B009HOTHPE EBOK (14 page)

Irv had two tours going on at the same time that winter. I was on one tour, Buddy was on the other one. One of the reasons Buddy took the plane on that fateful night was because of the way General Artists Corporation had planned the tour, without any logic to the geography involved. Also the buses were breaking down more often
and
it was February and the heaters barely worked.

That area where the plane crashed has become something of a Bermuda Triangle. Otis Redding died somewhere near there in another plane crash. And then Stevie Ray Vaughn crashed and died in that same area. But in Buddy’s case there was nothing mysterious about it—it was all winter-weather related. Whether it’s wind, snowstorms, or ice on the wings, you can’t mess with the weather.

Outside of weather conditions, most airplane accidents are man-made. If it involves machinery that’s often a question of maintenance—in other words, human error. When I started out, my dream was one day to fly in a private plane. I bought my first Learjet in the seventies, but I don’t fly it myself.

Have I ever been superstitious about flying? I always think about it when I fly. I don’t take unnecessary risks and I don’t fly in bad weather. I’m just very cautious. To this day, whenever I get on a plane I think about the possibility of it crashing. With fate you never know. We’re all just a blink away in this world.

Dion was on that tour. His drummer had frostbite that last night they played, so Buddy sat in for him on drums. Dion introduced him as Dion & The Belmonts’ new drummer. When they left the stage Buddy performed a
“Gotta Move On”
solo.

He would have been one guy who lasted, Buddy. He and Bobby Darin. The only time things started to thin out for Buddy was when the Frankie Avalons and the Fabians—that manufactured pretty-boy look—came in. That was when things got kind of iffy for him. But his influence as a musician was really deep. He was basically just a country boy, very methodical about his music and the direction of his band, but not sophisticated in any other sense. He and Presley are all about that “yes sir, yes sir,” and “yes ma’am” country courtesy that always sounds a bit put-on to Northern ears. You could get a toothache listening to these guys!

The crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper left an unfillable gap in rock ’n’ roll. It was such a monumental disaster it may even have triggered the next wave—the following year The Beatles started playing in Hamburg.

I had spent so much time with Buddy, touring, touring, touring—and then suddenly he was just gone. The Winter Dance Party tour ran to its scheduled end with other performers filling in. Bobby Vee and his group with Bob Dylan on piano joined the tour the next day as did others until it concluded its run on February 15. You just went on. In shock.

Three

LONELY BOY

When I wrote “Lonely Boy,” that wasn’t some clever notion I’d come up with—that was
me
. I’d left my family and friends behind in Canada and suddenly I was out on the road, performing in front of thousands of people. I was envious of the camaraderie, the pranks, the dirty jokes, and the silly games of my contemporaries back home. As corny as it sounds, deep down I really was a lonely teenager—because, invariably, I
was
alone. I was out there singing, and I’d see teenagers together at those dances. It looked like another world, a movie, almost. That kind of romance wasn’t possible, living on the road. Sex, however, was another matter.

I’d always thought if only I could make it in the music business, everything would be perfect, but ever since “Diana” hit, my life was just more working and touring and writing. The tour bus was my home. You knew everyone and they became your family. Especially at my age, you take family wherever you find it. But, even as sibling rivalries go, it was a pretty competitive family. You’d wonder who was going to have the next hit and who wasn’t. In 1958, five of my songs became hit singles: “You Are My Destiny,” “Crazy Love,” “Let the Bells Keep Ringing,” “Midnight,” and “(All of a Sudden) My Heart Sings.” It was all happening so fast. When I came down from Ottawa, Canada, here I was sharing charts with The Everly Brothers and started touring. I remember the hula hoop being huge that year.

In 1959, I met Bobby Darin for the first time. I thought to myself, “Gee, I’m really touring big-time now!” “Mack the Knife” came out in August and I tried to bump it off with “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” which hit in September; in November, “It’s Time to Cry” came out. Frankie Avalon had one of his biggest hits, “Venus,” in 1959. I had four hits that year—and “Lonely Boy” got featured in the movie
Girls Town
with Mamie Van Doren. Big year—four songs in the Top 100. I got friendly with Lloyd Price who had a hit with “Stagger Lee,” produced by Don Costa on ABC-Paramount where I was recording. Originally a morbid tale of a murderer by that name, Dick Clark thought the lyrics were too dark and made him change them. It was at ABC where I first met Carole King—you could see right away she was going places, that’s how talented she was.

Things
were
good, but then things changed. They always do. After the plane crash in February 1959 that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper, the road just wasn’t the same anymore. When you’re very young and something like that happens, everything seems to come to a standstill. It was strange, very strange. Time really seemed to just stop, Buddy’s death left a big hole in my life, an enormous silence.

That was when I started touring less and doing more television—Ed Sullivan’s
Toast of the Town, The Perry Como Show
. I pretty much became a regular on
The Dick Clark Show
and
Dick Clark’s Saturday Night,
and, of course,
American Bandstand,
which was just getting off the ground. It was based out of Philadelphia, and was all the rage on weekday afternoons, not only because of the music, but also the personalities, the romances, who was dancing with whom. A cross between a reality show and a soap opera, kids felt they had to keep up on a daily basis. I wasn’t that much older than they were.

The whole key to doing those shows was faking it. The first thing you had to learn was how to lip-synch. They emphasized—and overemphasize—that you needed to get it down flawlessly or you’d end up looking like a dope. We were all very conscious of the fact that if you messed up you looked like a badly dubbed foreign movie—your lips are moving but no sound comes out. There was no live band so you had to rehearse—with yourself. You’d practice in the mirror, see if you could pull it off, catch yourself fluffing the line.

Of course, there were the inevitable “technical hitches.” One time when I was on
American Bandstand
, we were live, and I was singing “Diana” when, in the middle of the chorus, the record stuck. I was left standing there just repeating the words “Oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’, oh my darlin’,” until finally, I just started fucking laughing and that was that. They just shut the record off. Kids watching probably had no idea what had just happened. And it certainly didn’t become a scandal, like it did for poor Ashlee Simpson on
Saturday Night Live.

We all dreaded going on these shows. You did it one way in a studio and then you had to mimic it syllable for syllable on the pop music circuit. You’d do it over and over again—
exactly the same
as on your record—at all these record hops, so it seemed like you’d been doing it forever. I don’t remember how good any of us were at it, but lip-synching was the key. Getting on any of these local bandstand shows—that would make or break you.

A little later Dick Clark developed his local clique, Frankie Avalon and Fabian and that whole Philadelphia gang. But, of course, eventually Mr. Squeaky Clean was brought up on payola charges.

That was like a big shock for all of us because, you know, everything was supposedly so honest and innocent back then—most of all Dick Clark himself, who projected this wholesome image, and suddenly his name comes up in connection with this squalid “pay-for-play” business.

I remember Congress announcing their intention to hold hearings over payola in November 1959. It hit us like a bolt of lightning.

But why should I be surprised? When I joined ABC and began to have hits, they were making so much dough—most of it from my hit records—that they used to take bags of money out on an airplane to L.A. just to keep the television branch of ABC going. It was just getting started and they needed money to to keep it operating. Everything was so casual, nothing was computerized, money was flying out of teenagers’ pockets and into the coffers of the record companies and radio stations—and into the hands of the mob, too, since they controlled the jukeboxes and the clubs we performed in.

In those early years—we’re talking 1959 and 1960—I was making mad money, more than a million dollars a year, which some reporter figured out was equal to the combined salaries of the president and vice president of the United States and half the U.S. Senate—and I wasn’t even old enough to vote yet.

When
American Bandstand
first took off there was a lot of hanky-panky going on between the deejays and the guys promoting the records, lots of money changing hands to get air time for their records. That’s what payola was—paying to get your record played. We were just clueless young artists—what did we know? Our songs were becoming hits and then we started hearing the word “payola,” and all the rumors about who was paying who to plug your record.

In the beginning music publishers and songwriters used to walk around with music sheets; they’d sit at a piano and plug a song—that’s years and years ago—but this eventually gave way in the late ’50s to the new wave of promotion guys. They were called “promo men,” guys who would be hired by the record companies to go around and pay off disc jockeys.

It was a common business practice but eventually people started questioning it because these disc jockeys also happened to be in the publishing business themselves. They frequently got writing credit on records they had nothing to do with, and they often had a piece of a record company, too. There was definitely a conflict of interest there, but everybody would turn a blind eye and say, “Hey, what can you do, y’know? That’s just the way it is.” Still, it was a dirty business. No respectable businessman would run his company like that. But for the record companies payola was a very useful tool—you could just buy yourself a hot record. What a racket!

It really got out of hand by the late ’50s. By then, there were squads of these promo men, like the guy The Stones make fun of on “The Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man.” These were slick guys who plugged records, which at that time simply meant paying off these disc jockeys. You’d go into the men’s room and right out in the open there’d be promo guys handing over huge envelopes stuffed with cash. I don’t know how deep Dick Clark was into all this—he went on denying it, but the evidence kept piling up and so did the rumors.

Dick Clark used all kinds of rationales to justify his participation in it. One day Leonard Goldenson, the head of ABC, brought him into the office and, you know, really grilled him and what they found out was that he’d been given the publishing—I think all or part of it—to my record, “Don’t Gamble with Love” as a payoff for getting me on
American Bandstand
.

I was just a kid, so what did I care? They gave me three hundred bucks a week—I was in heaven, you know? I was just writing away on a record contract and when Congress started asking questions of all these people, it all came out in public that they’d given Dick Clark a piece of my publishing.

But Dick Clark was never indicted because the stuff that went on wasn’t, strictly speaking, illegal, but still it was definitely frowned upon. So even though they tried to nail him on it and there was a lot of bad publicity, they really couldn’t do anything. Nevertheless, for Mr. Clean-Cut Dick Clark, it was a really big, big deal, and it went on for some time. I know they dragged his producer, Tony Mammarella, down to Washington for sessions with the subcommittee. They brought him down to D.C., and he started naming names and telling about the money that had changed hands—he admitted to it all. And they brought in other people, too. Dave Maynard and a guy named Norm Prescott—these were all disc jockeys—and they started spilling the beans. They’d say stuff like, “If you played a new song, you’d get a thousand bucks right there on the spot, and then if you got it into the charts they’d give you another ten thousand bucks.” Those were huge amounts of money back then and people were outraged. It just boggled the mind to think that these hit songs were
fixed
. So right away you knew they had to find a fall guy.

That’s where Alan Freed comes in. Freed was a revolutionary deejay and rock impresario who did more than anyone to promote rock ’n’ roll. He plugged all the R&B artists and really changed the scene; nevertheless, he was the guy who got crucified in all of this. He was indicted in 1962 on two counts of what they called “commercial bribery” and was fined $300, which wasn’t much of a punishment money-wise, but it was all they could do. It was the resulting public disgrace that exacted the real price, though, and led to his downfall. He was blackballed by the industry, and lost everything—his livelihood, his self-respect. He was made the scapegoat for the whole thing. Everybody had a hand in the pot, but Alan was the one who was made to pay. He was a nice guy and a true rock visionary, but for some reason they just had it in for him. Within a year or two of those hearings he was ruined, and a year after that, on Lyndon Johnson’s inauguration day, January 20, 1965, he was dead.

Okay, what now? Here I was, a bona fide teen idol, but I knew that wasn’t going to be enough. A lot of us had a good run as teen singers in the fifties, but we weren’t going to be teenagers forever. Those of us who wanted to survive knew we had to do something else to prove ourselves. It’s the law of pop music: every three years you have to reinvent yourself. After you’ve done that a few times, you get to stick around.