Buddy Holly: Biography (30 page)

Buddy’s draft notice finally arrived from Selective Service’s General Hershey on May 28, 1958, ordering him to report for a physical examination. For once in his lifetime his fragile constitution proved to be an asset. Buddy escaped the draft due to a “stomach ulcer,” his mother later told fan Dave Skinner. Buddy’s poor vision was also a factor in his exemption.

It was an opportunity for a rare period of rest and relaxation, and he seized it, returning to Lubbock for a vacation, riding an English Ariel Cyclone 650cc motorcycle he bought as soon as he deplaned in Dallas. He’d wanted a Harley Davidson ever since he’d seen Marlon Brando play Johnny, the prototypical Hells Angel, in
The Wild One
in 1954. For a while he’d owned a Triumph, but when the Crickets landed at Love Field in Dallas on May 13, 1958, he made a beeline for the Harley showroom, his pockets filled with $5,000 in cash. Pointing to a shiny new model, he asked the owner to tell him the price. Jerry later told Goldrosen that the owner sized the Crickets up as feckless teenagers, laughed, and said they could never afford a Harley and he wasn’t going to waste his time talking to them. A typically insular Texan, out of touch with the world beyond the Lone Star State, he failed to recognize the international celebrities under his nose. According to Bill Griggs, whose article “Buddy’s Motorcycle” appeared in
Reminiscing
magazine in 1983, the owner asked Buddy Holly and the Crickets to leave his shop, blowing the easiest $3,000 cash sale he’d ever have made.

Determined to ride three motorcycles out of Dallas, regardless of model or make, they took a cab to Ray Miller’s Triumph Motorcycle Sales at 3600 West Davis, today known as the Big D Cycle Shop. Miller instantly recognized Buddy and the Crickets and welcomed them to test-ride any bikes they fancied. Buddy chose the Ariel and a black leather wardrobe to go with it. Joe B. bought a Triumph Thunderbird, and Jerry selected a Triumph Trophy. Buddy shelled out over $3,000, then they roared down the highway to Lubbock, 323 miles west of Dallas, barely missing the hail, tornadoes, and rainstorms pounding most of West Texas that day. In their matching motorcycle caps with silver eagle insignias, they looked like the biker gang from hell, especially Buddy, who was wearing black sunglasses.

In the following days the Crickets tooled around their neighborhoods on their bikes and hung out on the sidewalk in front of their parents’ homes. Jerry’s brother James Allison photographed them with his home-movie camera. In one shot, Buddy sits leaning on his handlebars, looking cool in shades and leather cap. In another scene, a bare-chested Jerry Allison mugs for the camera, looking like he could use some exercise and home cooking. As Jerry leaves for a spin on his Triumph, Buddy places an affectionate hand on Joe B.’s shoulder, both young men looking happy and relaxed. Joe B. later recalled in Douglas Brooker’s television documentary
Reminiscing
that Buddy was the “big brother” he’d always wanted, that he “really loved” Buddy’s companionship, and that their times together made his life “really enjoyable.” Buddy called Joe B. “Buyus,” later explaining the nickname to Alan Freed. According to Freed, Joe B. was always cadging sodas and candy, saying, “Buy us a Coke, buy us a candy bar.”

“Buy us somethin’,” Buddy added.

The summer of 1958, Buddy told Freed, gave the Crickets an opportunity, after the uninterrupted touring of the previous year, to enjoy the fruits of their labor for the first time. Buddy reunited with old friends such as Bob Montgomery, who was still playing gigs around Lubbock, singing C&W and going to Clovis to learn everything he could about the record business. Montgomery can be seen in the background, on someone’s front lawn, in James Allison’s home movie of Buddy and Jerry playfully reenacting the knife fight from
Rebel Without a Cause.
Jerry played Buzz Gunderson, the gang leader who’d been portrayed by Corey Allen in the movie. Buddy was Jim Stark, the archetypal fifties adolescent immortalized by the late James Dean, whose death in 1955 presaged Buddy’s own four years later. (Maria Elena, addressing the Buddy Holly Memorial Society in 1984, said that James Dean and Anthony Perkins were Buddy’s favorite movie stars.) As James Allison’s camera rolled, Jerry seems to be charging at Buddy, holding a small object that appears to be a pocketknife. Possibly remembering his disastrous clash with Joe B. in London, Buddy went to his motorcycle and revved up the engine. “It was an English Ariel,” Larry Holley said in a 1992 interview. “It shifted on the road side, brakes on the opposite side. Everything was backwards. It was a pretty motorcycle. I rode it a little bit, but I was getting used to dirt bikes.”

Buddy’s family was glad to see him, but they seemed oddly unimpressed by the developments in his career. He tried to convey the extent of his fame to them. Larry Holley later told members of the Buddy Holly Memorial Society that Buddy said the English accepted him “with open arms”; he enjoyed the British tour so much that he found he couldn’t “say enough about it,” he told Larry. At last his family seemed to grasp what the world outside Texas had long known. They had a star in the family. They finally “realized it after he went to England,” Larry told Griggs. “I don’t think we realized it before that.” Even the handful of people in Lubbock who were cognizant of Buddy’s achievements affected a bland indifference, too ornery to admit that one of their own had made it in the world beyond Texas. No doubt nothing could have been more disappointing for Buddy, who valued praise above money and who’d hoped his hometown would at last come through with the recognition and love they’d so long withheld. To his barber, Jake Goss, he seemed irritable and abrupt when he came into the shop with the Crickets the day after he’d swept into Lubbock on the Ariel. The boys were loud and boisterous, as noisy as their motorcycles, Goss later told Griggs.

Plopping down in a barber chair, Buddy ordered Goss to restore the natural wave to his overpermed hair. As Goss struggled with his locks, Buddy contemplated what style to try next. It was more than vanity on Buddy’s part; hair was gradually becoming the radical “freak flag” of rock ’n’ roll. Buddy kept trying different styles, going in for extreme changes on at least three or four visits to the shop; none of them satisfied him. Though Goss took pride in his work, calling it “personality styling,” cutting and shaping a customer’s hair to suit his face and profession, and even throwing in a shampoo—all for $5—he found Buddy anything but appreciative, describing him as hurried, impatient, fidgety, domineering, and moody. “I usually felt ill at ease when I was styling his hair,” Goss told Griggs. “He really wasn’t very talkative.”

Buddy’s taciturnity was attributable, at least in part, to his neighbors’ stolid refusal to acknowledge his accomplishments over the previous ten months. In contrast to Lubbock, Jerry Lee Lewis’s hometown—Ferriday, Louisiana—accorded Jerry Lee a hero’s welcome when he returned from the same Alan Freed tour on May 17, awarding him the key to the city. Lubbock did nothing to honor Buddy, though he continued to score one hit record after another. That summer the Crickets’ new single “Think It Over” went to No. 27 in the United States and No. 11 in England. Years later
Rolling Stone
reflected on the song’s profundity: “The adolescent confidence of … ‘Think It Over’ conveys Holly’s magical notion that the insistent repetition of one’s wishes is in fact the fulfillment of the wish itself,” wrote Jonathan Cott. “As in ritual, the rapture of song becomes the proof of this magic and, in the end, the magic itself.”

Buddy had another classic tune on the drawing board. At the end of May he recorded “It’s So Easy,” the song he sometimes referred to as “It’s So Greasy to Fall in Love.” No small contribution to the record is the flowing, coherent lead guitar playing of Tommy Allsup, one of Petty’s staff musicians. A native of Tulsa, Allsup had been the lead guitarist in a western swing band led by Johnnie Lee Wills, Bob Wills’s brother. Allsup was drawn to Clovis, like so many musicians in 1958, by Petty’s reputation as the genius behind Buddy Holly. “Petty had ’em lined up at the door,” Allsup told writer William J. Bush in 1982. Petty’s house band now scheduled sessions with a different singer every night.

Larry Holley noticed that Buddy was “flush with money” that summer. The Crickets had been holding back as much of their pay as they could from Petty and justifying it to him as expenses. Petty realized he’d lost control of them when they angrily objected to being kept on salary despite their fame and substantial earnings. From that point on they discontinued forwarding money earned on the road to the Crickets account in Clovis. It was, of course, the smartest financial move they’d ever made, but unfortunately they stopped short of making a clean break. Jerry later acknowledged in the TV film
Reminiscing
that they “weren’t taking care of our business like we should have been.” They were “just a bunch of kids” who liked the excitement of being entertainers but had absolutely no interest in looking over their contracts, Jerry added.

While at home, Buddy went on a fishing trip to the Brazos Box Canyon in northern New Mexico, taking along his brother Larry, his father, his cousin Sam, and Bill Edwards, a friend of Larry’s. Maria Elena remained in New York all this time, where she had been since Buddy departed following his New York engagements in early April. When quizzed about this in 1993, she said, “I remember that he had to go somewhere, and he wanted me to come with him, but I couldn’t go because my aunt would not let me. In between that time [and their August wedding] I prepared to get ready to go to Lubbock.”

Accompanied by his relatives, Buddy hiked through the rugged wilderness until they reached a trout stream that poured from a crack in the mountains. Sheer cliffs jutted a thousand feet overhead. The fishing was excellent and they roasted their catch over an open fire. At nightfall, bedrolls were unfurled and they slept out under the stars. When they left the next day, toting heavy backpacks, Buddy surprised Larry by leaving the others far behind. It was a ten-mile hike, and Buddy beat everyone else back to the car by several hours. He was still growing, and he was getting stronger physically every year.

Back in Lubbock, Buddy strolled downtown, stopping at a shoeshine stand to get his boots polished. Robert Linville, one of Buddy’s backup singers, later told Griggs that when the black shoeshine attendant admired Buddy’s wristwatch, Buddy gave it to him with a smile, commenting that he liked it more than Buddy did, so he deserved it.

The Crickets felt that they could now afford an apartment in Clovis, so they wouldn’t have to make the daily drive from Lubbock to cut their records. The quarters they leased were located on Main Street, near Petty’s studio. Buddy was a hero around Nor Va Jak the way he would never be in Lubbock. His string of hits had turned Petty’s modest establishment at 1313 West Seventh Street into one of rock’s premier studios, second only to Sun Records. Roy Orbison continued to record in Clovis whenever he visited the Southwest, finding it more amenable than Memphis or Nashville. Charlie Phillips’s “Sugartime” originated in Clovis, with Buddy playing guitar, before the McGuire Sisters covered it and sold a million records. Buddy was in the studio daily, cutting his own songs or playing guitar for, among others, Trini Lopez, Buddy Knox, Carolyn Hester, and Terry Noland. Whether he was working on his songs or those of his compadres, to Buddy Holly the studio had become a sacred place where magical things happened. Though his only tangible contribution was as session guitarist, his powerful presence informs Fred Crawford’s “By the Mission Wall,” Jack Huddle’s “Starlight,” Jim Robinson’s “Whole Lotta Lovin’,” and the Norman Petty Trio’s “Moondreams.”

One day he rode his Ariel Cyclone up to Shaw’s Jewelry Store in Clovis to buy a present for Maria Elena. The clerk, a Clovis woman named Maxine Nation, told Bill Griggs in 1984 that Buddy was wearing a black leather jacket when she noticed him standing at the diamond counter, studying gems. She assumed that he was an ordinary biker until she noticed that his hands and fingernails were immaculate, very different from the greasy paws of the bikers who regularly roared through Clovis. He was making a Manhattan girl his bride, he told Maxine, and he was shopping for a gift to express his love. As Maxine displayed an array of jewels, she was struck by Buddy’s politeness and charm, though she still didn’t recognize him. Buddy finally selected a diamond pendant, said he’d prefer to pay by personal check, and offered to cover the cost of a long-distance call to Lubbock should Maxine need to ring his bank. Smiling, Maxine assured him the store would absorb the cost of the call. When he volunteered the information that he was in Clovis to make records at Petty’s studio, Maxine did a double-take and asked him if he was really Buddy Holly. Later she told Griggs that Buddy laughed and said, “I guess so.” They chatted and Maxine told him that in person he had the same radiance as he had on his recordings. She offered him respect and admiration, which was rare for him in the Southwest.

Around this time, realizing that his fame had availed him nothing on his home turf—the place that mattered most to him—he began to redefine his values. The desire for worldly recognition had motivated him and energized his climb to stardom, but now he began to see that public opinion, applause, performing, and touring—all the razzle-dazzle of show business—had no effect on one’s self-esteem. He formulated new dreams: producing, publishing, and owning his own recording studio and record label. Unfortunately, each time he tried to implement these plans, Petty proposed another tour or promotion trip.

It was at Petty’s urging that the Crickets went to San Francisco in June to appear on Ted Pandall’s KPIX-TV show, promoting their records. Afterward Buddy flew down to Los Angeles to see his old friends the Everly Brothers, who were staying at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel. While Buddy was visiting the Everlys, Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend Sharon Sheeley dropped in. With her was the new teenage idol Ricky Nelson, whose recording of a song she’d written, “Poor Little Fool,” was a hit. Later they all went to see Cochran at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where he was staying with Gene Vincent, drinking liquor out of a flask, and celebrating his No. 8 smash “Summertime Blues.” They took in a party in Jerry Lee Lewis’s suite at the Knickerbocker, but Ricky left in a huff when Jerry Lee pissed in the corner.