Buddy Holly: Biography (10 page)

Increasingly now, Buddy found himself at odds with the mores of West Texas. Race was only one of the issues troubling him. He loved to party and drink, which went against his mother’s religious scruples and eventually led to a showdown between them. If his mother was anything like mine—a fundamentalist Methodist of the same generation, geography, and economic background as Ella Holley—she was smotheringly overprotective, sitting up at night waiting for her cherished son to come home from dates, smelling his breath for signs of alcohol and tobacco when he finally came in. And if Buddy adored his mother as I did mine, and clearly he did, the burden of guilt was intolerable and resulted in further rebelliousness.

Melba Montgomery, a C&W singer, once stated that in those days, “a lot of the singers would put away a fifth or two of Jack Daniel’s a day.” On one occasion, Buddy got falling-down drunk with some musicians shortly after returning from another Hank Thompson tour in the autumn of 1956. When he staggered home that night, he made so much racket that he woke up his mother. One look was enough to tell her that he was drunk. Buddy said, “Mom, I’m sorry.”

“I wasn’t really mad at him,” Mrs. Holley recalled years later. “I was mad at those fellows in the band.” Her words demonstrate the depth of her denial about Buddy’s drinking; she was too proud to admit that a son of hers might have an alcohol problem. As long as she could blame someone else—the fellows in the band—she could blind herself to his drinking, a serious issue for anyone but a potentially fatal one for ulcer sufferers. Then there was the matter of Buddy’s smoking. “We were against drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes,” she said, adding that Buddy had no such compunctions about either vice. For years Buddy tried to conceal his smoking from his parents, but they knew he smoked “on the sly,” Mrs. Holley said. One day she caught him smoking and told him to stop trying to hide it, to light up right in the middle of the living room if he wanted to.

One of the stressful issues that might have been driving Buddy to drink in 1956 was the unresolved situation with Echo McGuire. After she left Texas to go to college, he made the long trip to Nebraska to see her. She told him he was leading the kind of existence “I couldn’t be part of,” Echo said, according to Buddy Holly biographers John Goldrosen and John Beecher. She could see the path he was taking, and “it just wasn’t what I wanted for myself,” she added. She stopped wearing his class ring around her neck. Buddy never went back to Nebraska to see her again.

After they stopped going steady, Buddy appeared “not to care who he went with much,” his mother observed. She later confided to John Goldrosen that Buddy dated many girls “who didn’t have too good a reputation. I wouldn’t have wanted him to marry them, I know that.”

Girls weren’t the only problem. “He run with some pretty rough guys,” Larry reveals in a 1992 interview. “Run with a rough crew.” One of Buddy’s friends rode a motorcycle and carried a chain. “Any time anybody tried to beat up on Buddy, he would take his chain and whip them, you know,” Larry recalls. He was a beloved and invaluable ally, since Buddy had resentful local rednecks to contend with—ambitious Lubbock pickers who weren’t good enough to cut a record and hated anyone who had. “Buddy liked everybody, but everybody didn’t like Buddy,” Larry continues. “Nowadays everybody who knew him says they was his good buddies, you know, but at that time it was a different story. He had his enemies and his friends. There was a lot of people in Lubbock who didn’t like him. There must have been a hundred musicians here that could play a little bit—this little band and that little band—and they were all jealous of each other. It was a vicious little circle.

“There’s so many musicians in Lubbock and they’re all vying. Buddy was strugglin’ for the top notch. This was a very jealous town and there was always some guys that wanted to beat up on him, because he was popular with some of their girlfriends. They’d make remarks. There was a lot of jealousy among Texas boys against anybody in their area that is famous or drawing some attention. That’s just the way Texans are. There were a few times that me and Travis had to go to the roller rink and see if Buddy was getting into trouble.”

Larry Holley believes that sinners are in imminent danger of God’s retribution. “It’s scary if you’re out of God’s will and you’re a Christian,” he says. “I know I used to be pretty wild and I flew around in my own airplane. Nearly crashed it several times. If you do wrong and keep on doing willful sins, the Lord will take you out of the picture. He beat me down to a nub. He’ll whup you until you get back in line. If you don’t, He’ll finally turn you over to the devil for the destruction of the flesh. You cannot live a life and entertain the world and the worldly crowd who could care less about the Lord, you cannot do that and be a Christian and just keep going on and on—the Lord will take you on to be with Him.”

Larry at last decided to speak to Buddy about the trouble he was getting into and the way he was treating his parents. “He was about nineteen at the time,” Larry recalls. “Mother and Buddy had it around and around quite often because he liked to stay out nearly all night.” In addition, Buddy’s friends were complaining. “Lot of people said they didn’t like Buddy’s attitude,” comments Larry. Mrs. Holley scolded Buddy for bossing his musicians around, even yelling at them. “He was pretty snobbish and felt like he was better than others in a lot of cases,” Larry remembers.

One day in 1956, Larry took Buddy out to his car for a long talk. “Now, Buddy, if you’re going to be a musician and make it in the world, you’re gonna have to learn to be friendly with ever’body you run into and just treat them nice whether they’re poor or whether they’re rich or whatever,” Larry said. Buddy sat very still, listening but saying nothing.

“Another thing,” Larry continued. “I want you to start treatin’ mother better. She’s come to me several times cryin’ and tellin’ me how impudent you talked to her. She’s my mother too and I love her and I’m just talkin’ to you like a big brother and I want you to start actin’ like you’re gonna have to—you’re liable to go some place in this world and you’re gonna change your ways.”

“Thank you,” Buddy said. Since Buddy respected his brother and had always sought his approval, Larry’s influence prevailed. In a few days, Larry recalls in 1992, Mrs. Holley told him, “I don’t know what you said to Buddy but he’s a different person since then.” Says Larry today, “Buddy was just a wild kid, baby of the family, spoiled … and he did pretty much as he pleased. He had some goals and he wouldn’t let nothin’ stand in his way until he reached them.… When I sat down and talked to him, he thought that I hung the moon.”

On October 23, 1956, the
Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
took notice of Buddy, writing, “Lubbock now has its own answer to Elvis Presley.… He plays an electric standard guitar and wears ‘fancy’ sports coats … singing rock ’n’ roll exclusively.” Jack Neal came back into Buddy’s life in time to supply him with some new material before he went to Nashville for his third Decca recording session in November 1956. One night Neal and Buddy were at Don Guess’s house when Don started kidding Buddy about being as big a cocksman as Don Juan. Neal, who later told Griggs that Buddy Holly was generally thought to be “a ladies’ lover,” had been working on a song called “Modern Don Juan,” was having trouble with it, and wondered if Buddy and Don would help him.

Buddy liked “Modern Don Juan” enough to take it to Nashville with him on November 10. Unfortunately, he didn’t get Neal’s permission to record it, which would later create complications. As usual, everything went wrong in Nashville. It wasn’t just Decca’s continuing insensitivity to his talent and total mismanagement of his recording career. Buddy’s life was falling apart, both personally and professionally. It takes money to hold a rock ’n’ roll band together, and Buddy 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 a Don Guess song, “You Are My One Desire.” He also rerecorded Sonny Curtis’s “Rock Around With Ollie Vee,” but this cut was no more likely to make it to the charts than the version he’d recorded in Nashville the previous summer. Though Boots Randolph’s sax solo was terrific, the recording lacks a raw rockabilly edge and sounds thin and anemic.

No hits emerged from this session, but both “You Are My One Desire” and “Modern Don Juan” 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. Indeed, the song might be called a clever rock ’n’ roll
Don Giovanni.

On the other side of this recording, Don Guess’s “You Are My One Desire,” Buddy’s voice quivers with an intensity that’s weirdly arresting. Nashville session-man Floyd Cramer pounds out his inimitable staccato on the piano. When Buddy lowers his voice to a lover’s purr on this cut, he’s at his most appealing. Unfortunately, he was singing too high on the other cuts, following the advice given to him by Decca C&W star Webb Pierce. Years later Owen Bradley attempted to explain how Nashville ruined its opportunity with Buddy Holly: “He needed somebody else to help him, not us. He wanted to make things not as country, as we were instructed to do it, but he didn’t fight it that strong.” Bradley had received his marching orders from boss Paul Cohen to make a country record and was simply trying to survive. It was his job, as he saw it, to keep Paul Cohen happy, he later told Goldrosen. It all came down to office politics: Cohen was Bradley’s “benefactor” as well as the Decca official who’d signed Buddy, so Buddy also felt constrained to satisfy Cohen, according to Bradley, who later claimed there was no friction between him and Holly. Indeed Bradley characterized Buddy as friendly and cooperative. But the game they were playing would do neither of them any good. Had Decca turned Buddy loose in the studio, as RCA continued to do with Elvis a few blocks away, they’d have had the string of hits that Buddy later produced at another studio.

Though Elvis Presley’s film
Love Me Tender
was the runaway box-office sensation of the year, Decca in 1956 still thought of rock ’n’ roll as “a passing fad,” according to Decca producer Dick Jacobs, who later worked with Buddy. “Decca had been a middle-of-the-road company and was not surviving well during the rock ’n’ roll era.” No wonder. When Decca had been offered Elvis Presley, Decca’s national sales manager, Sydney Goldberg, had said, “We got the best country label in the world. Who’s gonna buy a record by a guy named Elvis Presley? We pass.” During those years of the mid- and late 1950s, Decca, grounded by its success in the past, lacked the vision to see where American music was heading.

Decca’s hillbilly bias was the undoing of Buddy’s record debut. Right down to the final take at Bradley’s Barn, they were still trying to turn him into a C&W warbler. And his troubles were just beginning. “Modern Don Juan,” for which he hadn’t secured a release from its author, Jack Neal, was to be issued as a single almost immediately, on December 24, 1956. A tense confrontation with the songwriter awaited Buddy as soon as he returned to Lubbock, Neal later revealed in an interview with Griggs. Buddy shoved some papers at Neal and ordered him to sign them. Bristling, Neal inquired why. Buddy nonchalantly related that he’d just recorded “Modern Don Juan” at Decca. Digging in his heels, Neal said, “No, I ain’t signing no papers.” He had Buddy over a barrel. If Neal didn’t consent to the recording, Decca could sue Buddy for breach of contract. Neal was in a strong negotiating position, to say the least, but, good friend that he was, he finally relented and signed the release without changing any of the terms.

When “Modern Don Juan” was released on Christmas Eve 1956, with “You Are My One Desire” on the B-side, Decca lost the opportunity for a rock ’n’ roll hit when it was classified as C&W, destroying its chances in the burgeoning rock market. Despite a good
Billboard
review, neither record stores nor DJs knew what to do with the record. Though “Modern Don Juan” was no great loss to the world, it’s unfortunate that the sexy and hypnotic “You Are My One Desire” was a casualty of Decca’s marketing gaffe.

Jack Neal attempted to cheer Buddy up, reminding him that at least he had a new record on the jukeboxes. Designed and manufactured by Wurlitzer, jukeboxes in the fifties were elaborate consoles with glowing rainbow lights and bubbles rising in transparent tubes, all surrounding a selection of approximately one hundred recordings which were displayed under glass and chrome. One play for a nickel, five plays for a quarter, and once the coin was dropped and the selection made, an ingenious robotic arm would pluck the designated disc from a chrome rack and deposit it on the turntable. Excellent bass and volume boomed from the bellies of the jukeboxes, filling the cafés and lunchroom diners of the time with big sounds like Gogi Grant’s “The Wayward Wind” and the Four Lads’ “No, Not Much.” The diners ranged from brightly lit, shiny chrome Pullman cars to the austere pillboxes of the White Tower chain.

After Buddy settled his differences with Neal, he double-dated with him and his future wife that winter, though Buddy was without a steady girl.
Love Me Tender
was playing at the Lindsey, while
Hot Rod Girls
and
Girls in Prison
was the double bill at the Red Raider Drive-in, which advertised in-car heaters. When they went out with their girls, Buddy was so talkative that Jack had to interrupt Buddy’s interminable monologues to get a word in edgewise. Years later Neal told journalist Philip Norman, “He could be quiet as a mouse one minute, then cut up and do something crazy.”

Except to scorn them, the city of Lubbock took little note that two of its young citizens had a record in national release on a major label. According to Bob Church, brother of local musician Terry Noland, Ben D. Johnson of Tabernacle Baptist Church deplored the fact that his congregation was becoming infested with rock ’n’ rollers. Noland later told Griggs that the church nonetheless accepted Buddy’s generous donations. Buddy’s passive acceptance of their condemnation is typical of the behavior of some ulcer victims. Gastrointestinal specialist Dr. M. Michael Eisenberg believes that “ulcer-prone people are oral-dependent and passive in situations where more active and open aggression is more appropriate. Ulcers may be caused by a kind of inner-directed hostility or discontent stemming from a strong childish need to be looked after and loved, a need that may be rejected or denied.” Unfortunately, the more abusive Buddy’s church became about his music, the more he drank and the worse his ulcers got.