The fact that so many books still name the Beatles as "the greatest or most significant or most influential" rock band ever only tells you how far rock music still is from being considered as a serious art. Jazz critics have long recognized that the greatest jazz musicians of all times are Duke Ellington and John Coltrane, who were not the most famous or richest or best sellers of their times, let alone of all times. Classical critics rank the highly controversial Beethoven over classical musicians who were highly popular in courts around Europe. Rock critics are still blinded by commercial success. The Beatles sold more hits than anyone else, beside Elvis, and therefore they must have been the greatest? Jazz critics grow up listening to a lot of jazz music of the past, classical critics grow up listening to a lot of classical music of the past. Rock critics are often totally ignorant of the rock music of the past.
And that past is Buddy Holly. Hollywood has yet to produce an authentic portrait of the rock ’n’ roll experience, though it is one of the most emblematic of the twentieth century. The moviemakers’ flirtation with Buddy Holly’s life is a classic example of distortion, simplifying the uneven edges that made a life in rock ’n’ roll so giddy and tragic, and in Holly's case archetypically modern—torn between a yearning for acceptance and a compulsion to destroy all that is false in society. The real Buddy Holly is to be found nowhere in the scarce efforts to represent him on film. Society will begin to apply pressure on the individuals and their partners, from all angles. But some people are bigger than society. Most of us are not. And only a few artists have explored, in clear-sighted or delusional ways, the possibility of an alternative societal model. When some of Buddy Holly's pals from Lubbock teased him about not playing God's approved music, Holly retorted: "If people can't hear God in my music, it's their problem."
If you drive by Downtown Lubbock’s Buddy Holly Hall often, you can see the progress being made. A construction team of nearly 300 workers are responsible for that progress, and hope to present the hall to Lubbock in less than a year and a half. “We’re going to be on the cover of every architectural magazine in the country, for how really cool this staircase is," explains Tim Collins, Chairman of the board for the Lubbock Entertainment and Preforming Arts Association.
That staircase is one that has been designed in the shape of an ellipse, which means, “It’s larger at the second floor and the third floor then it is at the bottom. It’s a great architectural feature that we’re really excited about," says Collins. The larger theater will hold 2,200 people. “Because of the construction of our big theater, this small theater will also be an NC-15, so our school district children will have the opportunity to perform in a hall that is of the same quality as The Lincoln Center or The Kennedy Center.” The Hall is currently being paid for by fundraising, explains Collins. Source: www.kcbd.com
Delusional thinking is associated with slower alterations in personal belief, a new study reports. People who suffer more delusions also tend to seek out more information prior to making a guess. Delusions are one of the most common symptoms of psychosis, but little is known about what causes them. A new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute offers insight into the development of delusions. An estimated 80-90 percent of individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders experience delusions—false beliefs that can be distressing and debilitating. “We found that patients who experienced more severe delusions tended to seek more information before making a guess than their less-delusional counterparts. This is a truly novel finding, and it helps confirm the fact that rigidity is an important part of delusional beliefs,” says Horga. This may explain why delusional patients seek more information than non-delusional individuals. Source: Columbia University Irving Medical Center Source: neurosciencenews.com
"There hasn't been anyone that famous in a single moment as he was during 'Thriller' time," Randall Sullivan (author of "Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson") said. "He eventually gave himself the nose of the boy, the young actor Bobby Driscoll, who was the model for Peter Pan in Walt Disney's movie." There is something about the way Jackson morphed from pretty to disfigured, closer to Joseph Merrick, the medical case study whose “elephant man” bones Jackson swore he never tried to buy. The morphing could have been a result of the pigmentation ailment, vitiligo, that he told Winfrey he suffered from. But what if all of that change he so notoriously underwent, all the damage he seemed to wear on his body, all the creatures his videos turned him into (werewolves, zombies, a panther, a skeleton), what if his outward self became some semiconscious manifestation of a monster that lurked within? Source: www.nytimes.com
Buddy Holly is often underestimated. The sentimental veneer of his music belies his underlying emotional resiliency, his passion for beauty, and his consummate control. The story of rock and roll is the tale of outsiders gaining control of an entertaiment mechanism in order to extract from it personal significance (which is the only way to achieve mass significance). Buddy Holly never talked too much, he listened, and he was a very bright guy. Onstage, he was uninhibited; offstage, he was quiet, shy and withdrawn even with friends. Buddy Holly didn't inspire the ecstatic adoration than Elvis did, nor was he able, like Chuck Berry, to stay above the fray and comment upon it. Holly was always in the struggle himself. Never sure if his success would last, he sought something permanent—something that would indeed last "through times till all times end." Love gave him that sense of permanence. Buddy Holly's life was an enactment of the American Dream, and his music mirrored this spirit. For Buddy Holly, the promises might have failed in the past, but he still hoped for the best, even when it was unrealistic to expect it. —"Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography of Buddy Holly" (2001) by John Goldrosen
I’d be sitting around the Sands, hanging out with all those guys or lounging in the steam room with a whole other pocket of people—Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, Don Rickles. Today it’s hard for people to get an idea of how incredible Vegas was in those days, the kind of intensity that existed there. The sense of fashion, the sense of klieg-light visibility the casinos stimulated. I don’t think there’s ever been anything quite like Vegas in its golden era. Today, Vegas is this huge Disneyland for grown-ups where you get all these spectacles thrown at you with no real heart and soul, none of the real magic of what Vegas was back then. The type of people that run the casinos today are a different kind of animal altogether. Today it’s all corporate, which means lawyers and contracts and fine print. Eventually, I made it into the innest in crowd there ever was: The Rat Pack. I got to live the high wild life—something I’d only dreamed of back in Ottawa.
All the established songwriters of the day—Cole Porter, Sammy Cahn, and Irving Berlin—were busy writing songs for crooners like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Perry Como. They weren’t about to start writing songs for me, that’s for sure. Anyway, these guys hated rock ’n’ roll, since they thought it was the death knell for most crooners. Overnight it was a brash new world, but they figured it was just a novelty sensation that would go away. Rock ’n’ roll had made serious inroads into the charts by the late fifties, but it wouldn’t be until the British Invasion in the early sixties that the big band singer became obsolete—except in Vegas, but then Vegas is another country. It took almost ten years for rock to take over the charts. Even if you were famous like Elvis, there just weren’t many writers out there writing rock ’n’ roll songs. Those who pioneered the rock ’n’ roll revolution—Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis—had mainly written their own songs. The only guys writing pop and rock ’n’ roll songs for other people in the fifties were the Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller duo, and the inimitable Doc Pomus.
In 1957 I played "Diana" to Chuck Berry and he threw me out of the room. “Listen, kid, let me give you a bit of advice, quit what you’re doing and get a real job.” Undaunted, I went over to see Fats Domino, who was in his dressing room, hoping for some better luck. I said, “Mr. Domino, I’ve got a song for you.” Domino listened to “Diana.” He looked at me quizzically and then beamed in that way Fats did, flashing his big teeth. “Now that’s sincere,” he said: “Not my kinda thing, son, not a song I could sing, understand? I’m old.” He advised to me: “If you want people to hear that song, you best record it yourself.” A year later, “Diana” was number one in the United States. I was hardly a pretty boy. When you’re unsophisticated, your expression is raw, raw but pure. I wasn’t afraid to sing “I’m just a lonely boy.” Clyde McPhatter, the lead singer of The Drifters, was insanely jealous of my success. He was a bitter, angry guy for someone who sang such sweet songs.
I was even different from the Southern guitar-slinging white boys, Buddy Holly (from Lubbock, Texas) and Eddie Cochran (who was born in Minnesota, but his parents came from Oklahoma). I was pretty damn sure of myself—had to be, to survive in that atmosphere. You can see a bit of the Anka alien in the film Lonely Boy, the 1962 documentary directed by Roman Kroitor and Wolf Koenig, especially in that scene in the station wagon where I’m sitting there, totally cool, calm, and affectless with people yapping away all around me. It’s an odd scene for somebody all of twenty-one, even I have to admit—but if I hadn’t had that kind of self-control I’d never have made it. No rock star today would stand for what we put up with on those horrible buses on tour. Those rock ’n’ roll tours would run as long as eighty days, we’d do as many as seventy cities—nobody got any sleep. After you’d sit on the bus for hours on end, looking at cornfields, you’d get to a broken-down theater where you’d line up next to each other in the crummy dressing rooms with your pomade and your hair dryer, hanging your suits in the shower to steam them out. I don’t know how we didn’t blow the electricity with all those hair dryers going at the same time. It was hard work, but we had nothing to compare it to.
Eddie Cochran was a typical rock ’n’ roller from California, but had the same aspects as the Southern guys. He was a quasi-cowboy, a cool cat. He had that swagger about him, the James Dean look. Eddie Cochran had his first hit “Sittin’ in the Balcony” and then had been in the movie The Girl Can’t Help It (1956) by Frank Tashlin. Eddie Cochran kind of mumbled like Marlon Brando and James Dean, and was fun to be around, a delight. He was a ladies’ man, and a good-time party guy. Buddy was tight with Eddie Cochran. They had a lot in common, except the drinking and womanizing. But Jerry Lee Lewis was off the charts. I can’t even explain how abusively unpredictable this guy could be. His whole lingo and attitude were redneck obnoxious—it was just nothing like I’d ever seen before. Buddy Holly was the only one who knew how to deal with Jerry Lee. Buddy was utterly unshockable—Jerry Lee’s behavior didn’t faze him one bit. Sometimes Buddy would fish Jerry Lee, totally soused, out of bars, drag him back to the hotel, put him under the shower, and get him to the theater on time.
Bobby Darin’s real name was Walden Robert Cassotto. He wasn’t exactly a pretty boy. He had the rugged good looks of a bulbous-nosed, crooked-mouthed hood, but still attractive—a John Garfield type. Like me, Bobby sprang from obscurity in 1958 and became famous with a recording of one of his own compositions, a rock ’n’ roll ditty called “Splish Splash.” Later on he made a hip transition with “Mack the Knife,” from Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera. Louis Armstrong had made a successful recording of it a few years earlier. Darin used to say, “The only person I loved until I met my wife Sandra Dee was my mother, and she died.” He’d been brought up by his grandmother, a vaudeville singer, and he learned at age thirty-two that Giovannina Cassotto, who he thought was his elder sister, was actually his mother.
Buddy Holly was an entirely different story. He had a soft shyness about him. He was a country boy, very raw, simple, modest, and sensitive. A very straightforward kind of guy. I was impressed with his guitar-driven sound and he respected what I did as a songwriter. In the beginning I was Buddy Holly’s nemesis. Buddy and I were neck-and-neck all the way with our hits “That’ll Be the Day” and “Diana.” He’d look at my picture in record-shop windows and say, “Who is this kid Anka, pushing me off the charts?” Like me, Buddy Holly wrote his own songs so he wasn’t dependent on outside writers like Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, who wrote the Everly Brothers’ songs. Buddy also had his own group, The Crickets; he didn’t play with pickup bands like the Everlys. We were all buddies, but those guys had that country-western, Southern clique thing going, and at the end of the day were in a bag all of their own. The difference between me and the Southern boys was that I wasn’t a guitar player, I had no idea where all of that was going, that guitar-driven rock sound. But in 1957, who could have guessed the next wave of rock and roll would be wailing electric guitars. The incredible sound that Buddy got on his guitar was the secret ingredient he passed on to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones—he was very influential with everybody in the next generation.
The influence of his Fender Stratocaster sound was where his genius lay. In Britain they’d never seen anything like it. They thought it was an outer-space guitar. English kids found his guitar sound sexy, and the glasses only added to his friendly appeal. And then there was that great hiccupy way he sang, “Love like yours will surely come my way, A-hey, A-hey-hey.” His ’55 Stratocaster got stolen on that British tour and he had to finish it with a blond Gibson. In comparison, Elvis was a different animal altogether—blunt, rough, and sex-charged. Their look couldn’t have been more different. There was no overt sexuality with Buddy like there was with Elvis. Buddy was also a singer-songwriter and that was the big difference between Elvis the entertainer and Buddy the confessional storyteller. That was the key change for The Beatles or The Stones, so Buddy’s influence in the end was more far-reaching than Elvis’s. Surely, Elvis was a larger-than-life CinemaScope American image. But Buddy provided the scaled-down guitar-band blueprint for most of the ’60s bands, especially in Great Britain. Buddy Holly loved my song “You Are My Destiny” with its big Don Costa production. He was looking for something different in his career. “I need to change my arrangements and try what you’re doing with your songs.” He wanted to leave The Crickets and move on. He asked me to write a song with him: “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” The whole focus of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” was to do it with a big band, with violins and horns, a big, plush orchestral sound that would frame his voice, impart a more romantic aura to his songs.
It was crazy how much touring we all did, but who knew if it was going to last? The critics were saying that rock ’n’ roll was a novelty and would quickly fade away. Believe it or not, it could have easily happened that way—there were very few places where rock ’n’ rollers could perform. Jerry Lee Lewis was just a nightmare. I didn’t like him and he hated me. We fought constantly. He was spewing venom at me at 25,000 feet crossing the Pacific Ocean. We were fighting and yelling and throwing things at each other. Admittedly I was this annoying young brat, and it was especially grating to him that I had all these hit records. He loved to pick on me, saying I looked like a squashed-down Danny Thomas. I wasn’t too shy about shoving it in his face that I was higher in the charts than he was. There were pillow fights on the plane to Australia. Pop heartthrob vs. the Killer, round one. Although Buddy and The Crickets had three hits in Australia (“That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!,” and “Peggy Sue”), Jerry Lee demanded his name be bigger than anyone else’s on the bill. Buddy said that was okay with him, but in the end my name got top billing, which really rankled Jerry Lee. Buddy started to steal the show in Australia, emerging at the forefront.
Unlike today, these guys were true song-pluggers, who went out and worked their catalog and had a sensitivity to the material. That’s how you got records made then. Now the recording/publishing business is more like the banking business. When we got back from our big Australian tour, Irvin Feld signed us up to do Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre from March 28 through May 1958. No Jerry Lee, but me, Buddy Holly, and The Everly Brothers joining up again with Chuck Berry, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters. After we did that show, Alan Freed, the disc jockey, wanted to manage me. In those days, you could be a disc jockey and manage someone. Different set of rules back then. There’s a definite conflict of interest there, but the business was looser. Freed was a kind of forceful, tall, imposing-type guy. He was a true innovator in radio programming, but he ended up a kind of a tragic figure, getting caught up in the payola scandal. In those days, everybody did it—you could barely walk into the Brill Building without seeing someone handing a DJ a big envelope. But Freed got nailed as the fall guy for the payola practice.
Buddy Holly was getting even more dissatisfied with The Crickets: he wanted to go out on his own, he was outgrowing them. I saw that Buddy had an amazing future ahead of him. We became close, tight friends. We got to the point where we were talking about writing songs together and combining our different strengths as songwriters and producers, creating a situation where we could work together. We planned to start a publishing company together. By the end of the all-star tours we were separating ourselves out from the rest of the pack. During much of the time I knew him, Buddy was involved in some form of litigation with his manager (over money issues), and disputes with The Crickets (over the direction the band was going). Sometime that fall, after I got back, Buddy called Irvin Feld and me. He was sounding a bit desperate. He’d broken up with The Crickets and was having problems with his management. He told us he was out of money, and was going through problems with Norman Petty, who had apparently stolen money from him and his band. While he was away and before he could explain what he was doing, The Crickets had sided with his manager and Buddy felt betrayed. He had married this woman he’d met in New York, Maria Elena—she was the secretary at his record company—and wanted to move there. Buddy said he needed money fast, so we created a parallel tour to the one we were on, just for Buddy.
The tour was called the Winter Dance Party, just some name to make it sound lively and fun because it was in the middle of the winter and it was way out in these remote ballrooms and arenas in the Midwest. It was Buddy, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens and Dion. Waylon Jennings was Buddy’s bass player at that point—I think Buddy was paying him 75 bucks a week, and incidentally he never got paid for that tour. In 1958, Buddy went into the studio to record what turned out to be his final hit, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” I really loved the way it came out. Dick Jacobs, the musical conductor at Decca studios, got his copyist to quickly write the lead sheets from Buddy’s guitar version. They wrote the arrangements for strings and rhythm very quickly. When I got to the studio there was this eighteen-piece orchestra, including eight violins, two violas, two cellos, and a harp, as well as string players recruited from the New York Symphony Orchestra. These were top session players, like Al Caiola and Abraham “Boomie” Richman from the Benny Goodman Band on tenor sax. Buddy sang it in his classic up-tempo Texas voice. His characteristic “buy-bees,” “golly-gees,” and hiccuppy vocals were so infectious and worked so well against the lush orchestration that, when he finished, he got a round of applause from those initially dubious studio musicians.
Buddy Holly talked about his new wife, Maria Elena, endlessly. Maria Elena had wanted to come on the tour, but she was pregnant and throwing up, and Buddy wouldn’t let her. Buddy would tape songs for her on his Ampex tape recording machine at his apartment. He’d written the song “Maria Elena” for her, recorded a few years later by Altenor Lima in 1963. Buddy Holly’s story was that of love. He sang about what he knew and the pureness and the simplicity of his voice reinforced that sincerity. Elvis, on the other hand, performed his songs; he personalized them with his own theatrical delivery, but by the sixties this type of song interpreter had become less convincing than groups and singers like Buddy writing their own material. Mostly, Buddy wrote in major keys: A, E, and D. That was Buddy’s magic sound.
Buddy’s vibe was always very upbeat, optimistic. He was happy he’d finally gotten rid of Norman Petty. He wasn’t the only one with problems with his manager. Don and Phil Everly were fighting their ex-manager over money, too. When I think of the difference between the way the fans saw me and the way they saw Buddy Holly, I feel it was because his approach was so personal. Buddy laid down a vibe that was unique to him. Straightforward, no technology. One microphone for him, one in front of the band, period. Nothing like it's made today. Buddy had grown up in poverty, wearing Levis and T-shirts, but now he was getting to be a real spiffy dresser. When Buddy talked about all the plans he had for a new studio and his European tour, he was just bursting with energy and optimism. One of the reasons Buddy took the plane on that fateful night was because of the way General Artists Corporation had planned the tour, without any logic to the geography. The crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper was such a monumental disaster that left an unfillable gap in rock ’n’ roll. Time really seemed to just stop. Buddy Holly’s death left a big hole in my life, an enormous silence. The one thing I’ve learned is that great pop songs never go away. The influence of the ’50s carries on today. —"My Way: An Autobiography" (2013) by Paul Anka
"Keep on shining on" (2009), The Buddy Holly Tribute song by The Crickets Sound Project: recorded and performed by Pete Carroll.
The expression of anger and sadness in pop music lyrics is on the rise, according to a recent quantitative analysis of the emotional sentiment contained in over six thousand songs that reached Billboard’s “Hot 100” between 1951 and 2016. This paper, “Quantitative Sentiment Analysis of Lyrics in Popular Music,” was recently published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies (on December 4, 2018). Notably, chart-topping songs released during the mid-1950s were the least angry during the entire sixty-six-year timespan of this pop music analysis except for the three years between 1982-1984. So, what happened since 1955? First, timbral variety went down. That means that songs are becoming more and more homogeneous. Pop music kind of sounds the same nowadays. The study also found that the number of chords and different melodies has gone down.
The researchers based their analysis on the Million Song Dataset—of songs from nearly 45,000 artists. Of the million songs therein, 464,411 came out between 1955 and 2010 and include data on both the sonic characteristics and the year of release. In another parallel study, 6,150 songs from Billboard's Hot 100 charts were analyzed using a text-mining program called "Tone Analyzer" (which is part of the computational linguistic tools in the IBM Watson developer cloud) to conduct an automatic analysis of the "tone" of sentiments (e.g., emotions, feelings, attitudes) found in written text such as published song lyrics. “Although love and romance have always been the most dominant topic of popular music, lyrics have changed significantly across the decades, reflecting social and political changes,” the authors said. “In general, the results show a clear trend toward a more negative tone in pop music lyrics, with a more significant change around the early 1990s. That trend can also be explained by changes in social values, reflected through changes in mainstream popular music. The results show that anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and conscientiousness have increased significantly, while joy, confidence, and openness expressed in pop song lyrics have declined.”
There were two quirky anomalies in the statistical analysis that bucked overall trends of increasing anger and sadness in Hot 100 songs from 1951-2016. Surprisingly, the researchers found that Top 40 songs released between 1982-1984 were less angry compared to any other period in modern pop music, except the 1950s. Another exception to general trends occurred in the mid-1970s, when there was a dramatic spike in Hot 100 songs expressing joy. (e.g., "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain & Tennille was one the most popular songs of 1975). The findings, published online on Scientific Reports, show that some trends do emerge over the decades—most of them not necessarily good. Unfortunately, anger started to skyrocket in song lyrics as the 1980s were winding down and there was more and more anger every year from the 1990s till the end of compiled analytic data in 2016. Whatever the cause, the authors conclude that “the period from the 1960s to the 1990s was a special time in popular music history.” Source: www.psychologytoday.com
Corporate takeover and subsequent ownership of the music industry has eliminated most meaning in an art-form that once thrived. Modern pop music is simply the soundtrack for the moguldom that has become the end-game. If there is an 'underground' scene it might never surface for fear of being bought. As David Leonhardt explains, “For Americans under the age of 40, the 21st century has resembled one long recession. This loss of dynamism hurts millennials and the younger Generation Z, even as baby boomers are often doing O.K. Because the layoff rate has declined since 2000, most older workers have been able to hold on to their jobs. For those who are retired, their income—through a combination of Social Security and 401(k)’s—still outpaces inflation on average. But many younger workers are struggling to launch themselves into good-paying careers. The generational gap in both income and wealth is growing.” 1989 was a turning point when the cumulative change in inflation-adjusted median net worth by age group took a significant nosedive for every generation under 55. Whatever happened to the Senate's Antitrust and Monopoly Committee? Isn't it interesting to think that we once thought monopolies to be a problem? Now we have them controlling newspapers, TV, Internet, Manufacturing, Scientific research, Pharmaceuticals, Agriculture, you name it and yet nobody bats an eye. And such monopolies are even being promoted and advanced by the majority of our government on both sides of the aisles and supported by voters. Unbelievable, isn't it?" Source: www.nytimes.com
For centuries, guitars were strung with 4 wound strings (a wire with thinner wire wound around it) and 2 plain (one wire) strings, the plain strings being the highest treble strings, E and B. Normally, the 3rd string, the G, is wound, making it a tough string to bend. An unwound G instantly makes a guitar easier to play and more expressive. And, the G string is often the string that is voicing the ‘flavor’ note in any given chord, and is also often the root string when soloing. Buddy Holly’s G string was unwound and his guitar style was one of the most profoundly pivotal moments in the history of the guitar. Like Buddy Holly, Eddie Cochran also was writing his songs using the immemorial 1-4-5 chord sequence in ways that did not use the the standard 1-4-1-5-4-1 blues sequence (even if you know nothing about music, you can understand it by humming a blues to yourself). Virtually every one of Cochran’s masterpieces utilizes those same three chords.
From 1954 onward, rock and roll advanced very quickly in the popular music and soon about 40% of the hit songs belonged to the emerging rock and roll stream. Entering the field in 1954, Decca was the first major record company that became active on the market of rock and roll music, signing Buddy Holly & The Crickets in 1957. Rock and roll scared some sectors of the American society and representatives of the establishment spoke out against it vehemently. Church officials typified the music as rebellious and warned that it would subvert American youth. As Columbia University's Dr. Meerio was moved to conclude at the time, "If we cannot stem the tide of rock and roll with its waves of rhythmic narcosis and vicarious craze, we are preparing our own downfall in the midst of pandemic funeral dances." The musical establishment incited a congressional investigation into the widespread practice of payola, by steering the investigation exclusively to those involved in producing and playing rock and roll music, making Alan Freed their designated scapegoat in the process.
Remembering Buddy by John Goldrosen is, by consensus, the best Buddy Holly bio out there, and Goldrosen does a great job digging into first-hand sources, exploring mythology and apocrypha and avoiding baseless speculation. To his credit, he speculates only as far as the facts lead him. Also, a feeling of sadness is reflected in Goldrosen's excellent account of the last hours of Holly's life, a strange and disturbing set of weird and ironic turns of fate that left three stars of '50s rock strewn lifelessly among plane wreckage. Amid the chronological facts, and Goldrosen's frequent attitude of apology for failing to capture the elusive nature of Buddy Holly, there are moments of illumination. One is a 1959 photo of Holly taken in a photo booth at the Grand Central Station, New York, in which he is sporting a sense of glee, a mischievous smile, and a cigarette dangled self consciously between his fingers—it reminds us that for all the genius and gravitas ascribed to Holly, he was still just a young man from a more innocent time when drugs and debauchery were almost unheard of. When Holly showed a temper, impatience or distance, Goldrosen suggests that came from a desire of wanting things done right, and from not tolerating those who settled for less. Holly was an introverted, well-behaved geeky kid who essentially changed an art form because, beneath his humble background, a sharp sensibility burned hot and bright.
Philip Norman also does a remarkable job with his well-researched bio on the Lone Star's original rock star. Who could have predicted a bespectacled, unruly-haired working-class kid would actually became the early, rare 'triple-threat' of singer-songwriter-instrumentalist in the American rock music scene? What is also refreshing is that, by all the accounts documented, Holly was a genuinely decent guy—barring one brief fling with a married woman—he's otherwise presented as a good son, brother, friend, husband, and (even at his young age) show-biz mentor. His life story is certainly not boring, but thankfully the standard sleaze and scandal (Rolling Stones or Led Zeppelin type) is absent and not missed at all. On the opposite side of professional research, we have a highly inaccurate book in the "Goldman tradition" of trashing the legends of deceased musicians. Leaden with errors, Ellis Amburn's biography of Buddy Holly would be merely an embarrassment if it weren’t fundamentally mean-spirited. Amburn misquoted and distorted what his sources told him—even Buddy Holly historian Bill Griggs is misquoted here—while also making up parts of a nonsensical narrative that doesn't fit Buddy Holly's personality at all. Not all sources are equally reliable and truthful, Amburn should know. The supposed “sexual” relationship—which probably never happened—of Holly with the 'wild girl' of Lubbock is mentioned by a musician named Tinker Carlen, a very unreliable source.
Carlen lost all credibility when he told Amburn he had “formed the Crickets originally” and “did their bookings”—much to the amusement of Jerry Allison (surviving member of The Crickets). Another similar case was Terry Dahlgren from Arroyo Grande, California, who once told The Tribune he had been hired in August 1958 by Holly & the Crickets to perform with them in a show in Cleveland. Dahlgren said that after that show, Holly asked him to get on the bus to tour as a member of the Crickets. Jerry Allison denied this claim in a telephone interview from his home in Tennessee saying he didn’t know Dahlgren and that the Crickets never had local performers play with them on tours. “We never had anyone fill in the tours, ever.” Allison said that details of Dahlgren’s story were untrue, including that the band traveled by bus then. “We didn’t have a bus in those days,” Allison said. Guitarist Tommy Allsup, who joined the Crickets in May 1958—and played with Holly in his final Winter Dance Party tour—also said Dahlgren never played with the group during its Summer Dance Party tour in July 1958, or Biggest Show of Stars tour in October 1958, or the Winter Dance Party tour in early 1959. “I never heard of this guy, he was not there,” said Allsup in a telephone interview from his home in Missouri. Asked if the Crickets ever had local guitarists play with the group during the tour, Allsup said, “absolutely not.”
Other fact-checking by The Tribune shows that many of the details of Dahlgren’s story conflict with the documented history of the 1958 tours of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. Told that Allsup and Allison called his story false, Dahlgren said he never played with them. “I played with Carl Bunch and Waylon Jennings in 1958 when the Crickets were touring with Holly,” he said. Documentation of the tours, however, shows that Holly didn’t tour with Bunch and Jennings in 1958. Holly did tour with Bunch, Jennings and Allsup in the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour. Dahlgren was unable to provide The Tribune with any evidence that he played with Buddy Holly and the Crickets, such as mementos, memorabilia, photos or people who could corroborate his story. In one last desperate attempt, Dahlgren said it had been in Akron when he had played with Buddy Holly. That lie was what ended with the patience of Bill Griggs and other researchers. Dahlgren was just another fake in a long line of opportunists trying to attach themselves to the rock and roll history. Source: www.sanluisobispo.com
Buddy Holly's widow threatens to sue Lubbock DJ: Portions of an email from William Clement, operator of KDAV 1590 AM, were included in his exchanges with Stephen J. Easley, the attorney representing Maria Elena Holly. Easley sent Clement a 'Cease and Desist' letter regarding a celebration in the Depot District of Lubbock called the “Buddy Holly Birthday Bash.” The letter also demanded that the station remove all mentions of Buddy Holly from their advertising, which included a picture of the statue at the Buddy Holly Museum. Clement stated that the planned festivities, scheduled to take place two days after what would be Buddy Holly’s 75th birthday, was actually being put along Buddy Holly Avenue, in the Depot District. Clement specifically listed the Melt Lounge as primary sponsor of the event. Clement continued stating that the sponsor had the right to use the Buddy Holly Avenue. Easley countered saying that “’A Buddy Holly Birthday Bash’ certainly is not within any license to rename a street.” Clement continued noting that Buddy Holly had a relationship with the station in the past, and claimed that Holly worked as disc jockey at the station in 1955-1956. KFYO News found numerous records of Holly performing and recording at KDAV-AM, but there has been nothing found that actually lists Holly as a disc jockey at the station. Multiple allegations and criticisms were made by Clement throughout his correspondence as well, and he offered to supply Ms. Holly’s attorney with “trinkets of history your client would most probably not like to be made public.” Easley reiterated the original 'Cease and Desist' demand, and expressed confidence in a favorable outcome for his client Maria Elena Holly if the issue ended up in court. Parts of the email sent to Easley from Clement alleged that Ms. Holly was a “golddigger” who was employed at Peer Southern “to entertain male entertainers,” prior to her marriage to Holly. Easley countered saying throughout the correspondence, “It is fortunate that you published the vile and defamatory statements about Mrs. Holly, reducing my burden of proving that you made them.” Source: kfyo.com
Buddy Holly had died intestate and so Maria Elena received the first $5,000 of the net estate, with the remainder being shared with his parents. Three guitars went to the Holley family with Maria Elena keeping the Gibson J-200. Buddy Holly’s claim against Norman Petty was settled in April 1959 for $40,000 and he was acknowledged as the only composer of ‘Peggy Sue’. In 1993, Holly was the only major rock’n’roller not to benefit from an officially released CD box set. Maria Elena Holly: "I have been in litigation with MCA and Universal for years. We know from that telephone conversation with Paul Cohen that Buddy’s original contract was suspect, and his one with Brunswick was as well. Norman Petty–I call him ‘The Evil Man’–had signed the contracts and he had no reason to sign on Buddy's behalf. Even in litigation, they said that someone had got into the office and ripped the signature out, a fan, and I said, ‘In your office? You know, that isn’t possible’." Shortly after the plane crash, Paul Anka told the NME on February 13, 1959, that he had played 150 shows with Buddy Holly and he added, ‘I feel especially unhappy for Buddy’s widow Maria who, to the best of my knowledge, is expecting a baby. Buddy’s marriage was a very happy one.’ This comment confirmed Maria Elena's pregnancy and I think that Buddy simply preferred to keep it a secret amongst his family and working associates until it was further advanced.
Unfortunately, Maria Elena lost their baby. ‘It was the shock. I was in bed, and one of the young men that Buddy was recording, Lou Giordano, called me and I told him that I was still in bed. I was not feeling good in the mornings. He said, ‘Don’t put on the TV and just wait until I get there.’ Of course, I got up and put the television on and they were talking about the crash. When my aunt came in, I was running around like a demented person and that is when I lost the child.’ The conclusions of the report by the Civil Aeronautics Bound were published on 23 September 1959: "At night, with an overcast sky, snow falling, no definite horizon, and a proposed flight over a sparsely settled area with an absence of ground lights, a requirement for control of the aircraft solely by reference to flight instruments can be predicted." Musicologist Dominic Pedler (author of Songwriting Secrets of the Beatles): ‘The intuitive appreciation of musical and lyrical semantics would intensify as Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting structures matured and they began incorporating the Buddy Holly trademark of an ambitious key change within the middle eight (a musical bridge that refers to a section with a different melody or lyrics within a song). In this regard, Holly's catalogue represented essential listening for the Beatles in their formative years. Indeed, it is no surprise that the origins of several distinctive Beatles chord progressions and songwriting manoeuvres can be traced to some of their favourite Holly songs.’ Would Paul McCartney have written ‘Yesterday’ if Buddy hadn’t come up with ‘True Love Ways’? Surely not.
Michael Gray, author of the definitive book on Dylan’s music, Song and Dance Man (1981): ‘Dylan was very proud at having seen Buddy Holly on his last tour. No musician who had an interest in rock’n’roll could avoid being influenced by Buddy Holly. He was the first person who knew what he was doing – he did the writing, the arrangements, he wasn’t just a singer being moulded by a manager. Holly had rather a strange voice and he sounded like nobody else. Nik Cohn’s book, Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom, says that Holly was the typical no-hoper that everybody liked precisely for that reason. It’s rubbish to say for Cohn that Bob Dylan can’t sing, but he can’t sing like Picasso can’t paint. They broke rules (Holly and Dylan), without taking notice of anything else. Holly’s first attempts at recording were complete failures and he was sent back to Lubbock, Texas, which is one of the most godforsaken spots in the universe, but he refused to become the small-town hick. There are several pieces by Dylan where you can hear a very strong Buddy Holly influence: Maybe Someday from Dylan's album Knocked out Loaded has a very Holly sound.’ —"Buddy Holly: Learning the Game" (2019) by Spencer Leigh
Rock’n’roll pioneer Jerry Lee Lewis has suffered a minor stroke, a representative for the star has said. The 83-year-old was expected to make a full recovery and was recuperating in Memphis with his family by his bedside after falling ill on Thursday, Zach Farnum said. Lewis, known by his nickname “the Killer”, began his career in the 1950s and is best known for his 1950s rockabilly piano hits "Great Balls of Fire" and "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," and "High School Confidential." Born in Louisiana, Lewis began his career at the famous Sun Records, which also played a key part in the careers of Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash. Lewis is a Grammy winner and a Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame inductee in 1986 and has been described as “rock’n’roll’s first great wild man”. Source: www.theguardian.com
Jerry Lee Lewis has, in old age, a stiff-necked and relative sober dignity. He is not wistful, except in the rarest moments, and does not act wounded; he just gets mad. He believes he is due some things but not the right to whine. A man like him forfeits that. A real Southern man does not whine, anyway. “I want to be remembered as a rock-and-roll idol, in a suit and tie or blue jeans and a ragged shirt, it don’t matter,” he says. Hank Williams taught him this, and he never even met the man. “[The music] takes their sorrow, and it takes mine.” He looks across the arc of bad-boy rockers who have come after him and laughs out loud. In May 1958, Jerry Lee was presented in Uk as some kind of serious threat, an example of the Southern American at his virulent worst. Even the British government took a hand in the affair, sending officers from the Home Office to inspect Jerry Lee’s and Myra’s passports and immigration status. The headlines screamed: 'Baby Snatcher, go home. We Hate Jerry Lee Lewis, shout ex-fans!' The British tabloids ripped Lewis to shreds, and his career "took a nosedive right into the concrete," as told to music journalist Alan Light.
Columnists called for his arrest and deportation and for an investigation by the child welfare office. Even Parliament weighed in. Sir Frank Medlicott, of the constituency of Norfolk Central in the House of Commons, questioned why a man of such nefariousness was granted a permit to work in England. Young women announced they were going home to smash his records. At a show in Tooting, South London, fans chanted “We Hate Jerry!” and cried “Cradle Robber!” from the audience. Offstage, Jerry Lee kept talking to reporters, and they only wound the noose tighter; by now several theaters had canceled and the tour was in jeopardy. Reviewers described him as a drooling bumpkin making more noise than music. Even the most highbrow critics in the States, even the ones who despised his genre, had often been forced to admit that, whatever danger to society he might pose, the music was good. But the British appreciation for American music was not yet deeply ingrained, and such matters were easily overlooked. Other threats would surface, from people who had hated his music all along and from inside his circle of friends and business associates. Dick Clark had already written him off. And it was only beginning. Sam Phillips seemed unsure how to respond, at least publicly, to the attacks on their marquee star. He knew the threat was serious, potentially career-ending. “Jerry Lee can’t be managed,” concluded Phillips. “People ask me what effect England had on me, and mostly the effect was on Sam Phillips and distribution,” Jerry Lee says now. “He just was not puttin’ my records out there.”
Myra, left mostly at home as he chased his newfound stardom, had hired detectives to follow her husband on the road and by 1970 had evidence to support her suspicions of prolonged infidelity. She filed for divorce while Jerry Lee was on tour in Australia. Her petition alleged cruelties and threats on her life. Jerry Lee denied the worst part of it—“I never hurt none of ’em”—but the infidelities were, as he once said himself, “hard to hide.” Jerry Lee wanted to know why the press always hovered around him in the worst of times, while they always gave Elvis a pass. “Y’all hate my guts or something,” he told the Commercial Appeal. “I’m no angel, of course, but I’m a pretty nice guy.” Myra later married Peter Malito, one of the private detectives she had hired to gather evidence of Jerry Lee’s infidelity.
He was not angry at Elvis, Jerry Lee says. He was not eaten up with jealousy. What he had always felt was disappointment at the way Elvis, who should have fought him to the death for the crown, had been managed by Colonel Tom Parker into such a sorry state, into a paunchy semirecluse behind locked gates. “Can a man play rock-and-roll music and go to Heaven? Jerry Lee asked Elvis the same thing he’d been bothering Sam Phillips about: “Can you play rock music . . . and still go to heaven? If you died, do you think you’d go to heaven or hell?” Elvis looked startled, trapped. “His face turned bloodred,” remembers Jerry Lee. “Jerry Lee,” he answered, “Don’t you never ask me that. Don’t you never ask me that again.” “He didn’t come around much, after that. I could tell he was scared. So I never did ask him that again.”
Jerry Lee Lewis was in the first class inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It was January 23, 1986. The inductees included some of the most influential musicians and personalities in music history, and they walked to the stage, some more stiffly than others: Fats Domino, who would not follow Jerry Lee Lewis onstage in New York; the Everly Brothers, who would not follow him, either. But rock and roll was a hard business, and sometimes when they called the names, there was a second or so of sad silence: For Buddy Holly, who rocked ’em to the floor and became his true friend. For Sam Cooke, who called him “cousin.” And for Elvis, who had cried before him about enlisting the Army. Keith Richards swayed to the stage to wild applause, looking a little surprised, as if he had just been roused from a good nap. Paul Shaffer ripped into “Johnny B. Goode,” and Chuck Berry, still spry, duckwalked onto the stage. Keith Richards, who once was punched in the eye by Berry at a rehearsal, hugged him and handed him his statue. Accepting for Buddy Holly was his widow, Maria Elena, whom Buddy had loved so strongly that one night he'd called Jerry Lee to tell he had proposed to her on their first date.
John Fogerty then spoke eloquently of the never-ending cycle of rock and roll and how a riff from Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ “That’ll Be the Day” would echo in the Beatles’ and later in his own music. “I never did care for the Beatles all that much, to tell the truth,” Jerry Lee confesses. He was surprised by John Lennon's compliments. “I just wanted you to know what you meant to me,” said Lennon to Jerry Lee. “You made it possible for me to be a rock-and-roll singer.” “It was flattering,” Jerry Lee remembers. “He said, ‘I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate what you've done for rock and roll.’”
Jerry Lee was especially fond of Buddy Holly, one of the driving forces in rock and roll. “He was my buddy,” Jerry Lee says with great nostalgia. Holly had opened for Elvis in Lubbock, and proved—even in those black-frame spectacles—that he could rock it right down to the floor. During their tour in January 1958, Jerry Lee watched Buddy on the stage in Sydney, Australia. In fact, Jerry Lee admitted that Buddy Holly was the true star of the show. “Hmm, I remember thinkin’, this boy’s gettin’ pretty good.” In February, Jerry Lee joined Buddy Holly & The Crickets on The Big Gold Records Stars tour (aka The Florida Tour). He traveled back to New York as a headliner of an Alan Freed package tour called The Big Beat, starring Jerry Lee, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry. Buddy Holly was congenial in agreeing to take third billing, but as the two other headliners came together backstage, it was like watching two trains closing in on a single track. “You know they call me the Killer,” Jerry Lee said once to the audience. “The only thing I ever killed in my life was possibly myself.” —"Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story" (2014) by Rick Bragg
During a performance at Electric Park in Waterloo, Iowa, a photographer asked Buddy Holly to remove his glasses for a picture. Buddy replied: “I never have pictures made without my glasses.” Buddy had tried out contact lenses in 1956, but they were very uncomfortable back in those days—so he stuck to glasses. Gary Clevenger remarks in Words of Love 1959-2009 (2010): "Under those big-framed black horn-rims he adopted, there was a very good-looking young man. I was intrigued by the close-up of Buddy with his trademark glasses and movie star good looks." Don McLean: Buddy Holly would have the same stature musically whether he would have lived or died, because of his accomplishments which nobody–not the Beatles, the Rolling Stones or anyone else–can beat, for these reasons—By the time he was 22 years old he had recorded some 50 tracks, most of which he had written himself and each of them, in the view of many, was a hit. No rock 'n' roll records can touch songs like "Rave On," "Think it Over," "Not Fade Away," "Peggy Sue" and many more.
Buddy Holly was also a sensitive, ballad composer, which people often overlook, with songs like "Moondreams" and "True Love Ways." Because of the ever-growing psychological power of the media, we seem to think we can reach back half a century. We have embarked on the 'American death trip' and the endless regurgitation of Marilyn, Elvis and JFK's death details. As a paperboy, I cut open the stack of papers on February 3, 1959, and saw that Buddy Holly had been killed in the plane crash. The next day I went to school in shock, and nobody cared. Rock 'n roll in those days was sort of like hula hoops, and death did not go with the exuberance and bright colors of the 1950s. –Don McLean Source: edition.cnn.com
Buddy Holly embodied, as much as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, the central conflict of the 1950s: conformity with establishment values versus individuality/rebellion. While he sometimes wore leather and rode a motorcycle, he was a devout fundamentalist Christian, hounded by a puritanical conscience that condemned rock and roll as evil. Perhaps it was this innate contradiction that made him so great. Smart in the head is one thing, smart in the heart is another. With an artist possessed of both, it’s game over for all challengers, which is why, if there are 10 performers in rock history that matter more than all others, Buddy Holly is one of them. Holly did look slightly milksoppish—but in an earnest, quick-with-a-smile way. Buddy thought those high, squeaky voices of Alvin & the Chipmunks really were the coolest thing. This was not someone you’d expect to be a rock and roller, especially at a time when rock-and-roll badassery wasn’t just in vogue, but represented by some seriously tough-looking cats—Elvis, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Gene Vincent, or Eddie Cochran.
Buddy Holly was hardly the awkward geek that his amateurish, poorly lit promotional photos suggest. Duane Eddy, the twangy guitar rocker who collaborated with him in 1958, once described Buddy as a “well-built” six-footer who had “wavy hair” and was “very good looking.” And he could play the Fender Stratocaster the loudest too. Buddy Holly’s right hand was among the strongest in rock history. According to Bill Griggs of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, Holly learned a unique way of picking: “Most people play down, up, down, up, when they're stroking the guitar. Buddy played basically downstrokes in a lot of his music. Therefore, he had to play twice as fast, but it also gave him what we call 'rhythm lead.' He kept hitting the bass chord on the guitar first. That's why he had that unique sound that people even today cannot duplicate, because you have to play the guitar 'wrong' to make it right.” The Beatles wrote “Can’t Buy Me Love” in a hotel, and Dylan recorded notable music in sleeping quarters (ditto Janis Joplin with her Typewriter Tape). But the ultimate grail is Holly’s tapes that he made just prior to his death in his Greenwich Village apartment. With his guitar and an Ampex tape machine, this is a very different Buddy Holly than his more "rockabilly garage" sound from two years prior. His enunciation is emphatic, as if he were a film director who’d recorded an intense emotional scene by overcranking the camera, playing it back so that it ran slower. You really hear it on the four versions of “Slippin’ and Slidin,” like Holly is decoding rock and roll for you. Source: www.thedailybeast.com
In rock critic Jonathan Cott’s words, “Holly’s deepest, wisest, and seemingly least complicated songs express the unadorned confrontation of beauty and love with time.” A letter seen in the Buddy Holly Museum in Lubbock was written by Holly's grieving father, Lawrence, to the editor of the New Musical Express two months after the plane crash, expressing his gratitude to his son's UK fans. "How has this loss of one so dear affected Buddy's beautiful wife?" asked Holley rhetorically. "She's been very brave and courageous but she, like us, will never get over such a great loss." Maria Elena's intense devotion to Holly's memory explains her antipathy towards the late Peggy Sue Gerron. The namesake of Buddy Holly's most memorable song was the girlfriend of Jerry Allison, drummer in Holly's band the Crickets. And even though Gerron died last year, aged 78, Maria Elena is still fuming about the claims she made about Holly in her memoir. "Oh my God, that book!" she exclaims. "But I stopped her. It was published, but she couldn't get much out of it. She went to London, then I called the journalists who were interviewing her and I said, 'That will be the last time you hear from me!' So they just stopped the interview. She claimed that Buddy was in love with her, and that Jerry knew about it. But Buddy hated her guts! When we were in his father and mother's house after the wedding, she came in and said: 'I don't know why Buddy would marry this woman because she's not from the same background. What? We were already married!" Source: www.afr.com
According to Peggy Sue's memoir, it seems that she never loved her first husband Jerry Allison—“Standing at the wedding ceremony: The biggest mistake of my life.” What do we learn about Buddy Holly? Always kind and understanding, like his parents, but he could erupt when pushed. We learn that Buddy helped “the Lubbock girl with the bad reputation” when she got pregnant—“Really, I loved her,” Holly reportedly said of her. Although Niki Sullivan hinted at Buddy going through a tragic romance with the wild girl of Lubbock that culminated in an unwanted pregnancy, Philip Norman dismantled that myth, proving that Holly was not the father. Norman was conceded a brief interview with Lubbock's mysterious woman: "On my first visit to his hometown in late 1994, I talked to Niki Sullivan, the Crickets’ rhythm guitarist, convinced that story was true. But the story has just one flaw. The person named by several knowledgeable sources as the mother of Buddy’s illegitimate child (who supposedly, according to Sullivan, waited for Holly's paychecks while living at a shelter for runaway unwed women) is adamant that she knew him only slightly and certainly never dated him romantically. She got married in 1954, almost two years before Buddy allegedly might have left her pregnant, and her two children–by the same husband–were both girls. The trail stops here." Philip Norman also refuted Sullivan's allegations of an affair between Buddy and Norman Petty's wife Vi.
Travis Holley (Buddy's brother): "I met Maria when he brought her here to be married. I had only heard about it a week before. And when I met her I understood why he wanted to marry her. She was just a little raven beauty. She was just as cute as she could be. And charming. And she still is." Next day, the Lubbock Avalanche newspaper reported: "Married: Buddy Charles Holley (21), and Miss Maria Elena Santiago (25), both of Lubbock". Maria Elena of course was not from Lubbock, but in rural conservative Texas, interracial marriages were still considered taboo, and it was unusual for an older woman to marry a younger man. From the very beginning of their relationship, Buddy confided to Maria Elena about his growing dissatisfaction with Norman Petty: “I’m not happy with Norman, because he never wants to put money out to promote us.” Maria Elena understood Buddy’s discontent: “Norman didn’t want to spend a red cent. Everybody else was exposed out there, and Buddy always had to struggle to make sure that the people knew about him.” Petty, in fact, had done little to increase the Crickets’ public exposure. The only promotional pictures of the group were black and white shots taken by Petty’s loyal bookkeeper, Norma Jean Berry. The Crickets were sorely disappointed when Petty refused to allow them to appear alongside other rock and rollers in the movie Go, Johnny, Go! (1959).
As described by Philip Norman, Norman Petty's portrait is quite frightening: "The face is a blandly good-looking one, its cheekbones curving with the symmetry of a ventriloquist’s dummy’s, its complexion airbrush-smooth, its butterfly bow perfectly tied. The expansive smile is professional rather than humorous, and kindles no warmth in the eyes, which are narrow, opaque and calculating." Petty turned over all the correspondence and financial records relating to Buddy and the Crickets to his banker in Clovis, with instructions to retain them for the three years required by the US Internal Revenue Service, then destroy them. But the banker did not destroy the papers and, after Petty’s death in 1984, we can go through receipts for Buddy’s guitars and clothes, see the cashed cheques for his dental work and wedding-ring, even read the heartbreakingly polite last letter Buddy sent to Petty a couple of weeks before his death. To the self-seeking professional biographer, it is a wildly exhilarating experience. But to the one-time English schoolboy, whose adolescence Buddy both brightened and soothed, it is horribly sad. As so often with those who cloak themselves in ostentatious secrecy, there was little about Petty’s life that could be called exotic. His father, Sydney, had originally been a migrant from the Oklahoma oilfields, stricken with tuberculosis and seeking a cure in New Mexico’s high altitudes. His wife Vi had her mother institutionalized for schizophrenia and herself manifested all the symptoms of the disease in its ‘episodic’ form: insecurity, anxiety, squirrel-like acquisitiveness, and chaotic disorganization.
Norman Petty was technically brilliant but creatively mediocre; a visionary in some respects but in others a blinkered small-town wheeler-dealer; ostensibly a backroom-boy, yet with a ravening ego, watchful for any chance to use the talent of the young musicians who passed through his hands for his own profit and advancement. Dr Jerry Fisher, who worked as an engineer with Petty in later years, and got to know him well, believes Petty to have been a classic case of arrested development. That explains his sexlessness. He didn't even seem to understand the rock and roll genre, or Buddy Holly's passion for the opposite sex. Norman Petty could not face the fact that Buddy Holly had evolved beyond the Clovis/Tex-Mex ethos. In an interview with Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm, Norman Petty still found it difficult to address why he hadn’t been more supportive of Buddy’s need to experiment as an artist; Petty admitted he had lacked vision. As John Beecher recalls: "Norman and Vi Petty sent us information, but mostly they obstructed us in our efforts to gain access to their photographs, recordings, and film - something I found really hard to understand until later, when I worked out that Norman was just waiting for an opportunity to make some money. I suspect that by the time Buddy (and later the Crickets) discovered what had been going on with their income that had been directed to Clovis, it was too late for Norman to regain trust and he knew this. Thus, he burned all his boats with Buddy and cold-shouldered his attempts to get his royalties. Soon, lawyers were involved in getting Buddy his money and the process would have taken years to resolve. When I visited Clovis, I saw the problem at first hand; it was not until MPL took over Nor Va Jak that writers received regular statements and payments." About Amburn's mean-spirited biography, of which Bill Griggs said "that book belongs to the trash can", John Beecher agrees: "I don't much dig what Albert Goldman has to say on Elvis. I knew that a lot of what he attributed to Lennon wasn't true; he tried to destroy Lennon's soul for commercial gain and I think that's unforgivable. A bit like the tales Ellis Amburn told on Holly - so many of his facts that were able to be checked were so out of line that it made one doubt his assertions on anything he wrote. Goldman again."
Amburn hinted about Maria Elena's suspect aunt Provi Garcia, Maria's lack of domesticity or her tempestuous personality, sexy yet brainy. According to Peggy Sue, "Whenever someone even mentioned Maria, Jerry would simply state, “That’s Buddy’s wife,” and put an end to the conversation." Peggy Sue insinuated Maria Elena was very demanding of Buddy and more experienced than she let on. On 5 January, 1958, Coral released ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’ and ‘Raining In My Heart’. That same week, Buddy received some New Year tidings which all but wiped his anxiety over his new singles from his mind. Maria Elena told him she was pregnant. In her interview with Philip Norman in 1996, Maria Elena explained: "We had not been trying to have a baby. It was an accident; it just happened. I didn’t want to have a child because it was going to interfere with all the projects we had starting out. But Buddy was elated about it. I told him, “If I have a baby, that means I won’t be able to travel around with you like you want me to.” But he said, “No, that’ll be fine. The baby can come with us.” Maria Elena didn't pursue her own ambitions to be a dancer-actress. “After we got married, he said, 'No, you don’t need to do that.’ He wanted me to be around.” Knowing how much she loved flowers, Buddy brought her an extravagant bouquet of roses for her 26th birthday. Maria Elena persuaded Buddy to drink “a couple of glasses of champagne,” she later told Goldrosen and Beecher. He became seriously ill, due to being an ulcer sufferer (possibly, in part, from the stress of his career).
Buddy Holly was described by The Melbourne Herald during the Australian tour in February 1958 as ‘the perfect representation of the American person, ascetic, serious, dignified...’ Buddy’s stage persona was the very opposite of what they had expected—not cool, but friendly, funny and unpretentious. Holly didn't intend to change the world (like Lennon or other 60s rock icons) but he wasn't going to let the world change him either. Buddy Holly adopted his new songwriting mode to produce the most stylistically varied body of original recordings of any late fifties writer/performer. Some were sonically brash, others subdued. Some were paradigm examples of experimental rock and roll, by including celesta and harp. Holly’s creative arrangements sometimes combined electric guitar with jazz sax or instruments one might expect to find in a symphony orchestra. His vocal hiccups are the skipped beats that convey to us that we are not lost on the way out, but surging towards the irreducible. —"Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly" (2014) by Philip Norman
The Myth of the Fifties: In his book called The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965, Alan Petigny—professor of history at the University of Florida—challenges the stereotypical ideas that the 1950s was such a conservative period and dives deep into the true radical changes taking place in American life at the time. Petigny argues persuasively that the 1950s were not truly conservative. Unlike other revisionist accounts that lean heavily on anecdotes, this study is firmly rooted in statistics and serious research. Petigny discusses a variety of topics from sex to rock ‘n’ roll, from psychology to religion, and gives the reader a true empathic picture of an emerging way of thinking he calls 'The Permissive Turn'. In contrast to those who see the 1950s as essentially a conservative period and the 1960s as a time of rapid moral change, The Permissive Society points to the emergence of a liberalizing impulse during the Truman and Eisenhower years. During the 1950s, a traditionalist moral framework was beginning to give way to a more relaxed style of child-rearing, the loosening of sexual attitudes, and the increasing influence of modern psychology.
The era usually denoted as “the Fifties” generated a remarkable set of social indicators. For the one hundred years prior to 1941, the American marriage rate was in decline. The proportion of the adult population that was married also fell steadily, while the divorce rate began a seemingly inexorable rise; by 1910 (thanks largely to Nevada), the United States was the divorce capital of the world. Fertility also showed relentless decline, falling more than 50 percent among the native-born population. A nation dominated by freehold farmers became a land of sharecroppers and urban tenants. In political terms, conservative values and free markets gave way to secularism, progressivism, and moral individualism. Then came the 1941–65 period, “the Fifties,” and the marriage rate soared; the average age of first marriage fell to twenty for women, twenty-two for men.
By 1960, the proportion of adults, age forty, who were or had been married reached 96 percent, a record high. Even the divorce rate, after a postwar spike in 1946, declined for the next dozen years. Most notably, marital fertility climbed sharply, almost doubling by 1957 in the celebrated Baby Boom. At the same time, measures of income inequality (such as the Gini index) shrank as the numbers of the very rich and very poor fell while the great American middle class swelled. Undergirded by federal housing and mortgage insurance programs, a revolution in property ownership commenced. Between 1945 and 1960, the number of owner-occupied homes nearly doubled, restoring America as a land of property owners. Church membership soared, Sunday schools were bursting at the seams, and President Dwight Eisenhower beamed a comforting, genially conservative smile over the land. A budding youth culture was being fueled by rock ’n’ roll.
Petigny challenges in particular what he calls “the four great myths of the 1950s”: (1) the belief that religious piety was on the rise, seen in the popularity of Billy Graham and rising rates of church attendance; (2) the proposition that American sexual behavior was relatively stable during this time, with the sexual revolution arriving only in the 1960s; (3) the claim that the status of women was losing ground during this era of domesticity; and (4) the belief that the youth culture of this period represented a vigorous challenge to the values of the adult world. Instead, he argues that American values were going through a fundamental transition in these years, driven by the democratization of psychology, the “medicalization” of ailments such as alcoholism (formerly seen as moral sins), the emergence of a therapeutic theology in the churches, and the liberalization of child-rearing practices under the influence of Benjamin Spock and other sociologists.
In all this, Petigny sees “an inversion” of the Marxist understanding of the relation between ideas and the material world: “the ideological superstructure took precedence over the material base.” This change of values represented a permissive shift in American life, but one beginning in the 1940s, not the 1960s. He gives special emphasis to the human displacements that occurred during World War II: fifteen million young men into the military, and five million young women into the factories. This great mixing of young adults spawned massive changes in sexual relations, ranging from a rise in the proportion of premaritally conceived pregnancies among whites and blacks alike to the emergence of egalitarian “companionate” marriages.
Such an argument is not completely new. John Costello anticipated this dating of the start of the sexual revolution in his serious book, Virtue Under Fire (1985); so did Allan Sherman in his insightful Official History of the Sex Revolution (1972). In The Hearts of Men (1983), feminist author Barbara Ehrenreich also emphasized—as does Petigny—the significance of the founding of Playboy magazine in 1953 as a transformative challenge to traditional sexual ethics long before the first bra was burned in the 1960s. And Elaine Tyler May’s Homeward Bound (1988) showed the complexity of husband-wife relations during the postwar years. The author notes “the decline and fall of original sin,” evidenced at the theological level in Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking (1952) and also in the popular new psychology of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. By the mid-1950s, Petigny shows, Billy Graham was moving away from fundamentalism, moderating his message, and declaring his admiration for theological liberals such as Norman Peale and Reinhold Niebuhr. Meanwhile, both Protestant and Catholic clerics moved enthusiastically into a new form of pastoral counseling, shaped by Freudian psychoanalysis.
Petigny demonstrates keen insight into other contentious issues. He challenges, for instance, the common argument that the introduction of the birth control pill in the early 1960s launched the sexual revolution, showing evidence that the use of condoms and other forms of birth control was spreading well before the arrival of the Pill. Condoms and contraceptives began to fall under more scrutiny from the FDA, thus making them more readily available. Thus, the more liberal attitudes on sex were becoming more prevalent. As such, the 1950s closed out with the birth control pill, a stronger condom, and leading to cutting down STD rates. As a result, the US saw an uptick in single mothers. Petigny speaks of a “commoditization of sex” during the 1940s and 1950s, in the popular films and music of that era.
Petigny asserts, “During the 1960s, Americans were simply more willing to acknowledge the extracurricular activities of their youth than they had been during the previous decade.” The prevalence of out of wedlock birth “between 1940 and 1960,” as Petigny proclaims, “increased by 2.5 fold.” Such evidence suggests there was an increase in premarital sex, making apparent the drastic liberalization of social norms–particularly those dealing with sexual promiscuity–taking place before the 1960s. The increase of premarital sex in the 1950s makes evident that a “permissive turn” took place before the 1960s. The Youth Culture and Sex chapter talks about how the teens practiced “going steady” because “the greater intimacy of going steady facilitated higher level of sexual intercourse amongst the young.” Sexual promiscuity no longer branded a woman as undesirable wife material by a majority of the educated middle class, although these attitudes were not always reflected accurately by Hollywood (Splendor in the Grass). While the 1950’s is not credited for being a time of feminism it most definitely was. Petigny remarks: “Feminism in the 1950s was less a movement or ideology than a new sentiment or set of attitudes.”
In addition, Petigny mobilizes survey data to deny feminist complaints that American homes during this era rested on the systematic repression of women. Instead, most homes were based on “egalitarian” relationships. The number of working women climbed steadily during “the Fifties,” partly because of a Baby Boom–driven demand for teachers and nurses. Women made real political gains as well, with the proportion of women in Congress and the state legislatures climbing steadily. Petigny even makes a compelling case that the Boy Scouts of America actually lost ground in this era. Myths regarding the youth culture of the era also fall before Petigny’s analysis. While acknowledging the musical revolution implicit in rock ’n’ roll and the alienation portrayed in James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause (1955) and in J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye (1951), the author notes the widespread support that this new music found among adults and youngsters alike. The problems shown in Catcher in the Rye were not about prevailing American values; it was Salinger's complaint about the failure of “phonies” and how to live up to personal expectations. An overturning of stylistic conventions ranged from Jackson Pollock’s paint-spattered canvases to the jazz improvisations of Charlie Parker.
The Social Conservative’s Dilemma: Adult acceptance of rock ’n’ roll also grew naturally out of the permissive child-rearing practices of the postwar era. That explains how a new celebration of spontaneity reshaped the arts during the 1940s and 1950s. The surge in fertility during the 1950s is particularly striking. It violated all the “laws” of sociology, including the general rule that the more education a woman has, the fewer children. While fertility rose for all American religious groups during the 1941–65 period, it rose far more impressively among Catholics. The total marital fertility rate for non-Catholics averaged 3.15 per woman in 1951–55 and 3.14 in 1961–65; for Catholics, the respective figures were 3.54 and 4.25. Only 10 percent of Catholics under age forty reported having four or more children in 1952–55, close to the Protestant figure of 9 percent. By 1957–59, the Protestant figure was unchanged, but the proportion for Catholics had more than doubled to 22 percent.
At another level, however, Petigny’s analysis leaves social conservatives facing a fairly large dilemma. The Fifties seemed to be the one clear example in modern American history of social, cultural, and moral renewal. Families appeared to be growing stronger. Burgeoning church construction and swelling Sunday schools betokened a measurable form of religious revival. The suburban revolution seemed to restore America as a land of property owners, with adult consumption patterns focused on family life. In essence, Petigny’s argument is that these were all ephemeral developments, almost illusions, and the strongest evidence in support of his view is the rapidity with which these signs of social health evaporated in “the Sixties” (even “Catholic exceptionalism” on matters of family and fertility had vanished by 1970). The implication for twenty-first-century social conservatives is that there are no secular or easy paths back to social health. In this respect, The Permissive Society is not only a valuable work of history and a refreshing correction to the myths that surround the Fifties. It also indirectly summons a searching of a more difficult, yet real, form of social renewal for the future.
During the late 1940s and 1950s, there were two different points of view on how people looked at guilt. On one side, the Christians would naturally think of guilt as one of the main factors of mankind’s spiritual believes that would ultimately show them the difference between right and wrong. On the other side though, Freud and modern psychologists view guilt as one of the biggest problems that are facing mankind in modern times. The reason that it is being viewed as a problem is because that despite civilization developing, they will lose their happiness if they allow their sense of guilt to increase over time. The only thing that is confusing about Petigny's analysis is the guilt factor. This part of his study does not specifically say if everyone feels guilty for being happy or guilty for wanting to develop civilization. Source: home.isi.org
Buddy Holly fitted the nice guy archetype and the non-conformist archetype at once. His was a triumph of subversion. Buddy introduced Edwardian fashions to rock ’n’ roll, years before they became popular in the sixties. He wore an ascot and a greatcoat with a fur collar, displaying a style that was radical, even unthinkable, in an era of Brooks Brothers sack suits and buttondown collars. Tasteful and vaguely aristocratic, Buddy had repeatedly reinvented himself until finally achieving a sort of beauty. Duane Eddy, whose twangy guitar made him one of the top rock’s instrumentalists, saw Buddy at this time and described him, in Reminiscing magazine, as an impressive sight—tall, powerful, and strikingly handsome. As Rolling Stone’s Robert Palmer would write from the perspective of 1990, “It is a measure of fifties rock’s genuine revolutionary potential (as opposed to the revolution-as-corporate-marketing-ploy so characteristic of the sixties) that while sixties rock eventually calmed down, was co-opted or snuffed itself out in heedless excess, fifties rock ’n’ roll was stopped. Cold.” Buddy Holly only saw one good royalty check during his lifetime. He received his check on August 26, 1958 for $14,462.74. Holly was in the process of dissolving the Prism partnership right before embarking his last tour. Ray Rush was reimbursed and Buddy agreed to let Norman Petty take 2000 $ out of his Prism account for the Ampex. Whatever record label Holly was going to run, it would have been without Norman Petty. Manny Greenfield had booked the Crickets on the Dick Clark Show, the English tour, and other venues. In return, he and Buddy had had a word of mouth agreement that Greenfield would receive a 5% commission. These commissions were dutifully paid and there are receipts and checks as proof. Sometime around July or August of 1958, Manny Greenfield felt he was Buddy's manager and should be receiving a commission on all of Buddy's earnings. "Not so," said Buddy. So the assets were being held up by Greenfield. Buddy wanted Irvin Feld (the promoter of the Winter Dance Party tour) as his new manager after the break-up from Petty.
I wrote Runaround Sue about a real girl in the neighborhood, but we changed the name to protect the guilty. She was the kind of girl who loved to be worshipped and worked hard to get a guy’s attention; but as soon as she had him, she’d lose interest and start charming somebody else. We used the name Sue because it fit and because it lends itself to a lot of rhymes. Now, let me put you wise: Contrary to what has been reported everywhere, the song is not about my wife. It is not about Susan Butterfield. Susan has had to endure being introduced as “Runaround Sue” at least a thousand times since 1961. She smiles through it all. And she may one day be canonized for it. Even The New York Times (December 3, 2000) reported that she was the “iinspiration” for the song. The New York Times! The song hit number one in September 1961.
I’ve written songs about Susan but never managed one that captures the wonder of it all. Her love is like God’s love, a mystery I’ll never fathom. You’ll notice something about the best rock and rollers: They tend to be outsiders. When they were kids they were loners. They didn’t fit in. They felt excluded. They made music to ease their pain. The great thing about writing a song is that it enables you to present a huge problem––loneliness, betrayal, fear, rejection––and then resolve it in three minutes. All it takes is a few verses, a chorus, and a guitar solo. The problem is that nothing’s really resolved at the end of the song.
The pain’s still there, inside––and that’s exactly what happens to the greatest rockers. The pain remains; and if you don’t find a way of dealing with it, you die. That’s the way it ended for too long a litany of rockers. They died from overdose, self-abuse, or reckless living. Others died inside. Some went crazy, or just burned out, or turned into misanthropes. But others grew up, which is, I think, the better way. At some point you need to grow up, even if you’re a rock star. Buddy Holly did change my life. I believe he founded the rock's avant-garde. For many people, he was the King of Rock and Roll, although Elvis kept the title. I got to know Buddy Holly pretty well. In New York I introduced him to Manny’s on 48th Street and a clothing shop on Third Avenue. He was 22 and very decisive and he impressed me because I was 19 and insecure. Buddy told me once, "Dion, I don’t know how to succeed, but I know how to fail: Try to please everybody." If he didn’t tell me that, I probably never would have done "Runaround Sue," or "The Wanderer." I miss those guys (Buddy, Ritchie and The Big Bopper). I feel they are helping me out. I have three angels up there.
I think John Lennon's intentions were good, though he wasn’t the most informed participant on the scene, and the drugs got in the way of his clear thinking. Nowhere is the murk of his thought more evident than in the most popular song of his solo years. “Imagine” has become an anthem for internationalism––one-world government––and a favorite hymn for those who are “spiritual but not religious.” Imagine there’s no heaven... Lennon was talented, but this song represents a huge failure of imagination. In 1971 we didn’t need to imagine atheistic internationalism. Communism was living and active and it wasn’t producing peace. The Eastern Bloc was a repressive, unhappy place. China was sustaining its self-holocaust into Chairman Mao’s senility. What made it possible for so many leaders to issue the orders for atrocities over the course of a half-century and more? They feared neither heaven nor hell. Imagine that. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine polled a select group of recording-industry professionals, critics, and artists, and they ranked “Imagine” the third-greatest song of all time. In the video for the song, John plays a white grand piano in a white room. His wife, Yoko Ono, walks around the room, throwing open the curtains on all the windows, one by one. When I saw the video, I wanted to shout: No! She should be closing the curtains! The song isn’t enlightening anything. It’s a deepening darkness.
John Lennon wanted good things. “All you need is love,” “Give peace a chance.” The problem is that those things slip away like eels unless you have a clear idea of what they are. How could John preach love to the world when he had a hard enough time showing love to the people closest to him? What right did he have to preach world peace when he couldn’t even get along with the Beatles? Peace isn’t the chaos of liberty, anarchy, and license. It is, as St. Augustine said, “tranquility of order.” It’s the train on the track (“Slow Train Coming,” as Dylan put it). It’s good to want a revolution, and it’s good to give peace a chance, but the only true revolution that produces lasting peace is the one that Jesus started. The alternatives just make you pick sides among the warring factions. So John ended up throwing his support behind armed terrorists in the IRA and Black Panthers, even though they really weren’t interested in giving peace a chance. ––Dion: the Wanderer Talks Truth (2011) by Dion Dimucci
And that past is Buddy Holly. Hollywood has yet to produce an authentic portrait of the rock ’n’ roll experience, though it is one of the most emblematic of the twentieth century. The moviemakers’ flirtation with Buddy Holly’s life is a classic example of distortion, simplifying the uneven edges that made a life in rock ’n’ roll so giddy and tragic, and in Holly's case archetypically modern—torn between a yearning for acceptance and a compulsion to destroy all that is false in society. The real Buddy Holly is to be found nowhere in the scarce efforts to represent him on film. Society will begin to apply pressure on the individuals and their partners, from all angles. But some people are bigger than society. Most of us are not. And only a few artists have explored, in clear-sighted or delusional ways, the possibility of an alternative societal model. When some of Buddy Holly's pals from Lubbock teased him about not playing God's approved music, Holly retorted: "If people can't hear God in my music, it's their problem."
That staircase is one that has been designed in the shape of an ellipse, which means, “It’s larger at the second floor and the third floor then it is at the bottom. It’s a great architectural feature that we’re really excited about," says Collins. The larger theater will hold 2,200 people. “Because of the construction of our big theater, this small theater will also be an NC-15, so our school district children will have the opportunity to perform in a hall that is of the same quality as The Lincoln Center or The Kennedy Center.” The Hall is currently being paid for by fundraising, explains Collins. Source: www.kcbd.com
Delusional thinking is associated with slower alterations in personal belief, a new study reports. People who suffer more delusions also tend to seek out more information prior to making a guess. Delusions are one of the most common symptoms of psychosis, but little is known about what causes them. A new study from researchers at Columbia University and New York State Psychiatric Institute offers insight into the development of delusions. An estimated 80-90 percent of individuals with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders experience delusions—false beliefs that can be distressing and debilitating. “We found that patients who experienced more severe delusions tended to seek more information before making a guess than their less-delusional counterparts. This is a truly novel finding, and it helps confirm the fact that rigidity is an important part of delusional beliefs,” says Horga. This may explain why delusional patients seek more information than non-delusional individuals. Source: Columbia University Irving Medical Center Source: neurosciencenews.com
