The term ‘rock star’ really came into widespread use in the seventies and eighties when the music business was looking to sustain the careers of its biggest names. The music industry was no longer happy to hop from fad to fad. It was beginning to realize the value of brands. There was no better brand than a rock star. By the twenty-first century, the term 'rock star' has been spread so thin as to be meaningless. In the twenty-first century it seems rather inappropriate to describe Kanye West or Adele as rock stars. These people are cut from a different cloth. The age of the rock star ended with the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography and the advent of the mystique-destroying internet. The age of the rock star is over. We now live in a hip hop world. The game has changed. If we no longer have a breed that qualifies for the description ‘rock star’, how can it be that the idea of the rock star as a social type remains so strong? This didn’t happen yesterday. Back in 1973, just two years after the death of Jim Morrison, just as a new generation was beginning to warm to David Bowie’s tongue-in-cheek rock-star figure Ziggy Stardust – Texas Monthly magazine published what was the first recorded example of the term ‘rock star’ being applied to describe somebody who wasn’t a rock star. I don’t see any sign of the acts who came afterwards, who were born in the late eighties and nineties, accumulating successive generations of fans or acquiring the patina of legend in quite the same way.
If you were born in one of the decades immediately following the 1950s, a pantheon of rock stars provided you with a cast of fantasy friends who lived out their lives in a parallel universe. Now, like the cowboy, the cavalier, the wandering minstrel, the chorus girl, the burglar in the striped sweater, the top-hatted banker, the painter with his beret and the writer in his smoking jacket, the rock star must finally be consigned to the wardrobe of anachronistic stereotypes. In real life he has been overshadowed by brazen hip hop stars, and overtaken by talent-school munchkins who are far more manipulative than he would have dared be. His power base has been destroyed by the disappearance of the record industry, his magic fleeing in the twenty-four-hour daylight of social media. While they were on the stage they captured our imagination and our trust in a way no movie star or writer managed. Rock stars were uncommon people. They were a product of the rise of post-war prosperity. They came from ordinary lives and had no reason to expect that they would ever be special. At the same time they refused to accept that they would ever be anything but exceptional. Many of them had careers that lasted far longer than their hits and their legends continued to endure. They endured because, like the stars of the great cowboy films of that earlier age, they were playing themselves and, at the same time, they were playing us.
Elvis Presley loved the company of females, whether they were adolescents smelling of Spray Net who just wanted his autograph, marriageable Eisenhower girls in rustling petticoats and white gloves who wanted to introduce him to their mothers, feather-bedecked showgirls ready to show him a good time in the dressing room, or even show-business professionals who weren’t sure whether they wished to mother him or shove him into the nearest cupboard and kiss his face off. By September 1956 Elvis was the biggest male sex symbol since Rudolph Valentino. But whereas Valentino had to get into costume in order to embody the full fantasy package and was only available on the big screen, the whole point about the new rock-star celebrity as embodied by Elvis was that while he might apparently live in the clouds he was still available in the normal world if you knew where to find him. A YouGov poll in the UK says that 29% of 18-24 year-olds have never listened to a single Elvis song. None reported to listening to him daily and only 8% admitted to listening to an Elvis song at least once a month. When pressed, only 12% said they liked Elvis, compared to the Beatles (23%) and Bowie (25%). The Guardian also reports that the value of Elvis merch and memorabilia is cratering, a bad sign leading up to the 40th anniversary of his death. Bookings for Elvis impersonators are falling. About the only positive sign is that streams of Elvis music are doing well, with 328 million streams in 2016. Compare that to Bowie (600 million) and Michael Jackson (1.3 billion).
Jerry Lee Lewis’ prodigious talent made him almost a novelty act. His only problem was that he actually was the redneck hoodlum his rock and roll peers only pretended to be. Fellow Southern boys were less easily thrown by Jerry Lee’s front, preferring to say he didn’t mean nothing by it, but even they were forced to concede that he would argue with a signpost. Whereas Elvis was professionally modest, the self-belief of Jerry Lee Lewis went beyond the quality it takes to get up on stage and command everybody’s attention with a prolonged ‘weeeeeeellllll’, passed directly through the braggadocio that showbiz traditionally expects of a headliner, and edged perilously close to an acute psychological condition. He was the first rock star to play up to his public image regardless of the cost. Furthermore, Jerry’s domestic arrangements made him more vulnerable. In looking at those arrangements from the twenty-first century it’s important to bear in mind that this was the real world for many people in the Southern states of America and not a Coen Brothers fantasy. Jerry Lee couldn’t say he hadn’t been warned. Sam Phillips had told him it might not be a good idea to take Myra with him to Britain, where a nymphet would inevitably be catnip to a press pack looking for a story about the decline and fall of morals in the coffee-bar generation. But Jerry was stubborn and in love. He didn’t return to Europe until the next decade and never recovered his momentum as a rock and roll star in the USA.
Born in 1936, the youngest of a poor but musical family, Buddy Holly had little reason to think he would ever amount to anything. In a school essay in 1953 he listed his many shortcomings writing, ‘I have thought about making a living out of Western music if I am good enough, but I will have to wait to see how that turns out.’ Gary Tollett, who sang on some of Holly’s records and came from the kind of west Texas town outside Lubbock that Larry McMurtry depicted in The Last Picture Show, said of his generation, ‘We thought more about work than we did about playing.’ Holly, the first member of his family to graduate from high school, thought he might get work as a draughtsman. The thing is, everybody liked Buddy Holly. His records ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Oh Boy’, ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Rave On’, had been hits. His particular strain of ‘western bop’ had enjoyed surprisingly wide acceptance. He had even topped the rhythm and blues charts. He had appeared on all the big TV shows: Ed Sullivan and Sunday Night at the London Palladium in the UK. Nevertheless in the winter of 1958, barely a year since he had been at number one in the US Hot 100, twenty-two-year-old Buddy Holly found himself without funds and embarked his final tour. The longevity of Holly’s songs is guaranteed because the sadness of his passing places every note in a melancholy light. He had an optimistic, gentle self-mocking hiccup in his voice. He was as popular with the boys as Elvis Presley was with the girls, but for different reasons. Buddy Holly was the most influential rock star of his time, possibly of all time.
Jim Morrison's total abandon and blatant sexuality stirred the audience's emotion and the effect was both chilling and numbing. On being a sex symbol, Morrison once commented: "Sex is just one part of my act. It is important I guess, but I don't think it is the main thing." His essential conservatism came out in an interview he gave to CBC radio in May, 1970: “I don’t want a revolution. A revolution is really just a switch from one faction to another. Democratic ideals are still worthwhile. I lament that so many people are living a quiet life when so many injustices are going on. I think that’s sad. The repression of sexual energy has always been the tool of a totalitarian system. I can’t talk much about sex. Sex will always be a mystery to me.” When he was about sixteen, Jim Morrison began reading Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy, finding insight into the the nature of man. He learned that all men, even his father, had to obey others. Nietzsche described a different kind of man who, because of his creativity and independence, answered to no man. This prophetic independence of the spirit opened hundreds of doors in Jim Morrison's mind. One of these doors may have been a deeper interest in music when Nietzsche described a musician as "a priest, a ventriloquist of God." His concert in Miami in 1969 would prove to be a turning point in his career and life. Beset by legal problems and years of alcohol abuse, Morrison was escaping to France not only to rechart his life, but also to salvage a dream. Paris was the home of the French Symbolist poets. If he couldn't find literary sustenance in that atmosphere, he couldn't find it anywhere. Morrison desired to leave the City of Night for the City of Light. Apparently Morrison had made amends with Janis Joplin just weeks before she passed away, and he was genuinely grateful for it. Jim Morrison was the perfect artist for the sixties generation, a representative mirror for the decade that started out believing music and love would set them free only to wind up ensnared by that freedom into decay and despair. He was faced with a hard choice: he could choose to totally become his rock-image, or he could fight to hold on to his true personality. True to form, Morrison chose neither option. Perhaps Morrison's real legacy is how he took the fear that accompanied the explosions into freedom in the sixties and, after first making it even more bizarre and apocalyptic than anyone thought possible, diffused it all by turning everything we were taking so seriously into a big joke.
Lou Reed had an unhappy childhood. His misguided parents thought electric shock treatment might snap him out of his adolescent unhappiness. Throughout his life it was difficult to know where his psychiatric problems ended and his overbearing personality began. The standard Velvet Underground review recounted their latest misadventures with the music business, described the state of the tensions within the band and ended by being slightly disappointed with how unadventurous record buyers were not supporting them as they had supported Led Zeppelin or The Doors. The Velvet Underground seemed to have missed the bus. Glenn O’Brien, who edited Warhol’s magazine Interview, commented about Lou that ‘he was brilliant, but had a lot of bitterness in him that fed a mean streak. A mean streak that alternated with empathy and great humour.’ Having apparently failed as a rock star, Reed was attempting in 1971 to reposition himself as a man of letters, publishing poems as Lewis Reed, and attending poetry readings with Jim Carroll at St Mark’s. Reed wrote a piece for Crawdaddy magazine, which was headlined ‘Why I Wouldn’t Want My Son to be a Rock Star or a Dog Even’. Its central thrust seemed to be that only a person with no proper sense of self would ever wish to be a rock and roll star. Some of its passages suggested that Lou Reed considered the life of the rock star beneath his dignity. Reed might have been enjoying the short holiday from the bohemian limelight back in his parents’ home in the suburbs but the rage for repute was building inside. His contradictory nature cried out for expression. He never lost his belief in the power and beauty of simplicity and minimalism in rock. David Bowie wanted to collaborate with Reed after signing a deal with RCA to release his album Hunky Dory. RCA threw a party at a club called The Ginger Man. Among the guests were Lou Reed and Bettye Kronstad, who appeared in the midst of Bowie’s cultivated fabulousness like the suburban figures they had become. Reed was still the elder statesman commercially rejected and Transformer would start to change his luck. Lou Reed made us believe that redemption was always equivocal but never impossible. —"Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars - 1955/1994" (2017) by David Hepworth
Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989–2014: It’s not clear why sexual activity is down. The study points to some possible culprits, like a decline in happiness in people over 30. American adults had sex about nine fewer times per year in the early 2010s compared to the late 1990s in data from the nationally representative General Social Survey. Sexual frequency declined among the partnered (married or living together) but stayed steady among the unpartnered, reducing the marital/partnered advantage for sexual frequency. Declines in sexual frequency were similar across gender, race, region, educational level, and work status. In analyses separating the effects of age, time period, and cohort, the decline was primarily due to birth cohort/generation. With age and time period controlled, those born in the 1930s (Silent generation) had sex the most often, whereas those born in the 1990s (Millennials and iGen) had sex the least often. The decline was not linked to longer working hours or increased pornography use. Age had a strong effect on sexual frequency: Americans in their 20s had sex an average of about 80 times per year, compared to about 20 times per year for those in their 60s. The results suggest that Americans are having sex less frequently due to two primary factors: An increasing number of individuals without a steady or marital partner and a decline in sexual frequency among those with partners. Source: link.springer.com
Half a century after Pamela Des Barres’s heyday, free love has been replaced with Tinder and the musicians who prowled the Strip are now denizens of classic rock radio. It’s a strange and often scary world. “It’s a dream era that’s never going to come again,” says 'Queen of the Groupies' Des Barres: "In the 60s we were in the throes of a very important revolution, spiritually, emotionally, psychically, sexually—every kind of way. I wanted to express myself along with all these people I admired so much. Part of that, being a groupie, was standing out. I made a lot of my clothes. The outfit I had on one of my times with Jim Morrison, I had on a striped bell-bottom set with a matching little bag that I made. The next time I saw him, I had on a vintage purple velvet ‘30s dress that I had cut off into a mini. Des Barres remembers "making out passionately" with Morrison, spread out on top of her and thinking, "this is the most beautiful man I have ever seen. He was so gorgeous, everything about him was just perfect." It was a different time. All of a sudden women could express themselves sexually, freely. Much more than now. It was a time when we felt, ‘Okay, we’re really coming into our own here.’ Taking the birth control pill out in public and being proud of owning our femalehood. But that’s really fucked up right now. Source: www.vogue.com
Jim Morrison's image was so iconic it was even copied by Elvis Presley. Bill Belew fashioned a black leather costume for the King, almost entirely based on Morrison's. It not only resurrected Presley's career, but also reestablished him as a sex symbol. The comeback of The King of Rock in 1968 was inspired by The Lizard King. Feeling trapped inside a badly scripted movie, Morrison, the tormented hedonist, found it easy to wander from scene to scene with scant regard for reality. Pamela Des Barres, the notorious rock groupie with whom Morrison had a less-than-torrid affair in 1967, spoke of a quiet man who read her poetry, with an occasional temper. They enjoyed walking along the shore, going to parties, taking drugs, but mostly just necking.
Jim Morrison "wasn't as promiscuous as people say he was," Danny Fields remembers: "I don't think he loved to fuck around. He was sort of passively promiscuous. He didn't go out with the specific intention of picking girls up and he certainly didn't order people to get him girls. His life was a series of rather long relationships and always had his woman somewhere. He was so sexy... but I think he found it uncomfortable to be adored by men." -"Mr Mojo: A Biography of Jim Morrison" (2015) by Dylan Jones
A new drama meanders through the nascent careers of Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, and Ike Turner — starring Chad Michael Murray as legendary producer Sam Phillips. “Sun Records” is based, loosely, on the musical “Million Dollar Quartet,” which tells the story of the real-life, mostly impromptu jam session between Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins at a Memphis joint named Sun Records. That little record label was owned by a small-time producer named Sam Phillips, who despite marginal financial success went on to be immortalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame — for discovering Presley, working with artists like Cash, Lewis, and Roy Orbison, and for producing the Delta Cats’ “Rocket 88,” an Ike Turner song that is considered to be the first rock and roll record. Rock and roll history is dense, fertile territory for mythmaking and nostalgia, and Sun Records, the historic institution, is as good a peg as any.
Colonel Tom Parker (Billy Gardell), the colorful figure who becomes Elvis’ manager, is instantly recognizable; and it’s hard not to fall for the baby heartthrobs as played by Drake Milligan and the other cast members: Kevin Fonteyne as soulful Johnny Cash, Christian Lees as lightning-in-a-bottle Jerry Lee Lewis. Margaret Anne Florence plays Marion Keisker, the radio personality and Sun Records office manager who discovered Elvis in 1953. She is the one who famously asked, “What kind of singer are you? Who do you sound like?” to which he responded, “I sing all kinds… I don’t sound like nobody.”
“Sun Records” seems like a sister production to 2008’s “Cadillac Records,” which similarly tells the story of a white producer curious about the commercial potential of the changing black music scene. “Sun Records” is a nostalgia trip, with occasional numbers to remind the audience the topic is in fact music. Milligan’s interpretation of young Elvis enjoyably apes the King, and Murray as the unstable Phillips is predictably charming. Source: variety.com
The combined efforts of Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips made the resources of the three main streams in popular music available to a host of new-coming rock and roll singers and musicians. Putting these elements together in the pressure cooker of extended sessions in the small Sun studio in Memphis led to a new rock and roll style known as rockabilly in which gospel, rhythm and blues, and country and western, particularly hillbilly music, were merged into a new kind of songs. The “Presley-Phillips” cooperation led to classic rock and roll records like “That’s All Right Mama” (1954) – Presley’s first record, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1954), “You’re A Heartbreaker” (1955), “Baby Let’s Play House” (1955), and the last record Presley made for Sun “Mystery Train” (1955). Phillips brought artists and performers like Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, to the front lines of the new musical stream. Alongside Sun and Specialty, four other independent record companies – Atlantic, King, Chess, and Imperial – were influential in shaping the new music. Atlantic was probably the best known independent company of the post-war era.
Elvis is shown mostly mooning over a girl and dealing with neighbors less color blind than he. Like every biopic ever, “Sun Records” is not perfect history. Sometimes it's a lazy mistake, as when Elvis says he read "a little" of "On the Road" years before it was published. At other times, it rewrites the record for the sake of making a scene: When Ike Turner (Kerry Holliday) brought his band to Phillips' studio to record, the speaker in the guitarist’s amplifier was indeed blown, but not because, as seen here, it was hit by a shotgun blast as Turner and his band drove away from a cafe where he’d grabbed the tip jar to pay for the session. Source: www.latimes.com
In a review for Creem magazine in 1979, Patti Smith praised Jim Morrison's An American Prayer:"Today the drama of his intensity seems dated. Dated in its passion and innocence, like West Side Story or The Grapes of Wrath. But he was always dated, at his most literal, even when he was around. Bigger than life and so he was laughable." Elvis, Intimate Family Memoir of Life With the King by Billy Stanley, reports a conversation with Elvis about Jim Morrison and The Doors in which Elvis said: “Jim Morrison had special abilities…. He was the new poet laureate… But he died before he could understand his power and what he could do with it. That’s a tragedy. So much unspoken. Just like James Dean.”
Jim Morrison couldn't exist in the modern world: He would do things to guarantee him trouble. He instinctively recoiled against authority but was smart enough to make his contempt dramatic, funny and challenging. When Morrison slipped away in a bathtub in Paris in July 1971, there was no Malibu rehab offering alternative salvation. He was buried without an autopsy — circumstances ripe for conspiracy and conjecture, so the Morrison myth metastasized. During the '90s, the zeitgeist shifted from sincere and psychedelic explorations of self to sardonic, detached cool. To a subculture embodied by the acerbic, flannel-shirted, slacker nonchalance of Pavement, the Doors seemed as played out as paisley. And while a thousand bands have artfully ripped off Pavement, everyone looks absurd imitating the Doors. They are the rock equivalent of "Don't try this at home." Idle at the intersection of La Cienega and Santa Monica today and you'll see everyone but Jim Morrison. The City of Night has become another gentrified crossroads offering "puppy presents" and frozen yogurt. The psychedelic era turned sepia — a final barbaric winter before everything got worse. Source: www.laweekly.com
Coming soon at the Paramount Theatre: •Dance Party: A tribute to Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens featuring Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, with Denny Charnecki and the D.C. Drifters on Jan. 14. The Austin Area Commission for the Arts is proud to present a tribute to the ‘day the music died’ on Saturday, January 14 at the Historic Paramount Theatre.
Denny Charnecki and the D. C. Drifters will present a tribute to the music of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper with special appearances by ‘Elvis’ and ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ Fans of early rockabilly music won’t want to miss it. The high-energy romp led by Denny Charnecki is a great way to introduce kids and grandkids to classic rock of the late 1950s. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Order tickets online at www.austinareaarts.org or stop in to the ArtWorks Center at 300 N Main Street to purchase tickets (10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday. Source: www.austindailyherald.com
The story of the “Million Dollar Quartet” — the nickname given to the formidable foursome of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins — has been told in both book and musical form. Now the tale is coming to TV via CMT and an eight-episode series that traces the rise of the famed label of the title, its genius producer Sam Phillips and the four disparate, but complementary musicians. “Sun Records,” executive produced by Leslie Greif and Gil Grant, is based on the Tony-winning musical “Million Dollar Quartet” and arrives shortly after the 60th anniversary of the legendary one-off recording session featuring the four men. Source: www.latimes.com
The million Dollar Quartet jam session seems to have happened by pure chance. Carl Perkins, who by this time had already met success with "Blue Suede Shoes", had come into the studios that day, accompanied by his brothers Clayton and Jay and by drummer W.S. Holland, their aim being to record some new material, including a revamped version of "Matchbox". Elvis Presley, a former Sun artist now with RCA Victor, arrived to pay a casual visit accompanied by a girlfriend, Marilyn Evans.
As Elvis played and Carl strummed along on guitar, Sam Phillips came out and said he'd like Elvis to hear what Carl had recorded earlier. Elvis listened to "Matchbox" and declared it a "killer" track; the harmony singing on "Your True Love" impressed him. Sam told engineer Jack Clement to start a tape rolling—“We may never have these people together again." The core and the focus remained Presley, Perkins, and Lewis; Johnny Cash had dropped by before Elvis's appearance and stayed long enough to sing with Carl and Elvis on “Blueberry Hill" and “Isle of Golden Dreams" before the recording began. Cash's presence was brief because he had to leave shortly to go pick up his wife Vivian to do some Christmas shopping. Newcomer Jerry Lee Lewis, born of similar roughneck stock as the others, wanted to prove himself to the veterans. Carl Perkins jumped in with a stunning version of Wynn Stewart's country hit "Keeper of the Key," accompanying himself on acoustic guitar, with Elvis and Jerry Lee harmonizing. Jerry Lee finally took over the piano when Carl and Elvis went into the control room, and proceeded to do a three-minutes-plus version of “Crazy Arms,” the longest song of the day. As Jerry Lee hit his final glissando, Elvis prepared to leave. It was nearly eight o' clock, Carl recalls, and Elvis told him that his female companion was hungry.
Elvis referred to Marilyn Evans as his "house guest," as Carl Perkins recalls: "People like Natalie Wood came home with him as house guests." Perkins' policy was to sign autographs only at the show venue; some girls often found their way to his motel room, but he refused to allow them entrance; he signed autographs outside. “I've never had affairs,” asserts Perkins. Unlike Presley, Perkins had a wife and three children waiting for him at home. Perkins' wife Valda had made it clear that if he cheated on her, she wouldn't be there when he came home, nor would she be talked into coming back. Perkins made it a practice to get back to his room quickly after the show and call home. When Carl would hear Valda's voice, and then hear one of his children squeal into the phone, "Hi, Dad-eeee", he knew he wouldn't stray: “I took my marriage vows very seriously. I knew if I wasn't true to them that Valda wouldn't stay with me a second. Presley? He took advantage of quite a few. I think that's pretty well documented. I've seen him with a lot of beautiful girls. He was pretty hot to trot.”
One of the acts Carl Perkins enjoyed playing was an obscure Buddy Holly song, "I'm Gonna Set My Foot Down" (cut during Holly's ill-fated Owen Bradley sessions in 1956), and he scorched it with a tough sounding arrangement and rowdy vocals. What had been a renegade subculture in the 1950s was moving into the mainstream of American life as its commercial potential became apparent. Magazines were launched featuring rock 'n' roll stars on their covers and featured stories about the artists on the inside. Elvis’s face and name showed up on everything from clothing and perfume to lunchboxes and trading cards, and as a film actor he was proving to be a box office smash.
Only Carl Perkins was absent from the new pantheon. On the road he was continuing to draw sizable, enthusiastic audiences, making his dismal showing on the charts all the more puzzling. A case can be made for the music changing and Carl not accommodating the marketplace, after having purveyed the purest form of rockabilly, having defined its style, he hadn’t thought to evolve it, as Buddy Holly had revolutionized the genre. Dick Clark once said, "Elvis was the King of Rock 'n' Roll, but Buddy Holly was the undisputed father of rock music." And Dick Clark is right. While chart failings dismayed Perkins, his sense of himself as a still-vital artist remained unwavering—"Dixie Fried" and "Matchbox" were as great as rockabilly or rock 'n' roll could get. Perkins believed that sitting on Sam Phillips's shelf in the Sun studio were some tracks, still unheard, hot enough to melt the disc jockeys' needles.
Of the early rock 'n' roll songwriters, Carl Perkins’ songs were the most subjective in narrative line. He was an artist who drew his best material from his own life in the cotton fields, in the tonks, and from having inhabited the lowest strata of the American working class. His memories were of a time and a place quickly receding into history.—"Go, Cat, Go!: The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, the King of Rockabilly" (1996) by Carl Perkins & David McGee
It was Buddy Holly who made the Fender Stratocaster, previously favoured by country musicians, the instrument of choice for rock guitarists. If his career is measured in terms of the number of records sold, Buddy Holly would rank high, although the sales didn’t take off until after his untimely death. But if it is measured in terms of influence on other rock musicians, he ranks higher. Indeed, some critics would say he ranks highest of all. Holly took up the guitar at the age of 12, playing country and western music, absorbing influences from bluegrass (acoustic stringed instruments), close-harmony singers, and rhythm ’n’ blues. His guitar style – in which he was able to produce a lead and rhythm sound at the same time – was much admired and envied. Holly's British tour in 1958 was “the most significant and influential tour in the entire history of popular music”.
Whereas "Hound Dog" aims for a monolithic effect (and falls short), "That'll Be the Day" is fully realized, with Holly acting out his role as if he's talking to the mirror, savoring the memory. Holly could be utterly sure of his self-doubt, whereas Elvis couldn't be as sure of his arrogance. Buddy Holly's performance is tougher, his frightening sincerity cut with playfulness, a sense of fun and an embrace of adolescent innocence. Although Holly presented himself as safe as a vanilla shake, he could be stubborn as hell. Buddy Holly’s fans make their annual pilgrimage to Clear Lake, Iowa, drawn by the Surf Ballroom’s magical vibrations. The Holly enthusiasts you can find at the Holiday Motor Lodge are clever, not at all like Elvis fans in their beehive hairdos and polyester pants suits.
"An obvious no-hoper," rock journalist Nik Cohn wrote of Buddy Holly in his study "The Golden Age of Rock" (2001): "Longtime rock fans have always been bitterly divided about him and his eccentricity. He wasn't a hardcore rocker, being too gentle and melodic." Holly shied away from the violence implicit in the rock scene, and from the hellfire emotionalism of the music. Holly was a rockabilly original, but unlike Gene Vincent or Carl Perkins (or Sun records wildmen Jerry Lee Lewis, Billy Lee Riley and Sonny Burgess), Holly looked for space in the noise, building his music around silences, a catch in the throat, a wink. Buddy Holly's songwriting in the years to come would have deepened, his range increased, his music would have taken shapes no one, not Holly, nor his fans and critics, could have predicted. Buddy Holly's story can be told again and again without it ever being settled.
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 more often than not, 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, the only true guitar/writer/singer/producer giant of the time, Eddie Cochran also was writing 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 hear what I’m referring to just by humming a blues to yourself). Virtually every one of Cochran’s masterpieces utilizes those same three chords.
Why didn't early rock and roll sustain? Not easy to answer. Partly it was because the vintage rockers were so ill-fated. Partly because most of them were not flexible. New figures came up to replace the gone heroes, but they weren't in the same class and were generally forgettable. “Rock ’n’ roll is being integrated into popular music,” warned DJ Bill Randle of Cleveland’s WERE station. “Rock ’n’ roll was an earthy, virile influence, but the authentic artists were destroyed by the gimmick imitators. There’s a point to which you can’t cater to the mediocre any longer.” Newspapers that scoffed at rock and roll in 1959 thought the big-beat music had just suffered a hiccup, and other new stars would fill the breach. Those new stars are gone now. Buddy Holly lives, every time we play rock and roll. And the music survives.
Buddy Holly looked more like an insurance agent, maybe a future computer whiz, than a rock and roll idol, said his astounded fans. Holly’s Cricket bandmate Sonny Curtis offered us this epic echo: “the levee ain’t dry, and the music didn’t die/‘Cause Buddy Holly lives every time they play rock and roll.” Bob Dylan credited Buddy Holly as his main melodic inspiration. Holly wasn’t political. All Buddy was saying: give rock a chance. Keith Richards initiated his riff repertoire playing Not Fade Away at Mapesbury Road. Rock and Roll is rarely a place to find role models for your kid. With Buddy Holly, we have an exception. He’s an example of the flipped adage of “nice guys finish first,” even when their trip comes to a sudden stop. As the Cold War heated into a bubbling volcano of nuclear warheads pointed at American and Russian cities, Buddy Holly taught a snarling world to sing and smile. Buddy gave all of us the notion, the will, and the gutsy optimism to rock. You couldn’t find a better rockin’ role model if you tried.
Many families first lived in prefab bungalows that were developed after the WWII ended. They lasted until the 1960s when a range of sprawling suburban homes replaced them. It was William Jaird “Bill” Levitt of Levitt & Sons, who brought standardization and mass production techniques to house building. He turned farmlands into uniform housing projects, so-called Levittowns, which spread in record rates all over the United States. More than ever America became a society of people, as William H. Whyte assessed in 1956, working within an entrepreneurial capitalism safeguarded by the government, and the adjustment to the group became the core of a new social ethic. The economic developments favored an ongoing suburbanization on a large scale that had begun in the late 1940s and which bloomed in the early 1950s. Domesticity, religiosity, respectability, security through compliance with the system, that was the essence of the fifties.
At the end of the 1940s, there existed six such musical streams: (white) pop or Tin Pan Alley music; country and western music, mainly hillbilly and western swing (C&W); rhythm and blues (R&B), jazz, gospel, and folk music. The formation of this six-stream musical landscape in the 1940s and 1950s provided the set of opportunities and constraints for the rise of rock and roll. Singers, musicians, and composers who made rock 'n' roll music, took the ingredients of rhythm and blues, country and western, and Tin Pan Alley music as their basic musical resources. A notable example is Patti Page’s big success “Tennessee Waltz” (1950) in which elements of C&W and pop are combined. The monopoly of the nationwide broadcasting networks was broken up which favored the growth of smaller local radio stations; as a result “the small, independent station became the postwar meteoric star of the broadcasting industry.” In 1950 there were already about 2000 AM radio stations, a number rising to about 3400 in 1960.
Jukeboxes were produced in great quantities between 1935 and 1950. In the early 1950s, the jukebox exploiters bought between a quarter and a third of all records and paid a fee for every time a record was played in their machines. This further strengthened the already strong position of the record companies. Nick Tosches sets the rock and roll's birth date as early as 1942 while others put it as late as 1953 or 1954. There really is much to say for Tosches’ view, because when listening to pre-1950s records one would categorize quite a few of them as rock and roll. Buddy Holly ranks #3 and Doc Pomus ranks#4 in the 100 Best 1950s Songwriters List from The New Book of Rock Lists (1994), after #1 Chuck Berry and #2 Leiber & Stoller.
The combined efforts of Elvis Presley and Sam Phillips made the resources of the three main streams in popular music available to a host of new-coming rock and roll singers and musicians. Putting these elements together in the pressure cooker of extended sessions in the small Sun studio in Memphis led to a new rock and roll style known as rockabilly in which gospel, rhythm and blues, and country and western, particularly hillbilly music, were merged into a new kind of songs. The “Presley-Phillips” cooperation led to classic rock and roll records like “That’s All Right Mama” (1954) – Presley’s first record, “Good Rockin’ Tonight” (1954), “You’re A Heartbreaker” (1955), “Baby Let’s Play House” (1955), and the last record Presley made for Sun “Mystery Train” (1955). Phillips brought artists and performers like Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis, to the front lines of the new musical stream. Alongside Sun and Specialty, four other independent record companies – Atlantic, King, Chess, and Imperial – were influential in shaping the new music. Atlantic was probably the best known independent company of the post-war era.
Another influential independent producer was Norman Petty who supervised the careers of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. From 1954 onward, rock and roll advanced very quickly 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, giving Bill Haley the opportunity to make his records, and later contracted Buddy Holly & The Crickets. Other majors like Mercury Records (Patti Page, Vic Damone) followed Decca’s lead and contracted authentic rock and roll artists like The Big Bopper. The Big Bopper's “Chantilly Lace” broke onto the charts the same day as Buddy Holly’s “Early in the Morning,” on August 11, 1958. Buddy Holly was completely in tune with a generation that was tiring of Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, Patti Page, and demanding music that was as raw and wild as their own feelings.
Paul Anka’s “I Am Just A Lonely Boy” (1959) is a good example of the 'neat boy' that the major record companies had in mind. As the first in a whole series of teen idols, Anka acted as a prototype. His first hit “Diana” (1957) – 9 million records sold – became an anthem by which the feeling of self-pity was introduced as a lasting feature of teen music next to the attitude of self-assertion that was propagated by the earlier rock and rollers. Paul Anka made some other famous songs: “You Are My Destiny” (1958) and “Put Your Head On My Shoulder” (1959). Rock historians Dave Marsh and James Bernard denounced the major record labels as “gutless and greedy, disdainful of artistry in the face of the bottom line” in The New Book of Rock Lists (1994).
Buddy Holly asked me if I wanted to go up on the roof of the building to get some air. It was about one in the morning and it was chilly. The Manhattan wind was like a whip. Buddy had a gray overcoat on, the collar pulled up around his neck. He looked out toward the skyline and then turned to me:“What did you think of the songs?” “I liked them,” I said, “especially ‘True Love Ways.’ That’s going to be a romantic classic.” “What about the other one—’It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’?” “Well—I just don’t see why you need Anka when you can write circles around him.”Buddy hugged his chest to keep warm. “If that’s true, if I can write circles around Paul Anka, then how come my records aren’t selling?” Buddy reached into his pocket and took out some chewing gum. He offered me a piece, but I didn’t want any. “You know, Rudy, sometimes I feel like it’s a plot. My sales, man... When all the business guys got involved, all of a sudden the numbers went down. I lost control of my own career. It’s like they can make you or break you. Right now it seems like they’re all out to break me for good, but I don’t know why. It feels like sabotage.” I can see those big black glasses in front of me even now. He looked me in the eye, and held that pose for a minute. Bobby Darin told me that Buddy had lost confidence when his sales hit bottom. He moved to New York to work on promotion and to get better studio production quality. He hid out for a few months and came up with some songs that he hoped would help him make the biggest comeback ever. “You’ve never heard anything like it before.” So then we both knew Buddy’s secret. —"The Winter Dance Party Murders" (2015) by Greg Herriges
"Rock music causes a breakdown in the synchronization of the two sides of the brain." — No other form of culture, and its artists, met with such extensive hostility as Rock 'n' Roll. In an even deeper sense, rock ’n’ roll went against white America’s ingrained fear of sex, a joyless legacy of the country’s puritan origins. “Rave On” was singled out by NBC Spot Sales as an example of the kind of music the network did not want its stations to play. The wave of protest continued when Contacts, the Catholic Youth Organization’s periodical, censored the music played at hops and warned to “smash the records… which present a pagan culture.” Perhaps skeptical about his future as a rock performer, Buddy Holly became interested in his future as recording producer. The musical establishment incited a congressional investigation into the widespread practice of payola (paying DJs for playing specific records). They succeeded in steering the investigation exclusively to those involved in producing and playing rock and roll music. Their representatives convinced the congressional investigators that rock and roll subsisted on payola. They castigated the music as an “inciter of juvenile delinquency” and pointed to Alan Freed as the prime offender. —"Anti-Rock: The Opposition To Rock 'n' Roll" (1993)
Maria Elena Holly would state in an early 1959 issue of 16 magazine that she’d initially met Buddy in January 1958, according to Alan Mann’s A–Z of Buddy Holly (1996). Archivist Alan Clark reprinted the 16 article in 1989 in his booklet “A Farewell to Buddy Holly: The Young Bride of a Favorite Young Star Bids Him a Last Goodbye,” in which Maria Elena says that she had previously seen Buddy around Peer-Southern and begun to think he was so shy they’d “never get beyond the point” of greeting each other and kidding around. The article goes on to state, in Maria Elena’s voice, that they finally connected when she encountered him at Howard Johnson’s. Buddy invited her to sit down for lunch, grabbed her hand and said to the Crickets: ‘O.K., you guys, just cut it out, because I’ve got her now.’ Maria Elena said she need two hands to eat. Buddy replied, “Oh, that’s all right, I’ll help feed you’. After she’d left, Buddy turned to Norman Petty and told him, “You see that girl? I’m going to marry her.” Some months later, Buddy took her to a record session, followed by “a quiet dinner.” As he dropped her off in a taxi, the car made a sharp turn and threw them together. “Before either of us realized it, we were sharing our first kiss,” Maria Elena remembered. They continued to stay in touch by phone while Buddy was on the road until their 'marriage proposal' date in June 1958.
Norman Petty had been nagging Buddy Holly to jettison rock ’n’ roll and start cutting pop records. Petty advised that Buddy change his singing style and get accepted in a more durable market so his career wouldn’t vanish with the demise of rock ’n’ roll, which Petty warned was imminent. He envisaged Buddy as a Vegas nightclub act, crooning to drunks and gamblers, and cutting Sinatra-type lovers’ albums. “Naw,” Buddy said, “I don’t dig it.” After Buddy's death, Norman Petty’s downfall was slow and tortured. After scoring an enormous hit in 1963 with Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack,” Petty made the mistake of criticizing the Beatles and psychedelia in the presence of record-industry associates and afterward was dismissed as old hat. Suddenly no one would take his calls. “In his latter years people that he started in the business, who were now in powerful positions, began to reject his recordings,” Billy Stull, manager of the Clovis studios, recalled in 1992. Though his contribution as a pioneering record producer of the rock era rivaled that of Sam Phillips, there were few honors for Petty. Sam Phillips was one of the original inductees in the Rock-’n’-Roll Hall of Fame, but Petty was ignored, perhaps because he never succeeded in dispelling persistent rumors that he’d mistreated Buddy Holly and other musicians. “He died an unhappy man. He kept the hurt inside. He had plenty of money and fame, but he was unhappy. He died unfulfilled,” says Stull.
“We were paying nine hundred dollars a month,” recalls Maria Elena, which was an astronomically high rent, even in New York, in 1958. Jerry Allison was furious over the sullen, slovenly “asshole” that "The Buddy Holly Story" (1978) made him out to be, he later told Bill Griggs, especially in the scene where Don Stroud, playing Jerry (named Jesse in the film), makes sexist and racist cracks about Maria Elena, which “really irritated the shit” out of him. The insults had actually come from a recording engineer, Allison told Mason City Globe-Gazette's writer Jeremy Powers in 1989. The Buddy Holly Story, Allison added, “They loosely took it from John Goldrosen's book.” Members of Buddy’s family viewed the Gary Busey “biopic” for the first time at the Lubbock opening on May 20, 1978. Initially they seemed pleased. Though the family appreciated Buddy’s talent, they never expected him to become a world figure, Mrs. Holley had told Bill Griggs.
Located by the indefatigable Bill Griggs, publisher of Rockin’ 50s magazine, Echo McGuire asked “not to be interviewed as her memories of Buddy are too personal,” Griggs related in 1992. Love was another mystery for Buddy Holly who, as a young man, bore a smile that put to shame a San Antonio sunrise in May bluebonnet season. Key figures associated with the Winter Dance Party tour were reluctant to discuss Buddy Holly. GAC’s Irvin Feld didn’t answer letters, Griggs said. Early rock was stymied not only by the stark disaster at Clear Lake, but by forces that had been trying to destroy it from the beginning. Terrified by its message of freedom, the establishment marshaled formidable forces—including the press—to discourage the musicians and their audiences. Even the music industry seemed to turn against rock ’n’ roll in 1958, attempting to bury it in the payola scandal that ended the decade. Buddy Holly’s life was a story of exploitation, betrayal, and distortion—by his manager, by insensitive record business entrepreneurs, by tour packagers who sent him into the frozen North Woods... “The Devil killed him,” said Carl Bunch to Bill Griggs in 1981.
After the Apartment Tapes hinted at a marked shift of Buddy Holly's musical progression, a strange myth attached to Buddy's figure was created around the existence of more mysterious demos that would surface or remain hidden in Scotch Magnetic Tapes, obscure masterpieces sealed inside some dusty box at his apartment or behind the doors of the Adelphi Sound Studios (Brill Building, 1650 Broadway). The speeded-up walla-walla-bing-bang nonsense of David Seville's “Witch Doctor” and Christmas 1958's hit “The Chipmunk Song” sounded far away from the collective memory with the beginning of the tumultuous Sixties. A different lifestyle (more technicized, commercialized and trend-oriented) would arise at the core of the rock industry and the American society at large.
The mistake of angling a determined era according with standards of the present also applies to the biographical approach that some writers have wrongly administered to Buddy Holly and other rock icons from the Fifties. Most songs Holly wrote and recorded at his New York apartment were about regret and lost love, but who knows what was going through his mind at the end of 1958? Holly fitted the nice guy archetype and the non-conformist archetype at once. This classic dichotomy (especially visible during the gender normative pervasive of the 50s) could have caused him a psychological split. Rock 'n' Roll, the same as uninhibited sexuality, was seen as close to pathology in those days. Holly suggested in his songs sex in the abstract, detached from its potentially disturbing reality, and elevated it to bear ironic symbolism.
In The Permissive Society: America, 1941-1965 Alan Petigny challenges our understanding of the 1950s as a time of staid tradition, showing a turbulent decade in which sexual mores, and assumptions of identity underwent profound, and sometimes destructive, change: “People didn’t start having sex because Elvis Presley was shaking his hips. The ‘40s and ‘50s experienced a dramatic increase in premarital pregnancies,” Petigny said: “more than doubling of illegitimacy among whites, more than tripling of all out-of-wedlock births.” Single motherhood rose from 7.1 to 21.6 newborns per 1,000 unwed women. The sexual revolution did not start in the free-loving 1960s as is commonly thought. “Between the beginning of World War II in 1939 and the inaugural issue of Playboy in 1953, the overall rate of single motherhood more than doubled,” Petigny added: “The silent generation may have been silent about what they were doing, but they weren’t all that complacent.” www.research.ufl.edu
Sources: —"The Riddles of Rock and Roll" (2003) by Leo d’Anjou, "This'll Be the Day: The Life and Legacy of Buddy Holly" (2009) by Maury Dean, and "Rockabilly: The Twang Heard 'Round the World: The Illustrated History" (2011) by Michael Dregni
A luncheon will be held Nov. 17 at Wellbridge of Romeo, 375 S. Main St. Lunch will begin at 1 p.m., followed by live Elvis and Buddy Holly-themed music from 2 to 3 p.m. The cost is $6 for residents or $7 for nonresidents. Register by Nov. 10. For more information, contact the Romeo Washington Bruce Parks & Recreation Department at 586-752-6543. Source: www.sourcenewspapers.com
For Elvis fans looking to find a new place to dwell, a home which once belonged to The King could be the ideal investment. The Beverly Hills home he lived in between 1967 and 1973 has gone on the market for $30million - twice as much as it sold for just two years ago. Elvis lived in the plush home at 1174 Hillcrest Road in Beverly Hills, LA, with wife Priscilla and their daughter Lisa-Marie.
The 5,400 sq/ft property has retained much of its the out ward stone decor from when Elvis lived there as well as the swimming pool and front gates where he would meet adoring fans. It was previously sold in 2014 for $15 million and is now on the market for $30 million. The King paid $400,000 for the home in the 1960s. Source: www.dailymail.co.uk
Buddy Holly's home was 4-H, a corner apartment at the Brevoort, 11 Fifth Avenue [at 9th Street]. The 2-bedroom unit with a wrap-around terrace rented for $900 per month. Married life with MarÃa Elena and Greenwich Village set Buddy Holly aflame. According to his widow, he loved listening to jazz at the Village Vanguard and poetry at local coffeehouses. He also wanted to write movie scores. Source: infamousnewyorkrealestate.blogspot.com
Maria Elena Holly: "Elvis called when Buddy died, and I spoke to him on the phone. I remember that. He called to say how sorry he was. Buddy was able to meet Elvis because he went to Lubbock. The story goes... he told me that Elvis did not have drums at that time. When he started, he didn’t have a drummer. And Buddy said, “You know Elvis, you need a drummer in your band.” It was one of Buddy’s touches."
Harrell Rudolph (an old school friend of Buddy Holly from his time at Lubbock High School): "In autumn 1954, Elvis Presley came to town as the star attraction at the Lubbock County Fair. At this time, Presley was not yet a national phenomenon. As is well known, Buddy and his band was the opening act. The next school day, we were interested to know what Buddy thought of Presley, did he talk to him, etc. I was surprised that to me he seemed a bit negative if not scornful of Elvis. He certainly was not in awe of him. From that day forward, we began to press Buddy to do an “Elvis imitation” at the Spring Round-up."
Buddy Holly felt the only way his dreams would become reality was to break from Norman Petty and move to New York. Buddy wanted to compose and perform music that was not of the rock and roll genre. Living at The Brevoort, Apt 4H, 11 Fifth Ave. Buddy would set up a small area for his Ampex reel to reel recorder where he could try out new song ideas. Buddy recorded six new compositions in December 1958 and in January 1959.
Jean Daniels (Lubbock High School - Class of 1955): "My family moved from Los Angeles to Lubbock during April 1952, and I was enrolled in the 9th grade at JT Hutchinson Junior High School. This was not the most comfortable day in my life. I didn’t know a soul and I was a pretty shy guy. I wandered into a nearby drugstore and found a seat at the soda fountain. A dark haired fellow with horn-rimmed glasses sat down next to me and introduced himself. He knew I was the new guy in school and welcomed me to Lubbock and JT Hutchinson. I am happy that Buddy Holly was my first friend and school mate in Lubbock. But that’s the way Buddy was, just a very nice, quiet, unassuming friendly guy. We remained good friends through out high school.
Despite the multiple names listed as songwriters on his tunes, most sources report that Buddy Holly's songs were, indeed, his. The other credits were mostly added as business arrangements. The industry had tried to manipulate his career, his bandmates had betrayed him, his manager had robbed him... He had tousled dark hair and those horn rims. His complexion was amazingly white and the expression inscrutable yet knowing. One of Buddy's favorite things to eat was tomato soup. His favorite architect was Frank Lloyd Wright.
Michael Shelley (D.J. at WFMU Radio Station, New York): What was Buddy Holly really like?
Sonny Curtis: He wasn’t anything like he was portrayed in "The Buddy Holly Story". Gary Busey’s portrayal of Buddy was more like Chuck Berry than Buddy. He also depicted Buddy as a sloppy dresser and an unsophisticated rube. Buddy was neither. Another thing I didn’t like from that movie it's that Buddy sometimes could be a smart alec, but he was always a gentleman.
Norman Petty: I found Buddy to be respectful and responsible. And even though I did not necessarily understand rock and roll, I liked it, although Vi did not, and above all, I appreciated Holly's talent. I didn't know if I was going to be able to understand what he was trying to do and I was criticised for not really understanding, but I think that we pretty well respected each other's capabilities. Buddy was the type of musician that never repeated an error. He was an excellent musician.
Sonny Curtis: I’m not a fan of Norman Petty. He told me once that I was wishy-washy and (paraphrasing) a person of low character. He said that I would wind up in this business with (his words) “a big goose egg.” When you are young, broke, doubting yourself anyway, and struggling to figure it all out, those are words that can break your heart. I’d love to meet him face to face and say, “Man, the way you treated me was not cool.”
Gary & Ramona Tollett: Gary's cousin, June Clark, who was Don Lanier's sister, wanted to help Gary become a recording artist like her brother. (The Rhythm Orchids had the first West Texas hit and million-seller from Norman Petty's studio in Party Doll.) She introduced us to Buddy Holly and Jerry Allison. Buddy was very shy. He was an extremely talented young man. We soon got together at June Clark's house and rehearsed numbers for Gary. Later on, Buddy suggested that we sing back up for him on some recordings that he had scheduled to do at Norman Petty's in Clovis, NM.
Jerry Allison: Buddy Holly affected me the same way than Elvis, he gave me goose bumps. I don’t think Buddy would have followed Elvis into the casinos scene. Buddy liked writing songs and he was into producing, I’m sure he would still have been amazing.
Jerry Allison never really got over the loss of Buddy in the Bonanza air-crash flying between Mason City, Iowa, and Fargo, North Dakota. Ironically, the promoter of the next event had been trying to get it cancelled due to the weather, not knowing that the three singers had already chartered a plane. Allison did "really regret that it worked out the way it did." ―"The Crickets: Six Decades of Rock ‘n’ Roll Memories" (2016) by Gary Clevenger & Tony Warran
