Buddy Holly: Biography (29 page)

Before departing on the Freed tour, Buddy confided some of his concerns about Norman Petty to Maria Elena. Thanks to her job at Peer-Southern, she was knowledgeable about his business affairs. She never tired of talking with Buddy about his music and his career; her favorite Holly songs, she later told Griggs, were “Maybe Baby,” “That’ll Be the Day,” and “Everyday.” “I’m not happy with Norman,” Buddy said, Maria Elena recalled in a 1993 interview, “because Norman does not want to spend money on publicity. He never wants to put money out to promote us.”

As she recalls today, Maria Elena realized that “Norman didn’t want to spend a red cent because he didn’t want the money to get out of his hands. I don’t care what anybody says, you need to be promoted. I don’t care how good, how wonderful you are, you need that exposure. And, sincerely, the man never did that. Buddy was not happy with it. Everybody else was always out there, and Buddy always had to struggle to make sure that people knew about him. Of course, he was lucky that he was actually recognized because of his talent … but otherwise Norman [did no promotion].… Even [Buddy’s] pictures were taken by Norman.… I was the one who [suggested] promoting him [and doing] PR work.”

Buddy made it clear to her that he “wanted to break with Norman even before he met me,” Maria Elena added in 1993. As an employee in the office of Buddy’s music publisher, with inside information about Petty’s business dealings at her fingertips, including details regarding negotiations and royalty payments, Maria Elena was in a unique position to help Buddy. All of Petty’s Nor Va Jak titles published by Peer-Southern in Latin America went through Maria Elena’s Aunt Provi. Today, when Maria Elena discusses Petty’s handling of the Crickets’ money, she sums it up as “not a very kosher situation.” She was also close to Jo Harper, who worked for Murray Deutch and served as Petty’s and Buddy’s secretary at Peer-Southern. “Norman … knew that I knew a lot about him and what he was doing,” says Maria Elena, “so he certainly did not want me to be around because he knew what was going to happen. He knew that the minute that we got married things were going to turn different, which they did.”

It was grossly unfair, she felt, for Norman to “put his name on every song that Buddy wrote,” she said in 1993. The falsity of the situation, she pointed out, “was proven by the fact that the first ‘That’ll Be the Day’ record … came out and the publishing only had ‘Buddy Holly.’ The second time around when it came out it had Norman Petty as a writer. I see Norman never wrote any other songs that he put his name on. It is also very clear that after Buddy died, Norman didn’t write any songs.”

To Maria Elena, Buddy seemed to be trying to crowd several lifetimes into one. “Buddy talked to me a lot about all the things he did before and what he planned to do,” she says. She had an eerie feeling “that Buddy was not going to be here a long time, because everything was happening so
fast.
”

“Music is my life,” he told her. “I want people to feel wonderful and great when they hear my music.”

After concluding the Brooklyn Paramount run, the Crickets played Loew’s Paradise in the Bronx on March 31 and the New York Coliseum in Manhattan on April 2, then set out across the country. The “Big Beat Show” was the most extensive tour Alan Freed had ever mounted. For Buddy, almost burned out due to unrelieved touring and mismanagement by Petty, it was another demanding series of one-night stands, encompassing nineteen states and eastern Canada and lasting for forty-four days, from March 28 to May 10. He returned to many venues familiar to him from previous tours, such as the Baltimore Coliseum; the Windsor, Ontario, Arena; the Cincinnati Gardens; and Oklahoma City’s Municipal Auditorium. There were also many new stops along the way, such as the Central High School Auditorium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and the State Theater in Hartford, Connecticut, where, on March 30, the audience included Bill Griggs, who later remembered, “The lineup at the State was Alan Freed, Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Diamonds, Danny and the Juniors, Billy and Lillie, Larry Williams, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, the Chantels, and Jo Ann Campbell. All this plus two movies for 90 cents!”

Reminiscing about the tour a few months later, Alan Freed and Buddy remembered flying almost “every kind of plane there was,” Freed said, noting that the DC-3 flights were particularly dicey. When Freed reminded Buddy how they’d almost gone “right through the ceiling,” Buddy made some
wump-wump-wump
sounds like a plane in trouble and started laughing. Buddy must have been relieved and grateful to have graduated from the Irving Feld bus tours, but the hazards of flying from one town to the next were dramatically brought home to them in April, when they landed in Cincinnati shortly after a helicopter had crashed on the runway. Always impatient of any delay and eager to get on to the next gig, Buddy was the first to urge taking a plane, according to Freed, who’d later say, “We toured together for forty-four days. He was a bug for flying.”

Danny Rapp, whose “At the Hop” was the biggest single of 1958, later described in
Reminiscing
magazine how Buddy, an “all-around great guy,” gambled large quantities of cash to take his mind off the jarring bumps and altitude drops they encountered in stormy skies as they flew from one gig to another across America, practically living on the plane. Soon Buddy was gambling compulsively. What struck Rapp most about Buddy was his enormous enjoyment of life, never more evident than in their backstage crapshoots during the tour, when Buddy would get so excited he’d sometimes wager as much as $3,000 (the most Rapp ever ventured was $5 to $10). He was also impressed with Buddy as an artist, noting that Buddy was “way before his time,” the model for “what the Beatles came out with” several years later. Constant stress would eventually prove too much for Danny Rapp, who died of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound in Parker, Arizona, in 1983. Chuck Willis, whose “It’s Too Late” Buddy had recorded in 1957, was another casualty of rock’s pioneering days; he collapsed during a stomach-ulcer attack in 1958 and died at the age of thirty. His last record, ironically entitled “What Am I Living For?” went gold after his death.

When the Freed tour played the Keil Auditorium in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 15, Buddy’s favorite guitar, his Fender Stratocaster, was stolen. A replacement had to be flown in from Manny’s in New York. By the time the entourage reached Iowa in late April, everyone was exhausted and testy. Though Jerry Lee had given manic, show-stopping performances early in the tour, totaling several pianos and even shoving a battered piano into the audience, his early show in Cleveland was so perfunctory that the promoter had to beg him to resume the mayhem his fans had come to expect. Two pianos sat backstage at Cleveland’s Public Hall, specifically earmarked for destruction by the Killer. Jerry Lee rose to the challenge, and business picked up.
Billboard
reported that one of Freed’s Cleveland shows raked in a “smashing $17,000.” Altogether the “Big Beat” tour grossed $150,000 in the first ten days on the road.

Then business began to fall off. Attendance was sagging for all three of the traveling rock shows that spring. Irving Feld was surviving, but “The Rhythm and Blues Cavalcade of 1958” would be pulled on April 27. Surprisingly, when the Freed show arrived in Waterloo on April 22, 1958, fifteen hundred tickets had been sold in advance for the 3:30
P.M.
performance in the Hippodrome Auditorium, setting a local record. The afternoon performance was a disaster. Jerry Lee failed to show up altogether, which could hardly have pleased the restive crowd. The lead singer of Dickey Doo and the Don’ts aggravated an already dangerous situation by getting into a fight with a member of the audience. Bouts of shoving and hair-pulling broke out in the auditorium.

On that sinister note the tour pressed on for Boston, where Freed had been busted by the police in 1956. At that time Freed had referred to the cops as “a bunch of rednecked old men.” Boston officials retaliated by banning rock ’n’ roll in the city after a 1957 Freed show allegedly caused a violent incident in the subway. Shortly before Buddy arrived with the tour on May 3, 1958, Mayor John B. Hynes at last lifted the ban and the “Big Beat Show” was allowed to go on. The seventy-two-hundred-seat Boston Arena was located downtown in the sleaziest section of the city. “The dregs of society lived there,” said Jack Hooke, Freed’s business associate. Just before the show, as
Time
magazine would later report in a story headlined “Rock-’n’-Roll Riot,” five thousand “hip kids” were milling around the arena. Several girls were accosted and raped by gang members. Fifteen beatings and stabbings were reported before paddy wagons arrived and hauled the offenders off to jail. The fighting spread to Roxbury and Back Bay, where stabbings and store lootings were reported.

Inside the arena, a riot was about to erupt. The bigoted Boston audience resented black R&B stars and had been spoiling for an opportunity to disrupt an integrated show. According to R&B musician and historian George Moonoogian, who was seventeen years old when he attended the Boston Arena show that night, the audience was 60 percent white and 40 percent black. Racism and riots in Boston were a tradition that extended back to the days of the abolitionists in the 1830s, when the poor Irish felt threatened. As former
New York Post
journalist Cy Egan puts it, “Boston always had a lot of ‘donkeys’—flannel-mouthed Irishmen with great skills at talking but no brains and filled with prejudices and resentments.” Violence broke out at the Freed show after a black vocal group began their set. A Caucasian girl leaped onstage, grabbing the crotch of one of the singers. No longer able to restrain themselves, the kids in the audience left their seats and started dancing. Freed dashed onstage and tried to restore order. Appearing suddenly from the wings, a policeman confronted Freed and snarled, “We don’t like your kind of music here.”

Chuck Berry attempted to finish the show, but gang members wearing colored head bandanas started throwing objects from above. These were the years just before the Freedom Marchers and only two and a half years after Rosa Parks. As chairs and other objects rained down, Chuck Berry had to run for cover behind his drummer. Security forces took over and expelled the crowd from the arena. On the street, a pitched battle broke out between the fans and the cops. Freed, Buddy, and the other performers retreated to the Hotel Statler and remained incommunicado until noon Sunday. They boarded a plane for Montreal at two
P.M.
Boston Mayor John Hynes again banned all rock shows. District Attorney Garrett H. Byrne denounced “rock-’n’-roll paganism.” Freed was indicted for inciting a riot by a Suffolk County, Massachusetts, grand jury, which cited the state’s antianarchy law and claimed that Freed intended to overthrow the government. Massachusetts State Senator William D. Fleming introduced a bill to ban rock from all government buildings.

Their remaining gigs, including Troy, New York; New Haven, Connecticut; and Newark, New Jersey, were canceled. Though Freed was in no way at fault, the Newark promoter, who had sold every seat in the Newark Armory for the May 10 show, went berserk and burst into Manhattan radio station WINS while Freed was on the air, pulling a gun and threatening to shoot Freed. The management of WINS, outraged by bad publicity, fired Freed, effectively ending his career as a DJ and tour packager. Die-hard promoters like Irving Feld would continue to mount smaller rock ’n’ roll package tours and Buddy Holly would continue to go on them. As he discovered on the 1959 “Winter Dance Party” tour, they could be shoddy, ill-planned, and dangerous.

Sensing that the time was ripe for administering the coup de grace to rock ’n’ roll, the guardians of the public weal joined the attack. The Boston Archdiocese condemned rock ’n’ roll. From the nation’s capital FBI director J. Edgar Hoover warned that rock was a “corrupting influence on America’s youth.” In the end, the combined forces of the establishment—the police, the government, the church, the courts, and even the press—waged all-out war on rock ’n’ roll. The
New York Herald Tribune
editorialized, “There was a time when cities boarded their gates against the plague.… Musicians are not generally thought to be dangerous [but] now another pied piper seems to have turned up. Most communities still try to keep known thugs at bay.” After showing a clip of Jerry Lee’s antics at the “Big Beat” Detroit performance,
Today Show
host Dave Garroway shook his head in dismay.

One of the few voices raised in rock’s defense at this time was that of Jack Kerouac, spokesman of the beat generation, who wrote in the March 1958 issue of
Esquire
that “the Korean postwar youth emerged cool and beat,” describing them as “characters of a special spirituality … staring out the dead wall window of our civilization … prophesying a new style for American culture.… The new Rock’n’Roll youth” whose records were being played on “jukeboxes from Montreal to Mexico City, from London to Casablanca” were, Kerouac believed, the first sign of the “Second Religiousness that Oswald Spengler prophesied for the West … a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, curious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful.”

The rockers were the standard-bearers of a new freedom on society’s horizon, but the establishment had reacted by branding them as subversives and revolutionaries. The sensitive, usually well-behaved and law-abiding young rock singers were astonished that the music they’d invented for their own amusement in Texas garages and on Bronx street corners was now regarded as seditious. Conceivably they could be prosecuted for treason. Though all charges against Alan Freed were dropped when Boston officials failed to produce sufficient proof of insurrection, the damage had been done. Suddenly Freed’s “Big Beat” concerts were too hot for show business and the tour was blackballed by timid theater owners. The heyday of the rock-package tour was over.

And the first, innovative stage of rock ’n’ roll approached its concluding days. The aftershocks of the Boston riot were extremely damaging to the way rock ’n’ roll was viewed around the world. It was now subversive, if one listened to the FBI and J. Edgar Hoover, and just about everybody did in the 1950s. All of this Buddy Holly had unintentionally—or perhaps more intentionally than we know—helped to foment. The late fifties was an increasingly dark time. As the conservative sector of the public plunged into paranoia over rock ’n’ roll, a response that would be repeated periodically, right up to the 1990s flap over rap, the world was also in despair over the worsening Cold War. The inevitability of a nuclear holocaust that would destroy all life on the planet was a given for Buddy’s generation. He was now twenty-one, and like other young men facing the draft, he must have felt the melancholy certainty of death or disfigurement by loathesome radiation on an atomic battlefield. So universal was the feeling of gloom and doom by the end of the decade that one of the most emblematic films of the time,
On the Beach,
starring Ava Gardner and Gregory Peck, was a bleak depiction of the end of the world that nonetheless had everyone whistling its memorable theme, “Waltzing Matilda.” According to film historian Leslie Halliwell,
On the Beach
was “about the most downbeat production ever to come from Hollywood.” William Golding’s pessimistic novel
Lord of the Flies
was even gloomier, portraying mankind’s reversion to savagery following a nuclear war.