Buddy Holly: Biography (8 page)

When Peggy Sue and Jerry later resumed their relationship and started going steady, her parents disapproved, considering her much too young at fifteen to be serious about a boy. They threatened to send her away to a parochial school in California. Her mother was very protective of Peggy Sue, believing she’d had a touch of polio as a child. “It was probably lupus, not polio,” says Peggy Sue today. “I have lupus now, so my childhood sickness was the first sign.”

Peggy Sue often saw Buddy outside the Hi-D-Ho Drive-in, standing beside his car and kicking the tires. In her father’s Ford Fairlane, she and her girlfriends spent “a lot of time driving around the Hi-D-Ho in circles, hanging around, checking out the cars,” she says. “When the boys didn’t have anything else to do, they’d kick their tires.” Waylon Jennings was the first in Buddy’s crowd to get married. Under the impression that he’d gotten his girl, Maxine Carrol Lawrence, pregnant, he married her in 1956 only to discover, several hours after the wedding ceremony, that she wasn’t pregnant after all. Their son, Terry Vance Jennings, was born one year later, followed by a daughter, Julie Rae, in 1958. “This is something that should not have happened in the first place,” Hi Pockets observed. “He was always in desperate need of money.” But Waylon refused to give up his musical ambitions and was still determined to escape West Texas at any price. Waylon’s cousin, Anita Shipley, started dating Sonny Curtis during this period.

As Buddy completed his preparations for the Hank Thompson tour in late 1955 and early 1956, he and Echo continued to hold on to their tenuous relationship, but it must have been clear to them both that the end was near. His emotions were on a roller-coaster ride—heartbreak over Echo and excitement over his forthcoming Decca recording session, set for January 26, 1956. His most pressing need was to find original song material to record if he expected to score a hit recording, and he definitely expected at least one hit out of the session—not to mention a lot of money and instant fame.

Shortly before Buddy left Lubbock, Ben Hall called him and offered “Blue Days, Black Nights,” a song he’d just completed. Hall no longer lived in Lubbock but returned specifically to give the song to Buddy. They arranged to meet and rehearse the song at one of the local radio stations. Although it was a winter day, the sun was shining and it was warm enough for them to go outside and work on the lyrics. They found a shady spot and sat down. Ben showed him how to sing and play the song, explaining that he’d written it about a hard time, when he couldn’t find his direction. His days had been bad, and his nights worse. Buddy loved the song so much that Ben decided he’d never show it to anyone else; it was Buddy’s.

Before leaving town, Buddy appealed to his brother Larry for money, confidently stating that he was about to become a star and could hardly make his debut with beat-up equipment. Assuring Larry that the family was soon going to be very proud of him, he asked for $1,000. Thunderstruck, Larry said “Why don’t you just ask for the moon?” But somehow he managed to rake up the grand. Impressed that Buddy was determined to make it as a professional musician “or bust a gut,” Larry says, “he blew six hundred of it on a Fender Stratocaster.”

Actually, Buddy purchased the Strat for $249.50 at Harrod Music on Avenue Q in Lubbock. Though the Strat was popular with C&W musicians, having sprung from the steel guitar, it was not considered a rock ’n’ roll instrument until Buddy made it famous. The futuristic-looking Stratocaster, featuring a tail-fin design that made it look more like a car than a guitar, was invented by a bespectacled Californian named Clarence Leo Fender. Among the Strat’s innovations was a built-in vibrato that enabled musicians to come up with shimmering musical nuances. But the Strat’s greatest attraction for Buddy as a rock musician was that it was
loud.

After acquiring the Strat, Buddy went shopping for a red sport coat but found nothing of interest in Lubbock, where hip clothes were as scarce as hen’s teeth, unless you wanted a cowboy look. Determined to outfit themselves as rockers, Buddy, Sonny Curtis, and Don Guess set out for Oklahoma City, 357 miles northeast of Lubbock, in search of the proto-Punk garb—pegged pants and turned-up Billy Eckstine collars—that Elvis Presley had found at Lansky Brothers on Memphis’s Beale Street. “That’s how we ended up being Buddy Holly and the Two-Tones,” Sonny explains. “We bought white trousers, but one of us got a blue shirt and one got an orange one—hence the Two-Tones.”

With what remained of the $1,000 loan from Larry, Buddy bought a Pro Amp for his new electric guitar. Finally the trio pulled out of Lubbock, Don’s bass fiddle strapped on top of the Olds. The boys made it out of town just in time. A collection agency was after the car because Buddy’s parents had turned the payments over to him, and he hadn’t been making them. Buddy’s hasty exit from Lubbock marked the end of his apprenticeship and the beginning of his life as a professional singer. He was well prepared for the challenges that lay ahead in the demanding world of show business. Solidly grounded in bluegrass and country singing, he’d learned rock ’n’ roll from the master himself, Elvis Presley, and was ready to conquer the airwaves and jukeboxes as the latest rock sensation. He took it as a good omen that he and Elvis were going to be in Nashville at the same time. Elvis had moved from Memphis when Sam Phillips sold his Sun Records contract to RCA in November 1955, and now both Elvis and Buddy were scheduled for Nashville sessions in January 1956. At RCA, where Chet Atkins had the good sense to say, “Just go on doing what you been doing,” Elvis sailed through his first session, which produced the No. 1 hit “Heartbreak Hotel.” At Decca, Buddy’s mentors would prove less amenable to the new music; in fact, they hated rock ’n’ roll.

Chapter Five

The Hillbilly Backlash

Unfortunately, Buddy’s initial forays into professionalism—the Thompson tour at the beginning of January 1956 and the Nashville recording session at the end of the month—were out-and-out disasters. The C&W establishment had been thrown into panic by the sudden ascendancy of rock ’n’ roll and Buddy caught the full impact of the hillbilly backlash, an explosion of C&W paranoia and rage. On the road as a backup player, he immediately clashed with hard-drinking C&W recording star George Jones, who poked fun at Buddy’s and Glen Reeves’s loud clothes and boozily denounced rock ’n’ roll. Buddy took it for a while and then struck back, informing Jones that he’d probably like rock ’n’ roll if he were capable of singing it. One night Buddy broke into a rock beat as he accompanied Jones, who was singing his Top 10 C&W hit “Why Baby Why.” Like all singers in the middle of a performance, Jones was at the mercy of his accompanist. Somehow Jones managed to complete the number as a rocker.

The situation didn’t improve when Buddy arrived in Nashville and found the conservative hillbilly capital reeling from the onslaught of rock ’n’ roll, which was decimating C&W on the charts. The old guard resisted rock ’n’ roll with all its might. Buddy was immediately embroiled in the growing conflict between C&W and rock ’n’ roll; eventually country music would be split down the middle, RCA and at least half of the C&W establishment fleeing to rockabilly—the term that was universally applied to the new rock ’n’ roll hillbilly style—and the other half remaining straight country singers. The rockabillies adopted Elvis’s style and mannerisms. The traditionalists took their lead from Hank Williams, Sr. Decca’s Paul Cohen and Owen Bradley, instead of recognizing Buddy Holley as a potential rockabilly star, tried to force him into a C&W mold, completely disregarding his wish to sing rock ’n’ roll. Buddy resisted, and Cohen got nasty, sniping, “You don’t have the voice to be a singer. You should forget about a musical career.” Jim and Dolly Denny had their hands full restraining a volatile and combative Buddy until the miserable session could be completed.

Of the four songs he cut on January 26 at Bradley’s Barn, a quonsethut annex to Bradley’s house at Sixteenth Avenue South, “Midnight Shift” and “Love Me” come off best, but the beautiful “Blue Days, Black Nights” was wasted, vitiated by inferior sound engineering and an arrangement that was hard-edged where it should have been soft and tender. (Ben Hall’s own performance of the song in Paul McCartney’s BBC-TV special
The Real Buddy Holly Story
demonstrates how affecting it can be when properly delivered.) For Buddy, the only redeeming feature of the Decca fiasco was the after-hours fun he, Sonny, and Don had in Nashville. Marty Robbins let them have the run of his office, and evenings they hung out downtown and “chased chicks,” says Sonny.

As if Buddy’s relationship with Decca weren’t bad enough, the company misspelled his name on his contract, dropping the “e” in Holley. Buddy decided to go along with the error, changing his name to Holly when he signed the contract, back in Lubbock, on February 8, 1956. The same month marked the beginning of the civil-rights movement, when a bold and defiant black woman, Rosa Parks, refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, kicking off a massive bus boycott. Whites, in embracing rock ’n’ roll, were appropriating a huge chunk of black culture, but they were no closer than ever to accepting blacks as equals.

“Blue Days, Black Nights”/”Love Me,” Buddy’s first single, was released on April 16 and sold nineteen thousand units, a sale so dismal that it’s a wonder the world ever again heard of Buddy Holly. In its review,
Billboard
failed to spot him as a future star and damned the record with faint praise, writing, “If the public will take more than one Presley or Perkins, as it well may, Holly stands a strong chance.”

Buddy’s next Decca session was set for late July. Determined not to repeat the same mistakes, he decided to practice and record demos of his new material, which included a hauntingly beautiful song he’d written called “Because I Love You” as well as another Ben Hall number, “It’s Not My Fault.” He went to Clovis, New Mexico, ninety-one miles northwest of Lubbock, which had a state-of-the-art recording studio owned by a man named Norman Petty. Hi Pockets Duncan was frantic when he heard that Buddy was about to hook up with Petty. “Whatever you do, don’t go to Clovis,” Hi Pockets pleaded. “Norman Petty has a bad reputation for taking advantage of kids.”

Now that Buddy was in the big time, he dismissed Hi Pockets’s counsel and went ahead to Clovis. Petty, a handsome man, somewhat resembling Jack Paar, the TV talk-show host, was immaculately clean, sometimes showering twenty times a day. He was devoted to his dog, Speedy, a Mexican Chihuahua. “We feel our studio has its own sound,” Petty once said. Acoustical engineers had helped him “tune” the walls with built-in rounded baffles. “We have perhaps the only live echo chamber in the entire Southwest,” he added.

Sounds from the studio were piped through a speaker system into an echo chamber located next door in a gas station. Once inside the chamber, sounds were picked up by another microphone and relayed back to the tape machine in the studio. When Petty sat at his control board, spinning knobs, he looked like a wizard. He was also a bravura, pyrotechnical organist who’d scored a minor hit record, “Mood Indigo,” recorded with the Norman Petty Trio, an instrumental group that included his wife Violet Ann (“Vi”), who was a pianist, and guitarist Jack Vaughn. Nor Va Jak, Petty’s independent record label and music-publishing firm, was named after Norman, Violet Ann, and Jack.

The Pettys’ relationship was more business than pleasure; though few knew it at the time, Petty was gay, Vi bisexual. Their assistant, Norma Jean Berry, was a lesbian. All three, of course, were secretive about their sexual orientations. When the Pettys were outed in the
London Daily Mail
in 1994, Sonny Curtis, who knew everyone at the Clovis studio, remained skeptical. “If Norman was gay, he never put a shot on me,” Sonny said in a 1995 interview. “Even if he was gay, what the heck?” However, Niki Sullivan, another key player, confirms the report.

Buddy recorded seven demos in Clovis, using Sonny, Don, and Jerry as sidemen. It was immediately apparent that the Clovis cuts possessed a fluid, full-bodied sound that no one at Bradley’s Barn had been able to catch. “Changin’ All Those Changes” and “Rock-A-Bye Rock” are early Holly gems. The plaintive “Because I Love You,” the song Buddy had just written, suggests the emotional pain he was going through as Echo drifted away from him in 1956. In the lyric, the singer expresses his fear that his girlfriend has found someone else and states he would rather die than go through the rest of his life without her.

Around this time, Buddy sent some important business Norman Petty’s way when he met a talented young athlete and songwriter at West Texas State College in Canyon, Texas, fifteen miles south of Amarillo, where Buddy and Roy Orbison were playing a student dance. During a break Buddy Wayne Knox, the jock-songwriter, who was twenty-three at the time and majoring in accounting and psychology, came up to Holly and Orbison, told them he’d written a song called “Party Doll,” and asked how he could go about recording it. Knox said he’d written it “behind a haystack” on the farm outside Happy, Texas, where he grew up. Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison suggested that Buddy Knox go over to Clovis and record “Party Doll” at Petty’s studio.

Knox heeded their advice, recorded “Party Doll” in Clovis—and beat both Holly and Orbison to the charts, becoming the first singer-songwriter of the rock era to score a No. 1 hit record. Knox’s coup at this juncture must have added to the mounting frustration of Buddy Holly, who couldn’t get anyone to play his record on the radio, let alone hit the charts. Finally, near despair, Holly stalked into radio station KLLL and asked DJ Bill Pickering, “Could I get you to play my record?”

“Well, let’s see. Let me play this other one, then we’ll put yours on the turntable and audition it and see how it sounds,” Pickering replied. He allowed Buddy to introduce “Blue Days, Black Nights.” Later, when asked if this was the first time the record had been been played anywhere, Pickering replied, “Yes, Buddy told me it was the first time.” Unfortunately the record stirred no response from the listeners. As a Decca recording artist Buddy had expected to be rich by now, but instead he was destitute.