Buddy Holly - 49 years on

Today is the 49th anniversary of ‘The Day the Music Died’, the fateful day when Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens, along with their pilot, Roger Peterson, perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake Iowa.

Rest in peace guys.

My wife asked me if I was going to write anything new for the anniversary, and I said no, thinking I’d just rehash some of my old tributes. (here, and here, for instance). I’ve changed my mind for two reasons. One, the old stuff was kind of skimpy, and two, well, the mood struck me.

I first got into Buddy Holly because of Robocop. Back in ’87 Robocop was a double feature, playing first and followed by La Bamba. My friend Erv went with me to see Robocop, and I went because I wanted to see LaBamba.

I was immediately hooked on Ritchie Valens and grabbed every cassette of his I could find, including a copy of a concert he did at his high school. (you’d be surprised how much the man recorded in an 8 or 9 month career).

[Sidenote: The concert cassette had an address of a fan club - pre-zip code no less - and I wrote in. The President of the Club, at the time of my letter a woman in her fifties, kindly wrote back and said the club had been phased out nearly thirty years before.

I still have the letter somewhere around here.]

Anyways, the movie soundtrack had a great cover of Holly’s Crying, Waiting, Hoping and I hesitantly called Mean Mountain Music, a store specializing in ‘50’s LP’s and tapes, and asked if they had any Buddy Holly.

“Uh, yeah,” the guy said, sarcastically. I deserved it; hell, I deserved a ‘duh!’.

So I became hooked on Buddy and stayed hooked, long after my affection for Valens faded into childhood nostalgia.

Why do I love the guy?

Not to sound shallow, but first and foremost I like the songs themselves. They’ve held up great over the decades, much better than many of the ’50’s rock tunes, and they still get you moving.

[ It’s a shame most people only know of “Peggy Sue”, a song I find pretty dull by Holly standards. ]

I also love his inherent cockiness. Here’s this curly haired, scrawny Texas kid with huge glasses, in an era that idolized beauties like Elvis and Troy Donahue. Yet he goes out and records songs that just reek of smug self-assuredness.

In his cover of Chuck Berry’s Brown Eyed Handsome Man, a fun and aggressive song (and one of my favorite of Buddy’s) he sings:

Arrested on charges of unemployment,
he was sitting in the witness stand
The judge's wife called up the district attorney
Said you free that brown eyed man
You want your job you better free that brown eyed man

Or in one of his own tunes, That’ll be the Day, he rejects his girlfriends threats of breaking off their relationship and retorts: ‘if we ever part and I leave you’

I like the fact that a half century after he’s gone musicians still tip their hat to him and acknowledge his influence. In 1998 Bob Dylan won album of the year and said in his acceptance speech:

"And I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory [note: this was on the final and fateful tour} and I was three feet away from him...and he LOOKED at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way."

I love the fact that no two songs of his ever sounded the same; Nickelback he was not. ‘Peggy Sue’ is not ‘Not Fade Away’ and ‘Words of Love’ is about as far away from “Oh Boy!” as a single artist can get. And whenever possible he was innovative, both in the recording studio and as a composer and arranger. Check out the use of the celeste/xylophone solo in ‘Everyday’. Who does that???

Finally, I love his inspired guitar work, which seems far and above anyone of the era, with the exception of Berry himself, and I really like Buddy’s voice and trademark ‘hiccup’.

Anyone can play ‘what might have been’ and mourn a great and productive future that never came to pass; Lord knows no one ever has the guts to come out and say ’had so-and-so lived, they’d have ended up locked in a mental hospital like Britney Spears’.

But with Buddy I think it’s safe to assume that the crash ended what would have been a long and influential career. Perhaps not as an artist himself, because he was already deeply interested in the producer/publishing aspect of the business. But with his knack for finding new and exciting ways to push the boundaries of rock ’n roll, who knows what he could have culled from some never-to-be-heard artist.

Next year is the 50th anniversary of the crash, and for the past 21 years I’ve wanted to spend that day in Clear Lake, Iowa to commemorate the event. I told my wife today to start making plans for the date, and God willing we’ll be there.

I only wish we were celebrating 50 years of new Buddy Holly recordings instead. 

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