Not Fade Away Not Fade Away E-Book

John Gribbin

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 226

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

Buddy Holly was killed at 22 when the plane he was travelling in crashed on 3 February 1959. Although this was less than two years after Holly's first hit record, Don McLean described this as 'the day the music died.' But Sonny Curtis, Holly's friend and musical colleague, told us that the music didn't die, because 'Buddy Holly lives every time you play rock'n'roll.' Fifty years after Holly's death, his lasting influence is clear; a musical based on his life seems set to run for longer than his lifetime and artists as diverse as Blink 182 and Bob Dylan call him an inspiration.The Beatles chose That'll Be the Day by Buddy's group The Crickets as their first attempt at recording, as well as taking the idea for their name. Clearly, the music didn't die!John Gribbin, an ardent fan since he was twelve, presents this labour of love written in the spirit of Sonny Curtis' lyric, as a celebration of Holly's all too brief life, and as an introduction,for all those not around in 1959, to the man and his astonishing musical legacy. "Not Fade Away" also includes - uniquely - a full and detailed account of every Holly recording session, which any Buddy fan will devour.

Leseprobe

First published in the UK in 2009 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DPemail: [email protected]

This electronic edition published in the UK in 2012 by Icon Books Ltd

ISBN: 978-1-84831-384-2 (ePub format)ISBN: 978-1-84831-385-9 (Adobe ebook format)

Sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asiaby Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,74–77 Great Russell Street,London WC1B 3DA or their agents

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This edition published in Australia in 2012by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,Crows Nest, NSW 2065

This edition published in the USA in 2012 by Totem Books

Inquiries to: Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP, UK

Text copyright © 2009 John and Mary Gribbin

The author has asserted his moral rights.

The extract from The Autobiography of Eric Clapton, published by Century, is reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in 11 on 15½ pt Palatino by Wayzgoose

Buddy Holly didn’t give birth to rock ’n’ roll, but he sure rocked the cradle.

Carl Perkins

We used to watch Sunday Night at the London Palladium … One night they had Buddy Holly on the show, and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven; that was when I saw my first Fender guitar. It was like seeing an instrument from outer space and I said to myself: ‘That’s the future – that’s what I want’ … Of all the music heroes of the time, he was the most accessible, and he was the real thing. He wasn’t a glamour puss, he had no act as such, he clearly was a real guitar player, and to top it all off he wore glasses. He was like one of us. It was amazing the effect his death had on us. After that, some say the music died. For me, it really seemed to burst open.

Eric Clapton, The Autobiography (Century, 2007)

For my friend in Lubbock, Texas – Bill Jolley

And for the next generation of Buddy Holly fans, Bella and William

Acknowledgements

Thanks to John Beecher for all of the Buddy Holly material he has supplied over the years, to Ben Gribbin for a critical reading of the first draft of this book, and to David Glasson for musical insights. Simon Forge and Michael Kenward played no direct part in the present project, but have shared many a Buddy Holly moment with me in the past five decades. Without any one of them, it would not have turned out the same way. Sonny Curtis and Kevin Montgomery took the trouble to put me right on some dates and other facts, Joe’s Vintage Guitars helped with information about 1950s Fender Stratocasters, and Carl Bunch provided the playlist for the last tour. Gary and Ramona Tollett provided details of the ‘That’ll Be The Day’ recording session, while Sherry Holley and Larry Holley helped with some family background. Quotes credited as (Memories) are from the superb collection gathered together by Jim Dawson and Spencer Leigh. The archive of the Buddy Holly Center in Lubbock is the source for the exact dates of his tours and other activities.

Special thanks to Warwick Bilton for technical help (see Chapter Five!).

For once, Mary Gribbin played no direct part in the writing of this book, but deserves thanks for tolerating my obsession with Buddy Holly for most of the past 50 years.

Although I have tried to check all the facts and make the story as accurate as possible, after half a century there is inevitably some uncertainty about the exact details of certain events; if anyone finds errors in my version of the story, or has additional information, I’d be glad to hear from them with a view to getting it right next time. I can be contacted via [email protected]

John Gribbin trained as an astrophysicist at Cambridge before becoming a full-time science writer, and he is the ‘master of popular science writing’, according to the Sunday Times. He has worked for Nature and the New Scientist, and has contributed to The Times and the Independent. His numerous books include In Search of Schrödinger’s Cat and Science: A History. Not Fade Away is his first-ever non-science title.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

Dedication

Acknowledgements

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Reminiscing

CHAPTER ONE

Little Baby

CHAPTER TWO

Learning the Game

CHAPTER THREE

That’ll Be The Day

CHAPTER FOUR

Rave On!

CHAPTER FIVE

Gone

CHAPTER SIX

Not Fade Away

Sources and Further Reading

Index

Picture Section

INTRODUCTION

Reminiscing

I wasn’t quite a teenager when Buddy Holly died. On 3 February 1959 I was just six weeks short of my thirteenth birthday. The news of Holly’s death in a plane crash, along with the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, made a relatively small impact on me at the time. It was the older boys at school who were shocked by the news, and stood in dazed groups in the playground discussing what seemed to them like the end of the world. I knew Buddy Holly and the Crickets from their hit singles played on the radio (Radio Luxembourg, listened to under the blankets in bed at night), but at that tender age I hadn’t purchased any of them myself. My own musical taste leaned more to Lonnie Donegan, the Everly Brothers, Lord Rockingham’s XI, and (of course) Elvis Presley. I was the proud possessor of the Kingston Trio’s version of ‘Tom Dooley’ on a 78 rpm record.

But in the wake of the events of 3 February 1959,the first 45 rpm record I bought was an EP by Holly containing the hits ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Listen to Me’, with their B-sides ‘Everyday’ and ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’. The first LP I bought was, curiously, The Buddy Holly Story Volume Two – so many of my friends had copies of the first Buddy Holly Story album, which was required listening at any gathering, that somehow I never got around to getting my own copy until years later. By 1962, I was enough of a Holly fan to be incensed when Tommy Roe had a big hit with ‘Sheila’, a blatant rip-off of ‘Peggy Sue’. And my enthusiasm has remained at that level; nine of the top 25 most played tunes on my iPod are by Holly.

I’m in good company. The Beatles took the inspiration for their name largely from Holly’s group, the Crickets; they took the inspiration for their early efforts at songwriting from Holly, and chose the Crickets’ ‘That’ll Be The Day’ for their first attempt at recording. George Harrison later said, ‘Buddy Holly was my first favourite and my inspiration to go into the music business’ (Memories). The Hollies took their name entirely from Buddy, while the Searchers took theirs from the name of the movie in which John Wayne repeatedly utters the line ‘That’ll be the day’, itself the inspiration for the song. The Rolling Stones first hit the UK top ten with ‘Not Fade Away’ – a Buddy Holly song. And Bruce Springsteen sings Buddy Holly songs in his dressing room to warm up before going on stage.

Without Holly, the British music boom of the 1960s, and all that it influenced, would have been very different. He was so influential because he could do everything – by the end of his short life he was not only writing the songs, and performing them in a self-contained unit with the Crickets, but was producing records too. Although the Crickets also performed as a trio, Holly’s band essentially invented the now classic group line-up of two guitars, bass and drums. They sometimes dispensed with the second guitar, because Holly was also a superb and original guitarist who could produce a sound like lead and rhythm at the same time. Playing second guitar in Holly’s band was about as pointless as the proverbial fifth wheel.

Elvis was undoubtedly a greater performer – but Elvis didn’t write songs, didn’t produce records, and was no more than a competent guitar strummer. Buddy Holly did it all, and he did it all so well. Appreciated much more in Britain than in his homeland, he was the inspiration for dozens of groups who thought ‘If he can do it, so can we.’ Some were right; many were wrong. But the ones who were right included the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. In the words of his biographer Philip Norman, ‘there is a case for calling Buddy Holly the [twentieth] century’s most influential musician’.

How did this phenomenon happen? How did a young man who was only 22 when he died, and whose career lasted just eighteen months from the time of his first hit record to his death, change the face of popular music? And why is he still so popular – the musical Buddy has now been running for nearly as long as Holly’s entire life! The simple answer is, ‘Because he was the best’. This book aims to look a little more deeply at the phenomenon, and explain how a Texan country boy from Lubbock became the best, travelling from country music to rock ’n’ roll and beyond. The earliest known recording of Buddy Holly singing and playing the guitar reveals a frighteningly competent twelve-year-old musician – the same age that I was when Holly died. He was recording for at least ten of his 22 years.

It isn’t my intention here to present a fully rounded biography of Buddy. Rather, I want to focus on the music that was the centrepiece of his life – both his own music and the influences that made him the musician he was, but especially his own recordings, rather than the minutiae of the almost non-stop grind of touring. None of us can go back to the Trocadero cinema in south London on 1 March 1958 to see and hear Buddy Holly live; but we can all play his recording of ‘Rave On’, and gain something by knowing how and when the record was made.

More literally than of any other recording artist, music was Buddy Holly’s life. The story of Buddy Holly’s life in music spans the ten years following that first recording; but the story of Buddy Holley (as he was born) begins twelve years earlier, on 7 September 1936.

CHAPTER ONE

Little Baby

Charles Hardin Holley was born in Lubbock, Texas, at 3:30pm on Monday, 7 September 1936. He wasn’t actually such a little baby; family members say he weighed in at 6½ pounds. The local newspaper, the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, reported him as a more hefty 8½ pounds; but they got at least one other important fact wrong in the birth announcement, which read in full:

A daughter weighing 8½ pounds was born at 6:10 o’clock Monday afternoon at Clark-Key Clinic to Mr and Mrs Lawrence O. Holley of 7913 Sixth Street.

The baby was a late addition to the family of Lawrence Odell (or ‘L.O.’) Holley and his wife Ella, née Drake. They already had two older sons, Larry (born in 1925) and Travis (born in 1927), as well as a daughter, Patricia Lou (born in 1929). From the beginning of his life, Charles Hardin was known as Buddy, a common American nickname for the youngest boy in a family; the name even appears on official documents such as his driving licence. His surname, Holley, was shortened to Holly by a spelling mistake on his first recording contract, and Buddy kept it as his professional name; the mis-spelling was common (L.O.’s name is written as ‘Holly’ on Buddy’s birth certificate), and he probably felt that he might as well go with the flow. For consistency, I’ll always refer to him as Buddy Holly.

Lubbock is a city on the dry plains of northern Texas, far away from the bright lights of places like Houston and San Antonio, and named after a Texan hero of the Civil War, Thomas S. Lubbock. In the United States, the term ‘city’ doesn’t have quite the same connotations that it has in Europe – it simply refers to an urban area with some degree of self-government, for example, with an elected mayor. Some US cities have populations of under a thousand people, while others are measured in hundreds of thousands. Lubbock lies 300 miles west of Dallas and 124 miles south of Amarillo on Interstate 27. It was founded in 1891, less than 50 years before the birth of Buddy Holly, as a centre of the cotton-farming industry, and the population only reached 4,000 in 1920, although it soared to more than 20,000 over the next ten years. By 1930, the city’s history proudly recalls, it also had three banks.

Texas itself didn’t join the Union until 1845, nine years after gaining its independence from Mexico, so in spite of its latitude it has a distinctly different history from that of the old southern states of Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. Apart from cotton, the only other important activity in Lubbock is the university, founded in 1923 as Texas Technical College and now known as Texas Tech, today offering 150 degree courses and with more than 28,000 enrolled students.

Lubbock is in the Bible Belt of America, claiming to have more churches per head of population than any other city in America. Right up until 1972 it was officially alcohol-free, and for almost as long it was racially segregated. Texas isn’t always regarded as part of the formerly segregated ‘Deep South’ by non-Americans, but to put this in perspective, Lubbock is actually at about the same latitude as the heart of the state of Georgia, birthplace of Little Richard.

So Buddy Holly grew up in a poor but hardworking and loving family, in an out-of-the-way corner of America where religion played a big part in everyday life, but where black people and Hispanics were regarded as racial inferiors. One result of this was that he had little contact with blacks until he discovered their music. He was born in the midst of the Depression, when his father had to take a succession of low-paid jobs to support the family, and they had to move house half-a-dozen times in twelve years in the constant search for affordable accommodation. The house where he was born, at 1911 6th Street, was a simple single-storey building no bigger than a modern holiday chalet; the site is now an empty lot. But Lubbock doesn’t seem to have suffered as severely from the Depression as many parts of the country – L. O. always seems to have been able to find work of some sort.

On his mother’s side, Buddy could claim some exotic ancestry. Her grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee, and Larry Holley recalls his half-Indian grandfather’s pride in his native American ancestry. That made Buddy one-eighth Cherokee. Somewhat less romantically, Ella Drake’s family belief that they were descended from the famous privateer Sir Francis Drake cannot be true, since the Elizabethan adventurer had no children. She had married L.O. in 1924, and was 34 when Buddy was born; L. O. was a year older than her. He had been raised on a farm near the town of Honey Grove, less than 100 miles from Dallas and even closer to Paris, Texas, but moved to Vernon, Texas, some 150 miles to the east of Lubbock, to find work. He also found Ella Pauline Drake there, but they moved to Lubbock a year after their marriage because there were better prospects of work in an expanding city, where Ella’s parents had migrated a little earlier. The Holleys belonged to the Tabernacle Baptist Church, one of many splinter groups in the American South, which teaches an almost literal interpretation of the Bible and expects a tithe of (usually) 10 per cent of the earnings of its followers.

All of this may give the impression of a grim Depression childhood for Buddy; but such an impression would be wrong. He was the indulged youngest child of the family, doted on by his mother and with two big brothers that he hero-worshipped. He certainly had an easier life than his siblings, and was the first member of the family to graduate from high school. Although lacking other forms of entertainment, the family were all (except L.O.) musical. Larry played violin and piano, Travis accordion and later guitar, and Ella and Pat could sing.

The two older brothers performed together at local talent shows, with Buddy eager to join in. When he was five, his parents bought him a toy violin and prevailed upon Larry and Travis to let him ‘accompany’ them at one of these competitions. Since Buddy couldn’t actually play the instrument, Larry smeared the strings with grease so that it wouldn’t make a sound; but the judges were so taken with the cute kid sawing away and singing alongside his big brothers that they won a $5 prize.

Larry in particular became a role model for Buddy – a hard-working, adventurous character, afraid of nothing. Buddy, says Larry, was ‘a cute little kid’ who enjoyed being pulled around the yard in an old apple crate, as if he were on a sled; ‘he really liked that.’ But not long after Buddy’s success in the talent show, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought America into the Second World War, and both Larry and Travis eventually left to join the Marines. Both survived to return home. Travis, who fought at Iwo Jima in February 1945, brought with him a guitar, bought from a shipmate, which he taught Buddy to play. Larry was among the soldiers earmarked for the invasion of the main island of Japan, and his life was among those almost certainly saved by the use of the atomic bombs that forced the Japanese surrender; the High Command had anticipated 90 per cent casualties in the invasion.

Buddy’s interest in music had stagnated somewhat after that talent show, and although he began taking piano lessons at the age of eleven, after nine months he decided that this wasn’t what he wanted to play, even though his teacher had told his parents that he was a quick learner and one of her best pupils. He dropped the piano and decided to switch to the guitar after listening to one of his fellow pupils on the school bus playing and singing on the daily journey, and his parents, ever-indulgent, bought him a steel guitar. That didn’t suit him either, and he asked for one like his brother had; it duly came, from a pawnshop. Travis taught him the basics, but before long Buddy, who had a musical ear and learned to play by listening, not by reading music, was telling Travis where he was going wrong. ‘He was a quick study and learned fast. In fact, before long he was showing me new things … He’d say, “There’s another chord that goes in there, Trav.”’ (VH1) From then on, the family recall, Buddy was hardly ever seen without a guitar in his hands. He would play on the school bus with his friends, at home in his room, and sitting out on the front steps. The music he played was, of course, country and western, the big sound of the 1940s in the American South.

American country music had its origins, musically speaking, in an amalgamation of traditional styles brought to the New World by settlers; but instead of sticking to the traditional subject of love, the lyrics tended to deal also with practical events in the everyday working life of people like ranchers (‘cowboy’ or ‘western’ songs) and miners, and with disasters and tragedies such as train wrecks and murders. By the mid-1920s, ‘hillbilly’ music was being both recorded and broadcast on the radio; a good example is Harry McClintock’s ‘Big Rock Candy Mountain’ from 1928. The first real stars of the genre were the Carter Family, a vocal trio who wrote literally hundreds of songs in the 1920s and 1930s; one member of the original trio, Maybelle, was the mother of June Carter, who wrote ‘Ring of Fire’ and married Johnny Cash. Other influential artists of the time were Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry.

Where Buddy grew up, though, the important part of the name ‘country and western’ was ‘western’, which essentially refers to West Texas. It stemmed from a marriage between country music and big-band jazz, developed in the 1930s, originally in a band featuring vocalist Milton Brown and fiddler Bob Wills. Wills went on to form the Texas Playboys, producing a string of hits in the late 1930s and 1940s, including ‘New San Antonio Rose’ in 1940. The western brand of C&W was very much music to dance to, at hops, jamborees and hoe-downs, which led to a more experimental approach to the music and the early acceptance of instruments such as electric guitars and drums – drums in particular were anathema in the traditional country music of the old states of the South, such as Tennessee, the home of the country music capital, Nashville. The other important feature of western music was that everybody played it – or at least, everybody played some kind of music, except for the few, like L. O. Holley, who couldn’t carry a tune. This must have originally been because there was nothing else to do for entertainment in West Texas, but the tradition of playing in bands not just at school but among groups of friends, performing for each other and anyone else who would listen, was firmly established by the time Buddy Holly began to take a serious interest in music in the 1940s. So there was nothing unusual about Buddy’s musical activity and aspirations; in that sense, he was very much a product of the time and place where he was born. It’s just that he was so much better than all the other kids who picked guitar for a hobby and dreamed of becoming a star.

One of those other kids was Buddy’s friend, Bob Montgomery, who featured strongly in Buddy’s musical development in the 1950s; but they didn’t meet until 1949. Buddy’s first school had been the Roscoe Wilson Elementary School, in the city of Lubbock proper; but in 1946 the need to find cheaper accommodation forced the Holley family to move outside the city limits. Buddy had to transfer to the Roosevelt Elementary School, which involved the long bus ride on which he first heard a fellow pupil playing the guitar, and where he later played his own guitar and sang songs, including Bill Monroe’s ‘Gotta Travel On’, to entertain the other students. At the age of twelve, partly thanks to his musical prowess, Buddy was the most popular boy in his class, recognised when he was voted, together with a girl named Barbara Denning, ‘King and Queen of the Sixth Grade’. It was around this time, in 1949, that Buddy recorded himself performing Hank Snow’s ‘My Two Timin’ Woman’ (bizarrely inappropriate material for a twelve-year-old!) on a wire recorder that a friend who worked in an electronics store had ‘borrowed’. There must have been other recordings made at the time, but none seem to have survived; this 1½-minute song is all we have from the pre-teenage Buddy.

Apart from the quality of the performance itself, the most important thing about the recording is that it highlights the kind of music that Buddy was listening to on the radio and being influenced by. Snow was a Nashville-based country music star, best remembered now for his 1950 hit ‘I’m Movin’ On’. 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 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 was fascinated by the Hank Williams sound, which involved a semi-yodelling style that stretched and bent individual syllables of words over several notes, and tried to copy it. 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 (and precocious sub-teenagers).

Another big influence on both Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery was the brand of country music known as bluegrass. Bluegrass is based on acoustic stringed instruments, in particular the fiddle, banjo, guitar, mandolin and stand-up bass. The term originated with the band Bill Monroe and his Bluegrass Boys, which had this classic line-up, although other instruments, such as the accordion, are also sometimes featured. It was his interest in bluegrass music that explains why Buddy took up the banjo in the late 1940s and even taught himself to play the mandolin, although the guitar remained his main instrument. There are similarities between bluegrass music and jazz, because in each case the instruments take turns playing the melody and improvising on it, while the others provide the backing. This can lead to exciting ‘duelling’ between the instruments; fascinating, and challenging, to any competent budding musician.

Monroe formed his band in 1939, but developed the definitive bluegrass style between 1946, when banjo player Earl Scruggs joined the line-up, and 1948, soon being copied by others. This line-up of the band also featured singer-guitarist Lester Flatt; Flatt and Scruggs left the Bluegrass Boys in 1948 to form their own equally influential group, the Foggy Mountain Boys. Much later, Scruggs recorded with saxophonist King Curtis, who also played on Buddy Holly’s record ‘Reminiscing’.

Another influence on Buddy Holly came from country duet performers, close harmony teams such as the archetypal Louvin Brothers (real brothers, but originally named Ira and Charlie Loudermilk; the singer-songwriter John D. Loudermilk, who wrote Eddie Cochran’s ‘Sittin’ in the Balcony’, is their cousin). In the late 1950s, this style was developed in pop by the Everly Brothers, and through them influenced such artists as the Beach Boys and the Beatles.