Buddy Holly: Biography (18 page)

During the Crickets’ stay at the Edison, Buddy Knox’s room was trashed. Knox was taking a shower when he heard a commotion in his bedroom and ran out, naked, to see what was going on. The Crickets, Petty, and Ray Ruff had come by to invite Knox to go to the movies. Knox decided to join them. Hastily pulling on his clothes, he forgot to turn off the shower. When they returned from the movies they saw fire-trucks in front of the hotel, which they soon learned had been flooded. Knox’s room was totaled, and the whole floor had been turned into a swamp.

A favorite pastime of Holly’s that autumn was visiting Manny’s Music Store in Manhattan. He spent hours inspecting the guitars and discussing their relative merits with clerk Henry Goldrich. Holly first came in with Buddy Knox in 1957, Goldrich recalls. Holly lifted a Les Paul guitar with some difficulty and said it was far too weighty; so was the Stratocaster, for that matter, but Buddy said it was his own fault, laying the blame on his lean build. Over the following year, Holly became one of Goldrich’s best customers, purchasing a Gibson J-200 acoustic, two white Stratocasters, a Guild F-50 Navarre acoustic, a Magnatone Custom 280 amp, and a Gibson Stereo GA series amp.

The “Show of Stars” tour party set out for Pittsburgh on September 6, rolling across the George Washington Bridge at three
A.M.
in a pair of Greyhound buses. The towers of the 3,500-foot-long suspension bridge, which has linked the island of Manhattan to the U.S. mainland since 1931, looked like a magnificent doorway to America, arching high above them as they passed over the mighty Hudson River. Filled with a sense of adventurous possibility, they were going into the country, many of them for the first time. They would discover their newfound stardom while exploring their homeland “from sea to shining sea,” from the mountains of Pennsylvania to Los Angeles on the roaring Pacific Coast.

According to evidence recently discovered by Bill Griggs, including hotel receipts and a contract, Buddy and the Crickets remained behind in New York for three days, camping out at the Brooklyn Paramount. They missed the tour’s first engagements, scheduled for Pittsburgh and Norfolk, and later caught up with the tour buses, which were packed with all-star passengers including the Everly Brothers, LaVern Baker, Paul Anka, Frankie Lymon, Clyde McPhatter, Jimmy Bowen, the Drifters, and the Bobettes. Guitars, drums, and amps were jammed in among the performers, many of whom brought aboard sacks of fried chicken and then left the picked bones under their seats. The buses rumbled across the American continent, crossing the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, passing battlefields commemorating the Civil War that had torn the country apart less than a century previously. A long night’s run of almost 400 miles on September 9–10 took them northwest into Ohio’s Appalachian Plateau for a show at the Akron Armory on the tenth, then across the fertile Ohio plains for appearances at the Cincinnati Gardens on the eleventh and the Veteran’s Memorial Auditorium in Columbus on the twelfth. Backtracking to Hershey, Pennsylvania, home of the famous chocolate candy bar, they played the Sports Arena on the thirteenth before heading north into Canada.

Before one of their shows, Jimmy Bowen, who’d hit the charts with “I’m Stickin’ With You,” stood backstage watching Buddy and the Crickets just before their set. Buddy seemed remarkably composed, far less nervous than the others on the tour. “For someone that age, he had his shit together,” Bowen told Griggs in 1980. The Crickets went on and roared through “Blueberry Hill,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” and “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man.” Though their set was brief, approximately ten minutes, they remained onstage throughout most of the show, accompanying the other acts. Buddy was delighted when it became clear that the Crickets were the audience’s favorite. Every time they got an encore, Buddy would say, “Wasn’t that fun?”

One-night stands meant traveling all night and arriving in the next town barely in time for the show. The stars caught what sleep they could sitting up in their seats or sprawled across the aisle, like LaVern Baker, who used her suitcases as a makeshift bed. Phil Everly said everyone loved LaVern, the great R&B singer whose hits included “Jim Dandy,” because she could always be counted on to patch up your jacket or sew your buttons on.

Buddy, who’d just turned twenty-one on September, 7, 1957, shot craps in the back of the bus with Chuck Berry. Bus driver Tommy Tompkins, who thought of Buddy as a clean-cut, well-mannered boy, watched a game one night and was shocked at Buddy’s expertise at throwing dice; no one, Tompkins later told interviewers Nick Rossi and George Block, was shrewder or more streetwise than Buddy. When not shooting craps, Chuck Berry passed the time by writing the lyrics to “You Can’t Catch Me,” later adding the melody during dressing-room jams or “in lonely afternoon hotel rooms with the guitar as a guide,” Berry related in his autobiography. After a sizable royalty check caught up with Berry at one of their stops, he bought a Cadillac. Joe B. had become friendly with Berry and hitched rides in the Cadillac, a luxurious first-class treat compared with the squalor of the bus. At thirty one, Berry was about ten years older than the others on the tour, and Joe B. often went to him for advice. Berry would stop whatever he was doing and invite Joe B. to relax and tell him his problems.

“It was a bus loaded with everybody in the Top 10,” Phil Everly later recalled. An amazing group, it contained the future of rock ’n’ roll. Frankie Lymon was the life of the party, getting everyone to sing and make up songs, partying all night during long bus rides. Unfortunately, he was bombing onstage. Though his adolescent soprano voice had charmed audiences on a previous “Show of Stars” tour, his voice was changing and audiences didn’t like it. His decision to drop his group the Teenagers after their hit “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” was a mistake; success eluded him when his label, Gee, tried to groom him as another Sammy Davis, Jr. Only fourteen years old, Lymon was shooting up heroin and sleeping with a leggy showgirl twice his age. He was busted during one of the tour’s Canadian stops in what Niki Sullivan describes as a carefully planned police raid. After staking out Lymon’s drug connection, the police broke into his hotel room, but he was released in time to continue with the tour. On the bus, Lymon’s racy language offended Tommy Tompkins, who said that Lymon showed no respect for the younger members of the tour, such as the Bobettes, a girl group whose hit record, “Mr. Lee,” was named after their principal at P.S. 109 in New York. Lymon was ordered off Tompkins’s bus, but Carl Vesterdahl, the driver of the other Greyhound, came to his rescue.

Popular music had never had to deal with such situations before; rock ’n’ roll saw the emergence of very young performers, some not yet fifteen, which represented a complete break from the past, when singers like Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, and the Andrews Sisters were thought of as very mature—and were. Paul Anka had just turned sixteen and had the No. 1 hit, “Diana,” which he’d written about his siblings’ baby-sitter. Described as “a billion volts of energy” by Niki, Anka was goofing backstage during Buddy’s performance when he kicked a plug out of a socket, killing the sound. Striding offstage, Buddy cursed so loud that the packed auditorium overheard him. Nevertheless, Buddy respected Anka’s songwriting gifts; the two entered into an agreement to write songs for each other. In Anka’s native Canada, where they played the Montreal Forum on September 15, thirty thousand teenagers jammed the two sold-out performances, and police had to turn away hundreds of ticket seekers.

“Peggy Sue”/”Everyday,” Buddy’s first Coral solo record, released while they were in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on September 20, was hailed by
Billboard
as a rockabilly record that could “cop plenty of pop and C&W coin.” “Everyday” was a cross-over tune “with a folkish flavor,” the reviewer added.
Cash Box
saluted Buddy as “a newcomer who’s broken into the star category.” He had indeed. On September 23, “That’ll Be the Day” hit No. 1 on the
Billboard
chart. Niki later couldn’t remember exactly where or when they heard the news, except that it was on the road in autumn of 1957. The Crickets rushed to a phone booth near the theater where they were playing and tried to cram themselves inside. They called Clovis and talked to Petty, who got Decca executives from New York and Los Angeles on a tie line and asked them to confirm that the record had sold a million. It was true; their first record was a monster hit. Dashing back to the theater, they ran onstage and breathlessly shared their triumph with the audience, announcing their million-seller. The crowd burst into a thunderous ovation. The Crickets did four encores that night, the only group on the show that was called back so many times.

The tour entered the white-supremacist Deep South at about the same time Arkansas exploded in racial violence. At the beginning of September 1957, Governor Orval Faubus, rabid opponent of integration, had defied U.S. federal law and ordered state militia to Little Rock to stop black students from enrolling in Central High. President Eisenhower summoned Faubus to a meeting and ordered him to obey the U.S. Supreme Court’s integration ruling. On September 25, Ike sent in federal troops, who pointed their bayonets at fifteen hundred white agitators while escorting nine Negroes into Central High. Though the integrated rock ’n’ roll tour of which Buddy was a part did not play Arkansas, trouble awaited them as soon as they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line. In Louisiana and Georgia, the whites and blacks on the bill couldn’t drive in the same cars or buses and had to book separate hotels. In New Orleans, racist laws even prohibited them from performing on the same stage together. The Crickets, Paul Anka, the Everlys, and the other whites had to leave the show until it finished the southern portion of the tour.

While the blacks carried on, the Crickets enjoyed a three-day break. The tour had been especially difficult on Niki, who later said he didn’t care for the “lifestyle.” Basic routines such as trying to eat three meals a day and going to the Laundromat were all but impossible on a tour of one-night stands. It was an unhealthy and exhausting way to live. The hazing and horseplay that the Crickets reveled in were an anathema to Niki, who had grown up as an only child and a loner. Besides the petty arguments and fisticuffs among the Crickets, he disliked the way they took out their frustrations on him, he later disclosed in Goldrosen and Beecher’s
Remembering Buddy.
One day they went into a restaurant for dinner, and everyone ordered steaks except Niki, who loved waffles and often ate them at lunch or dinner. The Crickets picked on him throughout the meal for eating a breakfast food at dinner. To Joe B. it was all in fun, but it grated on Niki, who was also dissatisfied with his peripheral role in the band. As its rhythm guitarist, he wasn’t miked on some of their records, since Buddy’s virtuosic attack on the guitar provided both lead and rhythm. Niki started thinking about leaving and getting his own record deal. When he dropped hints about his intentions, no one in the band tried to dissuade him.

The tour regrouped and resumed regular performances in Tulsa on September 28. On the same date, the Norman Petty Trio was playing the Officers Club at Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City, 104 miles west of Tulsa. Since the Crickets needed some more tracks to fill out their first LP,
The Chirping Crickets,
which was to be released in December, Petty arranged for them to record in a corner of the main room of the Officers Club. The acoustics at Tinker AFB were fantastic, far superior to many of the studios they’d recorded in.

One of the Tinker cuts was “An Empty Cup and a Broken Date,” a desolate tune by Roy Orbison about a boy who’s been jilted in a drive-in. Though Orbison resented Buddy’s success and had been making snide remarks such as “‘Blue Days, Black Nights’ sounded just like Elvis,” he began to court Buddy once “That’ll Be the Day” hit the top of the charts. He hoped Buddy would record some of the songs he’d been writing. As a singer, Roy had become discouraged, partly due to a sour experience with Norman Petty. Roy recorded “Ooby Dooby” at Petty’s studio but had to sue in order to break free from an unfair contract in which Petty grabbed “half the writer’s share and all of the publishing,” Roy confided to Odessa attorney John R. Lee. After extricating himself from Clovis, Roy went to Memphis and rerecorded the song at Sun Records. This time “Ooby Dooby” was a hit, though Roy’s subsequent efforts at Sun proved unsatisfactory.

Moving to Nashville, Orbison concentrated on songwriting and pitched “Claudette” to the Everly Brothers. Luckily for Roy, they put it on the B-side of their No. 1 record “All I Have to Do Is Dream” and Roy collected $25,000 in royalties. It was around this time that Buddy recorded Roy’s “An Empty Cup” at Tinker AFB, along with another Orbison tune, “You’ve Got Love,” written in collaboration with Little Johnny Wilson, a member of Orbison’s band the Teen Kings. “You’ve Got Love” has a typically self-abnegating Orbison lyric about how worthless and incomplete he felt without a woman. Claudette Frady, the beautiful girl in “Claudette,” was dating Little Johnny Wilson, who, though only five-foot-two, was considered the sexiest of the West Texas rockabillies. Roy was infatuated with Claudette and eventually persuaded her to marry him. Although he wrote the immortal “Pretty Woman” for her, their relationship was a calamitous one, marked by infidelity, divorce, Claudette’s fatal motorcycle accident, and the deaths of two of their small children by fire.

“You’ve Got Love” would not be one of Buddy’s successful records, but in a later version recorded by Little Johnny Wilson, who added “Peanuts” to his name when he became a Brunswick recording artist, it became a rockabilly classic, along with the B-side, “Cast Iron Arms,” another Orbison-Wilson collaboration.

The pièce de résistance of Buddy’s Tinker AFB session was “Maybe Baby.” This was his second attempt to record the song, and at Tinker he got it right at last. Unlike the flat Clovis version, the Oklahoma City “Maybe Baby” soars with the same intensity and rhythmic abandon as “Oh Boy.”
Rolling Stone
places it among the all-time “rock classics.” Buddy’s mother deserves part of the credit for “Maybe Baby.” For some time Mrs. Holley had been trying to persuade Buddy to record one of her songs, but he always found them too sad and dreamy and advised her to write lyrics that were perkier and more fun. When she gave him a few lines of “Maybe Baby,” he smiled and told her she was on the right track. He finished the lyrics and wrote the music, using the drum beat from Little Richard’s “Lucille.” As a member of Tabernacle Baptist Church, Mrs. Holley preferred not to have her name on a rock ’n’ roll record and asked Buddy to keep her contribution a secret. Joe B. said he also participated in the composition of “Maybe Baby,” but he was elbowed aside by Petty, who, as usual, appropriated cowriting credit with Buddy.