Buddy Holly: Biography (41 page)

In Buddy’s absence, his pregnant wife would remain completely dependent on her aunt. “Buddy was very concerned with the fact that my aunt was supporting us,” Maria Elena comments in 1993. “We were married, and he felt terrible about it.”

Before leaving New York in late January 1959, Buddy went to the Blair House Restaurant for lunch with Dick Jacobs, who was now head of Artists and Repertoire at Coral Records. At one point during the meal, Buddy handed over some demos and told Jacobs they contained the material he intended to record at a future session. For some reason, none of his great apartment tapes was included. He and Jacobs then discussed instrumentation and arrangements for his next session. Jacobs remembered it as a “very nice” meeting, he told Wayne Jones in 1985, and pinpointed the time as several days before Buddy’s departure on the tour.

Buddy met Maria Elena for lunch at the St. Moritz on Central Park South, according to Owen Bradley, who was lunching at a nearby table with Buddy’s old bête noire from Decca, Paul Cohen. Bradley was the Nashville producer of thirteen early Holly recordings, including the botched first version of “That’ll Be the Day.” In an interview years later, Bradley remembered that they “went over and talked for five or ten minutes.… We had a very nice conversation.” Since they all worked for the same label, Buddy probably figured he needed to get along with them, but was no doubt relieved when they returned to their table so he and Maria Elena could enjoy their farewell lunch. Despite her pregnancy, Maria Elena told Buddy she wanted to go on the tour, she recalls in 1993. Three weeks of one-night stands would be too hard on her, Buddy pointed out. They could have taken the Cadillac, as they’d done the previous autumn, but the Midwest was undergoing a horrendous winter that made driving dangerous if not impossible.

In the last moments before Buddy’s departure, Maria Elena had a premonition that he would fly in a small plane during the tour. “I had found out that I was pregnant and I was not feeling very well,” she says in 1993. “It was just starting. That’s why I didn’t go even though I was planning to. I went to the door with him.” One last time, she asked if she could come along. “No, this is just a very short tour,” Buddy said, “and you’re not feeling well.”

“Up to that minute,” recalls Maria Elena, “I was out there trying to go because I knew that if I were there Buddy would not have anything to do with planes—at all. No way. We always traveled commercial. I was deathly afraid of small planes.”

They lingered in the doorway, Buddy holding her close. She had a strong sense that he didn’t want to go. As a husband and prospective father, he wanted to be with her during her pregnancy. This was also his first tour without Jerry and Joe B. “He still missed the guys,” she says. “That was obvious.” Waylon also noticed Buddy’s distress. “The only reason Buddy went on that tour was because he was broke—flat broke,” Waylon stated years later. “He didn’t want to go, but he had to make some money. I ain’t saying the person’s name that was the reason he was broke. But he knows who he is.” There can be little question that Waylon was referring to Petty.

Finally Buddy kissed Maria Elena good-bye. In 1993 she recalls his final words to her: “Buddy said, ‘I want you to take care of yourself and my baby.’”

Chapter Thirteen

“There’s Nobody Else to Do It”

In late January 1959 all the members of the ill-fated “Winter Dance Party”—Buddy, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, Waylon Jennings, Tommy Allsup, Carl Bunch, and road manager Rod Lucier—met in Chicago and checked into their hotel. It was the beginning of rock’s most famous tragedy, and predictably the weather was already bad. Much of the city was snowbound, but they made it to their rehearsal on schedule. As Tommy revealed at the 1979 convention of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, Buddy seemed upset. Tommy assumed it was because the tour marked the first time that Buddy and his bride had been separated. It was obvious that Buddy missed the comfortable home he’d established with Maria Elena.

Buddy was also apprehensive about meeting Ritchie Valens, who was then only seventeen and might prove as troublesome as sixteen-year-old Paul Anka had on a previous tour. Valens wasn’t the only potential problem; as soon as Buddy heard them play, all the other musicians struck him as amateurish. Buddy was the only singer who’d brought his own band. At rehearsal, accompanying themselves on the guitar, the others sounded impossibly tinny. Taking charge, Buddy announced that his band would shoulder the responsibility of backing up all the acts. Carl Bunch later told Griggs that they accompanied “everybody”—the Bopper, Valens, Dion and the Belmonts, and Frankie Sardo.

Ritchie turned out to be nothing like Buddy had imagined. Quiet, shy, and unpretentious, Ritchie was reserved but responded warmly to friendly overtures. There’d been no time in Hawaii for Buddy to get to know him. Valens had grown up among gangs in Los Angeles and was discovered while singing with a group called the Silhouettes. He was so good-looking he was being called the “new Elvis.” Maria Elena relates in 1993 that Buddy telephoned her and said, “Ritchie Valens and I really hit it off well.” One reason for the affinity Buddy and Ritchie felt was the Hispanic background that Ritchie and Maria Elena had in common. Another was that the two young men were both successful recording artists who’d seen little of the money they’d earned. Despite Ritchie’s current record, with a hit on each side—“Donna” and “La Bamba”—he hadn’t yet received his royalties.

While Buddy’s rise had been slow and torturous, Ritchie’s was meteoric. Their meeting proved opportune for both. Ritchie, the new rock star, looked on Buddy as an experienced headliner who could give him much-needed guidance, while Buddy, who was always on the lookout for new talent to produce, sized Ritchie up as a brilliant newcomer who could put Taupe Records over the top with a string of Chicano-rock hits. Recalls Maria Elena in 1993: “Buddy was talking to Ritchie. Ritchie asked Buddy if he would record him and produce him. He had a few ideas to do some of the Spanish songs.” In just six months, Buddy had shaped up as a future mogul of the recording industry, attracting talents such as Waylon Jennings and Ritchie Valens, who would both be worth millions.

As the tour members became acquainted with each other in Chicago, Waylon was drawn to the Big Bopper, whose real name was Jiles Perry Richardson, though everyone called him “Jape” or “the Bopper.” Waylon would later tell TV interviewer Dick Cavett that he found the Bopper to be “a straight shooter.” They liked to go out after rehearsals and unwind with a few beers or shots of vodka. The Bopper was a big, crew-cut bruiser with a slaphappy smile and 190 pounds on a five-foot-nine-and-a-half frame. On stage he favored zoot suits and floppy hats. He spoke lovingly of his wife, a doe-eyed Cajun girl, Adrianne Joy Fryon, whom he sometimes called “Teetsie” or “T.C.,” and their young daughter. Like Maria Elena, Adrianne was pregnant when her husband said good-bye to her in January. Their second child would be a son, Jay P., due in late 1959. The Bopper acquired his famous nickname while working as a DJ on radio station KTRM in Beaumont, Texas. He announced on the air one day, “Bee-bop’s big and I’m big, so why don’t I become the Big Bopper?” The name stuck.

As a DJ the Bopper’s antics rivaled the most bizarre excesses of that 1950s breed of bug-eyed, daredevil radio announcers. On his KTRM “Disc-A-Thon” in May 1957 he’d stayed awake for six days, spinning 1,821 records, dropping thirty-five pounds from his then-240-pound body, and collecting $746.50 in overtime. Proud of having established the world’s record for continuous broadcasting, he was still, on the “Winter Dance Party” a year and a half later, wearing the watch he’d been given, which was inscribed:
KTRM CHAMPION DISC-A-THON
, 122
HOURS
, 8
MINUTES, J. P. RICHARDSON
, 5-4-57.

He was discovered as a recording artist by Houston’s Harold “Pappy” Dailey, who ran Mercury-Starday Records. “Chantilly Lace” was recorded on such a shoestring budget that jingle bells were used to represent a ringing telephone. A routine, somewhat sexist 1950s perception of women, the song is a racy ode to girls, extolling their wiggly walk, giggly chatter, pony tails and, especially, their transparent Chantilly lace lingerie. Made of silk with an outline of coarse thread, Chantilly lace originated in the Middle Ages in a village twenty-five miles from Paris, near the Forest of Chantilly. When the Bopper sang about it, he made the material sound as delicately appealing as his wife Teetsie, who was described by their friend Gordon Baxter as “little bitty cute … soft and pretty and stood beside him all the time and didn’t say anything.”

According to columnist Bob Rogers, both Buddy and the Bopper were scheduled to tour Australia later in 1959. “I once asked [the Bopper] why he left his safe, sane job as a deejay in Texas to go on tour,” Alan Freed would recall in May 1959, “and he answered, ’Cause it’s a ball. ’Cause I’m getting to see the country. I’m a traveling salesman. I’m selling ‘Chantilly Lace.’” The record had been the third most-played song of 1958, going to No. 6 on the
Billboard
chart, but its sequel, “Big Bopper’s Wedding,” had barely cracked the Top 40. On the tour the Bopper was pluckily trying to salvage his fading stardom. His friend Gordon Baxter said that everyone loved the Bopper “because there wasn’t a mean bone in his head.”

When Buddy wasn’t with Ritchie during the tour, he could usually be found with Waylon or Dion DiMucci, the Bronx-born, street-smart lead singer of the Belmonts. Riding high on a string of Top 40 hits including “I Wonder Why” and “A Teenager in Love,” Dion idolized Buddy. “I dug Holly’s lean, sparse Texas sound,” Dion stated in his 1988 autobiography
The Wanderer,
adding that he admired Buddy’s artistic freedom from record-company control. “But most of all I admired how together he was,” said Dion. They “hit it off right away” despite being from widely divergent backgrounds. Dion described in his memoirs how he’d grown up shooting heroin on Crotona Avenue and 187th Street. He was addicted to heroin, marijuana, pills, and alcohol, but heroin was the “silent partner in everything I did,” he wrote, “a way to regulate and control a hectic scene.” A weightlifter since his youth, Dion had developed a bodybuilder’s physique and regarded himself as the “hippest, handsomest, most together cat on the block, the best dancer, the sharpest dresser.” Heroin, his “secret lover,” gave him “instant courage.” Like Buddy, Dion had fooled around with gangs. He joined the Fordham Daggers and survived enough rumbles, zip gun fights, car crashes, and stab wounds to graduate to a tougher gang known as the Baldies.

Nothing in Dion’s background, however funky, had prepared him for the “Winter Dance Party,” which set out for the Million Dollar Ballroom in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 23, 1959, in a vehicle none of them would have spat on at home. Everyone was crammed into what appeared to Dion to be a “converted school bus.” When they felt like going to bed, “we slept where we were sitting,” Dion wrote in
The Wanderer.
To Tommy Allsup, the tour was a disaster from the start. “It snowed on us from the time we left Chicago,” Allsup said in 1979. “I don’t know why we got such lousy buses, such lousy
old
buses.” Transportation for the tour had been arranged in Chicago, where the job had gone to the lowest bidder. Unsurprisingly, the lowest bidder had the worst buses. “Usually the heater wouldn’t work,” Tommy added.

Shivering and miserable, the performers realized too late that the tour was a “third-class operation,” Dion recalled. The booker, General Artists Corporation, was responsible for the precarious situation the hapless artists found themselves in. Discredited by riots and controversy, rock ’n’ roll packages were considered passé, and the promoters were signing artists and then abandoning them to abominable conditions in far-flung territories like the upper Midwest.

The bus’s worn-out engine frequently stalled, usually when they were thirty miles from the closest service station. To ease the tension, Buddy and Dion played “dueling guitars,” wagering to see who could make his Fender Stratocaster ring the longest. Dion’s Fender was solid white, Buddy’s had a sunburst. Ritchie joined the fun, lolling beside them with his feet in the aisle. He serenaded them in Spanish, strumming his acoustic and singing songs like “Mama Long,” which he’d made the rage of Pacoima Junior High. Biographer Beverly Mendheim later revealed in
Ritchie Valens: The First Latino Rocker
that “Mama Long” was a group song and each person had to make up a verse about Mama Long, an outrageously foxy girl. As the verses became progressively risqué, Ritchie punctuated them with the
grito,
the cry he made famous in “La Bamba.” Dion later recalled that Ritchie “played the meanest rhythm guitar” of them all. When Ritchie’s Latin sound “filtered through pure rock ’n’ roll … it knocked me out,” Dion added.

Buffeted by freezing winds, they continued north from Chicago to Milwaukee, skidding and sliding along Lake Michigan for a hundred miles. When they began to fall asleep, some of them climbed into the luggage racks, where they stretched out and began to snore. Others sat and watched their breath turn to bluish vapor. The bus’s heater was woefully inadequate. By the end of the journey, noses were running and sneezes were exploding up and down the aisle. Piling out, they rubbed their hands and stamped their feet—all except for Carl Bunch, who could hardly walk. His feet were numb, a dangerous sign of frostbite. The musicians peered into the ghostly air and braced themselves against the snow blowing in from awesome Lake Michigan, which is 300 miles long, 118 miles wide, and 925 feet deep; winter ice moves in around November and usually stays until spring.

They checked into their Milwaukee hotel briefly, then they took a cab to the Million Dollar Ballroom. It was so cold in the cab that Tommy had difficulty breathing. Would anyone come out to a rock concert in such weather? they wondered, according to Waylon’s biographer Serge Denisoff. When they arrived at the dance hall, a long line of teenagers trailed around the corner, waiting for the January 23 show in twenty-five-below-zero weather. Even in the 1950s, there were enough Midwestern kids who worshiped rock ’n’ roll to fill the “Winter Dance Party” venues to capacity. As the cold seared their lungs, performers and fans regarded each other in the gray winter light, beginning to feel the transcendent sense of community that typifies the rock experience. After performing in the same area many years later, Bruce Springsteen said in Dave Marsh’s
Glory Days,
“There’s a very different feeling that happens when you get out there in the Midwest, really out there where there’s nothing for miles and miles around. The thing we got the most from was touring, getting people to come out, to leave their houses and come down to the show.”