Buddy Holly: Biography (7 page)

Tom Parker, the corpulent medicine-show promoter who’d made a star of C&W singer Eddy Arnold, was in Lubbock, scouting for talent. Both Buddy and Elvis intrigued him, but Parker focused on Elvis. Hi Pockets hobnobbed with Parker and admired his flair for promotion, which he felt was responsible for Elvis’s superiority as a showman. “But as far as actual talent goes, I’d put Buddy Holley up against Elvis Presley,” Hi Pockets said.

To Bob Montgomery, who also saw Parker in Lubbock, it was clear that Parker was intent on signing Elvis, but nevertheless saw great promise in Buddy. In fact, he would have put Buddy under contract had it not been against his policy to take on two performers at the same time. So impressed was Parker that he decided to recommend Buddy to Eddie Crandall, an important Nashville talent agent. Crandall didn’t act on the tip immediately; but he didn’t forget it, either.

After Elvis’s performance at Fair Park, Hi Pockets urged everyone to go out to the Cotton Club, Lubbock’s major dance hall, and put on another show. “We opened for Elvis,” says Sonny Curtis. “Bales of cotton were stacked around the stage to protect him from the audience. The most beautiful girls in Lubbock were trying to climb the bales to get at him. That’s what impressed us as much as the music. We’d been hillbillies, but after the Cotton Club we were rockers like Elvis.”

Attempting to exit the parking lot after the show, Elvis almost got beaten up. “Somebody was wantin’ to whip Elvis outside the Cotton Club—Elvis was stealin’ his girl or somethin’,” Larry Welborn remembered. Elvis and the girl managed to escape unscathed. According to Larry Holley, “Buddy and Elvis got along pretty good. They went out after the show.”

Buddy became such an ardent Elvis fan that he made a leather case for his J-45 guitar just like the one Elvis used on his Martin D-28. “I wish he had done one for
my
guitar,” Sonny Curtis later told writer William Bush. “I had a brand-new Martin D-28 and Buddy put pick scratches all over the face. It really pissed me off.”

“I Forgot to Remember to Forget” was Buddy’s favorite Elvis Presley song. Buddy recorded it at radio station KLLL, whose DJs played it for years. Mrs. Holly loved Buddy’s version so much that she said it was superior to Elvis’s. Unfortunately, the cut has not survived. Once Buddy began to release professionally the following year, he was required by contract to withdraw his amateur records from circulation.

In a conversation with Waylon Jennings, Buddy confided that Elvis was now his favorite singer. Waylon said he liked rock ’n’ roll but was also wary of it, confessing to Buddy that he was afraid he was going to be left behind as a C&W singer. “I wish I could be more ‘with it,’” Waylon said. “If I could sing rock ’n’ roll better, I would.”

“Let me tell you something, man,” Buddy said. “You can go into several fields. Don’t sweat it.”

Waylon remembers that Buddy was the only person, outside his immediate family, who took Waylon seriously as a singer. Elvis “changed Buddy,” Waylon later told Peter Guralnick. “It was the beginning of kids really starting to think for themselves, figuring things out, realizing things that they would never even have thought of before.”

Elvis’s band, which eventually included a drummer, Dominic Joseph “D. J.” Fontana, provided the guidelines for West Texas musicians such as Buddy Holley and Roy Orbison, who were trying to produce the rock ’n’ roll sound. “We got a drummer, and I think it’s a matter of instruments that defined whether you were playing C&W or rock,” said Orbison, who did not add drums until he formed his second band, the Teen Kings. Buddy’s first drummer was Jerry Allison, who he’d known since J. T. Hutchinson Junior High. One night Buddy dropped into the 16th and J Club, where Allison was performing with Cal Wayne and the Riverside Ranch Hands. Buddy said he’d show them the knack of playing rock ’n’ roll if they’d let him sit in with them for a while.

Allison spoke to Cal Wayne, who said it was all right for Buddy to join them. Buddy talked to them briefly and demonstrated how to rock the music. They tore into “Rock Around the Clock” with explosive force, salvos of sound ricocheting around the room and jarring the audience from its lassitude. Jerry was an instant convert. Until Buddy, they’d been drifting along, playing Hank Thompson and the Texas two-step. Now they swung into “Forty Cups of Coffee,” and suddenly everyone was up and bopping. Though Buddy and Jerry were not standing especially close to each other, they moved and communicated as if they were locked in an embrace. Their synergy was palpable, their sound a special syncopation all their own.

In the days that followed, Jerry moved forcefully into Buddy’s circle. Strongly in Jerry’s favor, as far as Buddy was concerned, was Jerry’s wholehearted conversion to rock ’n’ roll. Bob Montgomery and Sonny Curtis were less committed to rock ’n’ roll than Jerry was, according to what Jerry later told writer William Bush. Jerry invited Buddy to come to his house, where they could rehearse uninterrupted as long as they wanted to. Jerry set his drums up in his bedroom, and Buddy brought over his latest guitar, a gold-top Gibson Les Paul. Later Buddy complained that the Les Paul was too heavy and soon replaced it.

Buddy and Jerry played the roller rink as a duo, and those who saw them there say that they seemed to make more noise than a whole band. “We’d both play the same rhythm lick that somehow made our music sound fuller,” Jerry explained. They also made some records with Bob Montgomery in Wichita Falls, including “Down the Line,” but they couldn’t find a record company to release them.

When Elvis came back to Lubbock in 1955, he offered to help Buddy get on “The Louisiana Hayride” if he’d come to Shreveport, where the show was broadcast every Saturday night over station KWKH from the Municipal Auditorium. Elvis was a regular on the “Hayride,” appearing on the show fifty times between late 1954 and 1956. Chasing Elvis’s pot of gold, Buddy and his friends set out for Shreveport, 512 miles southeast of Lubbock, driving the ’55 Olds. It proved to be a wild goose chase; “Elvis was supposed to get us on and he wasn’t there,” Larry Welborn told Griggs in 1986.

Thanks to Sid King, who had a bluegrass band called the Five Strings, Buddy and his pals had better luck with “The Big D Jamboree,” Dallas’s famous Saturday-night C&W radio show. In Lubbock one night, King let Buddy, Bob, and Larry Welborn sit in with his band at the Cotton Club. Known for his bluegrass arrangement of “Blue Suede Shoes,” King liked Buddy’s group so much that he offered to get them on the “Jamboree” if they’d make the drive to Dallas, 323 miles east of Lubbock. In no time at all, the boys showed up on King’s doorstep in Dallas, completely unannounced. King had not counted on putting the trio up without considerable notice. Somewhat resignedly, he told them that they could stay with him for one night, and he’d try to get them on the show the following day. King was as good as his word. The next day they sang “Down the Line” on KRLD, and King remembered that Buddy was virtually a carbon copy of Elvis Presley. Buddy “idolized” Elvis, he told King.

The turning point in Buddy’s career came when he and Bob opened for Bill Haley and His Comets at the Fair Park Coliseum in October 1955. “Pappy” Dave Stone arranged the gig and told Eddie Crandall, the Nashville talent agent who was in the audience that night, to pay special attention to Buddy. Later the same month, Buddy and Bob opened for Eddie Crandall’s client Marty Robbins, who was about to hit the charts with “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation).” Marty Robbins’s comment to Crandall was that Buddy Holley had “what it takes.” In the end, Colonel Tom Parker, who was still enthusiastic about Buddy but totally preoccupied with Elvis, convinced Eddie Crandall to take Buddy on. Crandall secured exclusive right to represent Buddy on December 2, 1955, and started trying to get him a recording contract in Nashville. Instead of approaching record companies directly, he turned to the most influential man in C&W music, Jim Denny, the former manager of “The Grand Ole Opry,” who was now an artists’ manager and owner of Cedarwood Music, a publishing firm. Denny agreed to give Buddy an audition. As Mel Tillis once put it, “Every young songwriter and singer in town wanted to get in to see Jim Denny.” In the years before Tillis hit the top of the charts with “Detroit City,” he was never able to get past Denny’s wife, Dollie, “the pretty redheaded receptionist” at Denny’s publishing firm. With Eddie Crandall’s help, Buddy managed to break through to Denny and in doing so acquired a foothold in Nashville, the southeastern recording center of the United States.

From his Nashville office at 319 Seventh Avenue North, Crandall wired Pappy Stone at KDAV with instructions for Buddy to cut demos of four original songs and forward them to him “as soon as possible airmail.” The prospect of a recording contract galvanized Buddy’s songwriting abilities and he immediately went to work, turning out four new tunes. Two of them, “Love Me” and “Don’t Come Back Knockin’,” he cowrote with a Lubbock songwriter named Sue Parrish. The other two, “I Guess I Was Just a Fool” and “Baby Won’t You Come Out Tonight,” were his first solo efforts as a songwriter.

“Baby Won’t You Come Out Tonight” is a hard-driving rocker. The singer urges his girl to go-go-go, to
rock ’n’ roll,
a far franker euphemism for sex than the
kiss me, hold me
supplications of forties and early fifties lyrics. The rock ballad “I Guess I Was Just a Fool” is the first sign that Buddy was also capable of exploring deeper feelings and emotional states with insight and depth. In this song, the story of a man who has lost a relationship but is glad to know he’s at least capable of experiencing love, Buddy seems to be drawing on his ill-starred love for Echo McGuire. From these first creative efforts, it was clear that Buddy Holley was a songwriter to be reckoned with.

Accompanied by Bob and Larry, Buddy cut the audition tape for Decca on acetate at KDAV, according to Pappy, and then forwarded it to Denny in Nashville. Denny peddled the demos up and down Sixteenth Avenue South, known as Record Row. Columbia got a crack at Buddy but rejected him. Decca was shrewder; Paul Cohen, prestigious director of the company’s country-music division, was in the market for an Elvis Presley clone and was sufficiently intrigued to ask what Buddy looked like, wondering if he could be promoted as a sex symbol. “I don’t care how they sing,” a record mogul once told Waylon Jennings. “If they’re not good looking, don’t bring them around.”

Pat Pinkston, Pappy Stone’s wife, answered the telephone when Denny called Lubbock asking for a description of Buddy. She made no claims for him as a potential matinee idol but said he was a good Christian boy and with that Buddy Holley was one step closer to a recording contract. Denny “asked to have the boys come to Nashville for a recording session” at Decca, Pappy recalled in 1983. Decca specified they were interested in Buddy as a solo act, not as part of the singing duo Buddy and Bob. Loyal to his friend, Buddy reminded Decca that he was part of a singing team.

“Well, you can bring him along if you want, but he can’t sing on the records,” Denny said. “We want one singer, not two.” Buddy threatened to turn down the deal unless Nashville relented and cut Bob in. When Bob Montgomery realized what was going on, he graciously bowed out, telling Buddy that this was his big chance and he should go for it. Hi Pockets was equally magnanimous, tearing up the personal-appearance contract he had with Buddy. “I wasn’t able to travel with him,” Hi Pockets later told Griggs, “and I did not want to hinder his success in any way.” Making the first big mistake of his career, Buddy let Hi Pockets go. In the treacherous days ahead, he would need a devoted and honest manager as the breaks started coming fast. In January 1956, Hank Thompson signed Buddy for a two-week tour of the South. Buddy had attracted Thompson’s attention at the Cotton Club in 1955, when he’d played intermissions for Thompson’s Brazos Valley Boys. Waco-born Thompson was famous for his hit records “Humpty Dumpty Heart” and “The Wild Side of Life,” better known as “I Didn’t Know God Made Honky Tonk Angels.” He expected Buddy not only to open his show but to play backup for other stars on the bill, including George Jones, Hank Locklin, Glen Reeves, and Justin Tubb.

Buddy had to assemble a band quickly, not only for the tour but for the recording session that would immediately follow it in Nashville. Don Guess agreed to play bass fiddle. He couldn’t afford to buy the instrument, so Buddy rented one from the Lubbock public school system for $6 a year, signed up Sonny Curtis to play lead guitar, and began to rehearse his new band, often working at Lubbock High. Jerry was always around, playing drums, but he was still in school and wouldn’t be able to go on the road.

After a rehearsal at the high school one afternoon, Buddy rushed out of the band room with his guitar in one hand and his amplifier in the other. He bumped into a blond beauty, knocking her to the floor. Peggy Sue Gerron, baton twirler and first-chair alto sax player in the high school band, was never out of Buddy’s life for long after that. In the days that followed, he thought of her often and scribbled her initials “PSG” in his notebook. Unlike Echo, Peggy Sue listened to rock ’n’ roll and loved to dance. She also liked to spend time with boys who were fun-loving and had entertaining personalities. Born in Olton, Texas, forty-five miles north of Lubbock, Peggy Sue moved to Lubbock when her father, a serviceman, was stationed at Reece Air Force Base. She first met Jerry Allison at R. W. Matthews Junior High School, when Jerry was dating her best friend. It was the beginning of one of the most important—and troublesome—relationships of her life.

Peggy Sue soon got a crush on Jerry and often stood in the band room, watching him play his drums. “I thought he was absolutely darling,” she told Griggs in 1987. In high school she called Jerry “Jivin’ Ivan.” Eventually Jerry dropped her friend and started dating Peggy Sue. When Echo McGuire came home on visits from Abilene Christian College, they’d double-date with Buddy and Echo. Peggy Sue described Echo as “Buddy’s first crush,” adding, “for a brief time he was just wild about her. She was a darling thing, just precious.”

Peggy Sue and Jerry soon quarreled and broke up. “Our relationship was stormy from the first,” she said in 1994. “I started going with Doyle Gammill, the drum major in the band. I performed as a twirler in state competitions and was the only sophomore to make it into the senior band.”