Buddy Holly: Biography (59 page)

Other old friends of Buddy’s continued to flourish, often profiting from their association with his legend. The Crickets opened their sets with a medley of Holly tunes. In the summer of 1984 Griggs caught them at the Country Club bar in Reseda in Southern California. The audience was enthusiastic, but Griggs was “a little disappointed” with “Peggy Sue” when Jerry substituted a new routine for the steady drumming so familiar from the hit record. Eddie Cochran’s old girlfriend Sharon Sheeley was in the audience that night and took a bow, “still looking good,” Griggs noted, “after all these years.”

Dion made it back into the Top 10 with the elegiac “Abraham, Martin, and John” in 1968. He’d recovered from his drug addiction, experiencing a spiritual awakening that enabled him to express “the language of the heart,” he said, using a phrase of Bill Wilson’s, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. “Angels were waiting in the wings,” Dion wrote in his autobiography, referring to his comeback. “Abraham, Martin, and John,” both a eulogy for America’s slain leaders and an embodiment of the hope and love they symbolized, came in the midst of the Vietnam War, the Chicago riots, and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and helped a stunned nation come to terms with its grief.

Dion’s friend, Fred Milano, one of the original Belmonts, who’d toured with Buddy in 1959, was still singing “Tell Me Why” and “Teenager in Love” in little clubs like Memories, in Johnston, Rhode Island, where, according to one fan, the sound equipment was terrible but Milano, now bald, was still in very good voice.

Located by the indefatigable Griggs, Echo McGuire asked “not to be interviewed as her memories of Buddy are too personal,” Griggs related in 1992. Key figures associated with Buddy’s final tour were still around in the eighties but reluctant to discuss Buddy. GAC’s Irving Feld didn’t answer letters, Griggs said. In 1994 British author Alan Mann reported that Feld “has long since retired but his son is in the music business, carrying on the family name.” Jerry Dwyer declined requests for interviews from both Griggs, publisher of
Rockin’ 50s
magazine, and Jeff Tecklenburg, city editor of the
Mason City Globe-Gazette,
who reported that Dwyer complained of “harassment.” Jeremy Powers, a former
Globe-Gazette
reporter who investigated the crash, says in a 1995 interview, “It must have been tough to be the owner of the plane Buddy Holly died in. That’s something you live with for the rest of your life.”

Carl Bunch toured for a while with Roy Orbison. After serving in the Army from 1959 to 1961, Carl “bummed around the country” and married a girl while he was so intoxicated he could scarcely stand, Carl confided to Griggs. He worked as a prison guard in Georgia and married two more times before founding the “Dove Nest Ministries,” which he discussed in a book entitled
God Comes to Nashville.
Before evangelist Jim Bakker was imprisoned for defrauding PTL followers of millions of dollars, Carl appeared on Bakker’s
PTL Club
television show, singing Buddy Holly songs and freely inserting religious phrases in the lyrics. Had Buddy Holly lived, Carl is convinced, Buddy would have led a religious revival in the final decades of the twentieth century. “The devil knew that,” Carl told Griggs. “That is why the devil killed him.” Waylon Jennings, Carl’s old friend from the “Winter Dance Party,” arranged for Carl to tour with Hank Williams, Jr., as the drummer in the Cheatin’ Hearts band. Carl has also played drums for Frankie Avalon, Fabian, Jimmy Clanton, Tommy Cash, Dottie West, Marty Robbins, Mel Tillis, and Charlie Pride.

Sonny Curtis was flying high on the U.S. charts in 1981. His single “Good Ol’ Girls” was No. 15 in
Billboard
and No. 9 in
Record World,
and he had a new LP,
Sonny Curtis: Rollin’.
In charge of Sonny’s affairs at Elektra/Asylum was Buddy’s old friend Jimmy Bowen, formerly of Buddy Knox’s Rhythm Orchids and subsequently head of Elektra’s Nashville office. Later in the eighties, when Bowen took over MCA’s Nashville division, he almost dropped Reba McEntire but thought better of it and assigned Don Lanier, another ex-Rhythm Orchid, to help McEntire find better material. “Ultimately, Bowen didn’t agree to produce me, but compromised by mixing (electronically arranging) the album, which we decided to call
My Kind of Country,
” McEntire revealed in her 1994 memoirs. The album made McEntire the queen of country and helped launch the New Traditionalist movement in C&W. Earlier in her career she had encountered another of Buddy Holly’s old friends, Bob Montgomery, who had become one of the most successful independent record producers in Nashville as well as co-owner of a leading publishing company with Bobby Goldsboro. Montgomery was still writing songs; Patsy Cline recorded his “Back in Baby’s Arms,” and Montgomery’s “Misty Blue” was the most recorded song of 1967. But when the young Reba McEntire’s tape was submitted to him in 1975, “Montgomery was polite but equally uninterested in the demo of yet another unknown girl country singer,” McEntire later recalled.

Another member of Buddy’s inner circle, Buddy Wayne Knox, who was living in Canada, showed up at a Buddy Holly Tribute Dance at the Surf Ballroom in the eighties, driving a camper with a canoe strapped on top and looking like a rugged frontiersman in his full beard and curly hair. He’d never duplicated his early successes but was obviously enjoying life. Knox entertained twenty-two hundred fans who’d braved a snowstorm to attend the dance. Many of them had to spend the night sleeping on the dance floor or in the Surf’s booths due to zero visibility, 57-below-zero temperature, and high winds. The next morning they were rewarded by Surf manager Darrel Hein, who served fried eggs and coffee in the ballroom.

*   *   *

Norman Petty’s downfall was slow and tortured. After scoring an enormous hit in 1963 with Jimmy Gilmer and the Fireballs’ “Sugar Shack.” Petty made the mistake of criticizing the Beatles, fuzz-tone guitars, and psychedelia in the presence of record-industry associates and afterward was dismissed as old hat. Suddenly no one would take his calls. “In his latter years people that he started in the business, who were now in powerful positions, and began to reject his recordings,” Billy Stull, one of Petty’s protégés and later manager of the Clovis studios, recalled in 1992. “He’d always had tremendous respect and could get into any door, but now when Norman wanted to sell a new record, he couldn’t. He couldn’t see the top people anymore, or go to dinner with them. The Christmas cards and letters stopped. He would go and be turned down by the very people he had given their start, or he’d made their company a lot of money in the past. Maybe he didn’t progress with the music. He stuck to his guns, a clean, crystal clear sound. That wasn’t acceptable to the executives later so he felt disappointed and rejected. He’d been a great producer, so he felt some bitterness there.”

By 1984 he lay dying of leukemia. “Norman never spoke of Buddy Holly,” says Billy Stull. “He was more into the future, the next session, what’s the next song we’re going to do? He even started a book and threw it away. ‘The book I’m going to write is not going to be about these other famous guys,’ he told me. ‘It will be about people like you, unknown musicians I’ve worked with.’”

Few publishers would have been interested in a book about unknowns, even one by Norman Petty. At some point the project was dropped. Throughout 1984, Petty suffered terribly as his cancer consumed him. Though his contribution as a pioneering record producer of the rock era rivaled that of Sam Phillips, Elvis’s discoverer at Sun Records, there were few honors for the visionary of Clovis, who’d given the world Roy Orbison, Buddy Knox, Buddy Holly, and Waylon Jennings. Sam Phillips was one of the original inductees in the Rock-’n’-Roll Hall of Fame the following year, but the Hall of Fame ignored Petty, perhaps because he never succeeded in dispelling persistent rumors that he’d mistreated Buddy and other young musicians.

To the end, Petty refused to address such charges. “Norman was hurt by all these accusations,” Stull says. “I spoke to Norman about it and he said, ‘I’m not the kind of person to go out and try to defend myself. I’m hurt by what people say but it’s not true as far as my owin’ Buddy money.’ He died an unhappy man. He wouldn’t stand up and tell his side of it. He kept the hurt inside. He had plenty of money and fame, but he was unhappy. It had been some years since he’d had a hit as a producer.” Indeed it had. “Bottle of Wine,” a No. 9 hit for the Fireballs in 1968, was the last notable recording to come out of the Norman Petty Recording Studios.

In June 1984, Petty’s final public recognition was a gold record, signifying one million copies, for Buddy’s
20 Golden Greats.
Clovis Mayor Frank Murray spoke at the brief ceremony, citing Petty’s “eminence in the recording business.” The
Amarillo Daily News
covered the event, reporting that “Petty still waxes nostalgic about his three-year association with Holly.” He died on August 15 at the age of fifty-seven.

“He died unfulfilled,” says Stull. “He wanted a new record but the records quit getting released. Ironically, Petty’s style is back—the alternative rock stuff, real clean, that was Norman’s sound back in the early sixties. ‘Sugar Shack’ was in
Mermaids,
the Cher movie.” Lubbock took little note of Petty’s death, burying his obit on page eleven of the
Avalanche-Journal
under the headline,
PETTY
, 57,
FRIEND, MANAGER OF BUDDY HOLLY, DIES HERE.
Attending his funeral at the Central Baptist Church in Clovis were Buddy’s mother and brother Larry. Buddy’s mother said, “It’s real sad, it really is.” Clearly, the Holleys were very decent people.

Also in attendance were Jimmy Gilmer and Bill Griggs. The service included some peculiar touches—for instance, the minister compared Petty with Michelangelo and Beethoven. Wind chimes were installed in the church, and a powerful fan was trained on them, in keeping with written instructions by the deceased, a perfectionist to the end, who held that the only really pure notes were produced by wind chimes. Less bizarre was the playing of Buddy’s record, “True Love Ways,” which was followed by “Almost Paradise” by the Norman Petty Trio. After the service, the procession made its way through downtown Clovis, where policemen stood at every corner, doffing their hats. The cortege paused briefly on Seventh Street, in front of the original studio, and then proceeded to the Mission Garden of Memories Cemetery for the burial. Perhaps the final word belongs to Griggs, who says in 1995, “Petty took as much money [from Buddy] as he could legally. Morally—that’s another matter.”

Buddy’s father, Lawrence O. Holley, eighty-four, suffered a stroke on July 1, 1985, and was taken to the West Texas Hospital in downtown Lubbock. On July 7, his condition worsened and he was moved to the intensive care unit, where, on the following day, at eight
P.M.
, he died. Obituaries identified him as “father of the late rock-’n’-roll star,” a designation fully earned by L.O., who’d always been available when needed to drive Buddy and the Crickets to their early gigs. The Reverend E. L. Bynum officiated at the funeral, which was held at Tabernacle Baptist Church at three
P.M.
, Wednesday, July 10. Among the pallbearers were his barber Jake Goss, Buddy Holly Memorial Society president Bill Griggs, and Charlie Johnson, a trustee of the church and father of Ken Johnson, the associate pastor who’d participated in Buddy’s funeral.

L.O. was buried next to Buddy in the family plot. Buddy’s grave was now flanked by that of his father and his nephew Lee Weir, who had died at seventeen as a result of a fall off a bridge and onto a highway while going to a Rolling Stones concert.

In 1986, the newly established Rock-’n’-Roll Hall of Fame named Buddy one of the ten original inductees, along with Elvis, Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Brown, Little Richard, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry, Ray Charles, and the Everly Brothers. Cochran made the list the following year, as did Orbison, Bo Diddley, Carl Perkins, and Ricky Nelson (who had died in late 1985 in circumstances eerily similar to Buddy’s). Atlantic Records’ Ahmet Ertegun, Hall of Fame chairman, personally invited Maria Elena to attend the induction dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria on January 23, 1986. Over a thousand people assembled in the grand ballroom for the ceremony. Maria Elena attended with her daughter, Elena Diaz, who later reported that Fats Domino had told her, “I wish Buddy, Elvis, and Sam Cooke could be here to enjoy what’s happening.”

The eighties continued to be a decade of accolades for Buddy—
Newsweek
’s 1985 Bruce Springsteen cover story placed Buddy at the top of rock’s “Magnificent Seven”—but not all of them were in good taste. In 1988 the Surf Ballroom unveiled a six-foot monument dedicated to Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper which included the name of the pilot Roger Peterson, whose inexperience had contributed to the plane crash. According to the AP, the pilot’s seventy-one-year-old parents were determined to see the world acknowledge Roger’s existence and grant him equal billing with the dead rock stars. Understandably, Maria Elena objected. “Mrs. Holly, fifty-five, said it would be inappropriate to honor Peterson,” the AP reported, adding that Maria Elena blamed Peterson for taking off in bad weather. Connie Alvarez, Ritchie’s sister, rushed to the Petersons’ defense, telling the AP that it saddened her that “someone can be so selfish and unforgiving,” despite the passage of twenty-nine years. Elaborating on her earlier statement, Maria Elena explained that she did not hate Roger Peterson but felt that he was irresponsible. She wasn’t the only one who blamed Peterson for the crash; the CAB had cited pilot error, among other factors.

In the end Peterson’s name was included on the glum $4,000 monument, which looks exactly like a tombstone. In a photograph taken during the dedication ceremony, Jan Dilley, Roger Peterson’s sister, stands at some distance from Maria Elena, as does DeAnn Anderson, Peterson’s widow, who is embracing Peterson’s father Arthur. Evidently Connie Alvarez had decided to forgive Maria Elena, for the two of them are joined in a big three-way hug with Bob Hale, the emcee of Buddy’s last show.