Buddy Holly: Biography (6 page)

Busy with so many musical breakthroughs, Buddy neglected his schoolwork. He no longer had time for things like civics and algebra. Midway through his junior year, his mother told him to start bringing home some books. “It’s going to be harder now,” she said. But it wasn’t, not for Buddy. An able researcher and writer for his age, he dashed off succinct, interesting papers. Years later, when his tests and term themes were auctioned at Sotheby’s, the
New Yorker
magazine reviewed his book report on Robert Frost and pronounced it—by homework standards—“a masterpiece.” His writing style, like his later song lyrics, was direct, simple, and powerful. He was indeed a natural.

In 1954 Buddy met Waylon Jennings, who was ten months younger than Buddy and just as ambitious. Having grown up picking cotton, Waylon once said, “You’ll do anything to get out of West Texas.… It’s either music or pull cotton for the rest of your life.” A high school dropout at fourteen, Waylon lived in Littlefield, Texas, thirty miles northwest of Lubbock. He grew up raising hell with his brother Tommy and was “always into some damn trouble,” Tommy later said. They burned down a government storage grainery and a truckload of cotton, according to Waylon’s biographer R. Serge Denisoff. The Littlefield High School coach was sorry to lose Waylon, who was full of promise as a place kicker. He held a number of jobs—in a grocery store, a “dry goods” store, a lumber yard, and delivering freight. He’d won first prize—a table-top radio—on Hi Pockets Duncan’s KSEL “Saturday Jamboree” when he was only twelve. “He came from a poor family,” Hi Pockets said. “He was kind of on his own when he was a kid.”

By the time Waylon met Buddy, at seventeen, Waylon had developed his dazzling good looks and a resonant and expressive voice. Songwriter May Boren Axton would later refer to his “deep brown eyes and a beautifully crooked grin.” The title of Waylon’s first song, written when he was fifteen, was “Big Time Ladies Man.” Indeed he would come to be known as “the cowboy Warren Beatty.” Years later, groupie Pamela Des Barres called him “honestly crude and crudely honest.” After she and Waylon had sex, she says, Waylon apologized “for being so steamed up, and kissed me on the forehead, calling me a ‘sweet angel.’” Des Barres revealed this in her 1987 book
I’m With the Band,
adding that he started to get up but then returned to bed, “with a vengeance, saying, ‘I’ll tell you what, you really know how to please a man, baby.’”

Back in 1954 Waylon would occasionally drive down to KDAV and catch Buddy on the “Sunday Party” or they’d run into each other at amateur contests held on Saturday afternoons at movie theaters around West Texas. “Sometimes the same band would win it two or three weeks running,” Waylon told author Peter Guralnick in 1974. “We were still playing country—Buddy, too—hell, there wasn’t anything else, really. We worked a lot of shows together.”

Buddy frequently lent his sonorous Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar to Waylon, who moved to Lubbock in 1955 and became a DJ. One day they were loitering at the Lubbock bus station with Sonny Curtis, Weldon Myrick, and Roy Orbison. Standing in front of a beat-up jukebox, Buddy said, “Who’s got a quarter? We gotta hear this Chet Atkins record.”

Everyone was broke but Sonny Curtis, who sacrificed his last quarter. “That’s all we had,” Waylon recalls.

“I wish we could take in the Sonny James–Jim Reeves show,” said Orbison.

“I know,” said Waylon, “let’s sneak in.”

All five managed to crash the show. Sonny James and Jim Reeves fascinated them as C&W singers who crossed over into pop, something the boys all wanted to do. Sonny James had scored a No. 1 crossover hit with “Young Love.” Reeves’s “Four Walls” and “He’ll Have to Go” appealed equally to hillbillies and international fans.

Somewhere around 1953 or 1954 a representative of Columbia Records heard Buddy and Bob, raising their hopes for a recording contract. They rounded up Sonny Curtis, Larry Welborn, and Don Guess and drove to Wichita Falls, Texas, two hundred miles east of Lubbock, to cut a demonstration record, or “demo”, at the Nesman studio. The songs they recorded were Bob Montgomery’s “Gotta Get You Near Me Blues” and “Flower of My Heart.” Although they never heard from the Columbia man again, the Nesman tapes did survive. They are flat-out, free-flying hillbilly romps that stand up today as pure and timeless, despite Montgomery’s odd dismissal of them as “embarrassing.” Sonny Curtis’s zesty hoedown fiddling is outstanding.

Soon the Buddy and Bob band was playing the West Texas honky-tonk circuit. One night in San Angelo they were heckled by oil-field roustabouts in the audience. Buddy finished the show barely able to conceal his rage. According to Larry Welborn, someone bought them a six-pack. “Of course we couldn’t buy it at the time ourselves, being too young,” says Larry. Driving out to the country, they popped open their beers, and started rehashing the performance. After a few beers Buddy said, “Well, less go back. I wanta whip them son of a bitches that didn’t like us.”

“He was ready to go back and get after it with them,” Larry Welborn recalls. “He’d have that little bit of mean streak to him. He was just standin’ up for his own self. He wouldn’t let anybody tear him down. If he thought anybody was goin’ to say anything, he just beat them to the punch. Buddy believed in hisself, stood up for hisself.”

Sonny Curtis also found Buddy to be aggressive and reckless. “Though in appearance Buddy was very neat and always wore
tapered
jeans, he was
not
shy,” says Sonny. “He was a drinker—loud, a smart aleck, headstrong.” Jack Neal remembers being in a car with Buddy one time when he pulled a crazy stunt. Jack was driving and Buddy was sitting next to him, being very quiet. Suddenly Buddy decided Jack wasn’t going fast enough and stomped on Jack’s foot, sending the accelerator to the floorboard. “Scared me half to death,” Jack recalls.

One day at Lubbock High, Buddy got into a violent fight with another student in Robert Knight’s distributive education class. The boys flew at each other and fought their way across the room until they were hanging out of a third-floor window. “I had to grab them both by the collar,” recalls Knight, who hauled them in and let everyone cool down. Only a few years older than his students, Knight didn’t take the boys to the principal’s office.

“Buddy was cocky, but he had a lot to be cocky about,” says Knight. “He was aggressive, what experts in interpersonal relations call a ‘bipolar 8.’ He was very self-confident and got things done. Students who weren’t that self-confident were irritated by him and took the attitude: ‘I’ll knock your head off.’ Buddy was a visionary young man and had difficulty with them.”

The brawl in Knight’s class demonstrated that Buddy thought of himself as almost invincible. He had the kind of determination known only to heroes and fools—he was willing to fight to the death. Though he was not brawny—nor particularly healthy due to his ulcer—bullies knew he wasn’t to be messed with and left him alone.

The distributive education (DE) program at Lubbock High allowed students from poor families to attend classes in the morning and work at outside jobs in the afternoon. Buddy took a job at Smith Printing Company and became one of the outstanding DE students during his junior and senior years, holding an office in the DE club and helping put on dinners where employers could mingle with students and faculty members. He also traveled around with state with Robert Knight, entertaining at DE functions.

Knight found Buddy to be “unusually thoughtful, especially for a teenage kid. When I had the mumps, I was laying in bed and couldn’t do anything. Buddy and Bob came over when they got off work at four-thirty or five to entertain me for a couple of hours. I brought out my dominoes and we sat and played a game of 42.”

Rock ’n’ roll had become more dominant on the airwaves during Buddy’s senior year, 1954–55. The most popular jukebox hits were the Crew Cuts’ “Sh-Boom” and the Penguins’ “Earth Angel.” “Buddy started playing rock at the hops,” remembers Robert Knight, who chaperoned the dances in the gym. “Buddy got up there in his Levi’s, a white shirt, and loafers, or sometimes in Bermuda shorts. Buddy and Bob were so exciting playing the new rock ’n’ roll songs that I jumped up and danced with the kids.”

When the class of ’55 received its class ring—a tasteful gold band with a lariat encircling Lubbock High’s Romanesque facade and campanile—Buddy gave his ring to Echo McGuire, who placed it on a chain and wore it around her neck. In photographs, they are a happy looking couple. By then Buddy had filled out. He had broad shoulders, a narrow waist, and slender hips. In profile, his least attractive angle, he looked strangely Martian, but when he faced the camera he was handsome, with a big, heroic forehead, gull-wing eyebrows, a squared-off chin, and a strong jaw-line. Standing next to Echo, he towered over her by at least a foot.

Shortly before graduation, he registered for the draft. He signed in on May 6, 1955—the same day an atomic bomb was exploded in the Nevada desert. For young men facing military service, it was a grim, nervous time: everyone expected an imminent attack by Russia. The feeling, exemplified by Alfred E. Neuman in
Mad
magazine, was counteracted by a giddy materialism, even in West Texas. Flashy, gas-guzzling cars, dubbed “arrogant chariots” by the
New Yorker,
grew to record-breaking size and sprouted soaring tail fins. Impressive new interstate highways were built during the terms of President Eisenhower, their opening ending the preeminence of two-lane highways like Route 66. Record sales shot sky-high when the new 45-rpm disks replaced the bulky old 78s in the same way that CDs have rendered vinyl out-of-date. The recently invented transistor radios filled the air with music as never before.

Though Buddy didn’t own a car, he drove the family’s new 1955 Oldsmobile to school. He told everyone that it was his graduation present. One of his classmates called his mother and asked if the car was actually Buddy’s. To save her son embarrassment, Mrs. Holley answered that the car was certainly Buddy’s whenever he was in the driver’s seat. Before long, Buddy wrecked the car while showing off in front of Lubbock High. Waving to friends, he rear-ended the car in front of him, and the Holleys’ Olds had to go into the shop for expensive repairs.

On his graduation day—Friday, May 27, 1955—Buddy Holley was not asked to sing, despite the fact the commencement exercise included several musical numbers, such as “I Believe.” Following the ceremony, a prom was held downtown, atop the Dunlap Store.

In the fall, Echo went away to college, enrolling in a religious school in Abilene, Texas, 165 miles southeast of Lubbock. From then on, she and Buddy would see each other only on weekends.

“Buddy brought her over to my house some,” says Larry Holley, “and I felt like he might marry her.” But despite Larry’s opinion, the separation from Echo marked the beginning of the end of their relationship. From this point on, her name would resonate more in melody than in actual life.

Chapter Four

Elvis Meets Buddy

“When Elvis came to town, Buddy found him a girl,” says Larry Holley. “She was not anyone you’d find on this side of town.” Though there are still friends of Buddy’s in Lubbock who claim to have seen him showing Elvis around town, fixing him up with a girl, and even bringing him to the high school one day, Sonny Curtis, who played on the same bill with Buddy and Elvis in 1955, shrugs and says, “Elvis could get pussy where I couldn’t get drinking water.”

Despite varying opinions regarding Buddy and Elvis’s personal relationship, what is certain beyond any doubt is that when Elvis Presley hit Lubbock in 1955, he transformed all the C&W pickers in Buddy’s circle into rockers. “Without Elvis,” Buddy once said, “none of us could have made it.” Though rock ’n’ roll had burst on the world of West Texas the previous year with Bill Haley’s “Shake, Rattle, and Roll,” it was Elvis who whispered freedom into the ears of embattled Baptist boys like Buddy and unleashed a new generation of rockabillies. Though Elvis would not emerge as a national celebrity until the following year, he’d already been a sensation in Texas since playing his first gig in the state on August 21, 1954, in the small town of Gladewater. He appeared in Lubbock several times in 1955, and on one of his shows, Buddy and his group opened for him.

Hi Pockets once said that he was the first promoter to book Elvis into Lubbock. In the beginning, Elvis’s fee was $25. He had two musicians, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, but he told Hi Pockets that he’d be glad to add to his band if Hi Pockets could guarantee them a regular dance gig. Hi Pockets kept booking them until Elvis soared out of his league. “Buddy and all those boys were out there listening,” Hi Pockets remembered. “Man, they didn’t miss a thing.”

Sam Phillips had put Scotty and Bill together with Elvis the previous year at Sun Records in Memphis, Tennessee. Winfield Scott Moore III was a lean, stone-faced guitarist with a ski-jump nose. William P. “Blackie” Black, who drove audiences wild when he straddled his big bull fiddle and started humping it, regarded the world from slitty Roy Rogers eyes that beamed bright smiles. Bill had previously worked for Firestone Tire and Scotty was a Tennessee farm boy fresh out of the Navy. Their initial session with Elvis at Sun Records produced “That’s All Right, Mama,” Elvis’s first commercial release. For a while, Scotty was Elvis’s manager, later yielding to Bob Neal, who in turn would be replaced by Tom Parker.

As Larry Holley remembers it, Elvis was terribly late the night he was scheduled to appear at Fair Park Coliseum in Lubbock in 1955. In Elvis’s absence, Buddy and his front band blew the roof off the coliseum, playing until Elvis came on. Many people in the audience preferred Buddy to Elvis, Larry proudly recalled, although Buddy was still a beginner.

Elvis billed himself as “The Hillbilly Cat, King of Western Bop.” In the Deep South, where Elvis came from, “Cat” denoted a black man. Elvis’s style was hillbilly music with a Negro spin—rock ’n’ roll, as it would soon come to be known. “Elvis looked like a motorcycle headlight coming at you,” says Sonny Curtis. “White buck shoes, red pants, and an orange jacket.” When he rotated his hips in rhythm, the audience went berserk.