Buddy Holly: Biography (40 page)

Waylon Jennings and the other KLLL DJs atop the Great Plains Life Building always played Buddy’s records as soon as they received advance acetates. Although KLLL was emphatically a C&W station, rock ’n’ roll was still viewed as hillbilly music in 1958. The impressionable Waylon was sometimes nervous working “up a building higher than any I’ve been in my life,” he told Larry Corbin in 1973. Buddy embraced old friends Hi Pockets Duncan and the Corbin brothers—Ray (“Slim”), Larry, and Sky—and was interviewed on the air during the holidays. One day Buddy told Waylon and Slim he was trying to complete a new tune called “You’re the One.” He wondered if they’d help him. They did, though Waylon remembers contributing only one line, and it was finished in fifteen minutes. Then, as Buddy recorded “You’re the One” in the back room of the studio, Waylon and Slim stood by, clapping their hands to provide percussive effects in lieu of a drummer. Buddy’s performance of “You’re the One” is an air-cushioned skyrocket ride in the same league as “Maybe Baby.” It’s one of his love-me-hurt-me songs: In one breath he berates his girlfriend for abusing him and in the next asks for more, truly a prisoner of his own obsession.

After producing Waylon’s first record, the unremarkable “Jole Blon,” which would prove a disappointment upon release the following year, Buddy continued to encourage Waylon, producing his recording of “More and More” and even, according to Griggs, playing the guitar accompaniment as Waylon sang. Buddy also offered him a job in the band he was forming for the “Winter Dance Party” as electric-bass player, to replace Joe B. Waylon said he’d love to but didn’t know how to play bass very well. Buddy assured him that he could live with Buddy and Maria Elena in New York and Buddy would teach him how to play the instrument before the tour in January.

This was the break Waylon had been waiting for. His wife Maxine was pregnant and predictably raised objections but, as Waylon’s brother Tommy pointed out, “An artist … will give up everything for that shot.” Understandably Maxine was “pretty tore up,” Tommy said, but Waylon proceeded to ask Sky Corbin for a leave of absence from KLLL. Sky was reluctant—Waylon’s popular afternoon show pulled a 60 percent share of the audience—but eventually Sky granted the leave. Maxine was “awful disgusted,” Tommy later revealed. She disliked “the idea of him being gone all the time.” Buddy and Maria Elena immediately invited Waylon to stay with them in their Greenwich Village apartment. As a couple Buddy and his wife were so compatible, their lives so intertwined, and their goals so identical that Maria Elena didn’t have to think twice before agreeing to such arrangements.

Buddy saw other old friends in Lubbock. He and Jack Neal, his original singing partner, met for a meal at the Nightowl Restaurant, Neal later told Griggs. Excitedly, Buddy described the recording studio he was going to build immediately following the “Winter Dance Party.” There were so many gifted musicians in Lubbock, Buddy said, that he was going to make the city his world-wide production headquarters. Buddy promised that Jack was at the top of the list of the local musicians with whom he was going to work.

Airplanes were another new passion of Buddy’s. Maria Elena “got mad,” she later told Goldrosen, when she discovered that Buddy was taking flying lessons. “I
always
go commercial,” Maria Elena said in 1993. Nonetheless, Buddy completed one thirty-minute session at Champs Aviation at the Municipal Airport in Lubbock. According to Griggs, Buddy piloted a Cessna, wing number N9274B, paying $9 for the lesson. Larry was also becoming a pilot. Buddy took the lesson “behind my back,” Maria Elena revealed. When she uncovered his deception she admonished him not to fly in small aircrafts because it frightened her. However much he wanted to become a pilot, her terror of single-engine planes “should be reason enough” for him to avoid them, she said, according to Goldrosen.

Years later, Waylon discussed “Buddy’s flyin” with talk-show host Mike Douglas, disclosing that Buddy “had several hours to be a pilot … and he was gettin’ me into that, too.… We’d fly … to Odessa and here and there and everywhere.” Odessa, which is located 125 miles south of Lubbock, in the middle of the West Texas oil fields, was the scene of Buddy’s 1959 New Year’s Eve celebration. He brought in the new year pounding on drums in a honky-tonk where Tommy Allsup and his dance band were playing, according to Ray Rush, one of the Roses. Buddy told Allsup about his midwestern tour, opening in Milwaukee on January 23, and hired him to play lead guitar. Now all Buddy needed to complete his new band was a drummer. He told Allsup to “get ahold of that kid,” Ronnie Smith’s drummer, whom he’d met in Clovis. Fortuitously, Carl “Goose” Bunch was playing around Odessa with Smith and his band, the Poor Boys. Though Buddy “didn’t even remember my name,” Bunch later told Griggs, Buddy hired him immediately, a sign of the pressure he was under. The newly reconstructed Crickets were now ready to go.

Tommy Allsup later recalled in an interview with William J. Bush that during the New Year’s dance in Odessa, Buddy told Allsup that he admired Moon Mullican, who was playing piano in Allsup’s band. Mullican was one of the most respected and influential personalities in southwestern C&W music. Buddy said he was “dyin’ to gig” with Mullican and would be willing to sit in on drums if Tommy’s regular drummer would let him. Tommy’s drummer readily relinquished his sticks to Buddy Holly for the next two hours.

Aubrey “Moon” Mullican, born on March 27, 1909, in Corrigan, in the heart of the East Texas piney woods, fascinated Buddy not only because of Mullican’s well-known recording of “Jole Blon” but because of his legendary status as an innovator of Texas honky-tonk boogie-woogie piano playing, which reached its zenith in the 1940s with Mullican’s recording “Cherokee Boogie.” The style evolved out of blues licks that Mullican had first heard performed by Joe Jones, a black guitarist who labored on the Mullicans’ sharecrop farm in Corrigan when Mullican was growing up. At sixteen, Mullican played barrelhouse piano in the brothels of Houston and the port towns along the Texas Gulf Coast, where, said Mullican, prostitutes sat next to him on the piano bench and fanned him as he worked. He played so hard that the beer bottles bounced on the tables. Along with Floyd Tillman and Ted Daffan, with whom he worked in the Blue Ridge Playboys, Mullican became a seminal figure in the flowering of western swing in the thirties and forties. In the fifties Mullican emerged as a husky-voiced C&W singer, scoring hit records such as “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone” and “Sweeter Than the Flowers.”

Jamming with Moon Mullican that night in 1958, Buddy Holly chose not to steal the spotlight and remained anonymous throughout the set. No one in the Odessa audience recognized him. Besides the pleasure it gave him to play with Mullican, the drum practice would soon come in handy; he’d be required to wear many hats during the forthcoming “Winter Dance Party,” including that of drummer.

Before leaving Texas, Buddy made arrangements for Allsup, Bunch, and Waylon to come to New York for a week of rehearsal in January 1959 prior to the tour. Though Buddy had given the Crickets’ name to Jerry and Joe B., his new band, for legal reasons, would also be known as the Crickets. In view of anticipated litigation, it was advisable for Buddy to retain the name as a possible way of claiming monies being held by Petty. As Jerry and Joe B. faded into the past, the new year marked the birth of Buddy’s new band: Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, and Carl Bunch.

The night before they all left on the “Winter Dance Party” tour in January, Maria Elena had a frightening dream, which is recounted in both
Remembering Buddy
and
Rolling Stone
’s history of rock ’n’ roll,
Rock of Ages.
In the dream, Maria Elena watched in frozen horror as a huge fireball came hurtling at her. Though it roared by, just missing her, it plowed into the ground and dug a huge crater. She woke up screaming. When she described the nightmare to Buddy, he looked at her strangely. He’d just had a similar dream, he said, in which he was flying in a small plane with Larry and Maria Elena. Larry, who was at the controls, ordered Buddy to get rid of Maria Elena, but Buddy refused, saying, “Anywhere I go, Maria comes with me.” Larry landed the plane on top of a skyscraper and kicked Maria Elena out. “Don’t worry,” Buddy cried as they took off. “I’ll come back and get you.”

At breakfast the next morning with Tommy, Waylon, and Carl Bunch, Maria Elena and Buddy described the terrible dreams, Tommy later told Goldrosen.

Waylon was staying in the apartment with Buddy and Maria Elena, earnestly trying to learn the unfamiliar electric bass in the short time remaining before the tour. Waylon later told Bush that Buddy was accustomed to the smooth professionalism of Joe B. “and all of a sudden he’s stuck with me.” In fact, Buddy treasured his relationship with Waylon, forged over the years in talent contests and at radio stations and recording studios. “He intended to make me more or less his protégé,” Waylon later told Larry Corbin. “He taught me a lot.” Accustomed to playing an acoustic six-string guitar, Waylon quaked at the prospect of mastering the formidable electric bass, but Buddy bought him one and told him to learn to play it in fourteen days. Buddy also gave Waylon his albums
The Chirping Crickets
and
Buddy Holly,
and told him to study them because he’d be expected to perform all the songs on the tour. Waylon obediently committed to memory “everything he had ever recorded.”

In practice sessions, Buddy struck Waylon as a perfectionist. Eventually Waylon had to appeal to Tommy Allsup for help, and Allsup agreed to tutor him. As shaky about singing rock ’n’ roll as he was about playing the bass, Waylon said that if he “could sing rock ’n’ roll better, I would.” He remained with Buddy and Maria Elena in the apartment “a week or so before going on the tour,” Maria Elena recalls in 1993. “They were rehearsing, and Buddy kept trying to show Waylon how to play the bass guitar.” The two most essential assets of an outstanding guitarist, Waylon learned, are rhythm and stamina, Waylon recalled in 1982. Even when playing ballads, Buddy never lapsed into a “lazy sound,” Waylon noticed.

Sometimes Waylon switched from bass and borrowed Buddy’s Fender Stratocaster. When they practiced Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” Waylon used Buddy’s big acoustic Gibson J-200. The most valuable thing Waylon learned from Buddy was syncopation; Buddy’s rhythm “really turned me on,” Waylon later told Bush, adding that he also adopted Jerry’s paradiddle sound from “Peggy Sue.” In January 1959, they taped “Slippin’ and Slidin’” on Buddy’s Ampex recorder in the apartment. The opening guitar lick, probably by Waylon, is identical to the stunning lick that kicks off the Everly Brothers’ rip-snorting “Bird Dog.” Years later
Rolling Stone
rated Buddy’s vocal on “Slippin’ and Slidin’” among his most inspired creations. On the apartment tapes, Buddy planned everything in meticulous detail, Waylon explained in his interview with Bush. Buddy recorded as if he were in a studio, using everything he had ever learned and working with total seriousness and concentration. Waylon “was learning as I went along.… I had to be driving him nuts.” Buddy was always “harder on himself than anybody else,” Waylon said.

The “Winter Dance Party,” which would become the most famous tour—perhaps the most notorious—in American music history, was scheduled to begin on January 23, 1959. Buddy established the final set list and rehearsed the band in a rented hall in New York. Waylon sang harmony on “That’ll Be the Day” and other songs written by Buddy. Other composers were included in the set list. Waylon later told Bush that he and Buddy together worked on “Gotta Travel On,” a song based on a nineteenth-century British tune and adapted by the Weavers but never recorded by Buddy Holly. In a recording by Billy Grammer, it entered the charts in December 1958 and by early 1959 it was the nation’s No. 4 hit record.

One evening after a full day of rehearsing and taping in New York, Buddy, Maria Elena, and Waylon discussed what to have for dinner. Maria Elena recalled in 1993 that she said, “I’m going to cook some rice and beans and make some steaks.” Buddy looked at her in surprise. Maria Elena made no claims for her cooking and often admitted she didn’t know how to cook very well. Dinner that evening was inedible. “The beans came out horrible,” Maria Elena recalls. “They were awful; they were burned.” Buddy avoided them. Waylon, who’d never tasted Maria Elena’s cooking and didn’t know any better, took a heaping spoonful of red beans, swallowed them, and started choking. “Oh, my—” he sputtered, Maria Elena remembers, but Buddy kicked him under the table to shut him up.

“Aren’t they good!” Buddy exclaimed, lying. “You did a good job, Maria Elena!”

Waylon stood up and excused himself. “Well, I’m full,” he rasped, hurrying from the room. When Maria Elena recounts the episode thirty-four years later, she observes, “Buddy didn’t want to hurt my feelings. He knew I was trying. I just didn’t know how to cook. He wouldn’t hurt my feelings for anything.”

Before leaving on the tour, Buddy assured Waylon that afterward he’d devote himself intensively to Waylon’s career. He intended to establish a studio band at his new Taupe Recording Studios, and the band’s primary purpose would be to back up Waylon, whom Buddy envisaged as Taupe’s first star. The band would also back up Buddy and other Taupe recording artists such as Terry Noland and Lou Giordano. Buddy invited Noland to come to New York and record on the Taupe label directly following the “Winter Dance Party,” Noland later told Bill Griggs. The Taupe studio band was to include steel guitars and fiddles, a sign that Buddy was returning to his C&W roots, prefiguring the fusion of rock ’n’ roll and C&W that would occur in the sixties with the Byrds’
Sweetheart of the Rodeo
and again in the seventies with the Eagles’
One of These Nights.
Other influences were also beginning to gel: as a result of his exposure to jazz in Greenwich Village in 1958–59, he also intended to explore the uses of jazz in his own recordings once he opened his studio.

These plans had to wait because Petty was holding on to something like $50,000 to $80,000 of Buddy’s money. “In mid-January 1959 Buddy sent a registered letter to Norman Petty asking Norman to send him his publishing money,” Bill Griggs states in a 1995 interview. Petty did not send the money. “I’m going to Clovis and break everything in sight, including Norman’s back,” Buddy said. He was forced to spend what remained of the $2,500 advance from GAC to establish a payroll for the new Crickets. He paid his band well. The most experienced musician, Tommy Allsup, received $250 a week, a lot of money in 1959, Waylon and Carl Bunch somewhat less (Waylon’s biographer Serge Denisoff says Waylon received $200 a week). Allsup appreciated Buddy’s largess; his last job had paid $80 a week.