Buddy Holly: Biography (16 page)

Before beginning their tour, they went to Philadelphia for an autograph-signing session at a record store. Then, reporting to Washington’s Howard Theater to begin performances on August 2, they were taken aback when the Cadillacs, who were also on the bill, told them about a black Bronx group called Dean Barlow and the Crickets, some of whom were now in the Cadillacs, since Barlow’s group had broken up after having a hit record, “Fine as Wine.” Earl “Speedy” Carroll, the Cadillacs’ lead singer, had sung one of rock’s most famous lyrics on the 1955 hit record “Speedo,” pointing out that his nickname was “Speedo” but people usually called him Mr. Earl. Buddy tried to explain to everyone at the Howard that the Crickets had attempted to find a name that hadn’t been used before, but obviously they’d goofed.

Some of the black performers put Buddy and the Crickets down as one-hit wonders and predicted they’d soon be washed up, like so many white boys who tried to sing black music. Others, however, such as Clyde McPhatter, the headliner, befriended the boys from Texas, Joe B. recalled. In Niki’s recollection, the black audiences liked them, but the situation was so fraught with ambivalence that Buddy came down with a case of “nerves” and lost his voice. Diagnosed with laryngitis, he told Niki to go on for him.

None of the Crickets professed to be singers, and Niki was scared out of his wits over the prospect of singing, adding that he wasn’t yet much of a guitarist, either. When Petty joined the tour and learned that Niki had succeeded in putting over Buddy’s songs, he commented, with his usual condescension, “Anyone can sing those songs.” Petty noticed that Niki and Jerry’s personalities clashed and that Niki felt alienated from the group, but he did nothing to alleviate the conflict. He knew that Buddy, the most important member of the group, would always side with Jerry in any row with Niki. Eventually, according to Petty, everyone wanted Niki out. To make matters worse, Niki’s Gibson electric was stolen during the tour and he had to dash out and buy a new one between shows.

In Baltimore the Royal audience was famous for draining wine bottles and then tossing them at the performers. During one show a drunk in the balcony heaved a bottle at a black girl group called the Hearts and cut one of the singers, who left the stage bleeding.

The next stop was New York, where they were to play Harlem’s fabled sixteen-hundred-seat Apollo Theater beginning August 16. Still standing today, the Apollo is a neoclassical three-story gray brick building. The large plate-glass windows on the upper floors make it look more like a garment-district building than a theater, but, as Billie Holiday once noted, “Uptown, the Apollo was what the Palace was downtown.” A towering fifteen-foot sign, flashing the Apollo’s name in purple neon letters, lights up the ghetto sky nightly. Since 1934, its huge marquee had announced the noblest names in black entertainment, including Bessie Smith, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis, Jr., and Ray Charles. Accustomed to genius, the Apollo audience was the most exacting this side of La Scala. Blacks often said, “If you can work the Apollo, you can work anywhere in the world.”

Buddy Holly faced this challenge in a state of near collapse. When he visited Bob Thiele at Brunswick, he seemed a nervous wreck. An unguarded remark, Thiele felt, could shatter what little equanimity Buddy had left. Another Decca executive, Dick Jacobs of Coral, Buddy’s solo label, thought Buddy looked like a Lone Star lout, with his eyeglasses in unfashionable silver frames and a mouthful of gold fillings. After they talked for a while, however, Jacobs was smitten by Buddy, calling him a miracle of gentleness and kindness, a great soul. The Crickets walked in on Murray Deutch at Peer-Southern wearing jeans and T-shirts, striking Deutch as country bumpkins, fresh from Podunk, Texas. But Buddy won him over with a deference that was as courtly, and as full of yes sir’s and no sir’s, as Elvis Presley’s. They gave Deutch a humorous jingle they’d recorded to the tune of “That’ll Be the Day,” thanking him for having launched their recording careers and referring to him affectionately as the “Dutch boy.”

Their hotel, the legendary Theresa, stood at Seventh Avenue and 125th Street, resembling a smaller, grimier version of the Hotel Plaza in midtown Manhattan. On the Theresa’s ground floor, there was a handy Chock Full o’ Nuts, where they could buy the best coffee and powdered wholewheat donuts in town. Within a few years, in 1960, Cuban premier Fidel Castro would choose to stay at the Theresa, occupying a ninth floor suite. Conveniently for the Crickets, the hotel was near the Apollo, which is located at 253 West 125th Street between Seventh and Eighth avenues. Just north of Central Park, Harlem covers six square miles of Manhattan. Though it had once represented the ultimate expression of the black spirit in America, especially in the 1920s, its streets ringing with music, laughter, and uninhibited gaiety, by the fifties Harlem was on the way to becoming an angry ghetto. Few whites ventured there unless they were drunk and looking for “poon.” The Crickets were too innocent, according to Joe B., to realize they might be in danger.

To blacks, the Apollo Theater, bearing the name of the Greek god of music, retained the status of a holy shrine. When Elvis Presley visited the theater two years previously, Bo Diddley spotted him from the stage and later recalled, “I didn’t know who the heck he was, but him were there.” Known as the “black Vegas,” the Apollo represented the ultimate night on the town for the residents of Harlem. In the fifties they dressed conservatively, meticulously conking their hair, straight as a shingle, or marcelling it into shiny, precise waves. Elegant black women in spike heels glided past the tiled walls of the narrow foyer, which was decorated with photographic murals and mirrors. Mary Johnson’s refreshment stand offered candy, peanuts, ice cream, and potato chips.

Inside the auditorium, the interior reflects the Apollo’s infamous past as a burlesque joint. The rear wall is covered with three nude paintings of fleshy women in baroque frames, one of them reputedly Cleopatra. The wallpaper design is made up entirely of nudes. Several roomy boxes flank the stage. On Wednesday nights the C Box on stage right was always reserved by a gaggle of flamboyant black transvestites in gaudy drag.

Backstage before the show, the Crickets climbed to their dressing room on the top floor. Anthony Gourdine of Little Anthony and the Imperials once said, “I don’t care if you had nine hit records, when you first came to the Apollo you were nobody.” Like any other new act, the Crickets had to walk four flights down to the stage. Contrary to the 1978 movie
The Buddy Holly Story,
which stated that the Apollo management thought the Crickets were black and didn’t discover the truth until they showed up for work, the Schiffman family, who owned the theater, was aware that the Crickets were a white act. Frank Schiffman’s sons, Bobby and Jack, had both caught the Crickets’ act at the Howard Theater in Washington earlier in the month. The Apollo’s then-manager, Leonard Reed, said that Frank Schiffman’s policy was never to hire an act without knowing all about them. According to Atlantic’s Ahmet Ertegun, Schiffman was regularly fed information about hot new acts by industry A&R men. Nor were the Crickets the first white faces to be seen on the Apollo stage, as
The Buddy Holly Story
also implied. Although Jack Schiffman personally informed the film’s producers that Buddy Rich, Woody Herman, and other white musicians had preceded the Crickets, the producers elected to disregard the fact, said Schiffman. Unlike the other theaters on the black tour, which were shocked when the Crickets turned out to be white, the Apollo deliberately booked them because of their proven appeal to black record-buyers, who were sending “That’ll Be the Day” high up the R&B charts.

On opening day, Friday, August 16, Murray Deutch sent the Crickets a telegram, assuring them that they were going to be a smash. The matinee began at 10:20
A.M.
“They were wide awake early in the morning,” Billie Holiday, who started at the Apollo for $50 a week, once commented. “My knees were shaking so bad the people didn’t know whether I was going to dance or sing.… One little broad in the front row hollered out, ‘Look, she’s dancing and singing at the same time.’”

At curtain time, the house band hit its warm-up and then the MC announced, “It’s showtime at the Apollo!” When the Crickets’ cue came, they took their places behind the crimson curtain. Anyone would have been apprehensive about following Clyde McPhatter, whose high-pitched, silky renditions of his hit records “Have Mercy, Baby” and “Without Love (There is Nothing)” always elicited the audience’s roaring approval. Performers at the Apollo were also anxious to impress the booking agents—GAC, Universal, William Morris, and Associated—all of whom sent representatives to the Friday openings to scout for new talent. Also in the audience for the first show of the week were Apollo regulars Ed Sullivan, Milton Berle, and Joey Adams.

Dwarfed by the cracked and chipped imitation marble proscenium arch, the Crickets faced the audience and prepared to begin their set. Suddenly a woman in front started heckling them, leaning forward in her seat and yelling threateningly that they’d better sound
exactly
like the recording or else. Another heckler yelled, “What is this?” Watching from the wings, Ted Scott of the G-Clefs, who had a hit record called “Ka-Ding Dong,” thought the Crickets put on a show that could be mentioned in the same breath with Chuck Berry, Muddy Waters, and the best artists of the Chess/Checker labels. But that didn’t stop the audience from booing them, Scott recalled in 1983, and Niki, the following year, confirmed that they were a miserable flop; the audience hated them, derided their music, and was not impressed that they had cut a promising record. After two days, the Crickets were demoted to the bottom of the bill. They retreated to their dressing room, which was dirty, smelly, drafty, and roach-infested. Taking stock of their predicament, they realized, according to Niki, that they weren’t up to the standards of the Apollo audiences, who’d heard the best headliners in show business and had found them wanting.

Luckily for Buddy, it was a tradition at the Apollo for the performers to monitor each other’s acts and offer constructive criticism. Once his black colleagues realized how different he was from Pat Boone and other white recording artists who were covering R&B records, they accepted him as one of their own. Ted Scott realized that Buddy wasn’t the type to lurk around R&B artists in order to rob them of their material. Buddy’s performance had an authentic bluesy quality, Scott later told interviewer Bill Floyd.

On August 19, four days before the end of the run, “That’ll Be the Day” finally showed up on the
Billboard
chart. Just before they went onstage at the Apollo that day, Buddy suddenly told the band, “Let’s open with ‘Bo Diddley.’” They hadn’t rehearsed it and were forced to improvise, but they caught the primal rhythm of “Bo Diddley,” which at last galvanized the Apollo audience. From that performance on, the blacks accepted them and cheered their sets. To Jerry it seemed that the blacks viewed them as a novelty, but he was delighted that their Apollo engagement turned out to be a happy one.

Leslie Uggams saw Buddy at the Apollo and later described the experience to author Ted Fox. Uggams had been performing at the theater ever since making her debut on Amateur Night at the age of seven. Throughout 1957 she’d been buying Buddy’s records, thinking, “Hey, another brother out there doing his number.” She was under the impression that Buddy was black. At the Apollo, when the Crickets came on stage, the people around her murmured, “Oh, that’s Buddy Holly!” Turning to one of them, she remarked, “He’s
white,
isn’t he?” Recalling Buddy’s performance years later, Uggams told Ted Fox, “He was terrific … sexy and wonderful … and that’s what made it happen. It wasn’t that they didn’t want any white acts.… As long as they do a great show, that’s all the audience cared about.”

Now that they were a hit, the Crickets relaxed and began to enjoy the Apollo’s ribald backstage scene, which was “better than the show out front,” Uggams recalled. Hookers masquerading as exotic dancers offered the stars “anything you could want from matzo balls to matrimony,” said Chuck Berry, who frequently played the Apollo. Harlem characters drifted through hawking wristwatches, soul food, and dope. “There were drugs back in those days, mostly marijuana,” Ted Scott recalled in 1983.

After the Apollo run, the Crickets went directly into Alan Freed’s Labor Day rock ’n’ roll extravaganza at the 4,400-seat Brooklyn Paramount, located at the corner of Flatbush and DeKalb avenues. A popular DJ on radio station WINS, Freed was rock ’n’ roll’s first czar. Ever since 1955, hip New York teenagers had been religiously attending his stage shows, which were held on Easter, Labor Day, and Christmas. Rehearsing for the Labor Day show, Buddy again ran into Little Richard, who was the headliner.

“I loved him dearly,” said Little Richard years later. “I still love him.” In
The Quasar of Rock,
Richard remembered that Buddy “used to idolize my music” and would go onstage and sing Richard’s songs before Richard had a chance to. Richard used voluptuous girlfriends to lure Buddy and other straight-looking men into bisexual encounters. On one occasion he invited all the Crickets to come up to his dressing room. As they entered, an orgy was in progress. Niki recalled in the
London Daily Mail
in 1994 that the revelers ignored them and “carried right on with what they were doing.” The only whites in the room, the Crickets stood against the wall, gaping. “This was definitely not our territory,” Niki said in 1994. Rock star Larry Williams was making love to a woman while she gave Richard oral sex. “Everyone else was watching, like us,” says Niki. After Richard and his partners were finished, Richard closed his robe and walked over to the window. For a while he stood looking out at a nearby building, a home for senior citizens. Then, according to Niki, he said he’d been wondering if the old people would would appreciate it if he paid a visit and offered to conduct a prayer meeting.

Larry Williams was a dashingly handsome, mustachioed twenty-two-year-old singer from New Orleans. In 1957 he was scoring a string of Little Richard–type hits such as “Short Fat Fanny” and “Bony Moronie.” “I brought him to fame,” Richard said. Later, when Richard purchased some cocaine from Williams and failed to pay for it, Williams showed up at his house with a gun to collect. Though Williams’s career suffered when he was arrested for narcotics possession, he continued to grow and develop artistically over the years.
Rolling Stone
rates him among the greats, writing, “His red-hot version of ‘Heeby-Jeebies’ stands up to Little Richard’s own smoking version.” Eventually Williams committed suicide, shooting himself in the head. At his funeral, Richard sang a moving a cappella version of “Precious Lord.”