Buddy Holly: Biography (11 page)

His Nashville failures and his church’s disapproval might have undermined his hopes for a recording career had it not been for the moral support and financial help of Larry Holley, who urged him to go to Clovis and keep on making records. Buddy was too broke to maintain a band, but Larry Welborn and Jerry helped him cut “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” and “Bo Diddley” at Petty’s studio at the end of 1956. “I really didn’t get any session money or anything for it,” Welborn told Griggs in 1986. There was an unspoken understanding among the friends that they would back each other up musically anytime they were needed.

But without money, the band’s days were numbered. Occasional gigs like the one they played on November 22, 1956, at the American Legion Hall in Lubbock barely kept them in cigarettes and beer. The new year, 1957, brought the most demoralizing news Buddy Holly would ever receive: Decca was not renewing his option. The record royalties he’d expected would never materialize. He was insolvent. His band, Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes, was on the skids. His musicians began to leave him in rapid succession.

The first to go was Don Guess, who found some of Buddy’s expectations to be unrealistic. Buddy had been nagging Don all year to purchase a stand-up bass fiddle, as if this expensive instrument were something a destitute rocker could afford. Don couldn’t even buy a decent car and went around Lubbock in a secondhand hearse. Finally, according to Jerry, Don told Buddy, “Well, I’m not cut out to be a bass player.”

Sonny Curtis was the next to go. He had both personal and musical issues with Buddy. Musically Sonny wasn’t as committed to rock ’n’ roll as Buddy and could sometimes be fondly dismissive about rock. In the beginning, Sonny was a better guitarist than Buddy and had played lead. But Buddy quickly caught up with him and demanded to play lead in addition to singing, consigning Sonny to rhythm guitar. Personality clashes were inevitable between two such gifted musicians. Sonny, who eventually would write the hit song “I Fought the Law,” was really too talented to play second fiddle to anyone, especially if he wasn’t being paid for it. “The main thing was that there wasn’t any money coming in,” Sonny asserted in 1993. He quit Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes, left Lubbock to tour with Slim Whitman, and later joined the Philip Morris Country Music Show in Nashville. Sonny faced some lean times after leaving Lubbock. Philip Morris made him pay his own expenses on the road, so every time he’d go into a café, he’d total up everything before he ordered to make certain the bill didn’t exceed a dollar. He moved to Colorado Springs in 1957, then to California, writing songs all the while, and finally came home to work on his father’s farm in Meadow, Texas, to replenish his depleted bank account before going to New York at the end of the decade to record for Dot Records. When Griggs asked him in 1980 whether he regretted his decision to leave Buddy Holly just before the Crickets became a sensation, Sonny said that it would have been interesting “to contribute my influence,” but he had no regrets. In Sonny’s opinion, “everything works out for the best.”

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. He intended to cut some demos to show to record companies and asked if he could make them in Petty’s studio. Petty was concerned about Buddy’s clothes, Levi’s and a T-shirt, which were disdained in the Southwest as lower-class garb until the movie
Urban Cowboy
made them fashionable decades later. Cronies of Petty’s, local businessmen, criticized him for attracting “a hillbilly like Buddy” to their town. Though Petty defended him as “a diamond in the rough,” he turned Buddy down, advising him to go home, get himself a band, make some arrangements, and put together an act.

It was bizarre advice to give to Buddy Holly, who would shortly score million-selling records as a solo recording artist, but Buddy followed it, returning to Lubbock and working with a new group of musicians, all of whom wanted to make records. Jerry stayed with him from the old crowd, but the others were new faces: June Clark, Niki Sullivan, June’s cousin Gary Tollett, and Gary’s wife, Ramona. All of them were dreaming of having a hit on Roulette, the label behind the phenomenal success, “Party Doll.” June was the kid sister of Don Lanier, who’d cut “Party Doll” with Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen. Don and June had a sister named Teddy who worked at Roulette and felt she could get their demos heard by Roulette’s Phil Kahl, since she’d brought “Party Doll” to the label. Practicing at the home of June and Nig Clark in early 1957, they built themselves into a tight band and backup singing group. They recorded Gary Tollett’s songs at Petty’s studio, but nothing came of them.

One night at June and Nig Clark’s house, Buddy, who’d been drinking, had a seizure, possibly a reaction to alcohol poisoning. “He went out to the yard and starting swinging his arms around,” Niki Sullivan remembers. “Finally, it was Jerry, I think, who calmed him down.”

Shortly afterward, Buddy made his fateful decision to rerecord his Nashville turkey “That’ll Be the Day” in Clovis. This time, he went into the studio with a well-rehearsed group that had defined and honed their sound. Buddy, Larry Welborn, Niki Sullivan, Gary and Ramona Tollett, and Jerry Allison looked and sounded like a winning team. Decca was still sitting on the recording Buddy had cut of this song in Nashville the previous July, exactly seven months before. In retrospect, Decca’s neglect of “That’ll Be the Day” sums up the country establishment’s dismissal of Buddy Holly as a failure. Decca’s lack of vision did nothing to diminish Buddy’s faith in the terrific song he’d written, which he knew could hit the charts if recorded as an all-out rocker.

Chapter Six

The Clovis Sessions

“I’m advising you again not to go to Clovis,” said Hi Pockets Duncan. Buddy had just informed him that he was thinking of rerecording “That’ll Be the Day” in Petty’s studio. Hi Pockets had known Petty for years and didn’t trust him. He cautioned Buddy that Petty would steal the songwriting credit for any of Buddy’s songs recorded in Clovis, but Buddy was so obsessed with the fact that Buddy Wayne Knox’s “Party Doll” had come out of Clovis that he again ignored Hi Pockets’s warning. He was so desperate that he was willing to sign over a share of his songwriting royalties if Petty could make him a star. In Clovis he told Petty, “If you can get a hit for that Buddy, you can get a hit for this Buddy.”

“It’s the talent, not the studio,” Petty said, promising nothing. But he was flattered that Buddy had followed his instructions and formed a tight vocal group and a good band, one that included Jerry Allison and Larry Welborn. He let them move into the studio and begin rehearsals for a recording session.

The Clovis version of “That’ll Be the Day” was recorded on February 24, 1957. It was a cold Sunday evening, the temperature hovering around thirty degrees, when Buddy and his entourage set out for Clovis in two cars. Most of them held down jobs and hadn’t been able to leave until after work. In Buddy’s car, he frantically put the finishing touches on “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love,” which was the A-side to be recorded that night. The rerecording of “That’ll Be the Day” was the B-side.

After stopping on the road to visit relatives, they approached Clovis around nine
P.M.
, shortly after crossing the Texas–New Mexico border. In 1992, on a chilly day around Easter, I made the same trip. It’s difficult to stay awake during the ninety-mile drive because of the unrelieved flatness of the terrain, the monotonous, unwavering straightness of the road between Lubbock and Clovis, and the absence of visual relief save a few houses and an occasional herd of cattle. This is New Mexico’s milk pail; dairies are open twenty-four hours a day, operating nonstop. Some four thousand cattle are brought here daily, fattened up, slaughtered, and shipped all over the U.S. Portales, twenty miles to the south, is peanut country, supplying the nation’s ballparks. The land rises imperceptibly but steadily as you reach Clovis, your ears popping from the 4,300-foot elevation. Located on an old Comanche trail, at first the town looks like nothing more than a few scattered low buildings at the edge of a cattle pasture. But then you leave the highway and in a few minutes reach the downtown area, a couple of streets with neat two-story brick buildings that were probably put up in the twenties. I visited the town on a winter day in 1992. Though a few cars and pickup trucks were parked diagonally to the curb, there was no one to be seen on the streets and absolutely no traffic. I had the disorienting, dreamlike feeling that I was standing in the middle of a painting by Magritte.

Billy Stull, a Chuck Norris look-alike, was managing the Norman Petty Recording Studios in 1992, Petty having died some years before. We met at El Charro Restaurant, where the owner, Mr. Muscato, remembered that Norman Petty “used to come in here and eat—Norman was very quiet.” Later, Billy Stull gave me a guided tour of Petty’s two studios in Clovis. The original building is located a few blocks from the heart of town, at 1313 West Seventh Street. It looks like a 1930s gas station. Inside, the small, ten-by-twenty-two-foot studio is virtually unchanged since Buddy’s day, full of gleaming instruments and vintage jumbo microphones. There’s not a scratch or a cigarette burn on Petty’s huge electric console organ, a testament to the respect and love he must have earned from a generation of rough-hewn rockabillies. “Norman was a tremendous musician,” Billy Stull says. “In most sessions he would try to upgrade the musical abilities of the people in the studio … because he had such a tremendous knowledge of music, a great ear, a great imagination, a sense of experimentation.”

Stull may very well be right, but few who were present that February evening in 1957, when Buddy’s band and backup singers filed into the studio and began rehearsing “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love,” would agree. Jerry told Griggs in 1982 that Petty was a first-rate engineer and that he granted them complete freedom in the studio, but Jerry minimized Petty’s role as a producer, declaring emphatically that Petty did nothing but select and arrange the microphones and run the control board. In 1983 Griggs interviewed Gary Tollett, who said that Buddy “ramrodded” the entire session, making it clear that he was the star, that this was
his
performance, that everyone was there to do the record
his
way, because he was the boss. Whatever Petty’s contribution, he clearly deserves credit for his behavior at this key moment in the history of rock ’n’ roll: he let Buddy be himself, which no one at Decca had been willing to do.

They worked until midnight on “I’m Lookin’ for Someone to Love” and then recorded “That’ll Be the Day” almost as an afterthought, getting it in two takes. On the second take, the one that ultimately was released and became a hit, they weren’t playing together at a certain point in the last chorus, which sounded a bit ragged. They knew they could do it more professionally, but it was only a demo to send to New York, or so they thought, and no one dreamed it would be released. As it turned out, its charm is in its rawness and spontaneity, which might have been lost had they done another take.

Rockabilly has been defined as taking a country song and rocking it. Recorded only seven months after the Decca catastrophe, the Clovis rockabilly or “Tex-Mex” version of “That’ll Be the Day” is so far superior to its Nashville antecedent that it’s virtually unrecognizable as the same song. The most obvious improvements are Buddy’s cocky self-assurance and the peppier pace, which give the cut a feeling of untamed animal energy. Perhaps more than any other song of the fifties, the Clovis “That’ll Be the Day” captures the spirit of an era when music had just burst out of the garage and was still fun. With this cut Buddy introduced his unique sound, one that combined the heart and soul of C&W with the joy and edgy irreverence of rock ’n’ roll. And at the song’s flinty core is a profound diffidence about romantic love. The attitude in the song is identical to one expressed by Larry Holley: that Buddy never permitted any girl to come between him and his career.

At one point during the session, Petty called everyone together in the control room and struck his deal for the recording. “I’ll give you the acetate, and you go peddle it and that will be five hundred dollars,” he said. “Or,” he added, “I’ll go get you on a record label and for that I want the publishing rights. It’s your choice.” Petty also demanded part song-writing credit for himself. He assured them he was claiming co-authorship only because DJs knew him and would play the record if they saw his name on it. Jerry was the first to object to such blatant dishonesty. How could Petty claim authorship of “That’ll Be the Day” when it had already been written—and recorded at Decca—as a Holly-Allison song?

But Buddy was adamant, irritably pointing out that they were quibbling over money that might never materialize and insisting that at this low point in their careers Petty’s contacts were absolutely vital to the band. Letting impatience override common sense, Buddy agreed to a deal that would eventually cost him a fortune. In the 1950s people were not as quick to consult lawyers as they would become toward the end of the century. As Elvis once put it, “Colonel Parker knows the business and I don’t.” But from Buddy Holly to Billy Joel, who would become entangled in legal controversies with his manager, artists who trust others with their affairs often live to regret it.

On February 25, 1957, sometime after three
A.M.
, Buddy’s weary troupe finished “That’ll Be the Day” and headed for their cars to start the long drive back to Lubbock. With the temperature in the mid-thirties, they stood shivering as Buddy spoke briefly with Jim Robinson, a songwriting friend of Waylon Jennings’s from Littlefield. Robinson remembers introducing Buddy to his wife and remarking on a scraggly Van Dyke goatee Buddy had at the time. Buddy told them he was not going to cut if off until he scored a chart-topping record. Then he got in his car and headed out to the highway. Watching him drive off, Robinson’s wife, Bonnie, shook her head and said, “Well, that poor little darling, poor thing.” Robinson was somewhat more sanguine and told his wife that Buddy was going to be a star someday.