Buddy Holly: Biography (42 page)

Just before curtain, Buddy called Maria Elena. “I’m going onstage now,” he told her, she recalled in 1993. “I’m leaving the phone off the hook. I want you to hear something.” Then, Maria Elena remembers, “he sang ‘True Love Ways,’ which was our song. It became a ritual. He called me every night from wherever he was.”

The Million Dollar Ballroom audience accorded the Crickets’ debut “a
great
reception,” Tommy later told Bush, adding that the musicians found it necessary to turn their amplifiers up to top volume in order to compete with the cheering. Waylon struggled with the unfamiliar bass and tried to keep up with master guitarists Holly and Allsup. On four occasions during the performance Buddy turned to Waylon and told him something, but the sound was so loud Waylon couldn’t hear him. Finally Buddy walked over to Waylon and shouted in his ear,
“Turn that goddamn bass down!”
Waylon later confided to Bush. On the
Mike Douglas Show
in 1975 Waylon admitted that he was “probably the world’s worst rock ’n’ roll bass player. I was playin’ country bass behind a rock ’n’ roll singer.”

The Crickets looked sharp in tasteful new outfits: gray slacks with black jackets and silver ascots. When those became soiled, they would switch to their other uniform: brown slacks, brown tweed jackets, and golden ascots. The brown jackets sometimes looked maroon because of the poor stage lighting. Tommy recalled in 1979 that the only lighting provided for the shows was a bulb or two “hanging over the bandstand.” The sound, though equally primitive, was viscerally exciting. If the venue had a PA system, they hooked their Fender guitars into it. Each musician used his Fender amplifier “and that was it,” Tommy said. “Things have changed a lot. It takes all day just to set up the equipment today, but back then it was fun and it sounded good. I think it sounded better then than it does now.”

Tommy also revealed that, after the show, he, Waylon, and the Bopper decided to go out and sample Milwaukee’s famous beers, hitting a few of the city’s 1,650 bars. Tommy had noticed Buddy’s drinking in the past and was surprised that he wouldn’t join them on their pub crawl; Buddy was homesick, yearning to return to his bride. From Milwaukee they backtracked, driving fifty miles south to Kenosha, Wisconsin. The tires on the old bus squished sideways in gale-force winds from Lake Michigan. It was so cold inside the bus that Carl Bunch’s feet seemed to be freezing. The symptoms he described—tingling and numbness—sounded more and more like frostbite. He pulled on several pairs of socks and hoped for the best.

Buddy and Dion huddled together to keep warm. “I got to know Holly pretty well,” Dion recalled in
The Wanderer.
“Maybe I was always after someone to look up to, but I remember him as being a lot older than me, even though I was nineteen and he was only twenty-two.” Buddy was someone Dion could respect and learn from. He reminded Dion of Bobby Darin, who’d long been Dion’s role model.

All the musicians on the bus generously shared their musical expertise with each other. They sang and picked continually, mostly as a way to keep their minds off the cold. Everyone sang a Hank Williams song, even city-bred Dion, who’d been singing “Hey, Good Lookin’” for years to kids on Bronx stoops. Like Buddy, he’d studied Hank Williams’s “bent notes” and learned to emulate the “plaintive catch in his throat,” he wrote in
The Wanderer.

On January 24 they played the Eagles Club in Kenosha, a small predominantly Italian community in Wisconsin of some fifty thousand people, many of whom were employed at the local American Motors automobile plant, manufacturer of the popular Rambler. The stars posed for photographer Tony Szikil: Buddy in a shawl-collar sweater is draping his arm around Frankie Sardo, a sensuous Frankie Avalon look-alike whose record “Fake Out” was selling briskly along the tour route. Beside them in the photo the Bopper clowns in a simulated leopard-skin jacket, which was nicknamed “Melvin.”

After they finished the show at midnight, Buddy collected their pay. According to Waylon, Buddy cleared about $500 a night, after expenses. Tommy gave him a gun when he realized how much cash Buddy was carrying, Tommy later told Griggs. The .22-caliber “Vest Pocket” revolver was German-made, bearing the serial number 6K5313. The existence of Buddy’s gun was also reported in April 1959 in the
Mason City
(Iowa)
Globe-Gazette
and has been verified by reporter Larry Lehmer of the
Des Moines Register.
Buddy kept the gun, fully loaded, in the bottom of his toilet kit.

It was now the early morning hours of Sunday, January 25, and they were expected in Mankato, Minnesota, 350 miles northwest of Kenosha, on the same day. The real deprivations experienced by the musicians have over time helped create the legendary status of the tour. During the long ride over icy roads in the days before the advent of eight-lane interstates, Ritchie sat with Buddy and rapped about the notorious “girl” songs they’d both been having so much success with. Buddy had virtually invented the genre with “Peggy Sue,” while Ritchie was now scoring the hit of the year with “Donna.” Peggy Sue had already entered the vernacular; Ritchie had mentioned her in “Ooh My Head,” a song he performed in Alan Freed’s movie
Go, Johnny, Go!

When they arrived in Mankato, a rural community sixty miles southwest of Minneapolis, Buddy telephoned Maria Elena from the Kato Ballroom. He was still excited about producing Ritchie, who was standing next to him, waiting to talk to Maria Elena. Maria Elena stated in a 1993 interview that Buddy told her, “I want to do some Spanish songs myself, with English lyrics.” Ritchie then took the receiver and introduced himself. Speaking in Spanish, he said that Buddy was going to produce his records, adding, “Maria Elena, I’d like to come to New York with Buddy after the tour and stay with you in your apartment,” Maria Elena recalled in 1993.

En route to Eau Claire, Wisconsin, all they had to eat was what musicians call “jungle food”: pretzels, sardines, cheese, and potato chips—mostly snacks that could be extracted by coin or brute force from bus-stop candy machines. Ritchie sat down next to Buddy on the bus and said he was tape-recording a message to his mother, Concepcion “Connie” Valenzuela, who’d played a significant role in his career. In January 1958, she’d used the $65 mortgage payment that was due on her squat clapboard house at 13327 Gain Street to rent the $57-a-night Legion Hall in Pacoima for Ritchie’s debut. He was such a hit that Concepcion made a profit of $125, taking in tickets while her neighbor, Angela Hernandez, checked coats and ran the concession stand.

Ritchie had not been an easy child to raise. After his father Joseph Steven Valenzuela died in 1951 from diabetes, when Ritchie was ten, the boy ran wild. Concepcion couldn’t provide for her children on Joseph’s $140-a-month pension; she remarried, then divorced and went to work as a domestic. The north end of the San Fernando Valley was a tough neighborhood and Ritchie had his share of troubles with the law. Finally Concepcion confided to her cousin Henry Felix that she was ready to give up. “I tell him to be a good boy, but he doesn’t listen to me,” she complained. Felix told her to turn Ritchie over to him and he’d “see that he gets straightened around.” After a few months of rigorous discipline, Ritchie returned home, a hell-raiser no more.

On the tour bus, Ritchie went from seat to seat, asking all the musicians to tape record a greeting to Connie. Fred Milano, one of the Belmonts, later told interviewer Wayne Jones that they “all talked on the tapes, including Buddy,” saying “hello to Ritchie’s mother.” Justifiably proud of the fact that he’d bought his mother a new home on Remmington Street in Pacoima, Ritchie intended to treat Connie to a Hawaiian vacation. He was a devout Catholic and had taken the Bopper to midnight mass with him a couple of months ago when they’d both played Alan Freed’s Christmas show at Loew’s State in New York. Ritchie had wanted to say a special prayer for Connie. According to Freed, the Bopper “wasn’t very religious,” but, like Ritchie, he was homesick, and going to church helped him get through the holidays away from Teetsie. “I never saw anyone so pleased as the Bopper was,” Freed later told reporter Jim Hoffman.

It was 25 below zero outside the Fournier’s dance hall when they pulled into Eau Claire on January 26, 1959. An eager crowd rushed inside and immediately filled the wooden seats and pine bleachers. Buddy roared through seven songs: “Gotta Travel On,” “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Heartbeat,” “Be Bop a Lula,” “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Goin’ On,” and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” After the show, Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper ate dinner at Sammy’s Pizza, Don Larson, a fan, recalled in a 1993 interview. Carl Bunch discovered that he’d lost his gray and black stage clothes, which meant the musicians would now have to wear their one remaining costume—the brown tweed—until their clothes were filthy.

They boarded the bus and set out for Montevideo, Minnesota, 250 miles away, to play the Fiesta Ballroom on January 27. Aboard the bus, Buddy motioned to Waylon. “Come here,” Buddy said, Waylon later recalled in
Guitar Player
magazine. “We’re going to do ‘Salty Dog Blues’ together.” They rehearsed the song and decided to add it to the set list. A country tune by Charlie “Papa” Jackson, “Salty Dog Blues” is yet another indication that Buddy was pioneering a merger of C&W and rock. “We did country songs onstage,” Waylon told Goldrosen. “We did ‘Salty Dog Blues,’ and that’s as country as you can get.” Moving through the audience after their performance one night, Waylon heard a teenager say, “Man, that ‘Salty Dog Blues’ is what’s happening.”

At the height of the Montevideo show, someone snapped a photo of Buddy, Waylon, and Tommy on stage. Crowding the mike, rocking out with fierce energy, they define the very essence of aggressive, vital rock ’n’ roll, but backstage Buddy felt like collapsing. Reaching Maria Elena by phone in New York, he described the tour as “awful” and the buses as “dirty and cold,” adding that the promoters had reneged on all their promises. Maria Elena divulged in 1993 that she and Buddy spoke “every day, maybe twice, depending on how much time he had, usually in the evening before he performed.” In 1975 she told Goldrosen that Buddy instructed her, in the event Jerry or Joe B. called, to tell them that he was returning to New York in two weeks and wanted to propose a reconciliation. He intended to maintain two separate bands in the future; the original Crickets would tour with him, and the other band would be session musicians at Taupe Recording Studios in Lubbock, playing for Ritchie, Waylon, Lou Giordano, and other artists on Buddy’s label. Later in the week Buddy rang Niki Sullivan but was unable to reach him. Niki says Buddy was planning to get the original Crickets back together.

Maria Elena remembers that “Jerry called me at home and asked me if I knew where they were and I did tell him where they were at the time,” she revealed in 1993. “I gave him the phone number of the place and the venue that they were performing in. As I understand, Jerry tried to but they were going onstage, so Jerry said he was going to try again.”

Not all insiders agree that a truce between Buddy, Jerry, and Joe B. was imminent. When asked in 1992 if the original Crickets were intent on a reconciliation with Buddy, Larry Holley simply said, “I think that was another fictitious thing.” Petty also pooh-poohed the notion that Jerry and Joe B. “wanted to go to New York and join Buddy again,” pointing out that “there were things that were in the works at the time that would lead me to believe otherwise. They were going to stay with me and I was going to produce them as the Crickets.”

After playing the Prom Ballroom in St. Paul, Minnesota, on January 28, the “Winter Dance Party” dipped south into Iowa. Bound for Davenport, they ran into drizzly weather, a harbinger of the cold front that was creeping down the plains from Canada. On Thursday, January 29, the temperature kept dropping, and the trickle of heat from the old bus heater failed to keep out the chill. Unpacking their bags, they swaddled themselves in loose clothing and drew close to each other, passing bottles, gulping straight shots of liquor to ward off the cold. Ritchie’s favorite drink was “Silver Satin wine,” which sometimes plunged him into blackouts, a former musical colleague of Ritchie’s, Freddie Aguilera, later told Beverly Mendheim, a Valens biographer. Ritchie also loved speed, which he called “whites,” Aguilera added.

Later on January 29 they pulled into Davenport, a small town situated on a bluff over the Mississippi River, fifteen miles from Buffalo Bill’s birthplace. During their performances at the Capitol Theater, the temperature continued to plummet, winds howled, and the rain turned to sleet. Roads in the area glazed over and cars began to skid and pile up. Several accidents were reported around Davenport. All flights were canceled out of the Quad-City airport. Weather forecasters warned that the sleet would turn to snow during the night. In northwest Iowa, where the tour was due for a show in Fort Dodge the following day, a four-inch snowfall was expected.

Despite suicidal driving conditions, they left Davenport in the early morning hours of January 30. Between them and their destination, Fort Dodge, lay two hundred miles of sparsely populated plains, scattered farmsteads, and small towns. Locals rarely ventured out under such conditions, knowing that weather was their master in the winter, and they its slaves. Several miles out of Davenport, the heater completely conked out and everyone started turning blue. Carl Bunch complained that the coordination in his feet was “shot.” During performances, he no longer had any stamina. Drummers play both the bass drum and the hi-hat with their feet, so he worried about how he’d ever manage to complete the tour. None of them yet realized how close they were to frostbite—to gangrene and death. Dion and Buddy discovered a way to pool their body warmth. “Holly and I used to climb under a blanket together to keep warm,” Dion recalled in his memoirs. Buddy asked him to sing “A Teenager in Love.” “I could always get a laugh out of Buddy—soft and low like his drawl,” Dion said.

Waylon and the Bopper huddled together, sipping vodka and collaborating on a song they were crafting specifically for their mutual idol, George Jones, called “Move Over Blues.” “I don’t know if it was any good,” Waylon later recalled, but it was “real country.” Though the Bopper would never have a No. 1 record, two of the songs he wrote, “White Lightning,” recorded by George Jones, and “Running Bear,” recorded by Johnny Preston, both went to the top of the C&W charts later in 1959.