Buddy Holly: Biography (53 page)

Performing on the post-Holly “Dance Party” was “eerie,” Clanton observed. The audience was “very somber,” he told Griggs. He felt the fans came only because they were stuck with the tickets and couldn’t get refunds. They had a sad, lonely aura. He found them to be disconcertingly quiet, something the Baton Rouge, Louisiana, rock star wasn’t used to.

Romantic, dark-haired Frankie Avalon, one of the teen idols emerging as rock ’n’ roll’s pioneers passed from the scene, was on a roll of million-selling records. “Dede Dinah,” “Venus,” “Just Ask Your Heart,” and “Why” all came out in 1958–59. In his two-toned golf sweater, white bucks, and gabardine slacks, the eighteen-year-old child prodigy from Philadelphia looked like a juvenile version of Dean Martin or Frank Sinatra. His career had been built up on Dick Clark’s
American Bandstand
but would suffer when Clark dropped him during the payola scandal of the early 1960s. Clark, who was not found guilty of any wrongdoing, divested himself of substantial interests in music publishing and record companies.

For Waylon, Tommy, and Carl, the Sioux City show was almost impossible to get through. They were “too hurt, too sad, too sick” to concentrate on their performance, Bunch recalled in 1981. Ronnie Smith assisted Waylon with the lead vocals. They went onstage and tried to play Buddy’s hits, but all they could think of was their friends and the brutal way they’d died. Despite his trancelike delivery, Waylon’s applause matched Frankie Avalon’s. Frankie Sardo, the suave-looking Italian whose singing had improved under Buddy’s tutelege, was so depressed he decided to give up rock ’n’ roll. Later he told reporter Larry Lehmer that “it was a different show” after the night of the crash. Thereafter, it became “a memorial” to the fallen stars, with everyone acutely aware of “who wasn’t there.”

A teenager named Doug McLeod, who’d seen Buddy in Fort Dodge on January 30, attended the Thursday performance at the Val Air Ballroom in Des Moines. “Shock permeated the atmosphere,” he recalled in an interview with Holly fan Hans Goeppinger. When the emcee asked for a moment of silence, it “seemed to go on forever,” said McLeod. “It was hard for Buddy’s band, trying to perform his songs on their own, without Buddy. I remember Tommy Allsup standing there, trying to play and sing, with tears rolling down his cheeks.”

Waylon, inexperienced and on his first road trip, had been “nervous enough” even when Buddy was alive and Waylon could lean on him, McLeod noted. After the plane crash, Waylon was expected to “carry the show,” but it proved too difficult. “Waylon Jennings was almost a basket case,” McLeod said. All that had been keeping Waylon going was GAC’s promise to fly him and Tommy home for Buddy’s funeral on Saturday. But by Friday, February 6, after they played the Danceland Ballroom in Grand Rapids and still had no plane tickets to Lubbock for the funeral the following day, it was clear to Waylon that GAC had betrayed him.

The tour ended in Springfield, Illinois, on February 15. They took a bus to Chicago, transferred to a train, and finally arrived in New York two days later. Waylon was a wreck. During the trip he’d been drinking vodka and 7-Up. Tommy Allsup spiked his drink with a handful of “crosses,” amphetamines that Ronnie had acquired in a Mexican border town, and Waylon was strung out by the time they reached New York. Still feeling the effects of the speed, he stalked around Forty-second Street and Seventh and Eighth avenues day and night until he finally crashed on February 20 at five
A.M.
“After the first one,” Waylon later said, referring to speed trips, “the second one came easy.”

They went to GAC to collect the promised $4,000 fee but no one at the agency would speak to them. Finally someone at GAC informed Waylon and Tommy, “We gave it all to Buddy’s widow.”

Then GAC offered to tour them as the Crickets in order to take advantage of the publicity surrounding the crash. Petty immediately sought an injunction, informing GAC that Jerry, Joe B., Sonny, and Earl Sinks were the Crickets. Carl Bunch later revealed that Maria Elena arranged a recording contract for him, Ronnie, Waylon, and Tommy to record as Ronnie Smith and the Jitters, but little came of it and they soon disbanded.

Waylon returned to Texas, confused, bitter, and threatening to quit show business. He felt that the people in the music industry were nothing but “flesh peddlers.” According to his biographer, Serge Denisoff, “he blamed Norman Petty for Buddy’s death.”

*   *   *

Buddy Holly died intestate, leaving no will. Though Maria Elena was his sole heir, she assigned one-half of the Buddy Holly estate to Ella and L. O. Holley. At first there was nothing to split. “The only way I got money was when Buddy died and I used my lawyers,” Maria Elena said in 1993. “I had to use all kinds of methods to be able to get [Petty] to cough it up. Jerry can be witness to this. We got together in New York with my lawyers—what to do about the music. Buddy never did recoup all his money.”

Finally Petty paid $70,000. Over the years reporters persistently quizzed him about rumors that he’d usurped Buddy’s fortune. In 1985 he promised interviewers Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm that he’d one day explain everything in a book, but he never got around to publishing it.

Maria Elena eventually remarried, becoming Maria Elena Diaz-Hernandez, and had three children. She turned over many of Buddy’s personal effects to the Holley family. According to Larry, “When Buddy died, Maria was so distraught that she said, ‘Mother ’n’ Daddy’—that’s what she called them, ‘Mother ’n’ Daddy’—’Ya’ll take all this stuff. I don’t want to see it again. I don’t want to ever hear of it again. It just brings back too many bad memories. Ya’ll do what you want to with it.’” Larry says they told her, “We’d might as well.” Maria Elena confirmed in
Reminiscing
in 1977 that “most of the things that I had, I gave to Mrs. Holley.”

The Holleys soon regretted it. “We got tired of trying to keep them insured, and keep them hid so they wouldn’t get stolen,” Larry said in 1992. “A steady stream of fans were coming by, wanting to see them and hold them and have their picture made with them. It just got to be a burden we couldn’t bear.” Among other things, Buddy’s memorabilia presented a space problem; he (or his mother) had saved almost everything he’d ever owned or written, including all of his school homework.

Even in death, the spirit and talent of Buddy Holly continued to provide for his family. Larry’s fondest dream was that his parents would have no financial worries as they grew older. Thanks to Buddy, they would never want for anything. The first sign that Buddy was going to be a more lucrative “property” dead than alive came with the sudden spurt in sales of his last single, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” Decca executives had written the record off as a flop. After the plane crash, they watched in awe as orders started pouring in. Storming the stores, record-buyers felt they could keep Buddy alive a little longer by snapping up “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which jumped into the U.S. Top 40, becoming his first hit since “Early in the Morning” the previous August. Eventually “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” crested at No. 13. It went all the way to No. 1 in both England and Australia.

Buddy’s posthumous hits offered cold comfort for his heartbroken parents. A month following his death, Ella and L. O. Holley went to Clear Lake, quietly, to see the place that had consumed their youngest child. They met Carroll Anderson at the Surf Ballroom and went to dinner with him. Inviting them to the show that night, Anderson said, “I want you to come back, be with me.” In 1980 he recalled, “They said, ‘If you don’t mind, we’d like to be with you all evening.’ I said, ‘You be my guests at the ballroom and just try and visualize, if you can, when Buddy was performing here.’” In the coming years, the Holleys would keep returning to Clear Lake, including a trip in the fall of 1959, when they again shared a meal with Anderson. Being at the Surf somehow made them feel closer to Buddy.

The demand for Buddy’s records continued to rise in the months after the plane crash. Coral rushed out a greatest-hits LP entitled
The Buddy Holly Story,
which shot to No. 11. Though Buddy had never had an LP on the charts in his lifetime,
The Buddy Holly Story
would be on and off the
Billboard
Top 100 for the next seven years, becoming one of the more durable albums in recording history. Spotting a trend,
Variety
’s Mike Gross wrote, somewhat morbidly, “The ‘death rattle’ goes on perpetuaing the performer and very often filling the record company coffers.… Material on Holly is kept in the active file to handle the flood of requests for photos and bio information that continually pour in.”

Suddenly everyone at Decca/Coral started hounding Dick Jacobs to “get masters, get masters,” Jacobs later said in
Rockin’ 50s
magazine. Jacobs pulled off a coup when he acquired Buddy’s priceless apartment tapes, including “Peggy Sue Got Married.” On June 30, 1959, the apartment tapes were radically restructured on Coral Records’ Studio A console, with Jack Hansen assisting Jacobs. Overdubbed with background vocals and additional instrumentation, they resembled Buddy’s Pythian Temple string sessions of the previous year.

“Peggy Sue Got Married” was released in July 1959, with “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” on the flip side. Neither song charted in the United States, but “Peggy Sue Got Married” skied to No. 17 on the
New Musical Express
chart in England in September. The previous month a British reissue of Buddy’s old Nashville record “Midnight Shift” had sailed to No. 26, starting a long and profitable series of posthumous U.K. chart successes for Holly singles, including “Learning the Game” and “Listen to Me.” The British also loved his new album,
The Buddy Holly Story, Volume 2,
sending it up the chart to No. 7, and an LP entitled
That’ll Be the Day,
a reissue of his 1956 Nashville recordings, which went to No. 5. The July 1960
Hit Parade
reported that “True Love Ways” had “reached the Top 30.… What a great tribute it is to Buddy Holly’s wonderful talent that his records are still selling well enough to get into the hit parade eighteen months after his death.”

After the shock of his death wore off in America, his singles stopped selling in the United States. For years, Buddy Holly was all but forgotten in his native country. Though rock ’n’ roll by no means died with Buddy—the next few years would see the release of Orbison’s “Crying,” Del Shannon’s “Runaway,” Dion’s “Runaround Sue,” the Four Seasons’ “Walk Like a Man,” and Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion,” a banner era by any standards—the American rock scene paled in comparison with what was developing in England. In the early sixties, there were 350 rock bands in Liverpool alone. Young British musicians revered Buddy as a rock pioneer and also welcomed U.S. rock acts that had been floundering in the States, such as the post-Holly Crickets, who toured Britain with the Everly Brothers in 1960 at the same time that Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were overwhelming English audiences.

On February 4, 1959, the day following Buddy’s death, Cochran, still devastated by news of the fatal crash, recorded Tommy Dee’s song “Three Stars.” A memorial to Ritchie, the Bopper, and Buddy, Cochran’s performance is powerful and eloquent. He breaks down halfway through the record, when he gets to the part about Buddy. Cochran would never recover from his grief. He began shutting himself up in his room and playing Buddy’s recordings all night, Lenny Kaye revealed in his liner notes for the album
Eddie Cochran.

During Cochran’s British tour, he continued to brood about Buddy. According to Kaye, Cochran seems to have foreseen his own death. Sharon Sheeley discovered him in his room, listening to Buddy’s records. “You’ll only hurt yourself, honey,” she said. Writes Lenny Kaye, “Eddie replied, in a kind of dazed, far away voice, of how he thought he’d be seeing Buddy soon.” Shortly thereafter, his Ford Consul blew a tire and smashed into a lamppost while he was being rushed to Heathrow Airport, with Gene Vincent and Sharon Sheeley, to catch a plane for America. Suffering massive head injuries, he was taken to St. Martin’s Hospital in Bath, where Sonny Curtis, now a member of the Crickets, and Jerry Allison came to visit him. They were at the end of their British tour with the Everlys. Joe B. also wanted to visit Cochran but, knowing how terrible his injuries were, feared he couldn’t handle it emotionally. He planned to go the following day but, for Cochran, tomorrow never came.

Sheeley and Vincent were also seriously injured but recovered. Cochran never regained consciousness, dying at twenty-one. Later, at the London airport, Phil Everly said, “We’ll all miss Eddie, just like we miss Buddy Holly. In this kind of business, your friends aren’t always people you see every day. They’re people you know and you’ve toured with.”

The Crickets had split with Petty in the spring of 1959 and signed with Coral to record in New York. Sonny Curtis wrote an excellent song for them, “I Fought the Law,” an edgy commentary on the pitfalls of youthful impetuosity, but their recording of it sounds amateurish. Though Sonny’s guitar lead is exciting, Jerry’s drumming is lethargic and unrhythmic. Buddy’s replacement, vocalist Earl Sinks, was too innocuous to carry the song to the charts. Later, “I Fought the Law” got a second chance with the Bobby Fuller Four’s dynamic guitar-driven cover, which became an international hit. Success eluded the Crickets, who virtually disappeared from the music scene for years. Sonny Curtis left the band to fulfill military obligations, Joe B. vanished into the trucking business, and Jerry became a session drummer in Los Angeles. They would re-form later but would never again make a strong impression in the United States. In Europe, their popularity remained intact.

Though Buddy Holly fell into disrepute in America when early rock ’n’ roll went out of style in the sixties, the demand for his records was so heavy in England that Decca advised the Holley family to round up all of his unreleased tapes and begin a program of issuing new albums on a regular basis. Petty was sitting on many of the tapes and threatened to withhold them. Buddy’s parents took him back into the fold, giving him control of Buddy’s posthumous releases. Hi Pockets Duncan, the man who discovered Buddy, was still active in radio, and would have seemed a more logical choice for the job. But again Hi Pockets was passed over. “I have a pair of nailclippers that was in Buddy’s pocket when he was killed that his parents gave to me,” Hi Pockets said.