B009HOTHPE EBOK (12 page)

Frankie Lymon died of a heroin overdose in the end. I saw that coming. It was stupid and self-destructive, but these guys were desperate characters. Frankie Lymon wasn’t the innocent-looking teenager you saw at the shows and on television. Which is why him singing, “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent” was such an irony. Try running a clip of him OD’ing, slumped over in a bathroom stall, with that lyric in your head. Great little performer, but real edgy—he was an arrogant little guy with a big overblown personality and a chip on his shoulder. He was going with Zola Taylor, one of the original Platters who were on tour with us—and she was just one of his girls. A junkie, a bit of a con man, but no matter—the girls loved him. Quite a few of the musicians that traveled with us were just whacked most of the time, too. He wasn’t the only one. Another of The Teenagers died of an OD in prison.

I don’t know what Chuck was doing because whatever he did, he did in his limo, but there was always something going on with him. We’d be driving from New York through Pennsylvania, on our way to Ohio, but we had to let him take off ’cause he was wanted in Ohio for something or other. Transporting minors across state lines or just to harass him for dating white chicks. He’d show up again in Phoenix. He’d picked up this sixteen-year-old girl, we’d drive up the West Coast, across Canada, the girl’s still with him. They arrested him in St. Louis, put him in jail. I mean this stuff—minors, blacks with white girls—that went on a lot, but Chuck was permanently on the prowl.

Buddy Holly loved “You Are My Destiny” with its big Don Costa production. He’d taken his own song style as far as it would go and he was looking for something different. “I need to change my arrangements and try what you’re doing with your songs.” He wanted to leave The Crickets and move on. He asked me to write a song for him—and I did. That’s how I came to write “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” The direction he wanted to go in was to add string arrangements to his songs, develop a lusher, sweeter sound behind his vocals. The whole focus of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” was to do it with a big band, with violins and horns, a big, plush orchestral sound that would frame his voice, impart a more romantic aura to his songs—like a movie soundtrack. That’s what that was about, which, in retrospect is pretty funny because it was Buddy’s rougher, guitar-band sound that would inspire the next generation—certainly not lush orchestrations!

By the time of that first tour, which ended just before Thanksgiving of ’57, we’d all gotten comfortable with each other. I’d seen Irv in action and I was impressed. If I were going to continue in this business I needed serious representation. “Destiny” had just taken off and I told him, “I’m not going to work for you again ’til you become my manager.”

“Let’s talk in a few weeks,” he said in his I-gotta-think-this-through-and-so-do-you manner. “We’ll see what we can do,” he said. Now he only had me under contract for one tour; there was no other deal signed beyond that. I went home and within the next week or so my dad called him and said, “Look if you’re comfortable working with Paul, and I know you are, he wants you to manage him.”

My father and Irv met at a restaurant in New York. We all sat down and went over everything. He wanted, first of all, to make sure that was what I wanted to do with
my
life, that the one hit I had wasn’t just a whim. I, for my part, wanted nothing else. I wanted to dive in head-first and not even come up for air.

Irv was very smart. He said, “He’s going to make mistakes. Everybody does. Let’s have him make them far from home. When he gets back, he’ll be a giant.”

Irv had his own inimitable vibe. Always dressed in silk suits, a cigarette dangling from his mouth—he loved his cigarettes—he never needed any sleep. He was up day and night, worked very hard, and sold what he believed in. He was a salesman in the sense that he could persuade you to see things through his eyes. A true believer. Smart, shrewd, and aggressive, but also very trusting. Irv was the first guy to take me to a tailor and get me a suit before I started out on tour. He took me to a famous Italian tailor, where they created some sharp suits.

Between tours I lived with Irv and his family. His home life was not all that pleasant. His wife was a schizophrenic. They knew that she was very sick but in those days they didn’t have the antipsychotic drugs they have today. She would rage at Irv almost daily. She resented the amount of time Irv spent at work, seven days a week. His idea of quality time with his son was to take him to the store with him when he went to work. Irv’s wife didn’t resent me, she resented the time he spent on my career.

Because I was away from home a lot and was a minor, Irv became my legal guardian on the tours. When I was in the States during time off between tours I’d stay at Irv’s. I spent a huge amount of time at his house and at his apartment in Washington. I shared a room with Irv’s son Kenny. I was seven years older than he was so I became the big brother Kenny never had and was probably as annoying as any biological sibling.

I was so full of electricity coming off the road, I would be bouncing off the walls. I’d be up all night, and given my natural proclivity for pranks I’d get into a lot of mischief. While Kenny was sleeping I’d put gel in his hair, paint his face. He’d wake up in the morning, look in the mirror and he’d have spiked hair; there’d be blue dots all over his face. Remember that well into my twenties I was still a kid because I’d missed my childhood by going into show business so young. But at Irv’s house I knew I could get away with almost anything so I could always be a kid there.

Because I was a kid I felt I had to prove myself, and Irv was the ideal person to help me do it. I was perfectly in synch with Irv—and he got me fame and money beyond my wildest dreams. I remember the time Irv booked me into Freedomland, a theme park in the Bronx built by the master developer William Zeckendorf—who built half of New York—where top acts would perform in the summer. It was Zeckendorf’s idea to hire me and Irv got me the fantastic sum of $100,000 for one weekend’s work, an unheard amount of money—it was the highest amount an artist was ever paid in history up to that time. It was so huge, in fact, that when Irv called GAC (General Artists Corporation), my talent agency, to write up the contract, the agent thought it was a mistake and wrote it for $10,000. Irv went berserk, but it got fixed, of course. Part of the documentary
Lonely Boy
was shot at Freedomland, where you can get the essence, the feel of the time, the frenzy of the girls, crying, going crazy—pre-Beatle, pre-Beatlemania.

Before Irv became my manager, my agent Buddy Howe at GAC had been my mentor. Buddy was a great guy and helped me immensely in the early part of my career, but Irv was something else again. He was an original, everything he did was an innovation—there were no templates for pop music yet. Irv was the first manager of pop acts to think globally. He planned my first European and Japanese tours. He was always someone who wanted to break open new frontiers. And because of Irv, I was the first American pop artist to tour behind the Iron Curtain.

The music scene began to take off overseas when “Diana” became a hit in Europe and a lot of other places around the world. Then “You Are My Destiny” became a smash in July 1958. My next few records all took off internationally, too. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty, I toured Chile, Paris, London, Belgium, Japan. That became my lifestyle; I was a travelin’ man.

I went on my first European tour, opening the Trocadero Theatre in London on December 7, 1958.

In England, I met the singer Helen Shapiro, who was then fourteen. I wrote and produced a song for her, but given her age that’s as far as the romance went. There was no swapping spit. It was the reverse of the situation with Diana.

“Teen idol” was the new word. With rock ’n’ roll came a new set of clichés—and problems. I got mobbed in Paris. There’s a photo of me trying to get out of a car, but can’t because of the crush of fans. It was just a sea of people pushing
toward
me, mostly screaming girls. You might say, well, what’s so bad about that? But a crowd is a crowd—it’s a mindless crush of bodies and is a very scary thing to be in the middle of.

The minute I got back to the States in January, I was out on the road again with Buddy Holly and The Crickets, Eddie Cochran, The Rays, Royal Teens, Danny and The Juniors, Hollywood Flames, Mello-Kings, The Shepherd Sisters, Margie Rayburn, and The Tune Weavers on an Everly Brothers tour.

The Everlys didn’t have their own band. They would pick up musicians in the towns we played, unlike The Crickets—Buddy’s band traveled with him. I didn’t have my own regular band, either. When I performed I was just trying to transpose the sound of my records to a performance situation. I would pick up a band, we’d rehearse together, and they would go on tour with me. Very unlike the concept of what was to come in which the band became a fixed entity in rock ’n’ roll and you got to know who played drums, who played bass, who played lead. I didn’t get my own permanent band until I got a little older and started playing the clubs.

After the Everly tour I headed out with Jerry Lee Lewis and Jodie Sands with Buddy and The Crickets on Buddy’s Hawaiian tour and after that his ten-day Australian tour before returning to Hawaii for another performance.

It was crazy how much touring we all did, but who knew if it was going to last? The critics were saying that rock ’n’ roll was a novelty and would quickly fade away. Believe it or not, it could have easily happened that way, too. Phonographs weren’t exactly a household item—especially for teenagers. Also, there were very few places where rock ’n’ rollers could perform.

It was this little seed that got planted and turned into a monster industry. I just happened to be at the right place at the right time. I got in on the ground floor and it has just kept going up and up—well, until recently, anyway. I watched that whole evolution as young people began to dominate the music industry. By the mid-sixties I found myself surrounded by young people, but in the beginning we were few and far between.

Buddy Holly and The Crickets, me, and Jerry Lee Lewis going to Australia … oh man, that was some trip! Those wild, drinking Southern boys were one thing, but Jerry Lee Lewis was just a nightmare. I didn’t like him and he
hated
me. We fought constantly. He was a mean redneck, a real nasty guy spewing venom at me at 25,000 feet crossing the Pacific Ocean.

We were fighting and yelling and throwing things at each other. Admittedly I was this annoying young brat, very aggressive, very brash, and it was especially grating to him that I had all these hit records. That really got his goat. He loved to pick on me, saying I looked like a squashed-down Danny Thomas. I wasn’t too shy about shoving it in his face that I was higher in the charts than he was. Mean white trash aboard Pan Am first-class luxury modern, in those days, prop planes. Pop heartthrob vs. the Killer, round one.

When we got to Hawaii and later in Australia, Jerry Lee was always cooking it up because his name wasn’t as big as mine on the billboard. This really bothered him. I, the little shrimp, was stealing the show from the Killer; in Hawaii and Sydney, there was my name towering above his. I was the one getting mobbed at the airport by reporters, fans, and
girls.
This did not sit well with Jerry Lee—the Killer playing second fiddle to this little squirt. Jerry was the Killer, and I was the boy millionaire.

There were pillow fights on the plane to Australia. The Southern boys at one point tried to force me to drink some beer or whiskey—I wasn’t a drinker at that point and they wanted to initiate me. I staggered about the plane singing Calypso songs and kissing the stewardess.

Jerry Lee Lewis’s second single was “Great Balls of Fire.” Although Buddy and The Crickets had three hits in Australia (“That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy!,” and “Peggy Sue”), Jerry Lee demanded his name be bigger than anyone else’s on the bill. Buddy said that was okay with him, as long as they got extra money, but in the end my name got top billing, which
really
rankled Jerry Lee.

It all came to a head on January 27, 1958, in Australia. The promoter, an ex-patriot named Lee Gordon, had brought us down under and in the end he was the one who got things resolved. The solution was that Buddy would get more money and Jerry Lee would get his name bigger.

Buddy started to steal the show in Australia. He was emerging as the forefront of a new generation of fans, and was slowly starting to be picked up by people we would soon hear a lot about—The Beatles. That’s why they gave themselves that name—after Buddy’s group, The Crickets.

I remember once—accidentally—pulling out the power plug from Buddy Holly’s amp, blacking out the entire stage. I already had this reputation of being a snotty kid so security assumed I was just being a brat and chased me around the theater. On another occasion I took a tube out of Jimmie Rodgers’s amp, blowing his set mid-song. This wasn’t Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, this was the pop singer who had huge hits with “Kisses Sweeter than Wine,” “Oh-Oh, I’m Falling in Love Again,” “Secretly,” and a bunch of others.

In November 1957, we were on tour playing in a small Canadian town. During your time off everybody on these tours is trying to kill time one way or another: walking around the city, going to a movie, shopping. This particular day we had nothing to do so Phil and Don Everly and I went into a department store, which had black motorcycle jackets on display like the one Marlon Brando wore in
The Wild One
. It also had some of those biker caps that gang members wore. So we all bought these brand-new shiny motorcycle jackets and caps. There were three of us so now we looked like we were a gang. Why we did it I still don’t know. We’re going down the escalator and as we’re going down there are three real mean biker guys in motorcycle jackets coming up on the other escalator. Here we were in our brand-new shiny motorcycle jackets and there they were in their real broken-in scuffed-up knife-slashed jackets, like guys would wear in a genuine biker gang. In comparison to them, we resembled the ice cream man. This didn’t look good and from the glares they shot at us, it did not bode well.