Buddy Holly: Biography (26 page)

Voices of change were just beginning to be heard. In the mid-fifties Colin Wilson’s ground-breaking study
The Outsider
heralded a generation of dissidents. Then came the Angry Young Men of the West End theater, led by John Osborne, whose play
Look Back in Anger
galvanized young people fed up with the sclerotic establishment’s culture, manners, snobbism, and hypocrisy. From the publishing world came John Braine’s sizzling novel
Room at the Top,
which announced the arrival of a dynamic working-class hero. Rock ’n’ roll was the next step in the emancipation of the British from years of stiff-upper-lip stodginess, and Buddy Holly was its standard-bearer.

The Crickets were under contract to Lew and Leslie Grade, two brothers whose power was felt throughout show business in the United Kingdom. Lewis Grade, later to become Lord Grade, was described in 1988 by John Lennon’s biographer Albert Goldman as “the fat-cat, cigar-sucking boss of the British entertainment industry.” He owned ATV, the Associated Television Corporation, England’s major independent producer of TV programs. Leslie Grade, Lew’s brother, ran the largest theatrical agency in England, handling stars such as Laurence Olivier and also packaging movies, television shows, and stage attractions. In the sixties, the agency attempted to sign the Beatles, by then the most valuable act in the world, and failed. In retaliation, ATV seized controlling interest in Northern Songs, the Lennon-McCartney publishing company, in a hotly contested takeover. A third brother, Bernard Delfont, was a theater owner and controlled many of London’s West End stage productions. Unlike Lew and Leslie, who had changed their names from Winogradsky to Grade, Bernard preferred the tonier-sounding Delfont.

At Heathrow, accompanied by the Crickets and Norman and Vi Petty, Buddy complained to a
Melody Maker
reporter that he was paying two managers and a booking agent. According to
Melody Maker
he could well afford to, having received $2,000 per night on his last tour. Wally, the British road manager, “stuffed” the Crickets onto a bus along with the “motley crew” that made up the rest of the package: comedian Des O’Connor, a juggling act, the Tanner Sisters, Ronnie Keane, and a fourteen-piece band. After the star-studded casts of the Feld tours, the Crickets were astonished to be the sole rock band on the bill. But it was fun from the start, Jerry said years later in Paul McCartney’s TV documentary
The Real Buddy Holly Story.
Tired of the American road, they welcomed the enormous change that England represented for them.

One reporter informed Buddy that more than one million English teens had purchased his recordings. His reply struck the journalist as “very cautious”; Buddy said the band had been together for a year but he still wondered “how long it’s going to last.” He was grateful that the public “seems to like us” and felt they’d survive if they didn’t “make any mistakes.” Though Buddy was a man of true humbleness, both he and Elvis Presley realized the value of a public display of modesty. Indeed, they made it the style of early rock ’n’ roll; soon it would be replaced by the surly cockiness of sixties rock.

He was apprehensive about how the British were going to respond to a bunch of country boys from Lubbock, which was more like Liverpool than he could ever have imagined. He needn’t have worried. Forty-five hundred fans came to the Trocadero, Elephant and Castle, for the Crickets’ debut on Saturday, March 1, 1958—fifteen hundred at the first show and three thousand at the second. One critic saluted the Crickets as “one of the breeziest packages to be imported into Britain.” The reviewer also listed some reservations: their set was too short—only twenty minutes—and the ticket price too steep at 10s.6d. “Shortweight is hardly forgivable,” wrote the critic. Reviewing them on March 8,
Melody Maker
said Buddy was “obviously out of his depth” when he imitated Elvis’s movements and elicited “scornful laughs” from a few in the audience, but the hecklers were drowned out by “screams from the usual bevy of teenagers.” On a more positive note, the reviewer praised Buddy’s “Peggy Sue” as “every bit as good as on the disc” and concluded that Britain’s “outdated variety halls could learn a lot from these teenage coast-to-coast tours.”

Jerry remembered the elation they felt on being cheered by the British, who have a reputation for being restrained and highly discriminating. Bill Haley was the only rocker who’d preceded them to England; many in the audience were experiencing rock ’n’ roll for the first time. The Crickets were so stimulated by their favorable reception in England that they started leaping around on the stage, vying to see who could be the most audacious. Joe B. reclined on the stage, lowering his bull fiddle to his body as he might a woman, and plucked away. Buddy squatted over him, singing into a microphone that was attached to the bass. When the Crickets noticed that everyone was “marvelin’,” as Jerry put it, they thought “aren’t we the ones!”

Since Lew Grade owned ATV and personally produced
Val Parnell’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium,
the most widely viewed television program in England, the Crickets were guaranteed a slot on the show. Their live TV appearance at the Palladium on March 2, 1958, some say, became the bedrock on which English rock ’n’ roll was founded. Still children or teenagers in 1958, the future leaders of the British rock movement watched the show on their families’ or their neighbors’ TV sets.

As Buddy boogied the audience in the venerable, gilt-crusted Palladium on Argyll Street, near Oxford Circus, seventeen-year-old John Lennon leaned toward his TV screen in Liverpool, gaping at Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster, the first he’d ever seen, and studied Jerry’s paradiddles in “Peggy Sue,” which he’d never understood before. Later Lennon would call Buddy the innovative master of early rock ’n’ roll.

• Paul McCartney, fifteen, had recently joined Lennon’s band the Quarry Men. He later said that he acquired his technical “info” as a rock ’n’ roll guitar player by watching Buddy’s Palladium performance, studying his fingers to discover how he performed the “Peggy Sue” solo and if he used the capo. Paul scrutinized the guitar itself, the weird but cool-looking Fender. From then on, Paul “always loved Buddy’s music” and regarded him as a major influence.

• Keith Richards was a fifteen-year-old living at 6 Spielman Road in Dartford, a small industrial town sixteen miles southeast of London, where his father worked as a foreman in an electronics factory in Hammersmith. He’d first met Mick Jagger, a Dartford neighbor, when they rode their tricycles around Denver Road and later attended Wentworth Primary School. In 1955 Keith’s eleven-plus examination landed him in Dartford Technical College. With his soprano voice, he sang in the school choir and later at Westminster Abbey during the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, performing the “Hallelujah” chorus from Handel’s
Messiah.
Then, in 1958, “rock ’n’ roll hit England like Hiroshima,” Richards later told interviewer Charles Young. He talked his mother, Doris, into buying him an acoustic Rosetti guitar for seven pounds. Among his first musical influences were John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly. Richards respected Buddy because he was “self-contained, wrote his own songs, had a great band, and didn’t need anyone else.” The Rolling Stones would derive their sound from Buddy’s “Not Fade Away,” which also provided them with the “extra provocation,” Richards said, to compose their own material.

• Eric Clapton, thirteen, was living in Ripley, a village in Surrey, where he was considered a weirdo, at the time of Buddy’s Palladium telecast. He’d been listening to a Saturday-morning radio program since he was ten or eleven that featured a DJ named Uncle Mac, whom Clapton later described as “a very old man with one leg.… He’d play things like ‘Mule Train,’ and then every week he’d slip in something like a Buddy Holly record.”
    Clapton first heard of the blues when he read the liner notes on one of Buddy’s album covers and “greatly admired the style, the look, the individuality of Buddy Holly,” according to biographer Ray Coleman. For Clapton’s fourteenth birthday, he asked his grandparents, Rose and Jack Clapp, who were raising him, for a guitar. He picked up a $35 acoustic from Bell’s instrument shop in Kingston and smiled all the way home. Years later he told Philip Norman that his grandparents paid for the guitar “on the HP [hire purchase or time payment]—a [double cutaway] Kay. It wasn’t cheap and flash; it was expensive and flash.” Practicing the guitar became Clapton’s overriding obsession, and the turning point of his life occurred when he discovered he could get an echo effect like Buddy Holly’s by playing in the stairwell at home. “It sounded like a record,” Clapton said later, “and I thought, ‘Yeah, this could be.… The world had better watch out.’”

• Elton John was an eleven-year-old growing up in Metroland, Buckinghamshire, and still known as Reginald Kenneth Dwight. He was so impressed by Buddy that he started wearing glasses “not because he needed them,” wrote Philip Norman, “but in homage to Buddy Holly, rock music’s first four-eyes. At thirteen Elton John imagined himself to
be
Buddy Holly.”

• Denny Laine, the future linchpin of Wings, was twelve at the time of Buddy’s tour and had been “listening to Buddy Holly a lot. He was my first real inspiration,” recalled Laine. “In fact, the guitar lick on ‘That’ll Be the Day’ made me want to learn to play.” Later on, McCartney produced Laine’s solo LP
Holly Days,
ten tracks of Buddy Holly songs including the seldom covered “Lonesome Tears” and “Look at Me.”

Obviously oblivious to the impact he would have on the coming generation of musicians, Buddy engaged in a fervent backstage colloquy at the Palladium with comedian Bob Hope, the British-born star of U.S. wartime radio and films. In a lengthy letter to his parents, Buddy proudly recounted their talk as one of the high points of the trip. The tour party left London on March 3, bound for Hampshire, where it played the Gaumont Theater, then went north into Yorkshire and east to Stockton-on-Tees, by the North Sea. Outside London, the audiences were punctilious, polite, and comparatively subdued. At first the Crickets thought they were bombing, but everywhere they went, hundreds of silent, well-mannered fans, including both teenagers and adults, queued up for their autographs, sometimes standing in the rain.

Occasionally the Crickets ruffled the feathers of a provincial critic, like the Bradford, Yorkshire,
Telegraph and Argus
’s Peter Holdsworth, who deplored the “fanatical reception” accorded Buddy, then referred to him as a “screeching guitar player.” Seventy percent of lyrics “which issued from the lips of this foot-stamping, knee-falling musician” were indecipherable, according to Holdsworth, who couldn’t understand why the kids didn’t prefer a more “articulate vocalist.” He concluded his fulmination with the question, “Where on earth is show business heading?”

Their hectic itinerary allowed no time for sightseeing, Buddy complained in a letter to his mother. They were in Birmingham, a city whose industrial grittiness contrasted with the majesty of London, to play Town Hall on March 10. With a population of one million, Birmingham was, like Liverpool, poorer—its teenagers more like those in Lubbock. Writing on the stationery of the Alexandra Hotel, Buddy reported that he’d been suffering from a cold for the past four days. Still sick and feverish the following morning, he boarded the bus and rode twenty-five miles to Worcester, where he managed to complete two shows at the Gaumont. Joe B. later told Griggs that they were homesick and full of complaints about the cold, damp weather. Expecting to freeze any moment, they yearned for the warmer climate of Lubbock.

Despite exhaustion and chills, when they returned to London for two shows at Croydon’s Davis Theater on March 12 and two more at the East Ham Granada on the thirteenth, they received a rave review from the
New Musical Express
critic, Keith Goodwin, who praised their high spirits and unrestrained fury and predicted that they were destined for a long and exciting career. According to Goodwin, their success in Britain was due to the fact that they sounded as good in person as they did on their recordings. “This is rock ’n’ roll like we’ve never heard it before in Britain,” Goodwin concluded.

In London, Buddy must have slipped away from his Texas colleagues long enough to sample the sartorial splendors of Saville Row, for in photographs taken after the British tour it is clear that the kid from Lubbock had gone shopping in this bastion of the aristocracy. With the innate taste and style that had led him to wear Levis in Texas when everyone else was in baggy gabardines, Buddy selected some elegant clothes, perhaps including the overcoat with a fur collar, cravats, and Turnbull & Asser shirts in which he was later photographed. He also picked up a mod jacket somewhere, possibly in Carnaby Street. His shopping spree would have reverberations throughout the 1960s, first in the neo-Edwardian styles of British rockers and later throughout Anglo-American culture, when men rebelled against traditionally staid masculine dress codes and adopted the “peacock look.”

The tour set out once again from the British capital, zigzagging across the island country with stops in Ipswich, Leicester, Doncaster, Wigan, and Hull. On March 20, the group arrived in Liverpool, the center of a burgeoning rock movement, to play Philharmonic Hall. By this time the Crickets had four records in the British Top 30—“Listen to Me,” “Oh Boy,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Maybe Baby”—and were responsible for a boom in guitar sales in every town and city they played. A foggy, sooty seaport city of five hundred thousand, Liverpool was the birthplace of British rock. John Winston Lennon, a school boy whose adolescence parallels Buddy Holly’s in remarkable detail, grew up a shoplifter, juvenile delinquent, gang member, and garage-band organizer who favored drainpipe trousers and wore eyeglasses. About eight months prior to Buddy’s arrival, Lennon and McCartney met through a mutual friend named Ivan Vaughan. Lennon’s group, the Quarry Men, was playing a local church fair. McCartney was invited to join the group and the Quarry Men’s evolution into the Beatles took a great leap forward.