Buddy Holly: Biography (5 page)

Buddy and Jack Neal were still doing Saturday morning kiddie shows, which were regularly scouted by KDAV assistant manager Hi Pockets Duncan. In the latter part of September 1953, Hi Pockets auditioned them. They sang a duet at KDAV’s studio at 6602 Quirt Avenue. Hi Pockets described their music as C&W “with a little upbeat” or rockabilly, as it would shortly be known.

“You have a beat of your own,” Hi Pockets told Buddy. “You’re destined to be a star.” He offered to host Buddy’s radio debut. “The Buddy and Jack Show” went on the air November 8, 1953, opening with Hank Williams’s “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The newly discovered pair received fan mail almost immediately. Their fans wrote out the titles of songs they wanted to hear them sing on the air.

Grateful to Hi Pockets for discovering him, Buddy carefully hand-tooled a western belt and presented it to his benefactor. Larry described the belt as “a beautiful professional job.” Unfortunately, it was too small for the paunchy Hi Pockets, who nevertheless kept it and treasured it for many years.

William Joseph “Hi Pockets” Duncan, Buddy’s champion and staunchest supporter, was a big, bright-eyed, good-natured DJ with a toothy grin like actor James Whitmore’s. Injured in World War II, he walked with a cane for years before completely recovering from his wounds. Originally from Amarillo, Texas, he launched his nickname by opening a fifteen-minute hillbilly radio show with the impromptu announcement, “This is Hi Pocket Hank’s Hillbilly Hop presented by Henry Clay’s Food Store.” He also formed a band, Hi Pockets Duncan and His Texas Hot Shots, and played local events like Lubbock’s 1953 Labor Day dance at the VFW Hall.

Now a hit at KDAV, Buddy and Jack felt free to hang out there, teaching themselves everything there was to know about broadcasting and recording equipment and listening to the station’s extensive record collection. Hi Pockets and Ben Hall always greeted them warmly and made them feel at home. Dave Stone, another ardent advocate of Buddy’s, recorded the duo on acetate on November 10, 1953. Buddy played lead guitar and Jack sang “I Saw the Moon Crying Last Night” and “I Hear the Lord Callin’ for Me.”

Because Neal had a girlfriend he was serious about, he was holding down a full-time job as an electrical contractor. This was absorbing most of his time and interest, and eventually he got married and moved to Ruidoso, New Mexico. Buddy then teamed up again with Bob Montgomery, his old friend from J. T. Hutchinson Junior High, and sang with him on KDAV’s “Sunday Party.” Buddy and Bob’s high-pitched harmonies resembled those of the Everly Brothers, who were still living in Knoxville, Tennessee, singing on their parents’ C&W radio show on station WROL. But Buddy and Bob had more of a rustic C&W flavor than the Everlys and were closer to Bob Wills’s western swing. Born in Kosse, Texas, in 1905, Wills produced numerous hits such as “Mexicali Rose,” “Faded Love,” and “Steel Guitar Rag.”

“The ‘Sunday Parties’ were always about whoever showed up to pick,” said Sonny Curtis, a multitalented musician from Meadow, Texas, a small town thirty miles south of Lubbock. Anyone who had the tenacity to come across the plains to Lubbock and the nerve to sing into a microphone was welcome at KDAV. Sonny remembers broadcasting with Buddy and Bob, singing duets with Ben Hall, and sometimes doing solos. Weldon Myrick, who turned into a “real hot steel-guitar player,” was also around the “Sunday Party,” Sonny told Bill Griggs in 1980.

Sonny Curtis was a good-looking youth with pixie eyes, a sexy-sounding voice that derived some of its quality from a slight underbite, and poetry flowing in his veins. “Sonny started performing when he was eight years old, playing and singing bluegrass with our brother, Dean, and me,” Sonny’s older brother, Pete, said in 1995. Sonny was also a songwriter and could upstage just about anyone with his hoedown fiddling. He worked at Adair Music Store in Lubbock, and after hours he’d bring “race” records to Buddy’s house “where we’d spend the night listening to R&B,” he says. Then they’d go out to the Holleys’ Oldsmobile and listen to Gatemouth Page on the car radio until they fell asleep. When they weren’t practicing in someone’s garage, depriving whole neighborhoods of sleep, Buddy and Sonny drank beer and chased girls.

“Sonny Curtis was very helpful to Buddy,” Larry recalled. “The boys all had lots of fun playing and learning together.”

In his seventeenth year Buddy grew to five-foot-eleven but still weighed only 145 pounds. Just after he started his junior year, he and Bob Montgomery told Dave Stone that they were ready for their own radio show. It was a brash announcement that Buddy offset with impeccable manners. When Buddy turned on his charm, radiating sincerity and deference, “Pappy” Stone was impressed. Auditioning Buddy and Bob and pronouncing them “very good,” Pappy booked them into their own 2:30
P.M.
, thirty-minute segment on KDAV’s “Sunday Party.” “The Buddy and Bob Show” went on the air in late 1953.

“I had a bit of an ulterior motive,” Stone later admitted. As Lubbock High students, Buddy and Bob were sure to increase KDAV’s audience among local youths, who were demanding raunchier songs. When Buddy and Bob sang the sexually explicit R&B tune “Work With Me, Annie,” which clearly describes a couple in the throes of passion—the man instructing the woman to give him plenty of “meat”—West Texas teenagers flipped. “They were hits almost immediately from the time they went on,” Stone said. “Believe me, they didn’t any more than get that show started when the phone would start ringing off the wall.”

Most of the callers wanted more songs like “Work With Me, Annie.” Buddy was completely in tune with a generation that was rapidly tiring of Perry Como, Eddie Fisher, and Patti Page and demanding music that was as raw and wild as their own feelings.

Chapter Three

A Girl Named Echo

When Roy Orbison, a homely, bespectacled kid from Wink, Texas, 125 miles south of Lubbock, heard Buddy on KDAV, it altered his life. Roy had had his own TV show, but was convinced he’d never succeed on stage because of his glasses. After he met Buddy, he thought,
If this guy wears glasses and is going to try to make it big, maybe I can too.
“I would go to see Buddy’s shows and he would go to see mine, back and forth there,” Orbison later recounted. “Buddy was a very bright boy, very dedicated. He wasn’t uppity, or as we’d say in the business, ‘flashy.’ He could tell jokes. We had a relationship that developed.”

Buddy helped Roy with lead structures on some of the songs Roy was trying to write at this time. It was Buddy who showed Orbison the lick that would become so popular years later when Roy recorded “Pretty Woman.” Buddy took it from “Brave Bulls,” a song often played at bullfights.

Hi Pockets offered Buddy and Bob some sage professional advice after he learned they’d been providing free entertainment for a Lubbock man who invited them to his parties. They’d eat all they wanted, but the man paid them nothing. “That ol’ party boy is using you,” said Hi Pockets, who recounted his conversation with Buddy years later on a radio show entitled “A Celebration of Buddy Holly: The Legend Moves On.”

“Well, we always get fed,” said Buddy.

“Look,” said Hi Pockets. “I’m willing to be your manager.”

“Fine,” said Buddy. “What does that mean?”

“You need to beef up the act. Get someone on bass. Maybe Larry Welborn. We’ll organize a trio—Buddy, Bob, and Larry.”

“Where we gonna get a bass fiddle?” Buddy asked.

“I’ll have to buy you a bull fiddle to get you started,” said Hi Pockets.

Larry Welborn was a timely addition to the Buddy and Bob act, which was experiencing some strain. “I feel that I was just a little too close to him,” Montgomery commented in
Reminiscing
magazine in 1981. “I knew that he was a very talented guy. He was doing some very original licks and he had a great sense of rhythm, but as a singer in our early times, he never really impressed me that much.” Just how much Montgomery impressed Holly is not known. No doubt the two were highly competitive and critical of each other. According to biographer Philip Norman, “Montgomery remembers him as ‘a real ugly guy,’ skinny and awkward with worse-than-usual teenage acne and ‘West Texas teeth,’ stained brown by the overfluorided water.”

Around this time Buddy fell in love with a classmate named Echo Elaine McGuire. She was the kind of girl every boy in the fifties wanted to be associated with—she was attractive and had a good reputation. Her pious, churchgoing, middle-class family owned a string of dry-cleaning stores in Lubbock. Respecting such a girl’s virtue could be painful. Boys in the fifties usually ended up a date with aching testicles, known as “blue balls.” It was an all-too-familiar stigmata of the decade’s paradoxical and confusing sexual mores. Girls gave confusing signals. Their form-fitting sweaters, wasplike waists, and pointed bras said one thing—
ravish me
—but their demure Peter Pan collars and pert little scarves flashed a stern warning:
I’m pure—keep your distance.
Buddy solved the dilemma, according to some observers, by dropping his steady girlfriend off after a date and then driving by Tom Halsey’s Pharmacy, where more willing girls could always be found.

He also enjoyed abundant sexual release with a girl in school, though he did not love her as he did Echo; the relationship was strictly physical. The girl felt the same way about Buddy: they weren’t going anywhere as a couple but they certainly enjoyed each other’s bodies. She loved to hang out at a local juke joint and play R&B records. Some say Buddy got her pregnant and completely disrupted her life. To avoid disgrace, her family was said to have moved to another town. One source said the child she had by Buddy was a boy; another was less certain of the gender; still another said she had a girl. Bill Griggs, founder of the now-defunct Buddy Holly Memorial Society, doubts that it happened at all, though he’s known about the allegations for more than twenty-six years, he revealed in a 1994 letter. Sonny Curtis denies it outright, stating in 1995, “Buddy never said a word to me about having a kid.” Whatever the truth, Echo McGuire remained Buddy’s steady, though his brother Larry was skeptical of their chances from the start. Echo was a devout member of the Church of Christ, and Buddy was a Baptist. “I went with a Church of Christ girl for nearly a year myself, real steady, and really thought a lot of her,” says Larry. “But I was not intendin’ to marry her. She was pretty and nice. I was in love with her, but finally we broke it off. Baptist and Church of Christ kids will marry each other if they don’t watch out and in each case they end up not having a very good spiritual life thereafter. For some reason Church of Christ kids have the idea that people who are not Church of Christ are not gonna go to heaven. That just infuriates Baptists.”

Though Echo was undoubtedly important to Buddy, she was never his top priority, falling somewhere below music, God, beer, and sex. “If Buddy had a choice of going out on a date or playing his guitar, he’d play his guitar,” Niki Sullivan later told Griggs. “Music was more important to him, though he and Echo did go steady.”

The only kind of music Buddy and Echo had in common was the harmless stuff they sang as members of the high school choir, such as Brodszky’s “I Walk With God” or Christmas carols at the annual Yule Assembly. Church of Christ girls didn’t listen to risqué songs like “Big Long Slidin’ Thing” or dance to them, either. “They had hair all over their legs,” says Tinker Carlen. “Their mamas wouldn’t never let ’em shave their legs.” According to Sonny Curtis, “Echo was not a knockout like my girl Jean Cates.” In Megargel, the small Texas town I grew up in, 170 miles east of Lubbock, Church of Christ women wore long-sleeved dresses and thick stockings. Though I was a Methodist, I attended the Church of Christ because we were too poor to own a car, and Church of Christ folks would give you a ride. The sermons, shrilled by a hysterical preacher, left me cold, but I loved the part of the service when the congregation was invited to participate. People would stand up, release their pent-up angers and frustrations, and sing the Lord’s praises. Sometimes, in the grip of the Holy Spirit, they would dance and shout. In time, I noticed that fewer Church of Christ people had nervous breakdowns than the Baptists and Methodists in town, whose participation in church was restricted to an occasional amen or hymn singing.

For religious reasons, Echo McGuire couldn’t share Buddy’s passion for R&B or rock ’n’ roll. This proved a disadvantage because Buddy liked to check out the clubs, listen to the music, and pick with the musicians.

Larry Welborn, the bass player Hi Pockets had recommended, was a few years younger than Buddy, still attending Carol Thompson Junior High when Buddy recruited him for the Buddy and Bob act. “I was playing a little dive—I was so young I wasn’t supposed to be there,” Welborn remembers. “Buddy showed up one night and said, ‘I came out because I heard you were playing bass.’

“Is that so? Hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

Buddy nodded and said, “You’re closer to my age than the other musicians playing clubs around here. How would you like to work with me and Bob Montgomery on KDAV?”

“Well, at least it would be legal.”

Retaining top billing for themselves, Buddy and Bob ordered business cards that read
BUDDY AND BOB—WESTERN AND BOP
, consigning Larry to smaller type at the edge of the card and listing Hi Pockets as their business manager, in care of KDAV. Later in 1954, Larry Welborn dropped out of the act. Buddy, Bob, and Don Guess then formed the Rhythm Playboys. “I’m going to draw up a contract on you where anybody that uses you will have to come through me,” said Hi Pockets. “That will save you doing any more free parties.”

Bookings began to come through, as well as cash. They performed during remote broadcasts at store openings, sang at high school assemblies, and did community shows and car-lot sales. Still being underage, for the present they played no honky tonks, bars, or dances. The trio also became a popular attraction at the Lindsey Theater, playing before Saturday midnight previews. “If we played thirty minutes and got fifty bucks, we thought we was in pretty good shape,” said Hi Pockets, who did not charge the boys for his services. If he sold one of their remote broadcasts, he received a commission, and he was also paid whenever he performed as their emcee.