Elvis: 'If I Can Dream', Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue (Buddy Holly), The Phoenix Sound

This is a song from the brand new album "Elvis Presley: If I Can Dream" (2015). This version of "There's Always Me" was remixed and dubbed with the sound of The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra.

Nearly 40 years after his death in 1977, Elvis Presley once again returns to the music charts. “If I Can Dream” features a flawless blending of the entertainer’s original vocal recordings reworked with the lush and elegant accompaniment of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. The stirring orchestration gracefully breathes new life into 14 Presley classics that showcase the singer’s unforgettable voice.


I can still fondly recall being in awe of Presley’s stage presence performing hits like “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” and thinking that this guy with all the swagger and charm was certainly one of the coolest dudes I’d ever seen. A spirited version of “Burning Love” opens the album as the added strings feverishly propel Presley’s passionate singing to a higher level of excitement.

Priscilla Presley serves as an executive producer of the album and keeps the memory of her former husband alive and well through this special project that she has stated he would have always wanted to do. Source: www.heraldstandard.com

This colour clip was shot silent in 1955 in Oklahoma City while Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley were working the two bottom slots on a country package tour headlined by Hank Snow — not only the earliest film footage of Holly but that of Elvis as well. Part of the film was shot with an 8mm camera in Buddy Holly’s hometown of Lubbock, Texas.

Elvis performed in Lubbock several times that year. He first met Buddy Holly at a show at the Fair Park Coliseum on February 13. Elvis "just blew Buddy away," recalls Sonny Curtis, "the way he could get the girls jumping up and down definitely impressed Holly. But it was the music that really turned Buddy around. He loved Presley's rhythm —it wasn't country and it wasn't blues— it was somewhere in the middle. After seeing Elvis, Buddy had only one way to go: Rock and Roll."
Source: scottymoore.net

Perceived as a 'golden age' of music, the classic rock'n'roll of the late fifties, especially Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, returned a sense of 'security, authenticity and masculinity' (according to Paul Willis' Profane Culture, 1978) in its celebration —articulated through vocal delivery rather than in its lyrical content— of a tough response to an uncertain and uncaring world. —"Cultural Studies and the Study of Popular Culture" (2010) by John Storey

Buddy Holly’s amazingly prolific body of work represented a kind of punk approach. But there was also an expressly British tinge, related to an emotion more strongly felt in Britain than in the States, where Holly & the Crickets scored only two million sellers (“That’ll Be The Day” and “Peggy Sue”) and where Holly had no hits after “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” (in the USA, 20 Golden Greats aka Buddy Holly Lives made only #55 on Billboard; in UK it went triple platinum). Such devotion would baffle much if it weren’t for the continued instinctive power of the music of Holly & the Crickets. And yet, for all their instinct, songs like “That’ll Be The Day” and “Peggy Sue,” highly experimental though they are, sound as though the musicians playing them know exactly what they are doing. Even when trying out new ideas, new tempi, new approaches, there is something in Holly’s timbre and bearing which implies that he is never going to be at a loss.

“Peggy Sue” seems to have fallen to Earth from outer space, one of those page one pop records from seemingly nowhere which set the tone for everything that comes after it, like “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” I was struck after watching, at a young age, Buddy Holly & the Crickets performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show — it is still disturbing viewing. Perhaps due to the lack of dimensional perspective afforded by fifties television cameras, Holly, at stage front, looks about twice the size and half the age of the Crickets behind him. With his partially-rimmed spectacles, he gives the impression of a newly-arrived Martian; there is something about the performance which is not quite “real.” And yet the song is about finding a “love so rare and true.”

“Peggy Sue” here is little more than an abstract, a blank template for the listener to complete (“If you knew Peggy Sue”). Behind Holly’s voice are the murkiest, most thunderous drums you have ever heard (it sounds as though coming from the bottom of a well). Holly is spellbound by the grain of those two words, “Peggy” and “Sue”; he rolls them round his tongue and larynx in every conceivable way, experimenting with and being delighted by the different effects, like a jazz musician snaking their way around a standard or a riff; he is clearly exulted and before long, Peggy Sue is superseded by the use of the name as a signifier without anything obvious being signified; if there was ever such a thing as “free rock,” then “Peggy Sue” is its epitome, and maybe also its peak. But if “Peggy Sue” exhibits a childlike joy, Holly’s final, and wholly unexpected, vocal swoop from high to low indicates that this is definitely the work of a grown man.

Holly never stopped experimenting. With “Words Of Love,” he goes as far as to invent psychedelia with its woozy, disorientated vocals and strange syllabic emphases (“feel-AH,” “real-AH,” “hear-AH,” “ear-AH”) which indicate an intoxication of awe. “Everyday” expresses patient expectation using little more than slapped knees and celeste as musical background; Holly’s onomatopoeic arch of anticipation on “ROLL-er-COAST-er” conveys his excitement very effectively (as does his more subdued “Hey? A-hey-hey”). Rather than knee-slapping, the beat on “Not Fade Away” seems to be thrashed out on a cardboard box and Holly’s words now seem to defy reason as deftly as Dylan’s would soon do, missing out whole streams of syntax (“You know my love a-not fade away, A love for real not fade away”). His pent-up sexuality goes from child to man (“A-WAY”) and back again (“How I feel-EE!”). His guitar cuts in halfway like a battleship.

If both “Everyday” and “Not Fade Away” show Holly is up for it, the immediate attack of “Oh Boy” confirms that he is also ready for it; now he growls and shrieks, and even the square backing vocals can’t deter the acidic entry of his guitar solo. You almost want to rush up to him and urge him to be more patient. By not quite “getting” Bo Diddley, he inadvertently invents something else.

“Listen To Me” is extraordinary in its effortless elisions from harsh to soft, and back again; the curiously over-exaggerated vocal drops of “LIS-TEN-TO-ME-HEE” pretty much writing the template for Merseybeat before dropping back to a honeyed, spoken whisper from Holly: “Listen, listen, listen to me,” to be followed by an excitable lead guitar and, again, a subtly disorientated vocal. If “Think It Over” might have been designed as Holly’s “Jerry Lee Lewis record,” with a rattling barrelhouse piano solo, its implications are wider: Holly teases his would-be other half as much as pleading with her, at one point asking, “Are you sure I’m not the one?” and then intoning “A lonely heart grows cold and old” (it’s the pause that makes you remember the line).

“It’s So Easy” with its vocal grunts suggesting that actually it’s very difficult, offset by some strange verbal throwaways (“Gosh darn that love,” “doggone easy”), the supreme “Rave On” with its introductory six-syllable “Well” and a propulsion so powerful that it could almost have been made by machines; everything here has been accomplished, and works – and the unworldly “Well… All Right” which more or less spells out what McCartney is going to do with the Beatles but also moves with great naturalism between two different dynamic angles (moderately intense, and slightly more intense) and some long-form cymbal work from Allison that almost breaks the boundaries of tempo.

“Peggy Sue Got Married,” originally cut with the Crickets but here done with a revamped instrumental backing track, is one of Holly’s last great songs; throughout the song he is extremely reluctant to tell the listener what has happened, endlessly putting it off or making excuses, but finally he divulges the titular information, except that he remarks “You recall that girl that’s been in nearly every song” and you realise that actually she only unambiguously appears in one other song, except that all these songs might be about the same, unattainable woman, or idealisation of a woman –Holly as Lubbock’s own Robert Graves, with Peggy Sue his own White Goddess– and Holly’s guitar solo is appropriately melancholy. Peggy Sue is all around us, maybe even part of us. Buddy Holly was a bridge leading from the original rock ‘n’ roll pioneers, look around you, on every Beatles album up to and including Let It Be, on most Dylan. Source: nobilliards.blogspot.com

Peggy Sue Gerron still remembers standing in the audience in 1958 watching a meek, mild-mannered Texas boy electrify a crowd, turning on the charm with his hiccup delivery and his fancy work on his Fender Stratocaster. That night in Sacramento was the first time she had ever heard it —witnessing the birth of a new art form: rock 'n' roll. Peaking at No. 3, 'Peggy Sue' was Buddy Holly's second biggest-selling record behind 'That'll Be the Day.'

Peggy Sue was never Buddy Holly's girl. Peggy Sue and Jerry Allison, the Crickets' drummer, were dating, would later marry and ultimately divorce. Gerron describes Holly more as a "soulmate" than anything else. The song "Peggy Sue," in fact, wasn't even originally called "Peggy Sue." According to Bill Griggs, Holly first named it after Cindy, his sister's daughter, and Lou, his sister's middle name. Griggs said it was when Holly and Allison were trying to make the song work better one day when Holly told Allison that paradiddles, a repetitive style of drumming, would help strengthen the song rhythmically. Allison agreed if Holly woud change the name of the song from "Cindy Lou" to "Peggy Sue" so he could "make some points with his girlfriend." 

Peggy Sue said she has always felt humbled for having known someone like Buddy Holly. "He was such a gentleman," she remembered. "He was a little quiet. He never took over a room. I never saw him have a temper. He was quite a young man. He helped take care of his mom and dad and grandmother and I thought that was unusual that someone his age would take on that kind of responsibility." Peggy Sue said she suffered through a long grieving period, a period she said that never really ended, just changed. There is no love lost between Buddy Holly's widow and Peggy Sue. The history between the two includes the threat of a lawsuit by Mrs. Holly because of Peggy Sue's book, "Whatever Happened to Peggy Sue?" Source: www.mrt.com

Waylon Jennings and Buddy Holly in a photo boot at the Grand Central Station, New York, 1959.

Not long after Lee Hazlewood headed to Phoenix, Waylon Jennings settled in at KCKY following the death of his former bandmate Buddy Holly. The small station served as an incubator, but it was in Phoenix that Hazlewood, Eddy, and Jennings found solid artistic footing. The roots of that sound stretch further south, to a small cotton town called Coolidge, Arizona. Following his discharge from the military, Hazlewood worked at KCKY, where he met a Coolidge high schooler named Duane Eddy, who provided on-air performances on his guitar.

"The Fool" (original 1956 version) sung by Sanford Clark, a baby-faced kid stationed at Luke Air Force Base; the song was written and produced by local DJ Lee Hazlewood and blessed with the thwacking leads of guitarist Al Casey. It was recorded at Floyd Ramsey's Audio Recorders studio on Seventh Street and Weldon Avenue and released on a small Phoenix label, MCI Records. From there it bloomed, picked up by Dot Records and distributed nationally.

By the end of 1957, "The Fool" had sold more than 800,000 copies and set the blueprint for the "Phoenix sound," an echoing, reverb-drenched take on rockabilly that would propel guitarist Duane Eddy to fame, inspire Phil Spector's Wall of Sound, and lay the groundwork for the outlaw country stardom of Waylon Jennings. Fittingly, the recording of "The Fool" appears near the beginning of author Jim West's The Phoenix Sound: A History of Twang & Rockabilly Music in Arizona. Source: www.phoenixnewtimes.com

Hank Williams' Biopic 'I Saw the Light' (Official Trailer), Buddy Holly's 'Not Fade Away'

Tom Hiddleston takes on the role of a lifetime in the upcoming biopic I Saw the Light. After the first look photo released back in August, Sony Pictures Classics, via Entertainment Weekly, has released the first trailer. I Saw the Light is set for a limited release on March 25, 2016. I Saw the Light tells the story of the legendary country western singer Hank Williams, who in his brief life created one of the greatest bodies of work in American music. The film chronicles his meteoric rise to fame and its ultimately tragic effect on his health and personal life. The beloved singer died at the age of 29 in 1953, but not before leaving a legacy of hit songs such as "Your Cheatin' Heart", "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and "Hey Good Lookin." When Tom Hiddleston signed on to star last June, it was revealed that the actor will actually be singing Hank Williams' iconic songs himself.

The producers struck a deal with Sony ATV for the rights to Hank Williams' entire music catalog for use in the film. The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Olsen, Bradley Whitford, David Krumholtz and Cherry Jones. Written and directed by Marc Abraham (Flash of Genius), I Saw the Light is based on Colin Escott's award-winning biography. Notable director of photography Dante Spinotti was the cinematographer for the film. Hank Williams' final days were chronicled in the 2012 drama The Last Ride, starring Henry Thomas, but this biopic will chronicle his incredible rise to stardom.

Take a look at the first trailer for I Saw the Light: Source: movieweb.com

From Hank Williams first, then the Chicago bluesmen and finally Elvis, Buddy Holly had learned that words were less important than what one put into them. Buddy wrote about what his peers expected him to – falling for girls, pursuing girls, winning girls, losing girls and feeling blue; his lyrics were always accomplished, phrased with the neatness of the one-time amateur journalist, adding up with the logic and precision of the draughtsman he had almost become. For a creative muse Buddy could not draw on the nervy, neon excitement of Chuck Berry’s Chicago nor Leiber and Stoller’s view down Broadway: only horizonless wheat and cotton fields, the lawns and churches of Lubbock, the archetypal young American’s life-cycle of high school, dating, movies and driveins. It was when he stopped pretending otherwise, when he found the nerve, the encouragement and the space to be himself, that raw talent suddenly blossomed into fully-finished brilliance.

Like Hank Williams, whose “I Saw the Light” is one of his finest recordings, the influence of the Lord and Jesus, as well as the sound of gospel, would influence Buddy’s music. Unfortunately, Buddy’s initial forays into professionalism —the Thompson tour at the beginning of January 1956 and the Nashville recording session at the end of the month— were out-and-out disasters. The Country & Western establishment had been thrown into panic by the sudden ascendancy of rock ’n’ roll and Buddy caught the full impact of the hillbilly backlash. The old guard resisted rock ’n’ roll with all its might; eventually country music would be split down the middle, RCA and at least half of the C&W establishment fleeing to rockabilly and the other half remaining straight country singers. The rockabillies adopted Elvis’s style and mannerisms. The traditionalists took their lead from Hank Williams. Decca’s Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley, instead of recognizing Buddy Holly as as a potential rockabilly star, tried to force him into a C&W mold, completely disregarding his wish to sing rock ’n’ roll. Buddy resisted, and Cohen got nasty, sniping, “You don’t have the voice to be a singer. You should forget about a musical career.”

Buddy Holly - Not Fade Away (1957)

In late January 1959 all the members of the ill-fated “Winter Dance Party” —Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, Waylon Jennings— met in Chicago and checked into their hotel. It was the beginning of rock’s most famous tragedy. As Tommy Allsup revealed at the 1979 convention of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, Buddy seemed upset. Tommy assumed it was because the tour marked the first time that Buddy and his bride had been separated. It was obvious that Buddy missed the comfortable home he’d established with Maria Elena.

While Buddy Holly’s rise had been slow and torturous, Ritchie Valens’s was meteoric. Their meeting proved opportune for both. Ritchie, the new rock star, looked on Buddy as an experienced headliner who could give him much-needed guidance, while Buddy was always on the lookout for new talent to produce. Everyone was crammed into what appeared to Dion to be a “converted school bus.” When they felt like going to bed, “we slept where we were sitting.” Shivering and miserable, the performers realized too late that the tour was a “third-class operation,” Dion recalled. Buddy was homesick, yearning to return to his bride. All the musicians on the bus generously shared their musical expertise with each other. They sang and picked continually, mostly as a way to keep their minds off the cold. Everyone sang a Hank Williams song. Like Buddy, Dion had studied Hank Williams’s “bent notes” and learned to emulate the “plaintive catch in his throat,” he wrote in The Wanderer. Maria Elena divulged in 1993 that she and Buddy spoke “every day, maybe twice, depending on how much time he had, usually in the evening before he performed.”

Buddy introduced Edwardian fashions to rock ’n’ roll during this tour, 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 rock’s # 1 instrumentalist, 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 had founded rock’s avantgarde. —"Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly" (2014) by Philip Norman

Buddy Holly: Rock & Roll Soldier, Influence on the Beatles (Photographs from the set of Help!)

Buddy Holly was hardly the awkward geek that his amateurish, poorly lit promotional photos suggest. Duane Eddy, the twangy guitar rocker who appeared with him in 1958, once described Buddy as a “well-built” six-footer who had “wavy hair” and was “very good looking.”

While not avowedly political, fifties rock was revolutionary. It urged people to do whatever they wanted to do, even if it meant breaking the rules. Like so many of his generation, Buddy was transformed by rock ’n’ roll from a warbling C&W bluegrass country boy into an early Freedom Rider who went into a hostile South with a busload of black R&B stars. His relationship with black musicians became a powerful symbol of the fusion of R&B and rockabilly—the spark that ignited rock ’n’ roll as we know it today.

Through all the drama of a short but eventful life, Buddy Holly remains one of the more appealing public figures of mid-century America. He was capable of heroically transcending his ingrained Texas prejudices, yet he remained loyal to family and friends. In the music business, he was a gullible youth who was cheated out of a fortune. As a friend he could be generous to a fault, yet crafty as a fox. He was attracted to all sorts of women. While Elvis Presley was worshiped as a sex idol, people reserved a special love for Buddy Holly. He mirrored the ordinary teenager and symbolized both the guilelessness of the era and its repression. In his square suits and Slim Jim ties, he looked like an honor student who made A’s in algebra, but when he went onstage and blasted off with “Oh Boy,” the anchors of the past no longer held.

Buddy neglected his schoolwork through his junior year. Years later, when his tests and term themes were auctioned at Sotheby’s, the New Yorker magazine reviewed his book report on Robert Frost and pronounced it—by homework standards —“a masterpiece.” “Buddy was cocky, but he had a lot to be cocky about,” says Buddy's teacher Robert Knight: “He was what experts in interpersonal relations call a ‘bipolar 8.’ He was very self-confident and got things done. Students who weren’t that self-confident were irritated by him and took the attitude. Buddy was a visionary young man and had difficulty with them.”

Buddy Holly left the United States for the first time in 1958, carrying rock ’n’ roll—the music as well as its highly subversive message of freedom—to the world at large. Though he appears to have had little interest in politics, his music planted the seeds of a larger cultural revolution everywhere. Buddy’s forthcoming trip to England, set for March 1958, at first seemed to him quite the most important event of his lifetime. But in a conversation with [brother] Larry Holley, Buddy said that nothing would ever be as meaningful to him as the day he was baptized: “He wasn’t no saint by any means. He certainly wasn’t a goody-goody. He was a saint in the fact that he accepted Christ as his savior when he was younger.” Buddy always kept a copy of the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus” handy. Like Hank Williams, he loved hymns and was fascinated by “What a Friend,” in which the composers Joseph Scriven and Charles C. Converse describe a way to turn over worries and achieve inner peace.

Unlike many who achieve early stardom, Buddy retained his humility. Maria Elena Holly said in 1993: “He said he had an appointment. I called in and Murray Deutch said for him to wait. In the meantime he started a conversation. That was when he asked me if I wanted to go out to dinner with him.” She was charmed when Buddy attempted to speak Spanish with her: “How are you, Señorita?” Neither of Buddy’s LPs —The Chirping Crickets and Buddy Holly— made the Billboard Top 40 in America. Years later, rock critics would place both albums near the top of their all-time best LP lists.

Buddy took Maria to dinner at P. J. Clarke’s (the popular pub on Third Avenue that had been used in the filming of The Lost Weekend in the 1940s); she still recalls how he suddenly rose from the table and said, “Excuse me a minute, Maria Elena. I’ll be right back.” When they’d entered the restaurant they’d noticed a flower vendor standing on Third Avenue, just outside the door. Buddy now went to the vendor, selected a red rose, and hurried back inside. “This is for you,” he said, “and would you marry me?” The gap in his life since the loss of Echo McGuire had left him lost and adrift emotionally.

He’d found, in his typically impulsive way, the girl he wanted to marry, someone with whom he could share what he called 'true love ways': dining out, exchanging hopes and dreams, laughing, and being romantic together. “Music is my life,” he told Maria Elena. “I want people to feel wonderful and great when they hear my music.”

His voice in "Learning the Game" is edged with bittersweet irony as he drives home the truth that romantic love is the cause of most human suffering. There is something deeply comforting, even healing, in the way Buddy defines heartache as the common lot of mankind. “Buddy wouldn’t hurt my feelings for anything,” Maria Elena remembers. By the end of 1958 Buddy Holly’s life had become all but unlivable. When asked in 1992 if the original Crickets were intent on a reconciliation with Buddy, Larry Holley simply said, “I think that was another fictitious thing.” His funds were frozen in New Mexico, largely as a result of having given Norman Petty power of attorney over his business affairs. Bankruptcy had forced him to accept a dangerous bus tour in one of the worst midwestern winters on record.

Buddy was now on the "Winter Dance Party" tour without management, but even when Petty had represented him, Buddy had been subjected to exhausting conditions on previous GAC tours. In the Midwest's “icy breath of death rolling down low across the land” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald described it in Flappers and Philosophers) it was sheer chaos for the performers: On the way to Fort Dodge, the bus was so cold that once again they were in danger of frostbite. Carl Bunch (victim of frostbite and hospitalized) was convinced that “Satan” was determined to stop the tour — In a 1981 interview with Bill Griggs, he’d refer to Buddy as the musical point man of a “massive rebirth” of Christ consciousness throughout the world. Buddy by this point was “just a high-class bum being kicked around on the road.” By the time they bumped and skidded into Clear Lake (frozen solid for the winter of 1958–59), Buddy knew he couldn’t endure another long bus ride.

Robert Frost once wrote a poem called “A Soldier.” In it, the soldier falls in battle, but Frost says the force of his fall shoots his soul on to heaven. And so it was, I like to think, with the singers who fell so hard on this cold and merciless ground.

Despite the liberties the moviemakers took with historical fact, The Buddy Holly Story turned out to be disarmingly lovable, thanks largely to Gary Busey’s performance, a tour de force of acting and singing. Though vocally unimpressive (painfully obvious when one listens to the sound-track album), Busey knew how to handle a guitar. More importantly, Busey knew how to act, turning in a performance of such sincerity and conviction that no one cared whether it resembled Buddy. Just prior to the film’s release, Robert Gittler, the writer of the screenplay, committed suicide. Lubbock, ever predictable, failed to lobby hard enough for the world premiere and lost out to Dallas, where the movie opened on May 18, 1978, at the Medallion Theater. –"Buddy Holly: A Biography" (2014) by Ellis Amburn

Buddy Holly's melodies and arrangements were a huge influence on the Beatles. ("At least the first 40 songs we wrote were Buddy Holly-influenced," said Paul McCartney). With the whirlwind they were on in 1964, the first thing John Lennon asked when he got to The Ed Sullivan Show was, "Is this the stage that Buddy Holly played on?" Listen to the songs on the first three Beatles albums. Take their voices off, and it's Buddy Holly. Same with the Rolling Stones. The magic that Buddy Holly created was nothing short of a miracle. The fact that he died at 22 is just ridiculous. That tells you all you need to know about just how focused and visionary he was. Source: www.rollingstone.com

The Beatles: Photographs from the Set of Help! (2015) by Emilio Lari, Alastair Gordon, with Introduction by Richard Lester. There are great candid and posed shots of the Beatles, many unseen for years or never published, throughout. Musicians will enjoy the close-up images of the band with its famed guitars: George Harrison with his Gibson acoustic, John Lennon with his Rickenbacker, Paul McCartney with his violin-shaped Hofner bass. We’ve seldom seen these instruments so closely and looking so shiny and new. The same is true for the pictures of the Beatles themselves. They look so young, fresh and lively that it’s hard to believe the pictures are more than 50 years old. It’s an excellent collection of one photographer’s intimate view of the Beatles, featuring mostly unfamiliar and very compelling images of history’s most famous band. Source: boingboing.net

Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, The Velvet Underground: Light & Tragedy

‘The film is about the man behind the myth, the power of his music, the sheer voltage of his talent and charisma, and his formidable demons; he wrote some of the greatest songs in the history of American music.’ ―Tom Hiddlestone (I Saw the Light) on Hank Williams.

Sony Pictures Classics were hoping that I SAW THE LIGHT, the Hank Williams biopic starring Tom Hiddleston, would be generating some major Oscar buzz and had the film appropriately slotted into the Oscar bait slot of November 28, 2015. However, despite the acting of stars Tom Hiddleston and Elizabeth Olsen receiving praises, the film failed to generate the Oscar buzz that the studio wanted at last month's Toronto International Film Festival. Seemingly in response to that lack of Oscar attention, Sony has pushed back I SAW THE LIGHT to March 25, 2016. Source: www.joblo.com

The gifted British actor Tom Hiddleston plays Hank Williams and also creditably sings his songs (musician Rodney Crowell worked with Hiddleston). I Saw the Light follows Williams’ life from his marriage to Audrey Sheppard (Elizabeth Olsen) at a gas station in Andalusia, Alabama in 1944 to his death, from alcohol and pill-induced heart failure, en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio on New Year’s Day 1953. Marc Abraham’s effort is a fairly standard film biography. “I got caught up in Hank’s story. He died at 29, wrote all these songs, divorced the same woman twice, married a 19-year old right after recording ‘Your Cheatin’ Heart’. I thought what an amazing story. He was in the public domain, and I just started writing the script,” said Abraham.

Hank Williams had his first big hit with “Move It on Over,” about a man in trouble with his wife, in 1947. In fact, it is an early rock and roll song, one that unmistakably reflects the postwar atmosphere. After a successful stint on the Louisiana Hayride, Williams first performed at the Grand Ole Opry in June 1949, where his “Lovesick Blues” was a triumph.

The glory did not last long. He was eventually fired from the Opry for alcoholism in 1952 and his famed producer, Fred Rose (Bradley Whitford in the film), stopped working with him. His life went from bad to worse… In one of the better scenes in I Saw the Light, Williams is in New York—where he feels like a fish out of water—for the Perry Como television show in November 1951. He speaks frankly to a reporter from a big city newspaper. “Everyone has a little darkness,” he says. Williams refers to the anger, misery, sorrow and shame that everyone feels. “I show it to them [the public] … They think I can help.”

In another comment, cited by Colin Escott in his biography of Williams, the real-life singer told an interviewer in 1951, “Folk songs express the dreams and prayers and hopes of the working people.” Williams was born in immense poverty in rural southern Alabama and grew up during the Depression. His father was a terrible drunk and his mother was not an easy person. He drank, and ultimately took pills, all his brief life to alleviate physical and psychological pain. But his songs reflected something more than merely his own personal distress and striving. Their rhythms and words tapped into the sentiments of large numbers of people. As historian Rachel Rubin notes: “In its most important early decades (the 1920s to 1940s), country music told the story of urbanization, and the genre’s relationship to rural living was more a musical epitaph for a way of life increasingly being left behind.” Source: www.wsws.org

Like a sonnet, or a hymn, Hank Williams’ songs are timeless both because of and in spite of their structural limitations, using primary colors to drill down to the primary essences of the most primary human emotions. Unfortunately, Marc Abraham’s Williams biopic “I Saw the Light” fails to mirror its subject, focusing on the footnotes, the asides and the marginalia instead of the singular genius at its center. Despite a thoroughly committed, impressive performance from Tom Hiddleston as Williams, the film tackles the life of one of the 20th century’s most seminal musicians with all the passion of a stenographer. Erasing all traces of Britishness from his voice, Hiddleston makes for a very effective country singer; he doesn’t necessarily sound like Williams, but as with Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line,” the sheer amount of effort the actor took to nail a number of the singer’s distinctive tics, hiccups and blue notes is obvious. Source: variety.com

Country song craft was in transition. From the dawn of recorded country music in 1923, country songs had been a mixture of traditional ballads, dance tunes, Victorian parlor songs, hymns, blues, and vaudeville numbers. Deep introspection was rare. As far back as a 1947 Montgomery Advertiser feature, Hank Williams was dubbed “the hillbilly Shakespeare.” His songs were the true-to-life blues. Like most truly great songwriters, he flirted with banality, but nearly always managed to sidestep it. Hank’s ultimate triumph as a songwriter was that he learned to tell an audience of thousands what he couldn’t tell someone sitting one-on-one across the room. Hank felt the need to mask his tenderheartedness with callousness and shitkicker bravado, but in his songs he let his weakness show, increasingly so once he discovered that everyone else was weak too.

In endless gestures of appeasement toward Audrey Mae Sheppard, Hank bought jewelry and things for the home as she performed the sacred task of perpetuating his line. All the while, Audrey was more interested in perpetuating her career. She could truly see no reason why Hank’s applause should not be hers. After four years as a singer, she still had little grasp of how she really sounded. The pickers said that she sang “between the frets” (meaning she hit neither one note nor the other). Horace Logan recalled: "Audrey was a pure, unmitigated, hard-boiled, blue-eyed bitch. She wanted to be a singer and she was horrible, unbelievably horrible. She not only tried to sing, she insisted on it, and she forced herself out onstage when Hank was out there."

Wondering what Audrey was doing while he was out on the road contributed to Hank’s broodiness and general upset. He saw the band members happy to get off the road and get home to their wives and families. He would go home and perhaps not find Audrey there at all. If she was there, they’d probably have a fight. As early as 1950, coming in off the road, he had told the guys that he was going to Acuff-Rose to pick up a check for two thousand dollars, go home, give Audrey half of it, then spend the rest of the night fighting with her over the other half. It just wasn’t funny anymore. Still, Hank loved Audrey, but it’s clear that she no longer loved him.

Audrey claimed that she was divorcing Hank for the good of the children. Hank knew that he had failed and, according to those close to him, still hoped from time to time for a reconciliation. In the cross-complaint Hank spoke of his humiliation and grief when he heard what Audrey had done (an abortion). Hank’s cross-complaint document was, by turns, sad and bitter. Hank more or less agreed to Audrey’s terms, despite the fact that his lawyer considered them punitive. This, according to Price, was because Hank wanted to show his continued love for Audrey and his regret over what had happened. Audrey got the house on Franklin Road, and one-half of all Hank’s future royalties with a binding obligation upon MGM and Acuff-Rose to remit them directly to her. If Audrey ever remarried, her claim upon the royalties would end and Hank’s only obligation would be a maintenance payment of $300 a month for Hank Jr. until he was twenty-one.

Hank’s self-defeating conduct stemmed in part from his perception that he was being marketed as a commodity. He was sent to fly the flag for country music in general and the Grand Ole Opry in particular. The comfort and joy he’d once drawn from checking the charts diminished now that he came to see himself as commodified. Never especially forthcoming, he withdrew all the more now that Audrey was gone. As 1952 wore on, Hank was increasingly past caring what the Opry’s plans were, and whether or not he figured in them. Most of those who worked with him that year talk of his rapid disintegration. There’s a romantic notion that the writer or poet calms his troubled soul by reducing it to rhyme, but as Hank Williams pulled off his boots and eased himself gingerly onto his bed, the little verses he had scratched out in his untutored spidery handwriting almost certainly offered him no relief at all.

The final paradox is that Hank Williams left no journals, almost no letters, and no extended interviews, and the people who knew him best have to admit that on some level they didn’t know him at all. Yet, for all the ambiguity and unknowableness, Hank Williams appears almost desperately real to us through his music. At his best, he froze a moment or a feeling in terms simple enough to register instantly yet meaningful enough to listen to forever. ―"I Saw the Light: The Story of Hank Williams" (2015) by Colin Escott & George Merritt

Musically, 1949 was also an important year not just for country music but for pop music in general, with the emergence of Hank Williams, already a major country star, as a mainstream ‘crossover’ artist, with the huge success of his definitive recording of ‘Lovesick Blues’. Williams’ music could be heard in Lubbock (Texas) thanks to his live broadcasts on country music stations – the Louisiana Hayride on KWKH from Shreveport, throughout 1948, and the Grand Ole Opry on WSM from Nashville, where he started in 1949.

Buddy Holly was fascinated by the Hank Williams sound, which involved a semi-yodelling style that stretched and bent individual syllables of words over several notes. But as John Goldrosen has pointed out, there was more to it than that. Williams wrote songs from the heart, drawing on his personal life and speaking directly to his audience, rather than simply performing (in effect, acting) someone else’s message. The fact that so many of his songs dealt in a plaintive or wistful fashion with lost or unrequited love simply made them even more appealing to teenagers. Like Hank Williams, Buddy Holly was deeply influenced by the spiritual sound of the old country church. ―"Not Fade Away: The Life and Music of Buddy Holly" (2012) by John R. Gribbin

"Buddy Holly was sort of a hero. Though a star, he still sounded and looked like a friend. He was one with his listeners, with one important difference: he could successfully express through his music the feelings that those listeners could not express for themselves. And since he was unusual only in his ambition, perseverance and musical talents, his concerns were shared by his audience. When he sang his song, his audience could claim that it was their song too." ―"Remembering Buddy: The Definitive Biography Of Buddy Holly" (2001) by John Goldrosen

Rave On Buddy Holly is a compilation tribute album released on June 28, 2011, through Fantasy Records/Concord Music Group and Hear Music. The track # 17 is "Peggy Sue" revisited by Lou Reed.

Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed, Maureen Tucker and Doug Yule (The Velvet Underground lineup in 1969). Those who have long been left cold by the Velvet Underground cite more than a waft of pretension, the sense that the music requires a pedigree. But that’s nonsense and The Complete Matrix Tapes collection (2015) makes you realize that. This is a band that, were time and circumstances different, could have reached a much wider audience; a band that was equal parts dangerous, demanding, assured, sarcastic, arty, unreal, sincere, tentative, patient, searching, ironic, unpretentious, formidable, and surprisingly capable of pure entertainment.

A lengthy take on “The Ocean” doesn’t just unfold with all the brawn and brain you might expect, it also sounds (despite some sonic limitations) as though it’s being revealed to the band on the spot and, consequently, revealed to us only now, in this very moment. It may be one of the finest moments of the Velvet Underground captured here or anywhere. The same might be said of the 37-minute take on “Sister Ray”. There is nasty, gnarled guitar work that comes crawling out of the speakers like snakes creeping from a swamp, like a transistor transmitting its thin, eerie tones into the night. Source: www.popmatters.com

"Beginning to See the Light" by The Velvet Underground, early version (recorded at the "Temptation Inside Your Heart" session, 1968) from the 'White Light/White Heat' album which was reissued on its 45th Anniversary in 2013.

Fever City, Rock and Roll Fever: Buddy Holly

If you took James Ellroy at his most imaginative and Oliver Stone at his most conspiratorial, and mixed them up in a supersized martini shaker, you would produce the vivid writing, explosive events, and irresistible entertainment of Fever City.

The story kicks off in 1960 Los Angeles, with the daring kidnapping of the child of one of America's richest men. It then darts back and forth between a private detective's urgent search for the child, the saga of a notorious hit man in the days leading to JFK's assasination, and the modern-day story of a skeptical journalist researching the still-active conspiracy theories of the 50s and 60s, with the aim of debunking them. Just as the detective discovers that the kidnapping is a crime much larger than he imagined, and the hit man finds himself caught in a web that is astonighingly complex, the journalist discovers -to his horror, dismay, and even his jeopardy- that the conspiracy theories might well be true. Source: www.amazon.com

The plane crash that claimed the lives of three rock 'n' roll stars, including Buddy Holly, could be investigated afresh by US transport safety experts. According to the Mason City Globe Gazette, the NTSB received the request from a pilot from New England called LJ Coon. Source: www.bbc.com

Clear Lake, Iowa (May 1, 2015): The National Transportation Safety Board will not reopen the investigation of the plane crash in February 1959 that killed Lubbock-born rock pioneer Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and "Big Bopper" J.P. Richardson. The NTSB said Coon did not present enough evidence to back up his assertions. Source: www.kwtx.com

Gary W. Moore (author of Hey Buddy, 2011) discounted conspiracy theories alleging a gunshot from a handgun owned by Holly brought down the plane. Barb Dwyer, wife of Jerry Dwyer, who was the fixed base operator at the airport and owner of the plane, declined to comment on Coon's attempts to reopen the crash investigation. Source: globegazette.com

Rolling Stone critic Johnathan Cott eloquently singled out "Peggy Sue" as a masterpiece: "With Peggy Sue, he created the first rock and roll folk heroine. In Peggy Sue Got Married, Peggy Sue vanishes, like Lolita, into the mythology of American Romance." About this mythic Peggy Sue, the words revealed nothing other than that she made her moody paramour feel ‘blue’, yet still love her ‘with a love so rare ’n’ true’. Where she came to life was in the ever-changing shades and shifts of Buddy’s voice, her name repeated over and over like a mantra – now murmured in tongue-tied bashfulness, now stretched to a six-syllable schoolyard taunt (‘Sue-oo-oooo-oo-oo’), now hiccuped, now sighed in rapture, now transmuted into a ringing four-chord eulogy, perhaps the most infallibly nerve-tingling solo in all rock ’n’ roll.

The Real Buddy Holly: In truth, Lubbock always went on with or without Buddy Holly, the city’s only world-famous native son. Two decades passed before city officials, in the wake of a Hollywood film depicting Buddy’s life, saw fit to erect a statue of the great musician. This seeming apathy has been a matter of consid­erable outrage among Holly fans, but one acquaintance of Buddy’s suggests that Buddy would have had no hard feelings. “There’s a stubbornness in Lubbock, which Buddy himself had,” says Peggy Sue Rackham, the woman immortalized in two Buddy Holly songs.

Understanding Buddy Holly is a different matter. He could be numbingly shy or obnoxiously self-confident depending on whether he was holding a guitar at the time. Even his musical genius is hard to nail down. As a lyricist, he was disarmingly cavalier. He was a stealth rocker, that hayseed grin and those im­possibly daft glasses making the world safe for the audacious overtures suggested in “Rave On,” “Oh Boy!” and especially “Not Fade Away”: “I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be/You’re gonna give your love to me.” While Elvis’ gyrations were inducing panic in the world, Buddy was slipping hedonism through the front door like a bouquet proffered by a happy-faced delivery boy.

His was a triumph of subver­sion; but how such a feat grew out of a per­fectly ordinary boyhood in Lubbock is an astounding mystery, one that no one has ever come close to solving. Amburn’s primary source for Buddy’s teenage antics is a Lubbock musician named Tin­ker Carlen. If only there had been loose Lub­bock women in the fifties to have had one’s way with, several of Buddy’s male pals lamented to me, adding that Buddy was every bit as unlucky as they were. Similarly, several of Amburn’s sources scoff at the author’s theory that Buddy had a drinking problem, “He wasn’t even a moderate drinker,” Sonny Curtis told me. Leaden with errors, Buddy Holly: A Bi­ography would be merely an embarrassment if it weren’t fundamentally mean-spirited.

Buddy Holly was on a roll. In June, while visiting his music publisher in New York, he laid eyes on the company’s rav­ishing Puerto Rican secretary, Maria Elena Santiago, asked her out that night, and proposed to her over dinner. In August the couple were married in the Holley home. They returned to Manhattan and moved into a Greenwich Village apartment. Despite his multitude of hit singles, Buddy was broke: The royalty money was tied up in the account of his manager, Norman Petty. Buddy convinced the Crickets that they needed to wash their hands of Petty and move permanently to New York, where they could get better representa­tion. After a tour in late October, they converged on Petty’s studio in Clovis. But Buddy and Maria arrived to find that the Crickets were already there, and that Petty had talked the boys into staying with him. “I want my money,” Buddy said. According to Maria, Petty replied, “I’d rather see you starve to death first.” Source: www.texasmonthly.com

In order to allow J.I. Allison to impress the real Peggy Sue, Buddy gave him the songwriting credit on the record. For his own reasons, Norman Petty added his name. Buddy could take someone else’s song and make it his own with a vastly superior rendition. By contrast, nobody, not even the Beatles, ever took a Buddy Holly song and improved upon his own recording of it.

Exactly why ‘That’ll Be The Day’ took so long to get into the charts never has been satisfactorily explained. For most rock ’n’ roll classics, success has appeared soaringly effortless with the frenetic pace at which America’s record business operated in the rock ’n’ roll fever of early 1957. The blend of sounds, which has seemed unimprovably right to modern ears, was an unusual, even eccentric one in mid-1957. And the voice sounded unlike that of a potential teenage idol, being totally lacking in sexual suggestiveness, self-pitying angst or any other clue that its owner belonged to the same generation as Elvis, Ricky Nelson or Eddie Cochran.

June Clark was a highly attractive woman, slim and wavy-blonde, with snub, big-eyed features glancingly like those of Brigitte Bardot, the French ‘sex kitten’. Her job on the cosmetics counter at Hull’s drugstore gave her an aura of glossy, nylon-crisp untouchability. But she found herself increasingly drawn to Buddy for his charm, his kindliness, his singleminded ambition and the dark, lonely depths in him which now and then revealed themselves. ‘I knew he liked me because he was a normal young guy,’ June says: ‘But the thing he always wanted to do most when we were together was just talk to me.’ June had been prepared for a superficial flirtation. But the intensity of Buddy’s feelings began to alarm her. Forgetting the need for discretion, he phoned her constantly, and also took to hanging around the Hull drugstore. ‘He’d just stand there staring at me while I waited on customers, till it got to be really embarrassing and unnerving.’

Since groupies and drugs still were almost nonexistent pleasures of ‘the road’, having fun meant one thing only. ‘We’d sometimes be drunk in the morning,’ J.I. has since admitted, ‘and stay drunk all day.’ This slackness and unprofessionalism infuriated Buddy. Lubbock may have been slow to recognize his enormous fame, but at least that has prevented any hint of the tacky opportunism with which Elvis Presley is memorialized at Graceland. In death, as in his brief life, Buddy remains untainted by vulgarity. On a basis of simply counting heads, rock music surpasses even film as the most influential art form of the twentieth century. By that reckoning, there is a case for calling Buddy Holly the 20th century’s most influential musician. Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly are the two seminal figures of fifties rock ’n’ roll.—"Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly" (2014) by Philip Norman

In The Buddy Holly Story (1978), the legend from Lubbock, Texas, is reassessed in a thoroughly entertaining musical biography that mixes fact and fiction in equal parts, a practice Hollywood is unable to resist despite the potential for distortion and false allegations. Luckily, the film captures Holly's charm and stubborn individuality through Gary Busey's chameleon-like performance in the title role. As the story progresses from Holly's formation of his band, the Crickets, to his departure for a recording career in New York City, it also charts the evolution of some of the musician's most famous tunes. The Buddy Holly Story also took dramatic liberties with biographical details (the scene in the church where Holly's pastor attacks his music was fabricated - the two men were close friends in real life) and completely omitted Norman Petty, Holly's producer, from the story line.

For the actors, however, The Buddy Holly Story was a dream come true. Gary Busey, who was once a drummer with Leon Russell's band, threw himself into the lead role with such intensity that he began to resemble Holly, the result of heavy dieting and the makeup department's influence (horn-rimmed glasses and curled hair). He also got a charge out of performing Holly's music with co-stars Charles Martin Smith and Don Stroud.

Audiences and critics were into The Buddy Holly Story as well, and typical of the reviews was this assessment by Film Quarterly: "Director Steve Rash and Gary Busey have interpreted The Buddy Holly Story with an unpolished beauty that remains faithful both to the spirit of the man and to his music." The film went on to receive three Oscar nominations in 1978. Busey was nominated for Best Actor. He would later say he won the role of the late singer because "they finally realized I have the same-sized teeth." Source: www.tcm.com

Rare Songs by Frank Sinatra, Chairman of the Board Film Collection

A rare recording from his 1945 radio program, Songs by Sinatra. Had he survived the cold, music legend Frank Sinatra would have celebrated his 100th birthday this year. But there's still some of his stuff almost no one in the world has heard—so all of that is coming out in a new compilation this month. Sinatra had a long history of performing the American classic Ol’ Man River by Jerome Kern & Oscar Hammerstein II. The song was one of his go-to tunes for nearly three decades. He sang it during his Man and His Music TV special and even included a stripped-down rendition during his 1962 world tour. The version below is taken from one of his early performances, from a radio show in 1945. At just 30 years old, a young Sinatra sings what will become a lifelong favorite for one of the first times. Source: www.thedailybeast.com

To celebrate “The Chairman of the Board’s” centennial, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment (WBHE) release Frank Sinatra: 3 Film Collection DVD & Blu-ray on November 16th and we have a Blu-ray up for grabs! This collection includes newly re-mastered releases of Anchors Aweigh, On the Town and Robin and the 7 Hoods for the first time on Blu-ray and is packed full of new special features!

Throughout his six-decade career, Frank Sinatra performed on more than 1,400 recordings and was awarded 31 gold, nine platinum, three double platinum and one triple platinum album by the Recording Industry Association of America. Sinatra demonstrated a remarkable ability to appeal to every generation and continues to do so; his artistry still influences many of today’s music superstars. He also appeared in more than 60 films and produced eight motion pictures. Source: www.nerdly.co.uk

Sinatra had been growing steadily more impatient with Capitol Records, with which his contract would expire in November 1962. He had been agitating for many things—a greater share of the profits, a producer of his own, control of his master recordings—but it’s hard to escape the impression that what he wanted most of all was out. When one listens to the recordings Frank made on the night of May 14 —and especially to his new “I’ll Never Smile Again”— it’s hard to escape the impression that, consciously or not, he already had one foot out the door. Singing over Jenkins’s sad strings, Sinatra sounds tender and vulnerable and middle-aged; there’s a slight quaver to his voice that’s not at all unattractive. Yet as he sings the first chorus —I’ll never smile again, until I smile at you, I’ll never laugh again, what good would it do— something quite strange happens. His pitch is uncertain from the first syllable, and—after weirdly mispronouncing the word “laugh” as “luff”—he hits an unmistakable clam on the word “do.” Frank’s ear was exquisitely tuned: he was famous for bringing a take to a grinding halt if, say, the third violin was a half note off, fixing the offender with an ice-blue glare and saying, “Where you working next week?” He would do multiple takes of a song if anything about his vocal or the accompaniment displeased him. Why did he not rerecord this “Smile”? –SINATRA: THE CHAIRMAN (2015) by JAMES KAPLAN