Buddy Holly: Biography (58 page)

Waylon had then wed Lynne Gladys Jones, a flamboyant barmaid from Pocatello, Idaho, on December 10, 1962. The marriage lasted until 1967. Next, Waylon married Barbara Rood, the beautiful daughter of a Scottsdale, Arizona, millionaire. Barbara left him in 1968. In 1969 he married Duane Eddy’s ex-wife, country singer Jessi Colter. Around that time, his drug abuse caught up with him. He “wound up in the hospital—the pill habit was killing him,” wrote Maureen Orth of
Newsweek.
A son, Waylon Albright, was born to Waylon and Jessi in 1979.

Waylon’s drug habit would last twenty-one years, ultimately costing him “$1,500 a day” in cocaine bills, until it ended in 1984, he revealed in his authorized video biography
Waylon: Renegade, Outlaw, Legend.
In 1977, he’d been arrested on a federal drug charge in Nashville, which consumed, he revealed in
Waylon,
“$70,000 [in] lawyer fees” before the case was dismissed. In 1978, he’d played Flagstaff, Arizona, where he and his band trashed four rooms in the Little America Motel, throwing sand in the air conditioners, spreading ice from the ice machines, and tearing up curtains and light fixtures.

Despite these exploits, Waylon was the biggest star in C&W, just as Buddy had foreseen, scoring a dozen No. 1 hits between 1974 and 1979, including “This Time,” “Luckenbach, Texas,” and the Grammy-winning “Mammas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” which helped to define the progressive country—or outlaw—movement. By 1980 his album sales soared to sixteen million. “In times I was down I could look back at what Buddy Holly told me,” Waylon said. “The encouragement he gave me. He was my friend first and foremost … last and not least.”

At the 1979 Lubbock fundraiser for Buddy’s statue, Sonny Curtis, Niki Sullivan, Jerry, and Joe B. also performed, and the event turned into a warm reunion. All the Holleys were present, including Buddy’s parents, Larry, Travis, and Patricia, as well as Snuff Garrett, Tommy Allsup, Larry Corbin, Jerry Coleman, and Maria Elena, who signed autographs for an hour and a half. Later, at the Lubbock cemetery, a crowd gathered to honor Buddy at a morning graveside service. As Tommy Allsup played “True Love Ways,” Niki Sullivan’s mother broke down, sobbing that she still had Niki but Mrs. Holley would never see Buddy again. After the benefit, Tommy Allsup returned to his home in Fort Worth, where he was running a bar called Heads Up, named after the coin toss that had saved his life.

Finally, an eight-foot-six bronze statue of Buddy by San Angelo sculptor Grant Speed was placed directly in front of the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center in the heart of the downtown area. Maria Elena and Buddy’s parents helped the artist unveil the statue at a dedication ceremony held on September 5, 1980. Mrs. Holley was enchanted by the idea of a statue of her son standing in the very center of Lubbock, making Buddy the town’s No. 1 citizen and official symbol. Buddy’s father still proudly wore Buddy’s Omega wristwatch, which had been returned from Iowa after laying in the snow throughout the winter of 1959. Waylon watched the statue unveiling from his hotel-room window in the Hilton Inn nearby, lest his presence divert attention from Buddy. Lubbock Mayor Bill McAllister addressed a gathering of 150, most of them members of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, who were sporting Buddy Holly hats and T-shirts.

The fans who’d traveled the farthest were Nigel Smith and Adrian Rossi, who’d flown ninety-six hundred miles from Australia. Altogether, twenty-nine states were represented and several foreign countries, including England, Holland, Germany, Canada, Ireland, and France. “
En France,
Buddy is still alive,” said Frenchman Michel Aphesbero. At a concert held in the Civic Center, Roy Orbison and Bo Diddley sang their hits and Waylon played rhythm guitar with the Crickets. Orbison, who said he loved Buddy and was “dedicating the whole show to him,” must have been mellowing with age, since he usually spoke rather coldly of Buddy, his West Texas archrival.

Buddy’s mother seemed somewhat reserved when Griggs asked her to comment on the statue. It was “real fine,” she said, but she knew Buddy “a little better than the rest of you,” she added. When I visit Lubbock for a look at the statue a dozen years later, I understand her reservations. It’s a disappointing memorial, beginning with the location. The inner city is virtually in ruins. The Lubbock County Courthouse sits in a slum at Broadway and Texas, near “A Tribute to Cotton,” a hulking replica of a bale of cotton, a sinister-looking monolith executed in solid bronze, without a trace of imagination, and dedicated “to those who made Lubbock County and the surrounding South Plains the greatest producer of upland cotton in the world.” The starkness of the scene is relieved somewhat on the day of my visit when a Mexican wedding party enters the cupola bandstand in front of the courthouse, the bride in white lace and the groom in a gray tuxedo, surrounded by clouds of children in white finery.

“Everything’s moved out to the malls. It’s dead downtown,” a woman bus driver tells me, referring to the migration to the suburbs that has also destroyed so many other once prospering midsized American cities. On Main Street, you can see a mile or two in either direction, down copious red-brick roads. There’s not a moving vehicle in sight though it’s five
P.M.
on a Saturday. Finally I come across a junkie hooker nodding off at a bus stop and another staggering out of a wig store. Then, like a scene from a Fellini film, a pickup truck comes careening around a corner, carrying a fat woman in farmer’s jeans in back, cackling and screaming. Why, I wonder, did they place Buddy’s statue in this Dalí-esque wasteland when it belongs at the splendid mall out on Slide Road, where the young people congregate.

I wander down Main Street, across Texas Avenue, and along Avenues J and K. The wind blows through these silent streets like the sigh of a ghost. At Main and Avenue J, I pass a familiar scene from Buddy’s youth, the Lindsey Theater, with its scalloped art deco facade, closed and abandoned right here in the middle of town. Nearby stand the stately Old Pioneer Hotel, now a retirement home, and John Halsey’s Pharmacy, in the Medical Arts Building, where Buddy used to pick up girls. Somehow these places survived the tornado of 1970 that went through the downtown area on May 11 like a giant lawnmower, killing twenty-six and cutting a swath of destruction all the way to the airport.

Buddy’s statue stands among the newer buildings—La Quinta Inn, Denny’s, IBM, the Sheraton and Holiday Inn motels, and the dreary convention center, which hugs the ground as if it’s expecting another twister from the darkened winter skies. These joyless structures, surrounded by the crumbling inner city, bear no resemblance to the bustling city I passed through as a child in 1939 with my family, traveling in a decrepit ’29 Chevrolet that was hitched to a wooden trailer house. Like thousands of families in the Great Depression, we were heading west, my parents in search of work. Years later, in the early 1950s, I returned to Lubbock for a football game between Texas Christian University, where I was a student, and Texas Tech. My path may well have crossed Buddy Holley’s at that time, for he was attending high school only a few blocks away.

Now, in 1992, I walk across the downtown railroad tracks and pass Rail House, the train station on Avenue K. Nearby is the West Texas Hospital, where Buddy’s father died in 1985. Today the area is dominated by places like Rudy’s 24 Hours Bail Bonds. The old Kress is now a Goodwill shop. A lone black man ambles out of Snappy Shine, and I wonder if this is the place where Buddy once gave away his wristwatch.

Buddy’s statue is as lifeless as the city that surrounds it. Nothing about this stiff, spindly, haggard scarecrow suggests music, rhythm, or rock ’n’ roll. A far better statue of Buddy, by artist Doug Clark, is in the Gates Memorial Library in Port Arthur, Texas, Janis Joplin’s hometown, on the campus of Lamar University. Clark’s sculpture group also includes Ritchie and the Bopper, and all three young stars are bursting with the energy and vitality of youth.

*   *   *

Buddy’s legend continued to grow. Up in Clear Lake, Iowa, the Surf Ballroom, scene of his final concert, jumped on the Buddy Holly bandwagon, announcing an annual dance to be held on the anniversary of his death. The gesture would have been more impressive had it come twenty years earlier. The old ballroom could no longer survive on local business and needed a gimmick to draw outsiders to slumberous Clear Lake. Radio station KZEV donated a bronze plaque honoring Buddy, which was installed in the lobby. On February 3, 1979, twenty years after Buddy’s death, a crowd of two thousand flocked to the Surf for a Buddy Holly dance, with music provided by Del Shannon, the Drifters, and Jimmy Clanton. It was so cold that frost covered the inside of the ballroom doors, and, outside, the temperature dropped to 24 below zero—95 below with the chill factor due to high winds. Nonetheless, the dance was such a hit that the Surf’s Holly hops became a fixture for the next fifteen years. Rock dinosaurs such as Carl Perkins, Ricky Nelson, Bobby Vee, Tommy Sands, the Diamonds, the Crickets, Buddy Knox, Don McLean, and Frankie Ford all came to Clear Lake to play the annual Buddy Holly dance.

Despite these signs of a continuing Holly revival, U.S. fans still clamored in vain for Buddy’s record company to issue a complete set of his recordings. In England, a definitive Holly collection came out in 1979, entitled
The Complete Buddy Holly,
a box set of six LPs containing all of Buddy’s recordings, but in the United States, MCA dragged its feet for another two years before making a comparable set available to Americans, finally releasing
The Complete Buddy Holly
in 1981.
Rolling Stone
critic David McGee applauded the set, pointing out Buddy had gone from “having one of the most abysmal catalogues” of any important rock star to having “one of the very best. Until the mid-1980s stateside fans hungering for even a taste of Holly’s prolific output had to search the import bins, where treasures abounded.” The new box set included everything from home recordings and radio interviews to alternate takes, all confirming Buddy’s status as “one of the most original musicians this country has ever produced,” McGee wrote.

On May 31, 1981, the
Los Angeles Times
surveyed local teenagers to determine their favorite singers from the fifties and sixties. Subjects were blindfolded and told to respond as records were played to them anonymously. In the final tally, Buddy came out on top, followed by Elvis, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Gary U.S. Bonds, Jimi Hendrix, the Drifters, Bob Dylan, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and Ike and Tina Turner. “I only wish Buddy Holly didn’t die,” said fourteen-year-old Eric Troop, one of the teenagers polled.

Buddy’s legend leaped to such heights in the early 1980s that the special “Baby Boomer” edition of the board game “Trivial Pursuits” contained no less than twenty-one Buddy Holly questions, including “Who was the most famous singer to die on Albert Juhl’s North Dakota [sic] farm?”; “What Buddy Holly song marked the North American debut of the Rolling Stones?”; and “What Buddy Holly hit did he almost call ‘Cindy Lou’?”

By the eighties, Buddy was showing up in novels such as Robert Parker’s
A Catskill Eagle
(as an intelligence agent, of all things) and Bradley Den-ton’s science-fiction opus
Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede
(as a space alien broadcasting from a moon of Jupiter). P. F. Kluge’s novel
Eddie and the Cruisers,
unlike the popular sixties movie based on it, is set in the 1950s; Buddy’s in a scene at a recording session just before the principal character dies in a car crash. In
Not Fade Away,
author Jim Dodge denounces “the promoters of the Winter Dance Party.… When you wrong the people who make the music, you wrong the music; and if the music does belong to the Holy Spirit, you wrong the Holy Spirit, too. You fuck-over the Spirit, you deserve what you finally get.”

Buddy’s name popped up in everything from the cult movie
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
to Mac Davis’s hit record “Texas in My Rear View Mirror” and from the “Buddy Holly Handicap,” an Australian horse race, to the Kathleen Turner movie
Peggy Sue Got Married
(which originally starred Debra Winger before the actress injured her back). In Lubbock, a couple of newlyweds reported that they’d fallen in love at Buddy’s grave and danced to “True Love Ways” at their wedding. “Buddy—The Singing Piston” showed up in a cartoon in
Hot Rod
magazine. At the height of the TV series
Dallas,
a Buddy Holly lookalike contest was held at South-fork Ranch on Buddy Holly Day. In Somalia, Africa, Peace Corps workers told of natives singing “That’ll Be the Day.” In Yemen, fans mobbed the theater when
The Buddy Holly Story
opened in the Middle East.

As Buddy’s posthumous fame continued to build in the eighties, many of the persons who’d played important roles in his life began to pass from the scene. Hi Pockets Duncan died after an illness on December 21, 1981. To the end of his days Hi Pockets had spoken fondly of Buddy, never regretting his decision to bow out as Buddy’s manager in 1956. Going on the road with Buddy would have been an impossibility for Hi Pockets, he admitted, and he knew that long-distance management was worthless. At the time of his death, Hi Pockets was still active in West Texas radio, serving as general manager of station KRAN in Morton, a small town thirty miles northwest of Lubbock.

Buddy’s friend Snuff Garrett, who’d become a high-powered L.A. producer working with Trini Lopez, Roy Rogers, Sonny and Cher, and Frank Sinatra, retired at the age of fifty-three and moved to Arizona. On September 2, 1982, Decca’s Dick Jacobs was stabbed by an assailant who’d gained access to his New York apartment. He recovered from multiple wounds to his abdomen and chest but only regained partial use of his right hand. On May 20, 1988, he died at the age of seventy. Another Decca colleague of Buddy’s, Bob Thiele, was still “alive and well,” Bill Munroe, a Connecticut friend, stated in December 1993.

Petty’s long-time secretary and assistant Norma Jean Berry—never a favorite of Maria Elena’s or Buddy’s—died in 1984, at the age of fifty-five, after a long illness. A few months later one of Buddy’s best backup singers, Billy Duane “Bill” Pickering, died at fifty-seven, having survived a severe cerebral hemorrhage by almost a decade. After singing at Buddy’s funeral, Bill Pickering had stated that he wanted one of Buddy’s recordings to be played at
his
funeral. Accordingly, the version of Buddy’s “True Love Ways” that had been overdubbed by the Picks was played at the Central Baptist Church during Pickering’s rites. Bill Griggs was an honorary pallbearer. Buddy’s early musical partner Don Guess, who’d become an insurance salesman in Roswell, New Mexico, later opening the Don Guess Insurance Agency in El Paso, Texas, died of cancer of the throat at the age of fifty-five on October 21, 1992.