History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (9 page)

He had her where he wanted her, with no defenses left, ready to do anything to get away from this terrible man, and so she sang “If You Try” one more time, with every word with an
ay
sound in it exploding into the sky in pain and loss. As “
pray
for” and “
make
love” let you hear everything she will never have in life, she could be Ronald Colman in
Lost Horizon
finally making it back through the mountains to his Shangri-La, his eyes blinded by the paradise that you can’t quite believe, even though it is within sight, he will ever reach again.

In Chicago, Beyoncé raises her head. She looks Brody in the eye, glances at the band, asks for one more take. Brody waves a dismissive yes. “Take fifteen,” says an engineer off camera. The guitar and the piano hit a single note, and Beyoncé approaches the mike like an actress about to deliver a soliloquy. For a moment she pushes to the edge of melisma, then falls back into the song. This is not about her. The purpose of her performing the song, now, is not to draw attention to herself, her name, her story, but to inhabit the fictional character in the song, finding her story, her voice. “The song has me in church while watching my man marry someone else,” James wrote in her autobiography. “I play the part of the lady left out, scorned, and wronged. ‘For them life has just begun,’ I sing as rice is thrown over their heads, ‘and mine is at an end.’ I sang like I meant it, and maybe I did. Maybe I foresaw the future. In the near future,
I’d get to live the very song I was singing . . . For the time being, though, I thought I was pretending, playacting, not knowing I was really playing the fool.”

As she stands at the mike, Beyoncé half-slumps to one side, as if she’s not singing but doing manual labor. Brody watches, smoking. Beyoncé’s face goes back and forth between defiance of him and living in the song. As Muddy Waters, Jeffrey Wright stands in the control room, listening, smoking. As Beyoncé goes up high to a “Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh”—which is a burst in the song, a hump in the music she has to get over, with no guarantee that she will, Wright smiles. She moves roughly, without grace. Whatever glamour she might have brought to the scene when she was dressed and made up for it is gone, erased by the woman in the song she has now become. She gets to the last verse — “Annnnnnnnd now—the wedding is over”—and Wright is contemplative, thinking not about her, not about the performance, but about life. He looks troubled, remembering something he hasn’t thought about for a long time. “
THE RICE,
” Beyoncé sings, “
THE RICE HAS BEEN THROWN!
” and Wright slowly closes his eyes and his eyebrows rise. My God. He wasn’t expecting this.

Beyoncé, you can think, was—was expecting to produce just that response, not in the film, where closed eyes and raised eyebrows are part of the script, but in the theater, out in the world, when the movie is seen, in 2008, when it came
and went with much notice and little business, or when someone might stumble on the scene online, or in some future format, long after the film, or even Beyoncé or Etta James, are forgotten.

Later in the movie, Beyoncé sang “At Last.” Her version was released as a single, and won a Grammy for Traditional R&B Vocal. Etta James died in 2012 at seventy-three, bitter, along with many other things, that in 2009 it was Beyoncé, not she, who was invited to sing “At Last” at Barack Obama’s first inaugural ball.

Crying, Waiting, Hoping

1959 • 1969

One morning in 2013 I walked into Cole Coffee in Oakland, California. The music they play is teasing, always on low, less Hank Williams than his ghost, a chirpy girl-group number that turned out to be Etta James, a primitive blues no one could identify. This day the song was typically distant, dim—the harder you listened, the more the dimness seemed built into the music, part of what it was trying to say. But it was also unmistakable—unmistakably the Beatles playing Buddy Holly’s “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” from when or where there was no telling. It sounded fabulous. It was also completely spectral, as if it were a mishearing of something else entirely—as if what I thought I was hearing had never been recorded at all.

Buddy Holly walked into the room sideways. In terms of pure power he can’t stand up to those with whom he’s most often linked as founder of a new music: Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry. He recorded nothing as immediately overwhelming—nothing that so forced an absolute confrontation between performer and listener— as “Hound Dog,” “Tutti Frutti,” “Who Do You Love?” or
“Johnny B. Goode.” The most musically extreme record of Holly’s time was Little Richard’s “Ready Teddy”: Elvis can’t keep up with Little Richard, but Holly, despite guitar playing that almost rewrites the song from the inside out, can’t keep up with Elvis.

Buddy Holly shied away from the violence implicit in rock ’n’ roll as it first made itself known, and from the hellfire emotionalism on the surface of the music. Performing under his own name or that of his band, the Crickets, he was a rockabilly original, but unlike Gene Vincent—or Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, or the Sun label wild man Sonny Burgess, who after the release of his “Red Headed Woman” dyed his hair red and bought a red suit and a red Cadillac—Holly looked for space in the noise. He built his music around silences, pauses, a catch in the throat, a wink.

“That’ll Be the Day” may be a very hard-nosed record, but its intensity is eased by its brightness, by the way it courts the prettiness that took over later Holly tunes like “Everyday,” or even “Oh Boy” and “Rave On.” “Hound Dog” aims for the monolithic and falls short; “That’ll Be the Day” is a dozen ways of looking at life at once, and fully realized. The singer is acting out his role in different accents; like Rod Stewart combing his hair a thousand ways in “Every Picture Tells a Story,” he’s talking to the mirror, rehearsing what he’s going to say, writing it down. He’s saying it on the phone while the phone’s still ringing at the other end,
going over how perfectly he said what he meant to say after he’s said it, or thinking of what he should have said after he’s said what he didn’t mean to say. Holly is reaching for Elvis’s roughness, but even as he does so he communicates doubt that he can carry it off—or that anyone should. That’s why “That’ll Be the Day,” a one-week number 1 hit in 1957, is a more convincing record than “Hound Dog,” which with “Don’t Be Cruel” on the flipside was an eleven-week number 1 hit in 1956—as Bobby Vee put it, thinking back to first hearing Holly on the radio in Fargo, North Dakota, when he was fourteen-year-old Bob Veline, “To me it was the most original, fresh, unique record I ever heard. And I was right, it was.”

Holly could be sure of his self-doubt; Elvis couldn’t be as sure of his arrogance, and so he muffles it with a self-mocking laugh: “As a great philosopher once said—” In that part of himself that was addressing “Hound Dog” to the world at large, to everyone who ever mocked him or the people he came from, you can hear Elvis meaning every word of “Hound Dog”; in the part of himself that was addressing the woman in the song, he’s only kidding. Holly wasn’t kidding on “That’ll Be the Day.” Holly’s performance is tougher— just as “Well . . . All Right,” a 1958 single with no orchestration other than acoustic guitar, string bass, and fluttered cymbals, a song inspired by the Crickets touring with Little Richard and hearing him shout “WELL ALRIGHT” at
the slightest provocation, a performance that translated a Little Richard scream into a distant, simmering, quiet rebellion, is tougher still.

Holly’s almost frightening sincerity was cut with playfulness, a risk-free sense of fun, and an embrace of an adolescent or even babyish innocence that was likely as calculated as his famous hiccups. Without that innocence and playfulness, his sincerity could have led him to take himself so seriously that today his music might sound hopelessly overblown; without his sincerity, many of his songs would now sound idiotic. Instead he so often struck a balance that was his alone.

“Anarchy had moved in,” Nik Cohn wrote of the first days of rock ’n’ roll. “For thirty years you couldn’t possibly make it unless you were white, sleek, nicely spoken, and phony to your toenails—suddenly now you could be black, purple, moronic, delinquent, diseased, or almost anything on earth, and you could still clean up.” What Buddy Holly was saying, what he was acting out, was that you could also be ordinary.

A photograph was taken in Lubbock, Texas, in 1955, on the occasion of Elvis Presley’s second visit to Buddy Holly’s hometown. In this picture, Elvis, at twenty, in a theater lobby or a crowded backstage, surrounded by teenage girls and boys and children, looks bigger than anyone else: taller, wider, taking up more psychic space. Even with his mouth hanging open, you can feel his glow. A month before, at his
first show in Lubbock, “Elvis had signed girls’ breasts, arms, foreheads, bras, and panties,” the novelist Johnny Hughes wrote in 2009. “No one had ever seen anything like it.”

Far behind him, just peeking into the frame, is an eighteen-year-old Buddy Holly, the only male figure, among thirty-odd people in the picture, wearing glasses, somewhere between geek and nerd, looking curious. He and two bandmates opened the show that day, supposedly Holly taught Elvis the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” but he holds no place in the crowd. You would never pick him out of the picture—or would you? No, probably not: there’s no aura around his body, no portent in his posture, not even any obvious desire in his eyes. Just that curiosity: but even as he pokes his head forward for a closer look, he holds his body back. His curiosity is a form of hesitation, a drama of doubt. That quality of doubt is what gives the Buddy Holly in this picture the interest he has—and the longer you look at this picture, the less stable it appears to be. Who can identify with who? Who would want to identify with the nobody? But who can really identify with the god—and in this black-and-white photo, no matter the expression on his face, it’s plain a god is in the room. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, sharing the same time and space: they’re both magnets, Elvis the black hole, Holly merely earthly gravity.

It was Buddy Holly’s embodiment of ordinariness that allowed him to leave behind not only a body of songs, but
a personality—as his contemporaries Elvis, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Jerry Lee Lewis did, and Carl Perkins, Danny and the Juniors, Larry Williams, Fats Domino, the Monotones, Arlene Smith, and Clyde McPhatter did not.

The personality was that of the guy who you passed in the hall in your high school every day. He might be cool; he might be square. He might be the guy who slammed your locker shut every time you opened it, but the guy who did it as a laugh, a “Hey, man.” He might be the guy who got his own locker slammed shut in his own face, and not in fun. Whoever he was, he was familiar. He was not strange; he was not different. He didn’t speak in unknown tongues, or commune with secret spirits.

Except that he did. “Well . . . All Right” is not just a good song, or a startlingly modernist recording. With a quietness that like the silences in Robert Johnson’s “Stones in My Passway” is also a form of loudness, the drum sticks moving across the cymbals like wind on water, the feel of death in the lack of any physical weight in the sound, the sense of a threat in every promise, “Well . . . All Right” is also the casting of a spell, but no one ever seemed less like a sorcerer than Buddy Holly.

“He was the patron saint of all the thousands of no-talent kids who ever tried to make a million dollars,” Cohn said. “He was founder of a noble tradition.” What Cohn is describing is how the gawky, wide-eyed Buddy Holly Gary
Busey summoned up for
The Buddy Holly Story
in 1978—someone who looks as if he’s about to fall down every time he does the Buddy Holly move where he folds up his knees like a folding chair—is as believable as the cool, confident, hipster Buddy Holly that Marshall Crenshaw plays at the end of
La Bamba
in 1987, performing “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” on Holly’s last stage, in Clear Lake, Iowa, then waving Ritchie Valens onto the plane: “Come on—the night belongs to the stars.”

If Holly looked like an ordinary teenager, on the radio he came across as one, even if to the bookers at the Apollo Theater in New York, with no photos, only the radio to go on, he came across as black: after all, “That’ll Be the Day” was a hit on R&B stations all across the country. His presence onstage, on the airwaves, seemed more accidental than willful. From his first professional recordings, the mostly dead-sounding numbers cut in Nashville in 1956, to the Clovis, New Mexico, sessions produced by Norman Petty in 1957, on through the soulful solo demos he made in New York in late 1958 and the beginning of the next year, the most glamorous element of Holly’s career was the plane crash that ended it—on 3 February 1959, leaving his twenty-two-year-old body in an Iowa cornfield along with those of seventeen-year-old Ritchie Valens and twenty-nine-year-old J. P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, and the pilot, Roger Peterson, twenty-one.

So Buddy Holly entered history differently than other rock ’n’ roll heroes—and his ordinariness carried over into the way in which one might encounter people whose lives brushed the end of his. Some years ago, on a panel in New Orleans, David Adler, author of the good book
The Life and Cuisine of Elvis Presley,
shocked me and everyone else in the room with the story of how, during his research in Tupelo, Mississippi, he met a woman who was in Vernon and Gladys Presley’s one-room house when Elvis Presley was born—and he believed her, and we believed her, because of the way she described how the shoebox containing Elvis’s stillborn twin, Jesse Garon, was resting on the kitchen table.

A gasp went up. We were in the presence of someone who had been in the presence of someone who had been present when an event took place that ultimately would change the world—and leave all of us present in that world different than we would have otherwise been if this event had not taken place.

But nothing like that feeling attaches itself to the story I heard when, without asking, I found myself listening to a woman tell how, missing Buddy Holly’s last concert as a twelve-year-old because no one she knew was vulgar enough to take her, she asked a friend to drive her to the site of the crash before the morning light was up, and how men with stretchers were still there when she arrived. Or listening to a woman who lived down the street from me in Berkeley
describe how, as a girl, she witnessed the collision of two planes over Pacoima Junior High School, Ritchie Valens’s alma mater, in 1957, a disaster that killed three students on the ground and, at least until he climbed onto a Beech Bonanza at the little airport in Mason City, Iowa, left Valens determined to stay out of the air if he could. Or listening in an Italian restaurant in New York in 1995 when, as if he’d never told the story before, Dion quietly went through the details of the life-threatening conditions he and everyone else endured while traveling the upper Midwest on ruined, heatless buses for the Winter Dance Party tour in January and February 1959 (“Dancing for teen-agers only,” read the poster for the show at the Laramar Ballroom in Fort Dodge, Iowa, “Balcony reserved for adult spectators”), and why he nevertheless gave up his seat on the plane that night. Or listening in San Francisco in 1970, as Bobby Vee told the story of how, when the news of the plane crash reached Fargo Senior High School the next morning, with everyone geared up for the show that evening, just over the state line in Moorehead, Minnesota, Bob Veline and his high school band, which lacked a name and had not yet played a single show, answered the call of the local promoter and, after rushing out to buy matching sweaters and twenty-five-cent angora ties, and naming themselves the Shadows, took the stage that night—“For Buddy!”—along with those who were left.