Buddy Holly: Biography (31 page)

Buddy returned to Texas briefly and then departed for New York to cut new singles. This time, he left the Crickets behind. His movements during this period reflect the fact that his life and talent were pushing forward in new directions. There was the increasing influence of Maria Elena and, with Maria Elena there, the lure of New York City—where the professionals were. One can also sense the coming demise of the Crickets. He was feeling the need to branch out and grow, and Decca had offered him the run of its New York studios. Petty, suspicious that Decca executives were once again trying to subvert his influence, decided to tag along when Buddy went east.

In New York, Dick Jacobs suggested that Buddy knock out a quick cover of a Bobby Darin song, “Early in the Morning.” It was a good idea, resulting in a return to the charts for Buddy, hitting No. 32 in the U.S., No. 17 in England, and No. 22 in Australia. “Early in the Morning” was a Ray Charles–type mix of gospel and R&B—someone called it “rock ’n’ soul”—and it marked Buddy’s transition from a rockabilly singer to a versatile rock star. Though he missed Jerry and Joe B., the session at last freed him to make the quantum jump he’d been yearning to. Buddy must have been enormously pleased in the summer of 1958 to be on the charts both as a solo performer and as a member of a group; the Crickets’ “Think It Over” was a simultaneous Top 40 hit, going to No. 27 in America and No. 11 in England.

“Early in the Morning” was recorded on June 19, 1958, at Coral Records Studios in the Pythian Temple, a building then owned by the New York Institute of Technology. Jacobs says that every time they saw each other following the session, Buddy told him that “Early in the Morning” was the finest recording he’d ever made. With the Crickets back in Texas, he found it stimulating to work with New York professionals, including guitarists Al Chernet and George Barnes, drummers David “Panama” Francis and Philip Kraus, Sam Taylor on alto saxophone, and Ernest Hayes at the piano. He worried about hurting the Crickets’ feelings, confiding to Petty his apprehension that Jerry and Joe B. would consider him disloyal if he continued to make records without them, but when “Early in the Morning” became a worldwide hit, Jerry graciously said he did not resent Buddy’s solo success.

Buddy now looked increasingly to New York—and specifically to Dick Jacobs—for guidance. Petty refused to acknowledge the deterioration of their relationship, pointing out that he was present in the control room at the Pythian Temple sessions. While granting that Dick Jacobs was Buddy’s new producer, Petty insisted that he was still the manager of the Crickets and Buddy Holly. He could not face the fact that Buddy had evolved beyond the Clovis/Tex-Mex ethos. Years later, in an interview with Skip Brooks and Bill Malcolm, Petty still found it difficult to address why he hadn’t been more supportive of Buddy’s need to experiment and grow as an artist; Petty admitted he had lacked vision.

While in New York, Buddy purchased a gold chain for the diamond pendant he’d bought Maria Elena in Clovis. Petty was aware of Maria Elena’s hold on him and knew that she had told Buddy he could get along perfectly well without the Crickets and that he no longer required the services of Norman Petty. Petty struck back with adder-tongued viciousness. As Maria Elena later revealed to Goldrosen, Petty circulated malicious lies about her, telling Buddy that she was a “cheap girl” who flirted with all the singers who visited Peer-Southern, that she liked to be “picked up,” that she went around with numerous men. Petty’s source was supposedly an executive at Peer-Southern. After Buddy repeated Petty’s slander to Maria Elena, she summoned the executive who’d allegedly maligned her and confronted him in Petty’s presence. Was he responsible for the lies? she asked. The executive denied everything. Petty was hopelessly out of his league every time he squared off with Maria Elena Santiago.

Rock ’n’ roll’s future continued to look precarious in 1958, partially due to a recession that cut into teenagers’ buying power but also because of continuing attacks, such as the one from the NBC division responsible for radio advertising. “Rave On” was singled out by NBC Spot Sales as an example of the kind of music the network did not want its stations to play. The wave of protest continued when
Contacts,
the Catholic Youth Organization’s periodical, warned teens to censor the music played at hops and “smash the records … which present a pagan culture.”

Perhaps skeptical about his future as a rock performer, Buddy became more interested in songwriting as a profession and attempted to supply other stars with material. He wrote two songs, “Love’s Made a Fool of You” and “Wishing,” both composed in collaboration with Bob Montgomery, for the Everly Brothers, who were on a run of seven Top 40 hits in 1958, including “Devoted to You” and “Bird Dog.” Buddy envisaged the new songs as the A and B sides of the Everlys next single. After recording the demos in Clovis, Buddy delivered them to the Everlys’ manager, Wesley Rose, head of the powerful Nashville publishing firm Acuff-Rose. Rose refused to permit anyone outside his stable of songwriters, even Buddy Holly, to write for the Everlys. As long as he could restrict the Everlys’ choice of material to in-house tunesmiths such as Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, who wrote Everly Brothers hits such as “Wake Up Little Susie” and “Problems,” he could collect royalties from both the singers and the songwriters. According to British fan Dave Skinner, who interviewed Buddy’s parents in 1969, Ella Holley said that Rose listened to “Wishing” but turned it down, saying that the Everlys could never put it over as effectively as Buddy. Rose also declined Buddy and Bob’s “Love’s Made a Fool of You.” Don later told Kurt Loder that he rued having lost these songs, blaming his contract with Acuff-Rose.

While in Nashville, Buddy ran into Roy Orbison, who was about to give up singing and was now employed as a staff songwriter at Acuff-Rose. “I was in a restaurant in Nashville one time with the Everlys having lunch,” Orbison remembered. “Buddy Holly came in and said he’d just been to England and it was magnificent. So the Everlys said they’d go, and it was magnificent. At the same time, other people had gone and it was a disaster. (I won’t say who.) So I didn’t really want to go.” Orbison was deluding himself. At the time he was still a couple of years away from the kind of stardom that Buddy and the Everly Brothers already enjoyed. In 1958, major bookers weren’t seeking Roy Orbison for tours, either at home or abroad. Chet Atkins hadn’t been any more successful with Orbison at RCA’s Nashville studio than Norman Petty had been in Clovis or Sam Phillips at Sun. It would take two more years—and the collaborative input of songwriter Joe Melson, with whom Roy would write “Only the Lonely”—for Orbison to emerge as a star.

Before leaving Nashville, Buddy met DJ Ralph Emery. “Buddy Holly came to visit me on ‘Opry Star Spotlight,’ my all-night show,” Emery stated in his 1992 autobiography
Memories.
“I told him I could not play any of his records, because I had none.” Obviously nothing had changed in Nashville, but Buddy’s songwriting efforts there in 1958 were symptomatic of his determination to emerge as an individual rather than a tool of record promoters and tour packagers. Nevertheless, he needed money and so, in July 1958, he set out on the “Summer Dance Party,” which charged through Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, playing one-night stands in godforsaken outposts such as Decorah, Oelwein, and Wausau—a veritable blitzkrieg of the Upper Midwest. This is Grant Wood country, the American heartland, and, in summertime at least, it’s fertile, green, uncrowded, and full of breathtaking sights.

The “Summer Dance Party” was strictly a Buddy Holly tour, not another all-star rock ’n’ roll package show in the Alan Freed–Irving Feld–Dick Clark tradition. The only other act on the bill was Tommy Allsup and his Western Swing Band, who opened each night for the Crickets. They traveled in Buddy’s Lincoln and the band’s DeSoto station wagon, carrying their equipment in a U-Haul trailer. For once they didn’t have to lug Joe B.’s bull fiddle; Joe B. started playing an electric bass that summer, using a Fender Precision purchased at Manny’s in New York.

Even in 1958, Iowa invariably spelled trouble for Buddy. On the “Big Beat” tour the previous April, a near-riot had broken out in the Hippodrome Auditorium in Waterloo. When he returned to the area for a July 8 show, another crisis developed, one that put his life in jeopardy. What started as a day of recreation for the Crickets turned into a nightmare after they rented a boat and went waterskiing on Cedar River, near Waterloo. All went well until the Crickets started horsing around. Buddy had been drinking on this tour, and his judgment may have been impaired when, together with the Crickets, he decided to walk some logs floating in the river. Later,
Des Moines Register
reporter Larry Lehmer described the resulting emergency as Buddy’s “unplanned dip in the river.” The logs started turning and dumped the musicians in the water, fully clothed. Luckily, no one was hurt.

A few days later, Buddy found himself in another dangerous situation. After their July 12 performance in Wausau, Wisconsin, he stayed up all night, drinking and listening to records with a group of fans, recalled Bob Oestreich, the drummer with the Roustabouts, who opened for Buddy at Wausau’s Rothschild Pavilion. The next day, though he was tired and possibly hungover, he tried to swim across a cold lake in the North Woods, near Rhinelander, Wisconsin. The day was chilly and gray, and a harsh wind made the water choppy. According to Lehmer, when Buddy was halfway across the lake, trying to fight the wind and currents, he drifted off course. He looked up and failed to see the shore, became confused, and almost panicked. Barely managing to control his terror, he kept swimming. Finally he reached land and dragged himself out of the water, pale and gasping for breath. Onlookers rushed to him with blankets and steaming coffee. Suffering from exhaustion and possibly hypothermia, he couldn’t stop shivering. They carried him to a house and put him in a hot shower. Finally he rallied and said he felt like he could go onstage that night.

People came from miles around to hear Buddy at the Crystal Rock in Rhinelander on July 13, unaware that he’d almost died a few hours before. He felt so sleepy and weak he barely made it through the first set. At the break he went outside and curled up in the backseat of the Lincoln, falling fast asleep. Unfortunately, the fans wouldn’t let him alone. One of them was seventeen-year-old Neale Winker, who’d driven with five friends from Tomahawk, a town twenty miles southwest of Rhinelander. Years later, in a 1993 interview, Neale recalled how he and his friends peered through the Lincoln’s backseat window and recognized Buddy snoozing inside. They were thrilled to be close to their favorite rock star. “We knocked and woke him up,” says Neale. “Someone came out of a side door and told us to get our butts out of there.”

When it was time for the show to resume, Buddy reluctantly climbed out of the Lincoln, went back inside the Crystal Rock, and splashed water on his face. He trudged onstage and tried to summon the energy to sing rock ’n’ roll. Suddenly, a kid in the audience started yelling. It was one of the boys in Winker’s party. At first annoyed, Buddy soon realized the guy was only requesting a song. “Hey, Buddy,” he yelled, “I’ll buy you a beer if you play ‘Rave On.’” Buddy smiled and felt a surge of energy. He boogied the house down with “Rave On” and still felt so charged up after the show that he ducked into a bar across the street for a nightcap. There he spotted Winker and his friends sitting in a booth and went over. “I’m here to collect my beer,” Buddy said. Recounting the incident in 1993, Winker recalls, “Buddy made my friend buy him that beer.”

Back home in Lubbock, Jerry noticed a change in Buddy. Once he’d been so ambitious he’d said yes to everyone who wanted to hear him sing. Now he was more selective. After the “Summer Dance Party” was over, the last thing he wanted was another round of one-night stands. Accustomed to the old workaholic Buddy, Jerry still expected him to leap at every offer. One day Buddy and Jerry were cruising through downtown Lubbock on their choppers. When they stopped at Sixth Street for a smoke, Buddy told Jerry about a lucrative tour offer Petty had just received. Jerry was all for accepting it immediately, he later recalled in Paul McCartney’s
The Real Buddy Holly Story,
but Buddy wanted to lay off for a while and simply enjoy life. What if their records stopped selling and the tour offers dried up? Jerry asked. They ought to grab work while they could. Buddy said he had some money and could buy Jerry whatever he wanted, including a Cadillac. Then Buddy said something strangely prescient. How sad it would be, he told Jerry, if they were suddenly killed without ever savoring the riches they’d earned. They turned down the tour.

Waterskiing became Buddy’s favorite sport, Ella Holley revealed in 1977. Larry Holley adds in a 1992 interview that the Crickets found Buffalo Springs Lake, eleven miles east of Lubbock, to be an ideal setting. Buddy and Joe B. jointly purchased an Owens outboard with a thirty-five-horsepower Evinrude motor, completely equipped with skis and ropes, reported Zenon Bilas in
Waterski
magazine in 1992. As usual, Buddy plunged into the sport, heedlessly attempting feats beyond his experience and ability. As Jerry and Joe B. pulled him across the lake, Buddy tried to negotiate the Lubbock Ski Club’s formidable jump. In the ensuing wipeout, he lost his wallet and eyeglasses, which sank to the “bottom of the lake,” Mrs. Holley later told Griggs, and were not recovered until several years later, after his death. Workmen who were dredging the lake, which was being enlarged, recovered them. The billfold still contained Buddy’s driver’s license and some cash, “crisp as if they had been burned,” said Mrs. Holley.

Recalling the seemingly innocent summer of 1958, Larry Holley later told Bill Griggs that Buddy was bursting with fun, laughter, and rowdiness. Larry remained what he’d always been to Buddy, a reliable and caring older brother. Buddy became so unruly that summer that Larry had to caution him, just as he’d done in Buddy’s adolescence. In some ways Buddy had never changed; he was as “salty” as ever, Larry noticed, and still had “a lot of fire” anytime he decided to relax and play. He’d been working out with weights and developing some really defined muscles that he was proud of. By August his bodybuilding regimen and karate classes paid off in an unexpected way: He was not only more muscular, but there was a change in his face as well. For the first time since his reign as King of the Sixth Grade, he could be described as handsome.