Buddy Holly: Biography (38 page)

“Buddy loved the jazz places,” Maria Elena says, mentioning the Five Spot, the Half Note, and the Village Vanguard. At Max Gordon’s Vanguard, a narrow cellar on Seventh Avenue, they could hear Thelonius Monk, John Coltrane, Gerry Mulligan, and Cannonball Adderley, as well as a gaggle of “sick” comedians, such as Robert Clary, Mort Sahl, and Lenny Bruce. “Johnny Johnston had a jazz club downstairs on Ninth Street,” says Maria Elena. “Buddy
really
loved to go there.” Jazz was enjoying unprecedented popularity in the fifties. Buddy, as a singer adept at inventing and embellishing as he performed, would have related profoundly to the freedom and spontaneity of jazz. You could walk from club to club and hear Count Basie at Birdland, Red Allen at the Metropole, Carmen McRae at Basin Street, Red Norvo at the Embers, Mabel Mercer at the RSVP Room, and Marian McPartland at the Hickory House. For Dixieland you hailed a cab and went downtown to Eddie Condon’s in the Village, where you could also catch Kaye Ballard, Felicia Saunders, or Sylvia Syms at the Bon Soir on Eighth Street.

“We were always around the Village Gate,” Maria Elena remembers with fondness. In 1958 the Gate resounded with the sounds of R&B. Buddy, Eddie Cochran, Jimmy Bowen, Don and Phil Everly, Gene Vincent, and Buddy Knox had long been regulars there. Knox later told Griggs that they “were probably the only ones in the place at the time. Later it became a huge commercial place.”

Recalling the one occasion when they went to the movies, Maria says, “The only movie Buddy and I saw together was
Mister Roberts.
Buddy had no time for anything but his music and getting things together. And so was I, trying to get things organized, get things established. He had so many plans in mind.” Not the least of his concerns was how to support himself and his bride. He visited booking agencies but had no professional portraits to leave with them. Petty’s amateurish snapshots were completely unacceptable in New York. Finally Buddy posed for a show business photographer and acquired a decent portfolio. “The first pictures that were suitable for promotion were the Bruno portraits, which I suggested,” recalls Maria Elena. “As soon as we were able to get his money in his hands, we were going to do some real promotion.”

Unable to afford clerical help, they answered fan mail personally and tried to get some fan clubs started. In reply to a letter from fan Jeff Speirs, Buddy wrote that, although there would not be a third album from the Crickets, he hoped Speirs would enjoy his current single, “It’s So Easy.” He enclosed a photograph, as requested, and thanked Speirs for being such a conscientious collector of his records. “We were working night and day,” Maria Elena says in 1993, “trying to establish all these things that he wanted to do. For instance, Buddy said, ‘You know, I want to learn acting.’” Once again Buddy referred to his favorite actor, the gangly Tony Perkins, whose recent films then included
Fear Strikes Out, Desire Under the Elms,
and
The Matchmaker.
“Buddy always watched Anthony Perkins,” says Maria Elena. “‘I want to be like Anthony Perkins because I’m kind of tall and lanky, like him. I want to do a movie. Not only act in it—I want to write the score of the movie.’”

As Buddy’s career required so much time, Maria Elena was unable to pursue her own ambitions to be a dancer-singer-actress. “After we got married, he said, ‘No, no. You don’t need to do that,’” she remembers. Without any hint of bitterness or regret, she adds, “He wanted me to be around.”

One day Buddy told her, “I want to do a classical score.”

“Well,” Maria Elena replied, “you want to do it, go ahead.”

She marveled at the many-faceted nature of his genius. “All the ideas that Buddy had at that time!” she says. “He wanted to open studios in different areas, like London.” His flagship recording studio, which would concentrate on Texas talent, would be in Lubbock, with branches in California, New York, and London. The Lubbock studio would include a retail record store to be managed by L. O. Holley.

“Phil Everly came into town,” Maria Elena remembers. Phil was still single, though he would later marry Jacqueline Alice Ertel, Archie Bleyer’s stepdaughter. In 1958 Phil was a frequent visitor at the Holly apartment. One evening they all wanted to experience a “completely different” cuisine, Maria Elena recalls, and went out to a restaurant. The young stars were anonymous on the Village streets. Among the bohemians and beatniks, rock ’n’ roll was not the rage that it was in the outer boroughs or New Jersey, where Buddy Holly and Phil Everly would have been mobbed. “We went to a Spanish flamenco place, somewhere around Sheridan Square,” adds Maria Elena. During the floor show Buddy was immediately caught up in the drama and excitement of flamenco guitar playing. After the show, he invited one of the musicians over to their table. Later Buddy told Maria Elena, “I want to learn classical guitar and do some kind of classical score for the Spanish guitar.”

With Maria Elena’s Latin heritage came a love of flamenco music; she owned a large collection of flamenco records, which she brought out for Buddy when they returned to the apartment that night. “He started listening to them and said, ‘Oh, I could do that, easy,’” she says. “He started playing his guitar and soon he picked it up. He was into perfection and said, ‘Who do I call?’” Maria Elena knew a teacher in the neighborhood. Buddy started taking flamenco lessons and soon was buying all of Andres Segovia’s albums.

Phil Everly and Buddy took long walks and talked about their careers and the direction rock ’n’ roll was taking. Phil later told John Goldrosen how he and Buddy lived in suspense each time they released a record, hoping they wouldn’t be written off as one-hit wonders. The Everly Brothers’ string of megahits in 1957–58—“Bye Bye Love,” “Wake Up, Little Susie,” “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bird Dog,” and “Problems”—did nothing to allay this fear. Phil complained that he couldn’t find anyone in the music industry who knew enough about rock to be trusted as a mentor. The genre was changing so fast there seemed to be no standards, just fads that kept coming in rapid succession, like the speeded-up walla-walla-bing-bang nonsense in “Witch Doctor” and the trilling of the chipmunk Alvin in David Seville’s “The Chipmunk Song,” the hit of the 1958 Christmas season. Obviously record executives were mindful of the number of Baby Boom families after World War II.

“Rock ’n’ roll is being integrated into popular music,” warned DJ Bill Randle of Cleveland’s WERE. “It’s no longer a novelty. Rock ’n’ roll was an earthy, virile influence, but the authentic artists were destroyed by the gimmick imitators.… There’s a point to which you can’t cater to the mediocre any longer.” According to Consuelo Dodge’s
The Everly Brothers,
Phil Everly said, “People were always asking you what were you going to do when it’s over?” Phil considered Buddy to be one of the few persons on the rock ’n’ roll scene with some stability. Despite the doubts Buddy had expressed in 1957 about rock’s future, he now felt that rock ’n’ roll had solidly established itself and advised Phil that he could look forward to a lifetime career in rock if he wasn’t averse to experimentation and change.

There were difficult moments that winter, shared with Phil Everly, when Buddy despaired over his absence from the charts. After “Think It Over” and “Early in the Morning,” which both hit in August 1958,
Billboard
reported nothing more of Buddy Holly’s in the Top 40 during his lifetime. He was drinking over it. Years later Phil Everly told Philip Norman, “I can remember him [one] night playing me all of his songs and asking me why he couldn’t get a hit record, he was so low. Then he said, ‘Will you put me to bed?’”

Casting about for ways to produce some income, he tried to capitalize on his celebrity by endorsing commercial products. In late 1958, Buddy asked the Guild guitar company to manufacture a Buddy Holly signature model. Guild agreed and Buddy began designing a blond electric Buddy Holly guitar. He was to receive a percentage of the profits. At the same time, Don and Phil Everly, who used Gibson’s J-200 acoustic, entered into negotiations with Gibson. Don cut out the pick guard shape he preferred and forwarded it to the Guild factory in Kalamazoo. By 1963 the Guild catalogue would advertise the Everly Brothers Signature Guitar: J-180, described as “a special guitar, capable of creating a strong rhythm … An unusual concept in jumbo flat-top guitars, designed and developed in close cooperation with the Everly Brothers.” Actually, according to Eldon Whitford, David Vinopal, and Dan Erlewine, authors of the book
Gibson’s Fabulous Flat-Top Guitars,
the Everly Brothers guitars were just “black J-200s with large and white double pick guards, in mirror image, one on each side of the sound hole.” Subsequently Gibson’s smaller J-185, a discontinued model, was substituted in order to avoid competition with the ever-popular J-200. The J-185 was dressed up with ten pearl stars inlaid on the rosewood fingerboard and an eleventh pearl on the peghead, just under the Gibson trademark. The double jumbo pick guards were made of mock-tortoise shell. The maple back and sides and spruce top combination “emphasizes the punchy sound while lessening overall sustain,” wrote Whitford, Vinopal, and Erlewine.

Don Everly once referred to Buddy as “a thinking man,” someone eternally expanding the parameters of rock, introducing innovations such as the string section and the saxophone duet with King Curtis. Eventually the Everly Brothers would break up, and the end would be as ugly as Buddy’s and the Crickets’. In a 1973 outburst Don would tell the press that he was fed up with being an Everly Brother. When he showed up drunk at a gig, an infuriated Phil slammed his guitar to the floor and walked out.

At one point during the winter of 1958, Buddy decided to learn Spanish. Maria Elena taught him by singing Latin American songs to him, beginning with “Maria Elena,” a Lorenzo Barcelata song written in 1933 for the wife of Mexico’s president, which was a million-seller for Jimmy Dorsey and Bob Eberle back in 1941. Buddy and Maria Elena recorded a few tapes together, but Maria Elena didn’t consider them good enough to be taken seriously.

Another new project was an LP with Ray Charles. In a 1993 interview Maria Elena says, “He wanted so desperately to do a gospel album that he said, ‘You know, I’m going to try to get Ray Charles and talk to him about doing a duet with him.’ Guess what happened later along the line? Paul McCartney went with Stevie [Wonder, ‘Ebony and Ivory’] and Michael Jackson [‘We Are the World’], a lot of the stars went with each other to record. When that happened I thought, my god, look at this. That man was really ahead of his time.”

He also told her, “I love Mahalia Jackson. I love gospel,” she reveals in the 1993 interview. The legendary singer made an unlikely film debut in 1958, appearing in a Lana Turner tearjerker,
Imitation of Life,
in which Mahalia belted the Twenty-third Psalm from a pulpit.
St. Louis Blues,
a dour and listless biography of W. C. Handy, also failed to capture Mahalia’s essential vibrance. According to Goldrosen, Buddy wanted to cut a sacred album as a tribute to Mahalia and present it to his parents.

He never stopped thinking and talking about new musical challenges and ways to diversify and expand as an entertainer, Maria Elena comments in 1993. His favorite part of the day was when he settled down in front of his hi-fi to listen to other artists’ recordings or play his various guitars. Despite his breech with the Crickets, sagging record sales, and no income, this was a happy time, thanks largely to Maria Elena and her generous Aunt Provi. “Buddy was a twenty-two-year-old going on fifty,” says Maria Elena. “He was very relaxed and easygoing, but he had this drive and his mind was so sharp. It was going all the time.” He was bursting with so many ideas that he’d wake up in the middle of the night and want to talk.

Buddy’s parents came to New York for a visit and stayed with them in the Village, Larry Holley revealed at the 1981 Buddy Holly Memorial Society Convention in Lubbock. The Holleys were likely surprised by the complete absence of domestic routines in their son and daughter-in-law’s household. There was no set time to eat, a habit Buddy had picked up on the road, which Maria Elena did nothing to discourage. “He didn’t eat much and neither did I,” she says. “I tried to cook. Buddy liked steak. You can’t mess that up too much. But I tried to cook just little things that I started learning.”

Soon she and Buddy were dining almost exclusively in restaurants. “There was a Mexican place on Fourth Street,” she recalls. “They were Cuban, but they had Spanish food. They had only about four tables. That’s where we went to eat some of our meals because they were so inexpensive. It was downstairs, and they had a bar and a couple of tables. People would make reservations for two weeks in advance. I met the owners and they were from Cuba. We always had a place there. They used to sometimes give us our meals free, because of Buddy.”

In order to pursue his theatrical ambitions, Buddy soon realized that he needed professional training if he expected to find work on the New York stage or in TV and movies. “He was going to … get himself some acting experience,” says Maria Elena. They made plans to enroll in Lee Strasberg’s private school. Maria Elena urged Buddy to learn how to dance, an essential skill if he ever expected to appear in a Broadway musical. Complaining that he had “two left feet,” Buddy tried to beg off, but she kept at him. Finally he agreed to enroll for lessons at a dance studio, as if he didn’t already have enough irons in the fire.

When no job offers were forthcoming, Buddy turned again to composing and wrote “That’s What They Say.” Using his Ampex tape machine, he recorded it in the apartment on December 3. In the lyrics, it’s poignantly clear that the singer has failed to find love. Instead of irony or bitterness, Buddy’s voice conveys a patience that is touched with spirituality. Though the song includes an element of hope, it is not held out as strongly as the conviction that faith is its own reward. Keep waiting, the song seems to say, and you’ll find joy in the process of living; serenity, which may in the end be preferable to romantic love, will come your way. Touching and melodic, this is American lieder of the highest order. Buddy had begun his career as a good songwriter. By this juncture, he had apparently become a great one.