Buddy Holly: Biography (55 page)

Eventually Buddy’s oeuvre became the basic textbook of the British rock renaissance. Eric Clapton, rock’s future guitar god, called Buddy “a very big early influence, particularly the way he looked, and I loved the look and the sound of his Strats.” Clapton played with the Roosters in Ricky Tick clubs in Kingston, Windsor, and West Wickham and briefly with a Liverpool group, Casey Jones and the Engineers. Finally he joined the Yardbirds and landed a Crawdaddy residency and a regular job at Studio 51 in Soho in 1964. On the Rolling Stones’ Christmas TV special
Rock-’n’-Roll Circus,
Clapton played “Peggy Sue” with a hastily improvised group that included Clapton on lead guitar, John Lennon on rhythm guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums, Keith Richards on bass, and Mick Jagger, vocals. In 1968, Clapton covered Buddy’s “Well All Right” in a band he formed with Ginger Baker and Stevie Winwood.

By the end of the sixties, Buddy’s triumph in England was as total as his obscurity in America. Folk singer Phil Ochs was booed in Carnegie Hall for announcing that he was going to sing some Buddy Holly songs. While new Holly LPs such as
Holly in the Hills,
which highlighted Buddy’s early C&W performances with Bob Montgomery;
Greatest Hits;
and 1969’s
Giant
consistently climbed the British charts, they made no impression on Americans. He was voted No. 6 in England’s
New Musical Express
poll as “World’s Best Male Singer.” He rated sixteenth in Britain as “World’s Greatest Musical Personality,” outranking George Harrison, Brenda Lee, and Frank Sinatra. But in his native country Buddy Holly was about to disappear into the same black hole that swallowed up so many of his peers, including Buddy Knox, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, and Gene Vincent.

Sometimes it seemed that only his family remembered him. In the 1960s, long after Carroll Anderson had stopped managing the Surf Ballroom and opened Carroll’s Café in Clear Lake, Anderson glanced up from his work one day and recognized Buddy’s aged parents sitting at a table in his restaurant. When he asked if he could join them, Anderson recalled in 1980, “They said, ‘You mean that you remember us?’”

It was the Holleys’ third visit to Clear Lake. Only here, perhaps, could they relive the triumph of their son’s last performance and come to terms with the terror of his final seconds. Anderson was touched by Buddy’s parents and referred to them as “very fine people.” No doubt they helped him deal with his own grieving. Even fifteen years later he was still haunted by the crash and its grisly aftermath. “You can’t believe how hard it hits you,” he said to Mike Oestreicher in 1980, “when you’ve got three young people … full of life … and in five minutes they’re all dead … torn up, dismantled.” He kept “some of the most gruesome pictures you’ve ever seen” locked up for years and finally burned them to erase the horror from his mind. He preferred to remember Buddy’s last words to him, which were, “I hope our paths cross again some day.”

Besides the undying love of family and friends, Buddy still commanded the respect of contemporary songwriters and poets. Waylon Jennings celebrated him in “Old Friend” and “The Stage,” Benny Barnes eulogized him in “Gold Records in the Snow,” and Sonny Curtis wrote the moving “Real Buddy Holly Story.” They all helped keep Buddy’s legend alive in America. When Buddy finally regained his popularity in his homeland in the seventies, it was largely due to a singer-songwriter-poet named Don McLean.

Chapter Sixteen

American Pie

By 1972, America was ripe for a Buddy Holly renaissance. The Beatles had broken up; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Jimi Hendrix were dead; and most of the sixties bands had faded from sight. David Bowie saluted the end of rock’s creative, pioneering period in the fifties and sixties by introducing “glitter rock,” which would usher in the disco and punk trends of the seventies. Chuck Berry returned to the charts with “My Ding-A-Ling.” Elvis was smoking again with “Burning Love.” Ricky Nelson’s “Garden Party” hit the jukeboxes and Elton John’s “Crocodile Rock” was No. 1. “Golden Oldies” thrived again on DJ radio stations, the Carpenters would soon be crooning sha-la-las in “Yesterday Once More,” and Fats Domino and Bill Haley bounced back into the $400,000-a-year bracket with their fifties hits.

Don McLean’s single “American Pie” made its initial appearance on
Billboard
’s Hot 100 at No. 69 on November 27, 1971. Seven weeks later it was No. 1. The song was full of nostalgic references to “That’ll Be the Day,” the grim headlines of February 3, 1959, and a host of fifties memories such as hops in the gym, danceable rock ’n’ roll music, the Monotones’ “Book of Love,” Chevrolets, pickup trucks, carnations, beer, whiskey, and God. It mourned the passing of friendly Buddy Holly tunes and deplored what rock had become in the hands of the Rolling Stones, obsessed with Satan and drugs and abandoned by God. Sad and reverential, “American Pie” became the anthem of Christmas ’71, providing an eerie glow to the holiday, like a distant reveille. Described by
Rolling Stone
’s Geoffrey Stokes as “an eight-minute chronicle of American pop inspired by the airplane deaths of Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, and Buddy Holly,” “American Pie” went on to become 1972’s biggest-selling single.

The LP, also entitled
American Pie,
was dedicated to Buddy. As “American Pie” dominated both the singles and album charts for almost two months, Buddy’s own records began to sell again in the United States. “‘American Pie’ became a tool to resurrect the memory of Buddy Holly and get it on track,” said McLean. “It’s growing all the time.” The song made fifties rock so fashionable that
Grease,
a lightly nostalgic send-up of the fifties, became an all-time smash on Broadway. Then, just a year after the release of “American Pie,” in 1973, a character in the popular film
American Graffiti
said, “I can’t stand that surfing shit. Rock ’n’ roll’s been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died.”

Ironically, McLean’s own career went into a slump after “American Pie.” In the eighties, he made a comeback with a hit cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” and again credited Buddy with his success. Tommy Allsup, who was one of McLean’s sidemen for the “Crying” session, came to work one day and showed McLean the wallet Buddy had been carrying for Tommy during the 1959 plane crash. He told McLean the Iowa police had just returned it to him. To McLean it was “like an omen,” McLean told interviewer Stu Fink in 1985. “Crying” soared to No. 5 on the charts and his career surged again “for about three years,” McLean added.

Decca’s response to Buddy’s resurgence in the early seventies was disappointing. Instead of assembling a definitive Holly collection, Decca issued a slapdash German two-album set without liner notes. On the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, Buddy’s British fans could choose from among a wide and rich variety of albums, including
Remember
in 1971,
Legend
in 1974, and
Rave On
and
The Buddy Holly Story
in 1975.

The first unmistakable sign that Buddy had regained his cult status in the United States was the establishment of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society, founded in 1975 by a Kmart employee and sometime racing-car driver named Bill Griggs, who lived in Wethersfield, Connecticut. Griggs eventually moved to Lubbock and published a Holly fan magazine called
Reminiscing,
which lasted over a decade, and promoted an annual weeklong convention, held around Buddy’s birthday and featuring live performances by the Crickets, Don McLean, Joe Ely, Carl Perkins, Buddy Knox, Bo Diddley, Del Shannon, Bobby Vee, and many others. Before the demise of the society around 1990, the membership roll boasted fifty-two hundred members from all fifty states and thirty-one foreign countries, including the Netherlands, Germany, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, Japan, Greece, Zimbabwe, Finland, Korea, Egypt, Denmark, New Zealand, Belgium, Sweden, England, Australia, Ireland, and Canada. In his newsletter Griggs addressed the readers as if they were members of one big family, as in a sense they were, bound by their love of Buddy. Griggs disbanded the BHMS due to the increasing strain of his relationship with Maria Elena and disagreements with club members, among other reasons.

Other than McLean, the one recording artist perhaps most responsible for the revival of Buddy Holly was Linda Ronstadt. In 1976, her magnificently earthy cover of “That’ll Be the Day” went to No. 11 on the charts. The following year she covered “It’s So Easy,” which soared to No. 5. Altogether, Ronstadt’s Holly covers racked up six months on the charts. Eighteen years after Buddy Holly’s death, he was again a major force in American rock ’n’ roll. Born in Tuscon, Arizona, on July 15, 1946, sultry Linda Ronstadt grew up, like Buddy, singing Hank Williams and Elvis Presley. She had a lush, doe-eyed beauty compounded of half-Mexican, half-German bloodlines. Despite formidable physical assets, she said, according to biographer Mark Bego, “I’m not a beautiful girl. I don’t have good skin or good hair or a fashion-model figure.” Real or imagined, such drawbacks did not prevent her from getting “a bad reputation even in junior high school because our skirts were too tight.” Nor would they prevent her involvement with dynamic J. D. Souther and a relationship with California Governor Jerry Brown that provoked widespread rumor and speculation.

In 1964 she went to Los Angeles and fell in with Shilo, the band that evolved into the Eagles, who came to epitomize the seventies synthesis of C&W and rock. “The Eagles backed me up,” Ronstadt said in record mogul Joe Smith’s book
Off the Record.
“When I heard them sing ‘Witchy Woman’ in the living room of J. D. Souther’s house, where I was living at the time, I knew the Eagles were going to make it.” Peter Asher, formerly of Peter and Gordon, who’d covered “True Love Ways,” got Ronstadt’s career off the ground, guiding her to a mixture of oldies and contemporary songs. She would use the classics of Buddy Holly, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, Willie Nelson, and Hank Williams as a vehicle to stardom. Her 1974 breakthrough album,
Heart Like a Wheel,
a No. 1 hit, included her cover of Buddy’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” In 1976 her LP
Hasten Down the Wind,
featuring “That’ll Be the Day,” went to No. 3 on the album chart and garnered a Grammy for Best Pop Vocal Performance, Female. “It’s So Easy” was in
Simple Dreams,
Ronstadt’s 1977 album that went to No. 1 and sold 3.5 million copies. Years later Ronstadt acknowledged her debt to Buddy, appearing in Lubbock at a “Tornado Jam” in Buddy Holly Park. After she and Joe Ely sang a duet of “That’ll Be the Day,” both said they were fans of Buddy.

Ronstadt’s immense popularity brought Buddy’s music to a mass audience in the seventies that might never have heard of Buddy Holly otherwise. Don McLean had evoked Buddy’s memory and propelled him up the ladder to pop sainthood, but it was Linda Ronstadt’s covers of “That’ll Be the Day” and “It’s So Easy” that started the world singing his songs again and won him an altogether new audience of young people.

With so much money pouring into Buddy’s estate, Buddy’s mother had a hard time keeping track of it. Looking after her ailing seventy-four-year-old husband occupied most of her waking hours. According to Larry, Mrs. Holley tended to be too open-handed, kept no records, and ended up forgetting to pay her taxes. “Mother had got behind seven years without ever filin’,” Larry said in 1992. “Daddy had his stroke and all she did was tend to him. Daddy didn’t know nothin’—he was just there, he liked to listen to ‘Hee-Haw’ on the radio, he was happy. Mother didn’t know nothin’ [about money] and they just let it drift on by and here come Internal Revenue finally with about half a million dollars that was owed and there was no way to get it. We didn’t want Mother to lose her house and have the fame of all this coming out that she was an income tax evader.”

Larry was forced to sell off the American rights to Buddy’s songs to Paul McCartney, whose MPL company is the largest independent music publisher in the world (the initials denote Paul McCartney and his wife Linda). The transaction divested the Holley estate of Buddy’s birthright but enabled the Holleys to raise badly needed cash and to get everything squared away with the IRS’s claim against Buddy’s mother. Paul McCartney told author John Tobler in 1980 that his business advisers approached him one day and asked, “Who do you really like?”

“Buddy Holly,” McCartney replied.

Somewhat later, McCartney heard that “Buddy’s old songs and stuff” were up for sale. He “jumped on it,” recognizing a business opportunity that also offered some fun as “a fan thing,” he later told Tobler.

MPL owns many copyrights of incalculable value, including the perennials “Happy Birthday,” “Chopsticks,” “Autumn Leaves,” and “On Wisconsin”; the Broadway musicals
Guys and Dolls, Grease, Hello Dolly, Mame,
and
A Chorus Line;
and the entire oeuvre of Scott Joplin and Ira Gershwin. McCartney’s personal wealth is estimated at $500 million. The
Guinness Book of Records
lists him as the richest musician in history. In response to the sale of Buddy’s catalogue to McCartney, Maria Elena told Griggs, “I was very happy to hear about that because I thought that Paul would be pushing record sales.” In 1993 she added, “Paul McCartney bought the whole catalog but Southern still has the overseas market, and MPL has the American market.”

From the start, overseeing the vast treasury of Holly classics proved for McCartney to be a labor of love. He’d been “a big fan of Buddy’s” since childhood, he told Tobler, adding that Buddy was “one of the first artists that turned me on.” On September 7, 1976, the fortieth anniversary of Buddy’s birth, McCartney inaugurated Buddy Holly Week in the United Kingdom, featuring a huge hop in London. Norman Petty was the guest of honor at a luncheon hosted by McCartney and attended by Eric Clapton and other rock luminaries. Buddy Holly Week became an annual affair, described by McCartney as “just great” because “all the people like me love it and it brings back great memories.” Also a fan of the Crickets and of anyone else who’d been close to Buddy, McCartney in the coming years would entertain Larry Welborn, Sonny Curtis, Jerry, Joe B., and Larry Holley during Buddy Holly Week, and in 1979 the Crickets would appear with him and his band Wings at London’s Odeon Hammersmith.