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Buddy Holly's Still-Living Legacy Article

FEBRUARY 3, 2009

By BARRY MAZOR

Wall Street Journal

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123363016857342371.html

Rock 'n' roll is so linked to the unconstrained energy of youth that it's hard to grasp that anything associated with it could be a half-century behind us. But Feb. 3, 2009, marks the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that took the lives of Richie Valens, the Big Bopper (aka J.P. Richardson) and Buddy Holly -- the event tagged in Don McLean's 1971 hit "American Pie" as "The Day the Music Died."


Buddy Holly [by Corbis]

The core songs and sounds of those three young, ill-fated stars have never gone far from public consciousness, but in the case of Buddy Holly, the pop genius killed that day at the age of 22, important parts of his recorded legacy have long been out of circulation, or only been officially released in doctored, distancing "improved" form. That gap has been sweetly filled by two new just-released CD sets from Decca/Universal Music.

The three-disc "Memorial Collection" gathers virtually all of the significant sides from his lifetime, hit singles ("Peggy Sue," "That'll Be the Day," "Rave On," "It Doesn't Matter Any More") and album sides as well. The two-CD "Down the Line: The Rarities" lets loose key Holly sessions and demos, freshly digitized and free of interfering overdubs -- Holly's early, increasingly R&B-influenced country duets with Bob Montgomery; the "garage tape" in which Buddy and a fledgling version of his band the Crickets rip into mid-1950s rock 'n' roll standards; and the celebrated "apartment tape" demos recorded at home in New York just before his death, including the originals of such gems as "Learning the Game" and "Crying, Waiting, Hoping."

"When I heard the 'Rarities' CD, it was pretty tough for me," admitted Maria Elena Holly, Buddy's "widowed bride," as the McLean song called her, in a phone interview. "It's so vivid. There's Buddy's voice, and he's talking and laughing, and there's the part where we're talking in the apartment. . . . It really took a while for me to get hold of myself; I was in tears, to be honest with you. But I'm glad that this is happening, because every time I've spoken with fans over the years they were always asking, 'Is it coming out? When is it coming out?' And it's so well done."

Of the hard-rocking garage tape, featuring the likes of "Blue Suede Shoes" and "Rip It Up" and startlingly crisp instrumental workouts, the musician who knew Buddy Holly best -- his Lubbock, Texas, schoolmate, explosive, influential Crickets drummer and co-songwriter Jerry "J.I." Allison -- said in a separate phone interview: "That still sounds really fine, because we were having so much fun when we were doing it. I wish we would have had better recording equipment, but I guess we were lucky that it got recorded at all! We were making money playing local dances -- the youth center, a local skating rink, and this and that -- and with most of that stuff, we were just practicing, learning new songs before a four-hour dance. . . .

"I'm so fortunate to have known Buddy; he and I started playing together when we were really young and were there when Chuck Berry and those people started making those great records. I guess we almost knew every rock 'n' roll song that was out then, even before it was called rock 'n' roll -- Fats Domino and Little Richard and, of course, Elvis stuff, once Elvis came through town."

The unique contribution of Buddy Holly and the Crickets to rock was in being the first truly self-contained, sustainable unit to write songs, record them, and play them out on the road with guitars, bass and drums. Did the Crickets have any model in mind for this groundbreaking set-up? Where did the idea come from?

"We didn't have a lot of choice, actually," Mr. Allison recalls, "because around Lubbock, if we wanted a song, there wasn't anybody else in town to do it, so we kind of had to write it. The Rhythm Orchids -- Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen and Donnie [Lanier] -- were having hit records on 'Party Doll' and 'I'm Sticking With You'; they were really three guys that we ended up being really good friends with that had something of the same idea. They wrote their own songs, but they hadn't worked as a group playing dances and stuff like we did, so that total was a bit unique."

Buddy Holly's music progressed astonishingly rapidly in the short 1954-59 period that marked his entire career -- from covers of three-chord hits to increasingly sophisticated, memorable songwriting, from garage rock to string sessions orchestrated by himself -- even as he evolved from a motorcycle-riding, Fender Stratocaster-wielding Lubbock schoolboy into a married, Greenwich Village-based producer and publisher in the same short time. The books, stage and film depictions of him seem to struggle and stretch to combine two clashing images -- the brash Texas country-boy rocker and the contemplative, almost intellectual sort of New Yorker, mature beyond his years, once he relocated to that city in the summer of 1958.


Getty Images
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the plane crash that took the life of Buddy Holly among other rock 'n' roll pioneers.
So which image is more to the point? The answer depends, still, on who's describing Buddy -- Ms. Holly, who's now in her mid-70s and lives in the Dallas area, or Mr. Allison, who turns 70 this summer and lives near Nashville.

"I've read people talk about his altar-boy image or his being a nerd and a real quiet guy," says Mr. Allison. "But Buddy was a really outgoing guy and talented -- a good tile-setter when we used to do that to make money, good at woodworking; it wasn't like he was a guy who'd just sit in the house and play guitar all the time."

Maria Elena Holly paints a different picture, of Buddy the mature, hipster Villager. "We both were night people. We used to roll up our pajamas, put on raincoats, and walk to the coffeehouses to hear guitar players, and in the morning we'd walk to Washington Square Park. Buddy would bring his guitar and just sit there, and all these other young musicians -- a lot of folksingers -- used to come and talk with him and ask 'How do you do that?' because the way he played the guitar was different, with a down stroke. It was like an educational session there every day.

"I used to say to him, 'You're my old-soul man.' He was 22 going on 50, and very serious about his music. I use to say, 'Why are you so particular, so precise and picky?' And he said: 'Why? Because I write music for people to enjoy, and to make sure they're happy -- and I want my music to last forever.'"

Mr. Mazor writes about country and pop music for the Journal.