is exactly like what happened to jazz in New Orleans at the turn of the century,”
Mersey Beat
publisher Bill Harry said to record-store manager Brian Epstein in 1961. “Everything is happening here, like nowhere in the world.”

The Beatles’ first significant break came when they performed as the Beat Brothers on Tony Sheridan’s recording, “My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean.” Brian Epstein sold out every copy he could order of the Polydor record and asked where he could see the Beat Brothers in person. Lunchtime most days at the Cavern Club, Bill Harry said, directing him to a dank cellar in Matthew Street, near Epstein’s Whitechapel shop. The Cavern catered to hard-core rockers and girls with teased hair who dined on cheese rolls and tea. The Beatles received 75 shillings each for their Cavern gigs.

On November 9, 1961, the glossy, well-heeled Epstein, who, like Norman Petty, was gay, found the Cavern show to be somewhat ragged. He deplored the way the Beatles smoked cigarettes while they played, but he was transfixed by the way they kicked endlessly. They performed “Shout!” as well as one of their own compositions, “Hello Little Girl.” Later Epstein went backstage to congratulate the band, which then consisted of Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and drummer Pete Best. Soon he was their manager. On New Year’s Day 1962 he took them to London, where they stayed at the Royal Hotel in Woburn Place and auditioned for Decca Records. British Decca proved no more perceptive in dealing with the Beatles than American Decca had been with Buddy Holly at Bradley’s Barn in 1956; they rejected the Beatles and told Brian Epstein to stick to the retail business.

By 1962 they were the most popular band in Liverpool, according to a poll of
Mersey Beat
’s five thousand readers. They dressed like Buddy, wearing Ivy League suits and skinny fifties ties, McCartney recalled. Though EMI had previously rejected them, they once again found their way to EMI’s Abbey Road studios in London, where thirty-six-year-old George Martin recorded them singing “Love Me Do” and “P.S. I Love You.” “Love Me Do” peaked on the national charts at 17—a minor success. Lennon then came up with “Please Please Me,” basing the vocal on Roy Orbison’s high, soaring style. It rocketed to No. 1 in 1963. Shortly thereafter, on October 13, the Beatles, now with Ringo Starr as their drummer, appeared on TV’s
Sunday Night at the London Palladium,
playing the same venue Buddy had electrified in 1958. Two thousand screaming fans charged the theater and battled the police, launching the phenomenon known as Beatlemania. Singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “This Boy,” and “All My Loving,” they became the symbol of sixties optimism, echoing the sunniness and buoyancy of Buddy Holly.

Their American conquest lay just ahead. Sid Bernstein, an agent at the same General Artists Corporation that handled the “Winter Dance Party,” presented them at Carnegie Hall on February 12, 1964, just five years after Peggy Sue Allison’s prophesy that a pop group would one day play the hallowed venue. Soon the “British Invasion” of the U.S. record charts was underway, and for much of the following decade British rock groups almost completely dominated the American rock scene. Perhaps more than any other rock group, the Beatles—and, as their inspiration, Buddy Holly—assured the dominance of rock ’n’ roll as the most popular and enduring musical form of the twentieth century.

David Garrard Lowe, an intimate of Brian Epstein’s, recalls meeting the Beatles just before their Carnegie Hall debut. Epstein had asked Lowe to get the boys some publicity in the United States. Then an editor at
Look
magazine, Lowe used his contacts to land the Beatles a
New Yorker
spread. “The first thing the Beatles told me when they landed was that they wanted to meet Elvis,” Lowe recalled in 1995. “The second thing they told me was that Buddy Holly was their major influence.” Asked if there were any truth to later rumors that Epstein and Lennon were lovers, Lowe said, “Absolutely not. Brian would never mix business with pleasure that way.”

Soon other British groups rode to fame singing Buddy’s songs. Both Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were fascinated by Buddy’s “Not Fade Away” and ultimately the song galvanized them into writing their own material. “The way they arranged ‘Not Fade Away’ was the beginning of the shaping of them as songwriters,” said their manager Andrew Loog Oldham. Added rock historian Nicholas Schaffner, “‘Not Fade Away’ fully realized, for the first time, the sound of the Rolling Stones—and British R&B generally—in all its explosive urgency.” The most convincing evidence that Buddy was the key factor in the Rolling Stones’ success surfaced with their first U.S. record release, which was “Not Fade Away,” in 1964.

Keith Richards regards Buddy’s influence as the most pervasive in all of rock. “He passed it on via the Beatles and via us,” Richards said in 1987. “He’s in everybody.… This is not bad for a guy from Lubbock, right?” In 1963, years before Graham Nash joined Crosby, Stills and Nash, he was part of the Manchester group the Hollies, who were named “after the American rocker who had such a tremendous influence on the British beat scene—Buddy Holly,” wrote Schaffner. The Hollies would score many hit records on both sides of the Atlantic, including “Bus Stop” and “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother.” Their LP
Buddy Holly
had sixteen Holly tracks, among them “Wishing,” “Think It Over,” and “Midnight Shift.”