Buddy Holly: Biography (9 page)

Appealing to Hi Pockets, who’d left KDAV and opened the Clover Club in Amarillo, 123 miles north of Lubbock, he asked, “Can you do anything for us?”

“Yeah. I’ll put you into the Clover Club on Friday night for a teenage dance and we’ll close the bar as far as beer is concerned,” Hi Pockets said.

That night over a thousand kids poured into the Clover Club, ready to rock. When Buddy’s band struck up “Midnight Shift,” everyone hit the dance floor,
including
the parents who were chaperoning their children. Hi Pockets ordered all grown-ups from the floor, knowing from experience that if cops suddenly appeared and saw adults dancing, they’d automatically assume that liquor was being served and bust the place. It was a dry county, but liquor was readily available from bootleggers, who worked in cahoots with the musicians.

Back in Lubbock, Buddy started playing the Bamboo Club. “He was packin’ out that little old Bamboo Club and all the youngsters, they liked him,” says Larry Holley. “He could go into a little old dive that had been just as dead and not having any crowds, and play there a few nights and they’d just be packed.” On May 10 Buddy and the Two-Tones—Sonny Curtis and Don Guess—opened for Faron Young at the Bronco Stadium in Odessa, Texas, a one-horse town deep in the stark Permian Basin, 120 miles southwest of Lubbock, and then toured for a few weeks with Sonny James, Faron Young, and Wanda Jackson. Returning to Lubbock, Buddy went to the movies one night with Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison and got the title for the song that would change his life.
The Searchers,
a John Ford western, ran in Lubbock from May 31 to June 20, 1956. At one of the showings, Buddy, Sonny, and Jerry sat in the refrigerated darkness of the State Theater on Texas Avenue and watched the story of Ethan Edwards unfold. Played by John Wayne at his cantankerous best, Ethan returns to Texas after the Civil War to discover that a tribe of Comanche Indians has massacred his brother and sister-in-law and kidnapped their daughter, played by Natalie Wood. In the course of his long search for the lost girl, Ethan often expresses his exasperation with the human race by grumbling, “That’ll be the day.”

The phrase stuck in Buddy’s mind, perhaps reflecting his aggravation over his hapless romantic and professional fortunes. A few days later he was working up a new tune at Jerry’s house when he suddenly turned to Jerry and suggested that they compose a song together.

“That’ll be the day,” Jerry said, echoing John Wayne’s skepticism. Buddy thought he was suggesting a song topic and said, “Yeah. That sounds like a good idea.” The pessimism and doubt inherent in the phrase mirrored the overall frustration Buddy was feeling that summer. Echo was headed for Nebraska and college in the fall, transferring from Abilene Christian. Both physically and emotionally, she was getting farther and farther away from him and there was nothing he could do about it. If driving 165 miles to see her in Abilene had been a drag, journeying 700 miles to Nebraska would be a nightmare. Their relationship made less sense every day, but, to paraphrase the lyrics, they couldn’t stop loving each other. That a major recording company had released one of Buddy’s records made it clear to Echo that he was launched on a musical career and would never give it up for her. Echo’s religious convictions would never permit her to accept such a life.

Buddy poured his bitterness, tinged with acid wit, into this song that would be legendary, “That’ll Be the Day.” For a pop tune, a genre notorious for its tendency to support the soppiest romantic delusions of mankind, it was unusually tough-minded and realistic about the vicissitudes of love. While Jerry remembers he “didn’t have any idea it was ever going to be called a classic,” Buddy did see it as a possible ticket to fame and recorded it at his next Decca session, which was held at Bradley’s Barn in Nashville on July 22, 1956, with Sonny, Don, and Jerry accompanying him.

The session didn’t go any better than the first one. Owen Bradley, their producer, had his heart set on going waterskiing and was eager to leave the studio. When they showed up for the session without a bass—the one they’d been renting from Lubbock High was no longer available due to summer vacation—Bradley gave them “a big hassle,” Sonny Curtis later told John Goldrosen. Bradley ordered them to come up with a bass in twenty minutes or the session would be canceled. They rushed to radio station WSM and borrowed a bull fiddle from Lightning Chance, a well-known session man.

At 10:30
P.M.
they finally began recording. They made a complete mess of “That’ll Be the Day,” partly, Jerry later told Griggs, because “it was a real serious record deal” and they were trying “real hard,” and partly because their Decca mentors, intent on getting a country song, urged Buddy “to sing so high, which was out of Buddy’s range at that time,” Jerry added. This mopey early version of the song can be heard on a British LP that was released many years later,
Buddy Holly: The Nashville Sessions.
Despite the mauling of “That’ll Be the Day,” the session was not a total wash. “Rock Around With Ollie Vee,” written by Sonny Curtis, and “Girl on My Mind,” by Don Guess, are full of innovative guitar licks, classic ones that would help define and solidify the new rock ’n’ roll genre. Buddy’s vocals on both cuts introduce many of his trademark sounds, including glottal twitches and fractured syllables.

Though it should have been clear to everyone present that Buddy was a startlingly original new singer-songwriter, Owen Bradley called “That’ll Be the Day” “the worst song I’ve ever heard.” Paul Cohen said Buddy was “the biggest no-talent I’ve ever worked with.” Other than Buddy, the only person in Bradley’s Barn who pegged the song a hit was the janitor, who said, “Man, I like ‘That’ll Be the Day.’” Decca couldn’t seem to get anything right—the executives suggested that the band change its name from the Two-Tones to the Two Tunes, but since there were three of them—Sonny, Don, and Jerry—they made it Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes.

Decca had no intention of releasing “That’ll Be the Day” or any of the other new cuts and refrained from doing so, at least for the present. Expecting his option to be dropped, Buddy was surprised when he was told to return for a third session in November. Before leaving Nashville, he and his buddies had some fun in the dives on lower Broadway, in the tenderloin district, which were full of hungry housewives dreaming of becoming C&W singing stars. “I don’t remember the chicks, but I remember chasin’ ’em,” Jerry commented in 1993.

Back in Lubbock, Buddy’s friends got the impression that he was no longer seeing Echo. He started dating other girls, including one named Sue Poff, and hanging out with the carhops at the Hi-D-Ho Drive-in. Jan Fulton, one of the carhops, found Buddy to be quiet when he was around girls, except when he was playing his guitar or beating on the dashboard of his car as he tooled around Lubbock. At the Hi-D-Ho, according to Jan Fulton, Buddy “played on the roof, outside, inside, everywhere.”

When Little Richard played the Cotton Club on August 24, 1956, Buddy was in the audience. Little Richard, twenty-four, was riding high on the success of “Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’.” During his performance the previous evening in Amarillo, officials complained that Richard’s performance was not “altogether what we thought it would be.” When Richard refused to “change his act somewhat,” Bill Griggs later stated in
Reminiscing
magazine, Richard was booked on a vagrancy charge, although he was carrying $2,669. The real issue was Richard’s uninhibited music, which, in critic Greil Marcus’s memorable description, “disrupted an era, broke rules, created a form, gave shape to a vitality that wailed silently in each of us until he found a voice for it.”

The next night in Lubbock, Buddy attended Richard’s show at the Cotton Club with Jerry Allison. During the performance they stood directly in front of Richard, yelling “
Hey, all right
!” as Richard sang hits like “Tutti-Frutti.” The audience was an uneasy mixture of five hundred whites and Latin Americans, many of them dancing the dirty bop. R. L. Lowe, manager of the Cotton Club, “stopped the blaring beat of the Negro pianist’s band,” according to a newspaper account headlined
ROCK-’N’-ROLL DANCE IS SHUT DOWN AFTER DISTURBANCE HERE
in the following day’s Lubbock
Avalanche-Journal,
when the dancers overflowed into the concession area and the restrooms and violent fights broke out in the parking lot.

According to Little Richard, Buddy brought him home for dinner with the family. “They got to be good buddies,” says Jerry. When Buddy tried to bring Little Richard into the Holley home, L. O. Holley “wouldn’t let me in,” says Little Richard, who was not only black but a self-described “glaring homosexual.” In Texas in the fifties, gays were completely in the closet; there were no gay bars, there was no gay culture, and the word
gay
itself was not yet in use as a description of homosexuality. It was indeed “the love that dare not speak its name,” and when it was spoken, usually by punks spoiling for a fight, the word used was
queer.
Shunned by straight society if they dared betray any sign of “deviance,” threatened with prison if they were caught making love, and damned by the church as sinners, gays led lives of desperate secrecy. On rare occasions, homosexuality would burst forth in the public prints, such as the inevitable scandals that erupted when prominent figures, supposedly heterosexual, were murdered by hustlers.

Blacks, like gays, were expected to remain invisible if they wanted to survive in Texas in the fifties. Blacks were restricted to their own sections of town and forced to ride in the back of the bus when they ventured into the white world; they were not permitted in white theaters, churches, or restaurants. And when they shared the same department stores and train stations with whites, they used separate drinking fountains and restrooms. Whites were never seen in the company of blacks in public; it was unthinkable. The attitude of people who called themselves “good Christians” was that blacks should be treated with the same courtesy and humanity afforded to whites
as long as
blacks knew their place and stayed in it. In breaking through these barriers, Little Richard was displaying incredible bravery, and Buddy appreciated his valor.

“If you don’t let Richard in,” said Buddy, “I’ll never come back to this house again.”

L. O. Holley finally relented, but Little Richard balked on the doorstep. As Little Richard would later tell Phil Donahue, “I didn’t want to go in there, because I felt that if it was happening like that on the outside, I better not go
inside.
” In
The Life and Times of Little Richard: The Quasar of Rock,
written by Charles White but copyrighted by Richard Wayne Penniman (Little Richard’s full name), White, and Robert A. Blackwell, Little Richard stated that the Holleys “weren’t too happy. I’ll bet they washed them dishes I ate off of about twenty times after we’d gone.”

In my 1992 interview with Larry Holley, I ask, “What about Little Richard saying that when Buddy brought him home, your folks wouldn’t let him in?” Larry understandably leaped to his parents’ defense and denied it. “That’s another fictitious lie,” he said. “Mother would never not let Little Richard in.”

“And he came there and had dinner?”

“I’m sure he did if he came over there.”

Meeting Little Richard was a rich and resonant experience for Buddy. Richard opened Buddy to a new sense of sexual curiosity and adventurousness. “We had some great times together,” said Richard during an autographing session for
The Quasar of Rock
in 1984. “He was the greatest.” Richard was mainly drawn to heterosexual males, he revealed in
Quasar.
At the time he was what is known in the gay world as a “size queen.” Nothing turned him on like “a big penis,” Richard said in
Quasar.
He was adept at setting up orgies, usually involving his band men. Though he unequivocally stated in
Quasar
that “Buddy Holly was a wild boy for the women,” Richard routinely seduced such straight men, using voluptuous girls as bait. He’d see “some big guy” and invite him to his room while the girl said, “Yeah, c’mon. I’d like to see what you got there.” Should the man’s equipment satisfy Richard’s requirements, he’d then produce a wad of money, he stated in
Quasar,
and bribe the man to fornicate with the girl. He would eventually invite Buddy Holly into such a situation, somewhat later on, when they played New York together.

The special affinity between Buddy and Little Richard was fired not really by sex but by a deeper passion—a kind of masochistic religious agony. Both were doomsday Christians, damned by their church’s curse on rock ’n’ roll and perhaps secretly savoring the conflict. “We always had that feeling that rock ’n’ roll wasn’t really worthy and had no socially redeeming value,” Jerry Allison said in 1989. Little Richard believed that “if you want to live with the Lord, you can’t rock ’n’ roll it, too. God don’t like it.” Born into a devout Seventh-Day Adventist family in Macon, Georgia, Richard was disowned when his father (who sold sourmash whiskey on the side) discovered that Richard was gay.

In associating with the black, gay, and altogether outrageous Little Richard, Buddy made his most defiant statement yet against the vicious, narrow-minded dogmas of his church. Even today the religion from which Buddy sprang would be appalled. “The homosexual should be punished by civil government … along with murder and kidnapping,” writes E. L. Bynum, the current pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church. “Homosexuality has been instrumental in destroying a number of civilizations.”

Little Richard represented another step in Buddy’s liberation from the racism and narrow-mindedness of Texas. As their friendship demonstrates, rock ’n’ roll was one of the forces breaking down race barriers and pointing to a new identity that would encompass both black and white. Many of the young people who listened to, sang, and danced to this hybrid black music in the fifties would go to the barricades for integration in the freedom marches, sit-ins, and street fights of the sixties. A primary reason the new music was so hated and feared by the white establishment was that it was bringing about the racial mixing that white supremacists had feared for centuries. A white backlash against rock ’n’ roll began in 1956, but was powerless to stop either rock or the social changes it helped to instigate. Before the decade was out, integration would be enforced by law.