Buddy Holly: Biography (20 page)

Nevertheless GAC would come in for severe criticism in the following decades for its treatment of rock ’n’ roll performers. “The executives of the company didn’t like rock music,” Frank Barcelona, a former GAC agent, revealed in Robert Stephen Spitz’s
The Making of Superstars: Artists and Executives of the Rock Music Business.
“The way the agency treated rock performers was a crime.… They didn’t like rock performers, knew nothing about the music, couldn’t relate to the audiences … it was too unimportant for them to be bothered with.”

GAC assembled the original rock package tours and turned them over to promoters such as Dick Clark, who called his package the Dick Clark Caravan of Stars. “If you had seven hundred fifty or eight hundred dollars, and you decided you wanted to be in show business, you could become a promoter,” Barcelona explained. “You’d call the agency.… We’d try to sell you an act for as much as we could possibly con out of you, you’d try to put on a dance or a hop at the local high school, and that was it.… Clark paid as little as he possibly could.… He treated his acts like a meat market.…
All
the acts went on the bus. But it was a joke. No one made money.”

Despite harsh conditions, the tours were a powerful force in the spread of rock ’n’ roll. As the tours approached each city, DJs played the artists’ records repeatedly. “It was almost a guarantee that if you were on the show, you were going to get your record played for at least the duration of the tour,” said Barcelona. “It was quite important to the performer and also to the record companies.” The package tours had far-reaching consequences. They presaged the rock tours of today. Even more significantly, they were a key link in the creation of the youth culture that would come to dominate postwar America.

On October 18, when they played Sacramento, Peggy Sue Gerron, now a student at Girl’s Catholic School in Sacramento, heard “Peggy Sue” for the first time. In my interview with Peggy Sue in 1994, she recalls how the nuns at the school had forbidden her to listen to rock ’n’ roll. When Buddy saw her in Sacramento he laughed and said, “Here comes ‘Song.’” Peggy Sue and Jerry had broken up, but they were to reconcile in Sacramento. “Buddy played Cupid,” says Peggy Sue, explaining that it was Buddy who’d allowed Jerry to change “Cindy Lou” to “Peggy Sue.” In Sacramento Buddy asked her if she was keeping up her interest in music. “Yes, I’m twirling in California,” she replied. “How are you, Buddy?”

“I love writing and hate touring,” he said.

With the Crickets still on the road, Petty mixed their album,
The Chirping Crickets,
in Clovis, using the Picks to provide background vocals. Buddy admired the Picks and welcomed their participation. The Picks made a significant contribution to many of the cuts, particularly “Oh Boy,” lending their unique mixture of C&W and do-wop. “Oh Boy” was released as a Crickets single in October, with “Not Fade Away” on the flip side. Twenty years later, rock critic Dave Marsh called both sides “classics,” but on release they were ignored in the United States. It was a different story overseas, where “Oh Boy” hit the charts in the United Kingdom.

Rock ’n’ roll’s port of entry to Europe was Liverpool, England, which was closer to America than any other city in Britain. Buddy’s recordings started showing up there in 1957, carried to Liverpool by sailors—known as “Cunard Yanks”—who worked on the shipping lines and often shopped for records and souvenirs when they docked in New York. Back home, as the records circulated, “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Oh Boy” became familiar to Liverpudlians, including future Beatle John Lennon, who’d just enrolled in Liverpool College of Art that fall. Rock ’n’ roll was banned on the BBC, but John and millions of other young Britons listened to it every night at eight
P.M.
on Radio Luxembourg, a privately owned radio station on the Continent that was powerful enough to reach Central Europe and England. Buddy’s popularity spread throughout England in late 1957, as Coral officially released his records overseas. In September, “That’ll Be the Day” showed up on the
New Musical Express
charts and threatened to knock Paul Anka from the No. 1 spot, where “Diana” had racked up a triumphant run of nine consecutive weeks. Soon, both “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy” were rising on the charts in England and Australia.

In frigid Vancouver, British Columbia, on October 23, 1957, during a backstage interview in the Georgia Auditorium with Canadian DJ Red Robinson, Buddy revealed that he wanted to go home, where, he diplomatically observed, the temperature wasn’t so “cool” and the skies were considerably “drier.” Still unaware that he was setting the Thames on fire, he was pessimistic when asked to predict the future of rock ’n’ roll. He gave it about half a year, doubting it would survive Christmas 1957. Enervated from singing his guts out in nightly rock shows, he longed for a radical change in musical trends, confessing that he’d rather sing songs that didn’t require him to scream and shout. Critical of “That’ll Be the Day,” he felt he’d made substantial progress with “Oh Boy.”

By the time the tour reached Denver on November 1, “Peggy Sue” was bounding up the
Billboard
chart. In an interview in Cochran’s room in the Albany Hotel, a local radio personality asked Buddy if he was going to make a movie. Suddenly turning to Cochran, who was lounging nearby, Buddy gave his friend a plug, revealing that Cochran had already broken into the movies. Jokingly, Buddy added that he was going to butter him up and see if he could get the Crickets a Hollywood contract. Cochran’s film was
Go, Johnny, Go!
a low-budget Hal Roach programmer featuring Alan Freed and Jimmy Clanton, with musical interludes by Chuck Berry, Ritchie Valens, Jackie Wilson, and Cochran. Like all the other rock ’n’ roll exploitation films, including Jayne Mansfield’s
The Girl Can’t Help It,
this was just another dumb jukebox movie. Even the glimpses it affords of rarely filmed legends such as Cochran and Valens are ruined by clumsy intrusions of the inane plot.

Cochran evidently tried to get the Crickets in
Go, Johnny, Go!
During the shooting, Freed’s manager Jack Hook called Petty and offered the Crickets a cameo—for no pay. The publicity they’d derive from appearing in a Hollywood film should be pay enough, said the filmmakers. Jerry didn’t agree, according to Petty, who later claimed that Jerry said the movie people could go to hell if they weren’t paying. Not true, said Jerry, who laid the blame on Petty and added that the Crickets were dying to see themselves in a movie; Petty’s bungling of the deal helped turn them against him, Jerry said.

When the Feld tour played Omaha, Nebraska, on November 4, Buddy found himself not far from Echo’s college but made no effort to contact her. In late 1957 she’d begun dating a classmate. She was over Buddy. If he was heartbroken, there was little sign of it in his interview the next day, November 5, on radio station KTOP in Topeka, Kansas, during which he gleefully ticked off his recent triumphs on the U.S. record charts.

His accomplishments abroad were just as impressive. On November 2, “That’ll Be the Day” seized the No. 1 position on the British charts. It remained the best-selling single in England for three consecutive weeks, selling 431,000 copies. “Peggy Sue” and “Oh Boy” were almost as successful, going to No. 6 and No. 3, respectively. All three records were No. 2 hits in Australia. The British rock scene that Buddy now dominated had just begun to coalesce the previous year. “Skiffle”—an easy, do-it-yourself music using kitchen washboards, kazoos, tin cans, and bass fiddles made out of wire and a broomstick—had coincided with the Elvis Presley phenomenon to touch off the first “youthquake” in British history. Before rock, the word
teenager
hadn’t even existed in England. In September 1957 a major concert was held at London’s Royal Albert Hall, featuring both rock ’n’ roll and skiffle. Lonnie Donegan, whose skiffle hits included “Rock Island Line” and “Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor (On the Bedpost Over Night),” was on the Royal Albert bill, along with Terry Dene and Nancy Whiskey.

John Lennon’s band, the Quarry Men, which did not yet include McCartney, Harrison, or Ringo Starr, was just beginning to play in Liverpool, at places like the St. Peter’s Parish Church Youth Club in Woolton and an open-air party in Rosebery Street. Until they heard Buddy Holly, they were mostly performing Lonnie Donegan skiffle records, though for some time they’d been bored with skiffle and longed to play rock ’n’ roll, if only they could figure out how. “In late 1957,” wrote Beatles biographer Philip Norman, “American rock ’n’ roll gave struggling ex-skiffle groups in Britain their first friend. His name was Buddy Holly.… Among the new performers thrown up after Presley, Buddy Holly was unique in composing many of the songs he recorded, and also in showing ability on the guitar, rather than using it merely as a prop. He gave hope to British boys because he was not pretty, but thin and bespectacled, and because his songs, though varied and inventive, were written in elementary guitar chords, recognizable to every beginner.… John Lennon, though he had always tinkered with lyrics, had never thought of writing entire songs before. Egged on by Paul—and by Buddy Holly—he felt there could be no harm in trying. Soon he and Paul were each writing songs furiously, as if it were a race.”

In a few short months Buddy had gone from total obscurity to stardom in his own country and enormous influence abroad. His impact on the coming generation of rock stars in England would carry his distinctive sound well into the next decade, when the Beatles would usher in the golden age of rock.

Part Two

Stardom

Chapter Eight

Ed Sullivan

The ultimate accolade for a performer in the fifties was appearing on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
a weekly TV variety program with an audience of fifty million viewers. The Crickets were summoned to New York to make their prime-time network debut on the show on December 1, 1957. From its inception on CBS in 1948 as
Toast of the Town
—Sullivan changed the name in 1955—the show was more than a hit; it was an American institution. Every Sunday night at eight o’clock Sullivan seemed to turn the United States into one big family. An unlikely looking MC, he slouched onstage, moving like a sleepwalker and sounding strangely addle-brained and inarticulate. Even his closest associates sometimes called him the Toast of the Tomb. Nonetheless, the whole world seemed to light up with anticipation every time he announced, “Tonight we have a really big show.”

During the 1950s, Sullivan presented Elvis, Louis Armstrong, Red Skelton, Phyllis Diller, Totie Fields, Sophie Tucker, Connie Francis, Teresa Brewer, Fats Domino, Bill Haley and the Comets, Gene Vincent, and Frankie Lymon, not to mention the Italian mouse Topo Gigio, talking dogs, plate spinners, foot jugglers, boxing great Joe Louis, the Jujiwara Opera Company from Japan, Miss America, Fidel Castro, Judith Anderson as
Medea,
the Harlem Globetrotters, Mickey Mantle, Maria Callas as
Tosca,
and circus elephants. Just when you felt you’d seen everything, out would come the entire cast of a Broadway show, such as Julie Harris, Ethel Waters, and Brandon de Wilde in
Member of the Wedding.
Sullivan was able to cram so many performers into his one-hour format because he permitted no act to exceed the length of a commercial, convinced, rightly, that the public preferred fast-paced entertainment. As Mark Leddy once joked, Sullivan filmed the Crucifixion but only gave Christ three minutes.

At the time of the Crickets’ appearance in 1957, Sullivan was fifty-five years old. He had come up through journalism as a New York sportswriter and gossip columnist, later turning vaudeville MC and TV star. His dour demeanor won him the nickname the “Great Stone Face.” “Ed’s the only man who can brighten up a room by leaving it,” comic Joe E. Lewis observed. The Crickets would have agreed with Lewis wholeheartedly; though they got off to a good start in their relationship with Ed Sullivan, it soon soured. In fact, Buddy Holly hated Ed Sullivan and ended up feuding with him. So had many others, for Sullivan was not the genial fellow he appeared to be on the TV screen. Over the years, he clashed with Woody Allen, Sid Caesar, Nancy Walker, Joan Crawford, Marlene Dietrich, Walter Winchell, Bo Diddley, Jackie Mason, Dinah Shore, Nat “King” Cole, Fred Allen, Henny Youngman, Hedda Hopper, Soupy Sales, and Jack Paar. After Paar’s tiff with Sullivan, Paar quipped that NBC’s trademark was a peacock and CBS’s was now a cuckoo. Who else but Sullivan, he asked, could “bring to a simple English sentence such suspense and mystery and drama?” Paar was referring to the awkward way Sullivan sometimes introduced his acts, such as vocalist-guitarist Jose Feliciano, about whom Sullivan said: “Let’s hear it reeely big fer singer Jose Feliciano. He’s blind—and he’s Puerto Rican.”

Niki dismisses the Crickets’ Sullivan appearance as a total farce. Instead of getting a week’s break in the tour, which was what the band needed, they had to backtrack and fly to New York, where the Feld tour had begun. They were shocked to learn the pay was so paltry on the most popular TV show in the world that they were actually going to lose money on the deal. They received $1,600 but had to pay $1,800 to various unions, coming out $200 in the hole. Both the dress rehearsal—and the telecast the following day—were held at Studio 50 (later renamed for Sullivan and since 1993 the home of David Letterman’s
Late Show
) in Times Square. Thanks to deceptive camera angles, Ed Sullivan’s studio audience always looked vast on the TV screen, but the Crickets were astonished to discover that the theater was dumpy and rather small, seating about 250 people. The cramped performance area was jammed with circus acts, jugglers, acrobats, and singers; the dressing rooms were grim cells.