Buddy Holly's mystery, The Permissive Society

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 

Happy New Year 2017!

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before. -Mae West.

Miles Teller's Truck Accident

We're told Miles Teller was driving in the San Fernando Valley late Thursday night when an Uber driver made a left turn in front of Teller, who was driving with his girlfriend. Miles' Bronco flipped over. He was not injured but enraged and got out of the truck screaming, "You f***** up my truck." 

We're told he was so angry people had to restrain him from attacking the Uber driver. Our law enforcement sources say the accident was not Miles' fault. It's clear from the photo the Uber driver made a left when it was unsafe. An ambulance came and took 2 passengers in the Uber to the hospital after they complained of minor injuries. An eyewitness says Miles appeared concerned about the 2 injured people. Law enforcement sources tell TMZ drugs or alcohol did not play a factor in the crash. We're told Teller put about $200k in the restoring his SUV over the years... ouch. It's interesting... Miles' 2 biggest movie roles -- "Whiplash" and "Bleed for This" feature his characters getting in a bad car accident. And, when he was 20, he got in a near-fatal car crash. Source: www.tmz.com

Buddy Holly and the Science of Music

Rave On - A Buddy Holly Biography (2001) documentary.

The evolution of popular music: USA 1960–2010: Between 1960 and 2009, the mean frequency of H1 declined by about 75%. H1 captures the use of dominant-seventh chords. Inherently dissonant (because of the tritone interval between the third and the minor-seventh), these chords are commonly used in Jazz to create tensions that are eventually resolved to consonant chords featured in tracks such as “I Feel So Bad” by Elvis Presley; songs tagged blues or jazz have a high frequency of H1; it is especially common in the songs of Blues artists such as B.B. King and Jazz artists such as Nat ‘King’ Cole. The decline of this topic, then, represents the lingering death of Jazz and Blues in the Hot 100 Billboard. Styles and genres represent populations of music that have evolved unique characters (topics), or combinations of characters, in partial geographical or cultural isolation, like country music in the Southern USA during the 1920s.

Music historians attribute this wholesale change of rock to the British Invasion of the early 1960s, when the Beatles and the Rolling Stones arrived in America and were followed by dozens of other Brit bands. Computer analysis paints a different picture. The signature features of this era — such as loud guitar, major chords with no changes and bright, energetic melodies — predated the arrival of Brit bands. This theme makes sense, said Ohio State University music professor David Huron: “When we think of styles, the prototypes are often not the earliest examples.” But even though the Beatles and the Rolling Stones didn’t initiate the revolution, both bands had 66 hits on the Hot-100 before 1968. The remaining H-topics capture the evolution of other musical styles. H3, for example, embraces minor-seventh chords used for harmonic colour in funk, disco and soul. Between 1967 and 1977, the mean frequency of H3 more than doubles. H6 combines several chord changes that are a mainstay in modal rock tunes. Its increase between 1978 and 1985, and subsequent decline in the early 1990s, marks the age of Arena Rock.


Of all H-topics, H5 shows the most striking change in frequency. This topic, which captures the absence of identifiable chord structure, barely features in the 1960s and 1970s when, a few spoken-word-music collages aside (e.g. those of Dickie Goodman), nearly all songs had clearly identifiable chords. H5 starts to become more frequent in the late 1980s and then rises rapidly to a peak in 1993.

Accordingly, T1 is over-represented in songs tagged dance, disco and new wave and artists such as The Pet Shop Boys. After 1990, the frequency of T1 declines: the reign of the drum machine was over. Source: rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org

In 1959, at age thirteen, Dodie Stevens had the #1 hit, gold record  “Tan Shoes & Pink Shoe Laces”. She followed with “Yes, I'm Lonesome Tonight” and “Merry, Merry Christmas Baby”, which all hit the Billboard charts in the early 60's. She toured worldwide with Fabian, Frankie Avalon, Annette Funicello, Paul Anka, Bobby Rydell and many more teen idols from that era.  In February 2009, she joined her peers in Clear Lake, Iowa at the Surf Ballroom to perform in a 5-day memorial concert, “Fifty Winters Later” (in memory of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper). 

By the beginning of 1959 the rumour about Buddy Holly visiting Cookham on Saturday March 1st 1958 had mostly been forgotten. Buddy Holly was in London where he was playing that evening at the Elephant and Castle Trocadero. Bored with the noise and bustle of London, Buddy decided to go for a train ride. When the young waitress Mary Brown served Buddy his glass of lemonade at the teashop, she wasn’t sure if this man was Buddy Holly. However when she was handed the signed sketch, there was absolutely no doubt. They say that when we dream, what appears to us to be a full-length story, only in fact takes a few seconds to flash through our mind. Folklore would have us believe that during Buddy Holly’s final moments, it would have been his whole life that flashed before him. On the morning of February 3rd Mary Brown woke suddenly from a terrible nightmare.  She had been dreaming that the chest of drawers in her bedroom was ablaze. It was 7 am.  Four thousand miles away in Iowa USA, it was  1am - and the precise moment the plane carrying Buddy Holly hit the ground. Mary sat on the edge of the bed for several minutes. Her heart was pounding.

Mary slowly opened the drawer.  This was the first time Mary had looked at the sketch since she'd put it away. Mary was rooted to the spot - shocked by her sister's sudden appearance. "He was at the tea shop," Elizabeth said venomously: "Give me the drawing." "No," Mary replied, turning to face her sister: "He gave it to me." Elizabeth grabbed the edge of the paper, to pull the sketch away from Mary. The paper ripped and Elizabeth ended up with a small corner of it in her hand. Without hesitating Mary tore the sketch in two. Then into four.  And she kept on tearing the page into smaller and smaller pieces until she reached the point that she couldn’t tear it any more.  Then she threw the pieces towards her sister - and these fluttered to the floor like snow flakes. Four thousand miles away in Iowa, the body of Buddy Holly was lying on the frozen ground not far from the mangled wreckage of the plane. Snow was gently falling from out of a pitch-black sky.  There were no stars showing.  And everything was absolutely silent. —The Last Dream of Buddy Holly (2016) by James Chalmers 

"Music transmitted from generation to generation shapes autobiographical memories, preferences, and emotional responses, a phenomenon we call cascading 'reminiscence bumps,'" explains psychological scientist and lead researcher Carol Lynne Krumhansl of Cornell University. To explore the connection between autobiographical memories and musical memories, Krumhansl and Justin Zupnick of the University of California, Santa Cruz asked 62 college-age participants to listen to two top Billboard hits per year from 1955 to 2009. And there was a 'reminiscence bump' for the music of the 1960s -- more than two decades before the participants were born. Krumhansl and Zupnick speculate that reminiscence for this music could have been transmitted from the participants' grandparents, who would have been in their 20s or 30s in the 1960s. Another possibility -- one that might be favored by those of the Baby Boomer generation -- is that the music of the 1960s is truly of higher quality. Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Music brings memories back to the injured brain: In their study, A. Baird and S. Samson played extracts from 'Billboard Hot 100' number-one songs in random order to five patients. The songs, taken from the whole of the patient's lifespan from age five, were also played to five control subjects with no brain injury. All were asked to record how familiar they were with a given song, whether they liked it, and what memories it invoked." The findings suggest that music is an effective stimulus for eliciting autobiographical memories and may be beneficial in the rehabilitation of autobiographical amnesia, but only in patients without a fundamental deficit in autobiographical recall memory and intact pitch perception." The authors hope to learn more about the clear relationship between memory, music and emotion; they hope that one day we might truly "understand the mechanisms underlying the unique memory enhancing effect of music." Source: www.sciencedaily.com

As a kid, Buddy Holly showed a quick aptitude for music, taking violin and piano lessons, and later steel guitar lessons. It wasn't until his older brother Travis Holley returned from the Marine Corps with a $15 pawnshop Harmony that Buddy took up guitar. "I taught him a few basic chords - - G,C,D,A,E," recalls Travis, "and before long he was telling me, 'No, Travis, you're playing it wrong, it should go like this.'" Buddy was very quick to learn.  -Larry Holley (The Buddy I Knew)

Peggy Sue Gerron had a crush on Buddy Holly since the day she had tripped over him in the halls of Lubbock High School. He reportedly complimented her as 'pretty' and she considered him 'attractive, not nerdy.' “Lubbock, Texas, in 1954 and 1955 was very, very provincial,” says Harold Womack, who was one year behind Holly at Lubbock High School. Another classmate, James Pritchard, says: “Buddy was pretty much of a loner, too. It was pretty hard on him around here for a while. A lot of people would laugh at some of the stuff he’d do.” “We called Buddy ‘Four Eyes’ because he was farsighted and wore glasses. Buddy was not popular in school. It was Buddy that impressed Elvis back stage after the concert at Fair Park Coliseum in 1955. Buddy showed Elvis how to play slide guitar when he was playing ‘Big Boss Man.’ Also, it was Larry Welborn that showed Bill Black, Elvis’s bass player, how to slap the bass by loosening the E string... They called us all rock hillbillies, then it was changed to rockabilly and Alan Freed started to call it rock-n-roll.” —Tinker Carlen interviewed by Dick Stewart for The Lance Monthly, May 2008 issue.

The essence of rock and roll genius is synthesis. Buddy Holly was the most innovative performer of the 1950s, the single most important rocker in the aftermath of Elvis, a Do-It-Yourself idol in an era of stars manipulated and puppeteered by backstage deals and big-bucks payola. Chuck Berry poeticized the 1950s teenage America, but his chord structures and melodic harmonies lacked Holly's classical sophistication. Jerry Lee Lewis played a great rock piano, but he didn't have Holly's versatility. Eddie Cochran, who was often described as 'James Dean with a guitar,' pioneered punk-rock. Holly was the most original, creating new progressions to the time-worn 12-Bar blues style. Elvis had a burning stage charisma and a panther strut, but Buddy Holly could ram raw rock and roll, coo croony ballads, wax weird comedy tunes, and slash a fiery Fender vibrato guitar. "Peggy Sue" showed Holly's genius in altering regular rock and roll to cult status: it glides in the guitar-friendly key of A major. On the third verse, Holly suddenly steeplechases into a weird, wild Polynesian F major chord. "Oh Boy" leads off on a traditional 12-bar Blues double verse, stomps off into a booming bridge on the downbeat dominant seventh chord E-7, throttling his way into rock and roll destiny. 

Philosophically, "It doesn't matter anymore" (a pioneer violin strings experiment) presages a glum world view, the grunge music (Kurt Cobain, Wilco) and musically is cutting-edge for 1959, rivaling "Everyday" as a profound music minuet. "It doesn't matter anymore" offers a voluptuous variation of the archetypical blues riff, sliding through the tonic notes, sensuously shuffling the root C and the G-A-Bb-A-G pyramid, blending a slide guitar with an unheard-of classical major seventh interval. Of all the 50's rock and roll giants, including Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly was the most selfless, the most talented and the most likable. He loved his music, his wife, and his fans. —"Rock N Roll Gold Rush" (2003) by Maury Dean

"Most of the time Buddy Holly spent in Lubbock was dedicated to perfecting that art form, rock-n-roll, which he would bring to the misfit youth of America and the world. Buddy's dream changed the world. While Elvis will always be the King of Rock-n-Roll, Buddy Holly is most certainly its George Washington. Buddy brought Rock-n-Roll to the people who truly needed it. Buddy Holly gave hope to all the outcasts, misfits, artists, dreamers, shakers, wailers & moaners of the world."—"Buddy Holly: Master Dreamcrafter" (2000) by Chris Oblesgy

Buddy’s father looked on Maria Elena as his daughter, he later told Goldrosen. L. O. Holley heaped extravagant praise on her, telling her that her marriage to his son was the most beneficial thing that had ever occurred in Buddy’s life: She had unleashed Buddy from Norman Petty’s strings, and marriage was transforming Buddy into a real “man.”  In 1993 Maria Elena recalls his farewell words to her before joining the Winter Dance Party tour in the late January 1959: “Buddy said, ‘I want you to take care of yourself and my baby.” In all likelihood, the last thing Buddy Holly saw was the face of Maria Elena and that of their unborn child. —"The Day Music Died: The Last Tour of Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens" (2003) by Larry Lehmer

Merry Christmas (Vintage Rock & Roll)

Christmas Songs from the 50's: (Everybody's Waitin' For) the Man with the Bag by Kay Starr 1950, Santa's Surprise 1947, It's Christmas Time again by Peggy Lee & Victor Young 1953, Pluto's Christmas Tree 1952, December by Kay Starr, Santa Baby by Eartha Kitt 1953, Cool Yule by Louis Armstrong 1953, Rudolf the rednosed reindeer 1948, The Christmas Blues by Dean Martin 1953, Dig that crazy Santa Claus by Oscar McCollie & His Honeyjumpers 1954, Judy Garland - Christmas Special 1963, Mrs. Santa Claus by Nat King Cole, I've Got My Love To Keep Me Warm by Louis Armstrong & Ella Fitzgerald 1957, Christmas In Connecticut 1945, This time of year by Brook Benton 1959, The Bishop's Wife 1947, Santa bring my baby back to me by Elvis Presley 1957, What Are You Doing New Year's Eve by Ella Fitzgerald 1960.

COCA COLA LA BAMBA

La Bamba Cola, on-line video games and limited-edition guitars are some of the products planned to bring revive the popularity of Ritchie Valens. The new licensing and merchandising deal by Southern California-based C3 Entertainment marks the first time that the image of the teenage Latino rock pioneer -- who died with Buddy Holly in a 1959 plane crash -- will be promoted through an official licensing initiative sanctioned by Valens’ family. Ani Khachoian, C3’s Executive Vice President of Licensing, Merchandising and Distribution, told Billboard: “We want to make sure every fan has the opportunity to rediscover this rock ’n’ roll icon, and that we introduce Valens to new audiences. He was a talented, positive young man, who worked hard. It’s a wonderful legacy for young people.”

C3 also represents the legacy of The Big Bopper, who died in the snowy crash with Valens and Holly while on their Winter Dance Party tour. In addition, C3 created the licensing program for John Mueller’s Winter Dance Party, a current touring tribute show featuring Mueller performing as Holly, with other artists paying homage to Valens and the Big Bopper.

Ritchie Valens, best known for his hit “La Bamba,” signed to Del-Fi Records in 1958 and recorded two albums, releasing singles that included “Donna,” which reached no. 2 on the Billboard pop chart. The 1978 movie La Bamba, starring Lou Diamond Phillips with music performed by Los Lobos, brought Valens’ story to new audiences; the soundtrack album sold 2 million copies in the United States. C3’s Khachoian says that a La Bamba Cola beverage is set to be manufactured and distributed by the Rocket Fizz Soda Pop & Candy Shops chain. Source: www.billboard.com

Limited edition (1997) of the Buddy Holly commemorative Coca-Cola bottle. In September 1997 the Lubbock Music Festival in Texas celebrated what would have been the founder of Rock & Roll's 61st birthday, whose birth date was September 7, 1936. In his memory, the Coca-Cola Company made 5,000 Special Commemorative  Buddy Holly Coke bottles. Source: www.classic-usa-cars.com

In early December 1957, the Crickets flew back to Texas, their first visit home since becoming international recording stars. As if it had undergone a mass lobotomy, Lubbock took no official notice of their homecoming, though Buddy Holly was the only famous person the city had ever produced. As if to prove he was a star, he rented a limousine from the airport to his parents’ humble dwelling. Gazing out the limo window, he saw that nothing had changed in Lubbock. He was disappointed when he arrived home and found no one there, his mother later told Bill Griggs. During the 1957 Christmas holidays the first royalty check, $192,000, arrived from Coral/Brunswick. Where, they wondered, were their $50,000 songwriting royalties for “That’ll Be the Day,” which should have been split three ways between Buddy, the Crickets, and Norman Petty? and [where were] their Broadcast Music Incorporated earnings (fees collected for each air play on radio and television)? When pressed, Petty offered no records to prove his contention. Hi Pockets Duncan revealed in a radio special on Buddy Holly that Petty had been siphoning 90 percent of their earnings.

Christmas 1957 found the Crickets on the rising platform stage of the nation’s No. 1 showplace in the heart of Times Square. Their co-stars on Alan Freed’s “Holiday of Stars Twelve Days of Christmas Show” were Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, and the Everly Brothers. Many of the performers on the Paramount bill, including the Crickets, regarded the Paramount show as the culmination of the their careers. All his life Joe B. had been told he’d never amount to more than “a cotton farmer from Lubbock, Texas,” he related to Bill Griggs, but now “we were on Times Square in New York and it was Christmastime.” Nowhere is Christmas observed with more panache than in Manhattan, where, in Rockefeller Center, a block-long row of silver angels trumpets their welcome all the way from Sak’s Fifth Avenue to the huge Christmas tree in the skating rink underneath the RCA Building. In the windows at Lord & Taylor’s department store, animated puppets re-create familiar fairy tales and Yuletide stories. —Buddy Holly: A Biography (1995) 

Buddy Holly: playing for the fans of the future

Decca continued its insensitivity to Holly's talent and total mismanagement of his career. Buddy Holly was unable to pay his musicians. Sonny Curtis did not come to Nashville this time, nor did Jerry Allison. Only Don Guess accompanied him when he went into Bradley’s Barn on November 15, 1956, to record “Modern Don Juan” and “You Are My One Desire.” No hits emerged from this session, but both songs contained glimmers of Buddy’s genius. “Modern Don Juan” is the story of a virile teenager who is a victim of his own promiscuity. With half the girls in his neighborhood gossiping about what a stud he is, the one girl he really cares about is unimpressed when he says he’s fallen in love with her. 

Buddy Holly and Hutchinson Jr. High pal Bob Montgomery had done a Lubbock ‘Hayride’ live gig on KDAV radio at tender age 15 or so, with help from Amarillo DJ guru Hi-Pockets Duncan. Somehow Holly scored a contract with Decca, but they ditched Montgomery. Buddy and the Three Tunes cut his first Nashville record with country producer Owen Bradley—“Love Me” on January 26, 1956. It didn’t vault to the top, but did shimmer with hot licks of star guitar guys Sonny Curtis on lead and Grady Martin on rhythm. Famous session guy Martin sparks Elvis tunes, and picks Marty Robbins’ Tex-Mex riffs on #1, ‘59 “El Paso.” Buddy’s road to the big time, however, screeched to a dismal detour, for 1956 made Elvis, not Buddy, a superstar.

Sonny James, whose ballad “Young Love” hit #1 in 1956, and Hank Thompson knew young (19 years old) Buddy Holly had a one-in-a-million voice. They signed him up to open for country stars Faron Young and young George Jones. Buddy’s original session in Nashville, with great guitars and steady stand-up bass musings of Don Guess, omitted one key component—a drummer (Doug Kirkham is listed on ‘percussion’). By October ‘56, a mysterious Thompson tour coalesced somewhere—gig dates are lost in the swirls of yestergone bye-bye Miss American Pie.

In this magical mystery tour, they brought the 2nd genius, 16-year-old drumstick wizard and Lubbock High pal Jerry Allison, to boost the beat of Don Guess’s big bull fiddle, with Buddy’s hot licks on guitar. Thompson was so impressed with his opening band of kids juiced with sizzly Texan energy, that he signed them up for a January 1957 winter tour of Little Rock, Arkansas, plus 14 other dates at burgs like New Orleans, Jacksonville, Florida, Savannah, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. 

The first, innovative stage of rock ’n’ roll approached its concluding days. The aftershocks of the police riot during Alan Freed's "Big Beat” show at the Boston Arena on May, 3, 1958 were extremely damaging to the way rock ’n’ roll was viewed around the world. According to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover,  rock ’n’ roll was now subversive.  The establishment had reacted by branding rockers as subversives and revolutionaries and would set out to destroy the rock movement. The sensitive, usually well-behaved and law-abiding young rock singers were astonished that the music they’d invented for their own amusement in Texas garages and on Bronx street corners was now regarded as seditious or they could be prosecuted for treason.

Buddy Holly’s relations with the Crickets remained tenuous. The Crickets had lost all interest in performing. According to Jerry, they started “shucking it.” Buddy threatened to fire them if they persisted in goofing off. Anyone who expected to be in his band, he warned, had better demonstrate more enthusiasm and interest.  They did not perform with him during the October 21 Pythian Temple “string session” in New York that produced, in three and a half hours, what writer Mark Steuer has called “the most inventive music of 1950’s rock”: “True Love Ways” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” After recording “Raining in My Heart” and “Moondreams,” Buddy expressed his worries about how the rock market would greet his experiment with violins. Obviously Holly valued his integrity and sense of responsibility toward his talent and career above money.

Buddy Holly managed to have Maria Elena Santiago invited to a luncheon at Howard Johnson's, thanks to Murray Deutch's secretary at Peer-Southern, Jo Harper. Holly asked Maria Elena to have dinner with him at P. J. Clarke's. Holly proposed marriage to her that night. "While we were having dinner, he got up and came back with his hands behind his back. He brought out a red rose and said, 'This is for you. Would you marry me?' Within the beautiful red rose, there was a ring. I melted." Holly went to her house the next morning and Maria jumped into his arms, which was a sign to him that it was a "yes". They married in Lubbock on August 15, 1958, less than two months later, she told the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal on what would have been their 50th wedding anniversary.

Holly’s parents, Lawrence and Ella, flew to New York to meet Maria Elena. They went out to dinner and later went to the cinema, watching Mr. Roberts starring Henry Fonda and Betsy Palmer. “Buddy’s parents liked me; they said I was like a little doll.” Music historians have reported that Holly was planning to build a new home and recording studio in his hometown, but Maria had told Buddy that she never would feel comfortable living in Lubbock. He assured her that the home would be occupied only by his parents, she said. Source: www.buddyhollyarchives.com

Actually, Buddy Holly first took Maria Elena to lunch in Manhattan at Howard Johnson's. After lunch, Buddy & Maria Elena shopped awhile by Tiffany’s; he bought a few guitar picks and Maria some jewelry. Later he took her to P.J. Clarke’s Pub nearby. Then the impetuous and starry-eyed idol asked her if she’d like to spend the rest of her life with him. After catching her breath, requisite I-love-yous were exchanged, and they launched into their happily ever after. Sadly, their happily-ever-after only lasted a half year. Maria Elena was worldly, tempestuous, and not the slightest bit domestic. “My aunt and I always ate out,” Maria Elena said: “We never cooked!” That was okay: He wasn’t looking for his mother or another Echo McGuire. Buddy gave Maria Elena a check to buy a wedding dress in Lubbock. Another cheque drawn on the Buddy Holly and the Crickets account and signed by Norman Petty, reads, ‘To: Gift Mart Jlrs Inc. $515 For: Ring – engagement.’

Matt McClure as Buddy Holly with Ariella Corinne Pizarro as his wife Maria Elena, in the Venice Theatre's production of "The Buddy Holly Story" (2015), Sarasota, Florida.

The rock package shows of the fifties were largely Irvin Feld’s innovation; their all-rock-star rosters distinguished them from their British counterparts. In England, rock tours were made up of traditional music-hall variety acts with perhaps a single rock attraction on the bill. Nevertheless GAC would come in for severe criticism for its treatment of rock ’n’ roll performers. “The executives of the company didn’t like rock music,” Frank Barcelona, a former GAC agent, revealed in Robert Stephen Spitz’s Artists and Executives of the Rock Music Business: “The way the agency treated rock performers was a crime.… They didn’t like rock performers, knew nothing about the music, couldn’t relate to the audiences.” Shivering and miserable, the performers realized too late that the Winter Dance Party tour was a “third-class operation,” Dion recalled. Discredited by riots and controversy,  the artists were abandoned to abominable conditions in far-flung territories like the upper Midwest. 

The bus’s worn-out engine frequently stalled, usually when they were thirty miles from the closest service station. To ease the tension, Buddy and Dion played “dueling guitars,” wagering to see who could make his Fender Stratocaster ring the longest. Dion’s Fender was solid white, Buddy’s had a sunburst. Ritchie Valens joined the fun, strumming his acoustic and singing songs like “Mama Long,” which he’d made the rage of Pacoima Junior High. During the long ride over icy roads, Ritchie sat with Buddy and rapped about the notorious “girl” songs they’d both been having so much success with. Buddy had virtually invented the genre with “Peggy Sue,” while Ritchie was now scoring the hit of the year with “Donna.” Peggy Sue had already entered the vernacular; Ritchie had mentioned her in “Ooh My Head,” a song he performed in Alan Freed’s movie Go, Johnny, Go! (1959)


They began the 330-mile trip to Appleton, Wisconsin, rumbling along the shores of Lake Superior, where ice floes were colliding like battering rams, entering the North Woods. The heater was no match for icy blasts from the lake, but it was all that stood between them and cruel exposure. Somewhere around Ashland, Wisconsin, the heater heaved its last puny puffs and died. The loose, rattling windows let in the cold and frost. Fifteen miles out of Hurley, disaster struck. They were going up a hill when the engine froze and stopped. “The bus finally broke down, out there in the middle of the wilderness,” Carl Bunch later told Bill Griggs. They were stalled on the highway, in a bus with no heater. The tour party was on U.S. 51, a mile north of Pine Lake, Wisconsin, in the rugged North Woods, not a place where anyone would want to be stranded at one-thirty A.M. on February 1, 1959, during the coldest weather in memory. The bus driver peered into the woods beside the highway; he could “feel” bears out there, he reported in Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review. At least the musicians had the protection of the bus, but even that would soon be denied them. When they ran out of newspapers to burn and began to freeze, they were forced to go outside, hoping to hail down a car. They stood in the middle of the highway, where the wind keening down from the north was as sharp as splintered glass.

The surrounding forest and the Great Lake beyond the trees seemed full of menace. In the early morning hours, traffic in these North Woods was all but nonexistent. The tour party was far less prepared to survive this wilderness than the French explorers who’d discovered it in the 1600s. “We didn’t know enough to be afraid, or what a mid-winter night by the side of the road really meant,” Dion wrote in The Wanderer. It was an hour, Tommy Allsup later told, before a big semi-truck came thundering through the snow. They all started waving frantically. Obviously the driver had no intention of stopping “and tried to get around us,” Tommy added. As the truck disappeared into the enveloping snow, they trudged back to the bus. “We just sat there and froze,” Tommy recalled. Freezing is indeed one of the more gruesome ways to die. Human tissue deteriorates at temperatures below 32 degrees. By now the temperature in the bus was 40 below. The Riverside Ballroom’s dance floor was packed with two thousand teenagers boogying under a gigantic sunburst ceiling.

Some of the girls wore ballet slippers and skintight “stem” skirts; others had on balloon layers of petticoats. Bouffant hair stylings were popular, though many girls looked pert in ponytails and Peter Pan collars. The boys wore their hair crew-cut and preferred dirty white bucks or Florsheim loafers. One fan, Sandy Stone Blaney of Ashwaubenon, Wisconsin, later told writer Mark Steuer how she edged her way to the front of the stage and reached up to Buddy, who “held my hand and sang a song to me,” she said. “And Dion held Sharon Larscheid’s hand and sang a song to her.” When Buddy discovered that GAC had greedily filled their one open date, he was distraught. As the tour manager Carroll Anderson would later observe, Buddy by this point was “just a high-class bum being kicked around on the road.” Buddy felt responsible for the morale of his band, which was at an all-time low after its ordeal in the North Woods. Bob Hale, a radio DJ who emceed the Winter Dance Party at the Surf that night, recalls Holly asked if he could touch Hale's pregnant wife's belly. They talked about Iowa's tough winters, and Holly promised he'd come back in the spring.


In “Not Fade Away” Holly asks his girl to make love to him, promising she’ll get something bigger than a Cadillac. The relationship of the couple in the song follows the same up-and-down, off-and-on course: the singer chastizes his girl for rejecting him, but by the final verse, he’s regained his confidence and is able to assert that the only love that doesn’t die is one grounded in honesty and trust. In rock critic Jonathan Cott’s words, “Holly’s deepest, wisest, and seemingly least complicated songs express the unadorned confrontation of beauty and love with time.” Even though the Big Bopper was six years his senior, Buddy seemed the elder statesmen of the tour in his chunky new Faiosa spectacle-frames and fur-collared coat. He was a self-controlled, abstemious figure who preferred to be alone in his hotel-room (when there was an hotel-room) rather than joining the others to ‘shoot the bull’ down in the bar or coffee-shop. His brother Larry Holley: "My feelings about Buddy: His desire was to be the best. I personally think he would have reached the very pinnacle of the music world if he had got to live longer. Norman Petty cheated Buddy out of millions of dollars by putting his name on every song that Buddy wrote. Also, it's my opinion that The Crickets (Jerry Allison and Joe B.) both deserted Buddy, but they keep riding on his shirttail. They can't write good songs, but just like Norman, they have got their name on songs they could never have written." Sources: —"This'll Be the Day: The Life and Legacy of Buddy Holly" (2009) by Maury Dean, —"Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly" (2011) by Philip Norman

"Damn Cold in February: Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the Atomic Bomb" (2015) by Joni Tevis: Buddy Holly giving it everything he's got... If you knew Peggy Sue, then you'd know why I feel blue, and as he moves into the second verse, the camera on Stage Right goes live, and he pivots smoothly. His fingers are a blur, but he doesn't make mistakes, and that tamped-down sex—how had I missed it?—burns in his eyes. And there's something about the way he stares at the camera that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Elvis, the Big Bopper, Johnny Cash, all play to the audiences at the time mugging for the camera. But watching Buddy, he's playing to the fans of the future. Maybe Holly savors these giddy minutes of getting ready in a strange place, cement-floored dressing rooms with chipped green paint, hand-me-down dressers, and mirrors fastened to the wall with daisy-shaped rivets. He carries with him guitar strings, fuses, safety pins, nail file... And outside, the scurf of people talking, waiting for the show. Waiting for him, Maria Elena, back in their little apartment, lighting the pilot on the stove. The honeymoon in Acapulco. The property in Bobalet Heights: all of these cost money. He's playing the first chords of "Peggy Sue" without even realizing it, diving deep into a pool. Feels the crowd stomping through the soles of his feet, and between songs he has to take off his glasses and wipe the sweat from his eyes. Slides the glasses on. Looks back. When you're with me, the world can see. That you were meant for me. "A studious-looking young man who totes his electric guitar like a sawn-off shot-gun." —Review of Buddy Holly performance, Birmingham, England, March 11, 1958.

Rock & Roll, Buddy Holly's Lasting Art

Classic-rock radio stations thrive parasitically on nostalgia, slowly incorporating ’90s to early-2000s tracks. As radio analyst Sean Ross sees it, even the active rock and alternative formats now feature few current releases, and those that do get played are either unable to cross over to top 40 or are softer genre hybrids that are very debatable as rock at all. Young female artists appropriate rock’s ­flexibility to express out-of-bounds thoughts while ignoring clichéd postures. The likes of St. Vincent, Alabama Shakes, Courtney Barnett, Angel Olsen, embody the thought that Kurt Cobain scribbled in his late ’80s notebooks: “I like the comfort in knowing that women are the only future in rock’n’roll.” Source: www.billboard.com

David Bowie, Prince, George Martin and Leonard Cohen were among the legends on this year’s grim roster. Is it time to add rock music itself? America was a ­quarter-century out from Nirvana’s Nevermind, the album that rescued rock from its early-’90s doldrums -- as far off now as the releases of Revolver, Pet Sounds and Blonde on Blonde were then. By contrast, consider how few new rock artists of comparable staying power or cultural significance have emerged since that decade’s alt-rock surge. “There is no figurehead band you could point to,” says critic Steven Hyden, host of the ­podcast Celebration Rock: “... a band that comes from nowhere and takes over the culture... that’s ­unquestionably over -- if a band like that came out, there would be no infrastructure to support it.” In the “rock era,” there was more space for eccentrics to skew the game.

Rock is now where Jazz was in the early 1980s. From Louis Armstrong in the 1920s to Duke Ellington in the ’30s to Charlie Parker in the ’50s to Miles Davis in the ’60s, jazz evolved at superspeed and never looked over its shoulder. That is where rock finds itself, in a stage of reflection on past glories. Rock-star memoirs are a booming business — Bob Dylan, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, made it cool with “Chronicles: Volume One” in 2004. Rock ’n’ roll as we know it was named in the mid-1950s: a “new” invention, the electric guitar, replaced the horn section. The performer was usually the songwriter, and there was a standard of honesty and authenticity in the rock musician that made him more artist than entertainer. The musicians who wish to push rock forward are no longer in the mainstream. Rock ’n’ roll certainly is for old people now. It’s for those young people who want it, too. Like any music that lasts, it’s for anyone who cares to listen. Source: www.nytimes.com

The crash of the Bonanza Beechcraft in Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959, marked the end of the first extraordinary phase of rock ’n’ roll, the period from 1955 to 1959 during which the basic innovations were introduced by Buddy Holly, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. Death or misadventure claimed the founding fathers of rock, who were never to repeat the successes of those years. The Army drafted Elvis in his heyday, while religious fervor temporarily derailed Little Richard. The others fell rapidly too. Scandal damaged Jerry Lee’s reputation. The law unmercifully hounded Berry. A near-fatal car smashup sidetracked Carl Perkins, and Buddy Holly was forever silenced in a snowy cornfield. Gigantic as Holly's achievement was, we barely glimpsed the dawn of his talent. It was his frenetic, hard-rocking songs as well as the late ballads that are so tough, mournful, and wise, that transformed the agonies and joys of his brief days into lasting art.

“I don’t want to be rich. I don’t even want to be in the limelight. But I want people to remember the name Buddy Holley.” —Buddy Holly


Buddy Holly helped Roy Orbison with lead structures on some of the songs Roy was trying to write. When Roy Orbison, from Wink, Texas, 125 miles south of Lubbock, heard Buddy on KDAV, it altered his life. It was Buddy who showed Orbison the lick that would become so popular years later when Roy recorded “Pretty Woman.” Buddy’s detractors were mostly mediocre C&W pickers who envied his talent, but they had a shattering effect on his self-esteem. He began to withdraw from the crowd, turning inward. Despite his standoffishness, Buddy’s smart-aleck persona quickly reasserted itself anytime he felt secure, especially when he was with other musicians, or a girl who liked him. Holly had the kind of determination known only to heroes and fools. In profile, he looked strangely Martian, but when he faced the camera he was handsome, with a big, heroic forehead, gull-wing eyebrows, a squared-off chin, and a strong jaw-line.


“I Forgot to Remember to Forget” was Buddy’s favorite Elvis Presley song. Buddy recorded it at radio station KLLL, whose DJs played it for years. Mrs. Holly loved Buddy’s version so much that she said it was superior to Elvis’s. Unfortunately, the cut has not survived. Once Buddy began to release professionally the following year, he was required by contract to withdraw his amateur records from circulation. When Elvis came back to Lubbock in 1955, he offered to help Buddy get on “The Louisiana Hayride” if he’d come to Shreveport, where the show was broadcast every Saturday night over station KWKH from the Municipal Auditorium. Buddy and his friends set out for Shreveport, 512 miles southeast of Lubbock, driving the ’55 Olds. It proved to be a wild goose chase; “Elvis was supposed to get us on and he wasn’t there,” Larry Welborn told Bill Griggs in 1986.


The rock ballad “I Guess I Was Just a Fool” is the first sign that Buddy Holly was capable of exploring deeper feelings and emotional states with insight and depth. In this song, the story of a man who has lost a relationship but is glad to know he’s at least capable of experiencing love, Buddy seems to be drawing on his ill-starred love for Echo McGuire. The plaintive “Because I Love You,” the song Buddy had just written, suggests the emotional pain he was going through as Echo drifted away from him in 1956. In the lyric, the singer expresses his fear that his girlfriend has found someone else and states he would rather die than go through the rest of his life without her. Buddy poured his bitterness, tinged with acid wit, into the legendary “That’ll Be the Day.”

In 1957, Buddy Holly's band found some of his expectations to be unrealistic and began to leave him in rapid succession. “The main thing was that there wasn’t any money coming in,” Sonny Curtis asserted in 1993. Without a band, Buddy considered giving up his singing career. He was never as confident as later portrayed in legend, Mrs. Holley told Griggs in 1979, after the release of Gary Busey’s film about Buddy, and “came darn near quitting for a time or two,” she revealed. But underlying all the failures was a quiet certitude about his destiny that was as strong as his faith in God. As a last resort, he drove to Clovis to see Norman Petty. Buddy was an inveterate night owl, and so was Petty, reaching their peak from three to six A.M. Norma Jean Berry, Petty’s secretary, often found The Crickets sprawled over the sofa. They’d rub their eyes, drink their morning coffee, then swarm into the studio to record the brilliant songs Buddy was composing in early 1957.


He was on a fantastic creative roll, turning out “Everyday,” “Words of Love,” “Listen to Me,” “Tell Me How,” and “Peggy Sue” in six months. At once sensual, meditative, and spiritual, “Words of Love” is an enduring love song, most likely inspired by intimate exchanges between Buddy and Echo in their years together. The lyrics, mellow and beguiling, suggest the late-night murmurs of lovers who’ve just been inside of each other—body and soul. The Crickets recorded “Words of Love” on a sunny, warm day in April 1957.

One day he rode his Ariel Cyclone up to Shaw’s Jewelry Store in Clovis to buy a present for Maria Elena. The clerk, a Clovis woman named Maxine Nation, told Bill Griggs in 1984 that Buddy was wearing a black leather jacket when she noticed him standing at the diamond counter, studying gems. She assumed that he was an ordinary biker until she noticed that his hands and fingernails were very different. As Maxine displayed an array of jewels, she was struck by Buddy’s politeness and charm, though she still didn’t recognize him. Buddy finally selected a diamond pendant and offered to cover the cost of a long-distance call to Lubbock. When he volunteered the information that he was in Clovis to make records at Petty’s studio, Maxine did a double-take and asked him if he was really Buddy Holly. Later she told Griggs that Buddy laughed and said, “I guess so.” Maxine told him that in person he had the same radiance as he had on his recordings.

Norman Petty could not face the fact that Buddy Holly had evolved beyond the Clovis/Tex-Mex ethos. Years later, in an interview with Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm, Petty still found it difficult to address why he hadn’t been more supportive of Buddy’s need to experiment and grow as an artist; Petty admitted he had lacked vision. While in New York, Buddy purchased a gold chain for the diamond pendant he’d bought for Maria Elena in Clovis. Petty was aware of Maria Elena’s hold on him and knew that she had told Buddy he could get along perfectly well without the Crickets and that he no longer required the services of Norman Petty.  —Buddy Holly: A Biography (1995)

Buddy Holly was never at odds with Lubbock (Texas): He was of Lubbock, and his brand of genius—good-natured, unthreateningly prankish, even respectful, but also surefooted and stubborn as hell—was literally homespun. Raised from hardworking stock in a hardworking town, Buddy had his own preoccupation but never once expected Lubbock to drop what it was doing on his account. What his family, his hometown, and the radio didn’t supply, Buddy found within himself. In effect, he set his own politely maverick personality to music. Lubbock would not have applauded an outright rebel, and Buddy wasn’t one. Offstage, he was the shy next-door neighbor type, a good ol’ boy. But he was totally ex­plosive onstage. Buddy had had his teeth capped to cover the gray traces caused by Lubbock’s heavily fluorinated water. His haircut was less unruly; his wardrobe included Ivy League-style suits purchased at Phil’s Mens Shop in New York, and he had discarded his wire eyeglasses in favor of the heavy black frames that would become a Holly trademark. Source: www.texasmonthly.com

"I met Marilyn", Buddy Holly's 'Memories'

Over several decades, broadcaster Neil Sean asked every star he met for their personal memories of Marilyn Monroe, and has published them in a new book: I met Marilyn (2016).

Jack Lemmon, the star of Some Like It Hot, The Apartment and The Odd Couple was among the first to know that Marilyn Monroe was having an affair with President John F Kennedy. Lemmon used to live at silent movie star Harold Lloyd’s old house. He recalled: “One day I was coming back home and there’s this helicopter doing a low lazy circle above it. And there were these guys in funny suits and funny glasses, standing around watching Marilyn and JFK having a frolic in the pool.” Marilyn, as it turned out, wasn’t remotely embarrassed that he had seen her naked in the pool with the President. 

One man who wasn’t wild about Marilyn was the singer who’d married two stars in succession — Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor — and he’d learned quite a bit about the seamier side of Hollywood. Marilyn, Eddie Fisher told me, was "a user" — reeling in men who could be useful to her, then discarding them when they’d served their purpose. “Marilyn Monroe was a serious player. She used people — she played them off, and I was a victim, too. When I first met her at the start of the Fifties, she made a beeline for me and asked me out on many occasions for a date. But she wasn’t the ‘Marilyn’ creation then — pretty but fake.”

“One thing about Marilyn,” Joan Rivers said, “was that she wasn’t a great gay fan: she loathed the idea that some men might not find her attractive. I told her about my gay pals and she looked bemused. She had a hard time even believing Rock Hudson was gay.” Like Debbie Reynolds, Joan Rivers was convinced Marilyn was murdered. “Sure, she was a pill addict and had problems, but none of the story of her death stacks up. I blame the Kennedys: without a doubt, she got mixed up in some terrible trouble. Given all she had going for her, why would she suddenly kill herself? She wasn’t the type to do it.” Source: www.dailyo.in

In the preface to his new book Moment by Moment, former LIFE photographer John Loengard notes that the thing about a good photograph is that it cannot be repeated. What it captures will never happen again, though now it is frozen in time by the image. “That may explain why an image of a brief moment, an instant in time, can hold our interest forever,” he writes. Loengard’s latest book is a survey that takes a closer look at a variety of the many iconic images he has created during the last 60 years. It is filled with quiet, intimate moments, from a laughing Marilyn Monroe to a young boy turning his head at the sound of his mother calling. Pictured on the cover is the famous photo of the Beatles in a swimming pool at Miami Beach in 1964. This photo in fact never ran on the cover of LIFE magazine – although as illustrated here, it is certainly cover worthy — but ran in the back of the book as a Miscellany. Source: time.com

Buddy Holly embodied, as much as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, the central conflict of the 1950s: conformity with establishment values versus individuality/rebellion. While he wore leather and rode a motorcycle, he was a devout fundamentalist Christian, hounded by a puritanical conscience that condemned rock and roll as evil. Perhaps it was this innate contradiction that made him so great. The songs Buddy Holly wrote and sang are among the most original and ecstatic Rock would ever know. Buddy tried out contact lenses in 1956, but they were very uncomfortable back in those days —so he stuck to glasses. And under those big-framed black horn-rims he adopted, there was a very good-looking young man. I was intrigued by the close-up of Buddy with his trademark glasses and movie star good looks. —"The Life and Music of Rock ’n’ Roll Pioneer Buddy Holly" (2009) by Staton Rabin and "Words of Love 1959-2009" (2010) by Gary Clevenger 

Jive Bunny - Ultimate Christmas Party. Jive Bunny and the Mastermixers use songs sampling and synthesisers to combine pop music from the early rock and roll era together into a medley.

John Beecher: Personally, my big disappointment would be that the hopes we had in the ‘50s and ‘60s, that there would be a better world and that people would learn to live together, have pretty well been dashed in recent years. Thank goodness we still have the music that will never change—those same records we first heard then are still important to me and it's good to know that Danny and The Juniors got it just right when they sang, "Rock ‘n’ Roll will never die." Source: www.musicdish.com

Memories are precious. The self-reported uses of autobiographical memory. They bond relationships, contribute to a sense of identity, and shape current decisions and future planning. Memories may also seem eternal, like cherished photographs in an album we peruse from time to time. Our memories play major roles in making us who we are. Our beliefs about our personal histories both reflect and constitute central aspects of ourselves. Practitioners (e.g., police officers, medical personnel, career guidance counsellors, historians, and political scientists), in a variety of everyday settings routinely rely on individuals’ autobiographical memory reports sometimes basing extremely consequential decisions on individuals’ reports of their personal histories. Yet remembering the past is a complex phenomenon that is subject to error. Source: www.tandfonline.com

I tried forgetting what you meant to me / For now I realize that I'm alone / In my mind I really know that you are gone / But my foolish heart refuses to see / Why you've left me alone with memories - "Memories" by Buddy Holly, written in the early 1950s. From the album "Holly In The Hills" (1965)