Rave On!
In a sense, the follow-up to ‘That’ll Be The Day’ had already been released before ‘That’ll Be The Day’ reached the top of the charts. ‘Peggy Sue’, coupled with ‘Everyday’, came out under Buddy Holly’s name on 20 September 1957, and was an integral part of the Crickets’ act on the Show of Stars. Cash Box described it as a ‘hot two-sider that could establish Buddy Holly as a name to be reckoned with’. The nearest equivalent would have been if ‘From Me To You’, the follow-up to the Beatles’ ‘Please Please Me’, had been released under the name John Lennon – after all, he wrote both of the songs, and sang lead on both records. The big difference between the Crickets and the Beatles, though, was that John Lennon had an equal songwriting partner; even Paul McCartney’s solo classic ‘Yesterday’ was issued under the group’s name.
Peggy Sue Gerron tells how the Show of Stars came to Sacramento on 18 October, and how strange it was to see the name ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets’, with no ‘e’ in ‘Holly’, on the advertisements, along with the names of many performers whose records she owned, now including Eddie Cochran, who had joined the tour. Cochran and Holly became close friends, described by several people who knew them as ‘like brothers’. ‘Everybody knew that being with the Show of Stars meant you’d made it’, says Peggy Sue. ‘Buddy Holly and the Crickets’ was, incidentally, increasingly the way the group were billed, and the way the name appeared on J.I.’s bass drum, even before ‘Peggy Sue’ was released.
Before arriving in Sacramento, Jerry Allison (belying the image of rock drummers of later years!) got his mother to phone Peggy Sue’s mother to obtain permission to invite Peggy Sue to the show, promising her a special surprise. As far as she recalls, she hadn’t yet heard the Crickets’ records, because she didn’t listen to the radio and her own collection consisted almost entirely of records by black R&B artists. So it came as a complete surprise when at the end of the short set Buddy stepped up to the mike and quietened the audience down before announcing, ‘This is a special show tonight, and we’re playing this song for a special person’, before launching into ‘Peggy Sue’.
Even though the attention of the audience was focused on the stage, ‘I suddenly felt the whole world was looking at me. At seventeen, my sole objective in social situations was to keep from being noticed. I was so embarrassed I could have died.’ She managed to get over it, and making her way backstage with Jerry during an intermission after the set was greeted by Buddy with the words: ‘Aren’t you glad your mother named you after my new hit song?’ The favour to J.I. had worked its magic, and he was back together with Peggy Sue, who Buddy took to calling ‘Song’.
‘Peggy Sue’ was indeed high in the charts in October 1957, reaching number three on the pop sales chart and number two on the R&B chart and selling well over a million copies. In the UK, it reached number six. Cashing in on Buddy’s success, since August Decca had been releasing singles from his Nashville sessions, starting with the inferior version of ‘That’ll Be The Day’, coupled with ‘Rock Around With Ollie Vee’, and eventually including an album also titled That’ll Be The Day. There was nothing Buddy could do but wait for the supply to dry up.
For the second Crickets single, Norman Petty took the recording of ‘Oh Boy!’ made at the same sessions that had produced ‘Peggy Sue’, and added vocal backings from the Picks, somewhat in the spirit of the vocal backings on ‘That’ll Be The Day’, to distinguish it from a Buddy Holly solo release. It sounds better without them. Coupled with a similarly doctored ‘Not Fade Away’ (‘Not Fade Away’ was merely a Holly B-side!), it came out on 27 October and reached number ten in the pop sales chart, a surprisingly low thirteen on the R&B chart, but a more impressive number three in the UK. ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘Oh Boy!’ were the only American top ten hits Buddy Holly ever had, and they were all released before the end of 1957. Britain was (and remains) consistently more enthusiastic, although curiously the only Buddy Holly record that got higher in the US chart than in the UK was ‘Peggy Sue’.
With two hits in the higher reaches of the chart and ‘That’ll Be The Day’ still selling well, Buddy Holly and the Crickets needed to put an album (then simply called a long player, or LP) out quickly. The stockpile of Clovis material didn’t quite provide enough in the way of suitable masters, bearing in mind the need to maintain Buddy’s solo career as well, and with the Crickets on the road Petty found an ingenious solution to the problem.
For a week at the end of September 1957, while the Show of Stars travelled through southern states where white and black performers were not allowed to appear on stage together, the white artists on the bill had some time off. The snag was, the Norman Petty Trio was also on the road. So after a flying visit home to Lubbock, the Crickets rendezvoused with Petty at Tinker Air Force Base, near Oklahoma City, where he had set up his recording equipment, including the Ampex machine, in the officers’ club. On 29 September they recorded four new tracks: Roy Orbison’s songs ‘An Empty Cup’ and ‘You’ve Got Love’, ‘Rock Me My Baby’, and a new version of ‘Maybe Baby’. All were overdubbed with vocals by the Picks when Petty got back to Clovis.
The idea for the more ‘rock’ version of ‘Maybe Baby’ came, indirectly, from Little Richard. On the tour, the Crickets had been playing the song with what J.I. calls ‘a swing beat’ (Memories). The singer Dale Hawkins (a cousin of Ronnie Hawkins) heard the song and ‘said, “Hey, why don’t you do it with the same beat as ‘Lucille’,” which was one of Little Richard’s big hits on the show.’ So they did. The result was so good that it was released as a Crickets single in February 1958, coupled with ‘Tell Me How’. It only reached number seventeen on the US pop chart, but number four on the R&B chart and also number four in the UK.
The LP, called The Chirpin’ Crickets, came out on 27 November 1957, three days after the Show of Stars tour ended in Richmond, Virginia (later copies restored the ‘g’ to ‘Chirping’). The tracks on it were: ‘Oh Boy!’, ‘Not Fade Away’, ‘You’ve Got Love’, ‘Maybe Baby’, It’s Too Late’, ‘Tell Me How’, ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘I’m Lookin’ For Someone To Love’, ‘An Empty Cup’, ‘Send Me Some Lovin’’, ‘Last Night’, and ‘Rock Me My Baby’. Many of the songs suffer from the heavy-handed overdubbing of the Picks’ vocals, done by Petty while the Crickets were on the road. Four days later, on 1 December, the Crickets appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, performing ‘That’ll Be The Day’ and ‘Peggy Sue’ live. Niki Sullivan’s guitar wasn’t plugged in for the performance. Ed Sullivan, who was no fan of rock ’n’ roll, was to some extent won over by Holly’s natural courtesy and good manners in a short on-camera interview, but was clearly unimpressed by the music. The album never made the charts in the US, but reached number five in the UK.
On 4 December Buddy and the boys at last got back to Lubbock, which they hadn’t seen – apart from the flying visit in late September – for four months, since the beginning of August. The city took no notice at all of the return of the biggest stars – indeed, the most famous people – Lubbock had ever produced; as far as the general population was concerned, the boys might have just got back from a tiling job.
Niki Sullivan promptly announced that he was leaving the band, complaining that he was exhausted and hated touring. This was only half the story. Niki and J.I. hadn’t been getting along too well, and had occasionally even come to blows when J.I.’s horseplay got out of hand. Buddy and J.I. were long-time friends, and Joe B. was happy to play along with J.I.’s antics, so Niki was increasingly isolated. It didn’t help that he was well aware that he was contributing nothing musically.
The attitude of the other Crickets was, well, if he wants to quit, OK; no hard feelings. There was some talk of asking Sonny Curtis back into the band, but by now Sonny had his own career going, and in any case Buddy and J.I. scarcely even needed a bass player, let alone another guitarist. They decided to carry on as a trio. Niki tried and failed to make a career in music as a solo artist, and ended up working for Sony; he died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, in 2004 at the age of 66. He had shown no signs of ill-health, and completed a round of golf earlier that same day.
In early 1958, his most pressing problem was getting the quarter share of the Crickets’ earnings and the songwriting royalties that he was entitled to. Norman Petty had all the band’s money under his control, but proved so evasive that in the end Niki settled for $1,000. Adding insult to injury, his church never received the promised tithe – indeed, none of the Crickets’ churches ever received their 40 per cents. Years later, Niki told Philip Norman: ‘My dad was right in what he said the first time he ever met Norman [Petty]. “Son, NEVER trust a businessman who keeps a Bible on his desk.”’
Buddy, J.I. and Joe B. had a few days’ rest before they had to get back to work. Buddy took the opportunity to have his hair styled – he always had difficulty keeping his naturally curly hair in order – and his front teeth capped, at a cost of $596 (twice the cost of a Strat!). The bills, like all his bills, were paid for by Petty out of the band account, and occasional sums of cash were drawn for the Crickets, but getting significant amounts of money out of Norman, as Niki was discovering, was next to impossible. Eager to keep the flow of funds going in his direction, as well as signing a few cheques, around this time Petty also signed the Crickets up to three more commitments – an Alan Freed Christmas show in New York (another Holiday of Stars), a package tour with America’s Greatest Teenage Recording Stars, and a short tour of Florida. Before leaving for New York, between 17 and 19 December the trio were back recording in Clovis, with the prospect of a ‘solo’ Buddy Holly LP in mind.
The numbers they laid down were ‘Little Baby’ (credited to Holly–Petty–Kendall), ‘You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)’ (a Leiber–Stoller composition made famous by Elvis), and ‘Look at Me’ (Holly–Petty–Allison). C.W. Kendall Jr, the co-composer of ‘Little Baby’, played piano on that song, while on ‘Look at Me’ Vi played piano, and on ‘You’re So Square’ J.I., again borrowing a trick from the Rhythm Orchids, played a cardboard box. This is one of the definitive Holly–Allison musical collaborations. It was also during these sessions that Buddy and J.I., rehearsing in the studio, taped their tantalisingly incomplete versions of ‘Mona’.
The day after the sessions, Buddy picked up a brand-new car, a pink two-seater Impala V-8. But he scarcely had time to enjoy it before he was leaving Lubbock again. He may not have been too sorry to leave, since it was on this pre-Christmas visit home in 1957 that he learned that Echo McGuire had fallen for someone else; she married Ron Griffith on St Valentine’s Day in 1958.
Back in New York from 23 December 1957 to 5 January 1958, for the Freed shows ‘Buddy Holly’ and ‘the Crickets’ were, for the first time anywhere, billed as separate attractions – even though it was the same band with the same singer! For less than two weeks’ work, they were paid $4,200 – but on 28 December they were paid nearly half that, $2,000, for a single appearance playing a single song, ‘Peggy Sue’, on the Arthur Murray TV show. On stage, Buddy and the Crickets were the big hits of the show, often getting two or three encores, where the other artists got none. Off stage, the disappointment at being away from home for Christmas was compensated for by their fellow stars the Everly Brothers, who continued their education of the country boys into the delights of the big city, including dining in good restaurants, buying smart clothes, and even (according to Don and Phil themselves) suggesting the most important change to Buddy’s image. If you’re going to wear glasses, they told him, wear ones that make a statement – don’t try to hide the fact. Jerry Allison remembers giving him the same advice.
There was scarcely time for the Crickets to catch their breath after the Freed show before the Teenage Stars tour, which ran from 8 January to 24 January. Before that tour even started, Petty had signed them to join Paul Anka and Jerry Lee Lewis on a tour of Australia, with a stopover in Hawaii, starting on 27 January. But that just left time between tours to make Holly’s first recordings in New York, on 25 January 1958, at the Bell Sound Studios. The idea was Buddy’s, and the session was set up for him by Bob Thiele. Petty, anxious that Buddy was starting to branch out on his own, was present at the session; as a sop, he was allowed to play piano.
The reason why Buddy was so keen to squeeze in the session was that Sonny West and Bill Tilghman had come up with an even better song than ‘Oh Boy!’. The song was ‘Rave On’. What more is there to say? If you don’t understand that comment, all I can say is, listen to the record! The same session also produced a version of the standard ‘That’s My Desire’, which by Buddy’s standards was just a filler. Buddy didn’t play guitar on either track, concentrating on his singing. The musicians were J. I. and Joe B., Norman Petty, guitarist Al Caiola, rhythm guitarist Donald Arnone, and backing vocals from the Jivetones. It is easy to imagine the trepidation that Norman Petty must have felt at this proof that Buddy Holly didn’t need him, or his studio, to produce great records.
The Crickets’ last commitment before leaving New York was a second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. This was pretty much a disaster. Sullivan objected to their choice of ‘Oh Boy!’ as their song, even though it was their current hit, as he found the lyrics suggestive. As the show was live, Buddy played it anyway, but Sullivan childishly ordered the sound to be turned down and the lights dimmed by the engineers. Buddy never played on the Ed Sullivan Show again (surprisingly, he was asked back, but turned them down, commenting that they didn’t have enough money to make it worth his time). But the show is memorable visually for the first appearance of Buddy’s new glasses, the famous black horn-rims, purchased in New York a few days before.
Norman Petty accompanied the Crickets on their trip to Hawaii and Australia, behaving more like a tourist than a manager, but travelling, of course, at the band’s expense. If there was ever any real business to conduct, such as sorting out the billing on the shows, it was Buddy who did the negotiating. In fact, at a time when artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, who had just had a huge hit with ‘Great Balls of Fire’ and was about to reach the top with ‘Breathless’, were insisting on top billing, Buddy was more laidback, and would accept a lower spot on the bill in exchange for a larger fee. He knew his set would be great, whenever he played it; and since ‘That’ll Be The Day’, ‘Peggy Sue’, and ‘Oh Boy!’ had each reached number two in the Australian charts, everybody knew who the biggest stars of the show were, whatever the order of names or size of print on the posters.
Petty’s involvement was – well, more petty. It was felt at the time that if a recording star got married, his career would suffer because he would lose his appeal to single girls. Even five years later, John Lennon was advised to keep his marriage secret for this reason. So when J. I. announced that he intended to marry Peggy Sue, Norman suggested to Buddy that they should fire J. I. and get another drummer. Buddy retorted that since Norman was already married, perhaps they should fire him, and get another manager.
The stopover in Honolulu, necessary because the airliners of the day didn’t have the range to reach Australia in one hop, provided the opportunity for a little sightseeing and two sell-out concerts. The short Australian tour, which took in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Newcastle, was equally successful, in more ways than one. It cemented a friendship between Buddy and Paul Anka, anther prolific songwriter, and it introduced the Crickets to possibly the only genuine Australian rock ’n’ roll performer, Johnny O’Keefe, who played on the package and was best known for his big Australian hit, ‘Wild One’. On 10 February, the Crickets arrived home, also via Honolulu where they did another show, with just time to lay down a few tracks in Clovis before heading off to Florida on 20 February for a five-day tour with Jerry Lee Lewis, Bill Haley (remember him?), the Everly Brothers and the Royal Teens (who? You may well ask! Their best-selling record was a novelty number called ‘Short Shorts’, which became a feature of the stage act of Freddie and the Dreamers. Their pianist, Bob Gaudio, later became a member of the Four Seasons). While they had been in Australia, Buddy’s single coupling ‘Listen to Me’ with ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’ had been released on 5 February. Neither side charted in the US, but ‘Listen to Me’ reached number sixteen in the UK. ‘Maybe Baby’ was released a week later. The lack of success of the records in the US may indicate that the cunning plan of making almost simultaneous releases by the same artist under two names was no longer such a good idea.
Whatever the charts said, though, Buddy Holly’s powers were in no way waning. The tracks recorded between 12 February and 19 February were of the highest class. One of my personal favourites, ‘Well … All Right’, features Buddy on vocal and acoustic guitar, Joe B. on bass, and J. I. tapping the rhythm on cymbal alone. Its composition was credited to all three Crickets, plus Norman Petty, but it’s doubtful anyone contributed much except Buddy, who got the idea for the title from an expression Little Richard used to holler out on stage. Petty did make a significant contribution to the sound, though, by placing a microphone inside Buddy’s guitar. ‘Take Your Time’ (a Holly–Petty song to which Petty made a definite contribution of at least one line, the one about heartstrings singing like a ball of twine) included Petty on organ, and another of Holly’s best recordings, ‘Fool’s Paradise’, used just the standard Crickets line-up. It was written by Sonny LeGlare and Horace Linsley, although Norman Petty’s name appeared on this one as well. The last Crickets song to be recorded at this time was ‘Think It Over’, credited to Holly–Petty–Allison. From now on, where Petty deemed it appropriate, vocal backings were dubbed on later not by the Picks, but by a group called the Roses.
At the end of these sessions, two more songs were recorded with J. I. singing lead and Bo Clarke playing drums. The first was his version of ‘Wild One’, retitled ‘Real Wild Child’. The second was a jokey version of ‘Oh, You Beautiful Doll’, just to fill up the B-side of a single. They were released under the name Ivan (J. I.’s middle name) and reached number 68 on the pop chart. As Jerry put it in a later interview (The Definitive Story), ‘it started at the bottom of the charts and worked its way across.’
The Florida tour followed immediately after the recording sessions, from 20 February to 25 February. When the Everlys, who didn’t have their own backing band, were provided with incompetent amateurs to support them, Buddy and the Crickets volunteered to step into the breach, appearing behind their friends as well as in their own set. The Everlys had the tricky task of following Jerry Lee Lewis on stage. ‘Only by the grace of God and Buddy Holly and the Crickets did Don and I manage to pull it off’ (Phil Everly, The Real Buddy Holly Story); ‘when Buddy Holly came back and played for us, it was just pandemonium.’
Somewhere on the tour, possibly after the last show, in Fort Lauderdale on 25 February, a jam session involving some of the stars was recorded on tape; a snippet survives of Buddy singing part of the song ‘Drown In My Own Tears’, with Jerry Lee Lewis on piano. The same week, Coral released Buddy’s ‘solo’ LP, simply titled Buddy Holly. Like the Chirping Crickets LP, it didn’t make the album charts in the US, but fared better in the UK, where it went to number eight. The tracks on it were ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’, ‘Peggy Sue’, ‘Look At Me’, ‘Listen To Me’, ‘Valley of Tears’, ‘Ready Teddy’, ‘Everyday’, ‘Mailman, Bring Me No More Blues’, ‘Words of Love’, ‘You’re So Square’, ‘Rave On’, and ‘Little Baby’.
Still there was no rest for the Crickets. On 27 February they set off on an overnight flight to London, with tourists Norman and Vi tagging along. They were about to begin the most significant and influential tour in the entire history of popular music, which would inspire the musicians who shortly became the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Searchers, and many lesser lights such as Freddie and the Dreamers, who took Buddy’s music, tweaked it a little, and in a few years came roaring back with it across the Atlantic to lay by its ears an America that had never fully appreciated its home-grown genius. The ‘British Beat Boom of the Sixties’ began on Saturday, 1 March 1958, when Buddy Holly and the Crickets played the Trocadero cinema at London’s Elephant and Castle, and took off the following day when they appeared at the Gaumont in Kilburn and on the top British TV show of its day, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. That TV appearance gave budding guitarists such as George Harrison, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards their first chance to even see a Fender Stratocaster, while John Lennon and Paul McCartney were among the musicians with noses pressed up against the TV screens trying to work out the chords Buddy was playing.
A superb account of the British tour is provided by Philip Norman, who was sixteen when Buddy died and grew up to become the best of rock biographers. Ellis Amburn’s version is worth reading for its unintentionally hilarious vision of a mythical parallel-reality Britain, perhaps based on viewing too many bad Hollywood movies, suffocated by ‘an antiquated and repressive caste system’, with London full of ‘immaculate white town houses’, the BBC ‘the only TV and radio network’ (Sunday Night at the London Palladium was actually on the rival ITV), and many more. Amburn also seems to be under the delusion that Australia is part of the United Kingdom. If this is any guide, it’s small wonder that some people who knew Buddy describe the Amburn book as containing elements of fiction.
Instead of trying to cover the same ground as Philip Norman, I’ll content myself with offering one representative review from the tour, and one anecdote about Buddy Holly. After their performance in Birmingham, the review read:
Buddy Holly, leader of the group, is a studious-looking young man who totes his electric guitar like a sawn-off shot-gun and carries around a giant-sized amplifier which even made the Town Hall organ pipes flinch. Mr Holly is 70 per cent of the act. He plays and sings with brash exuberance, and adds a few Presley-like wiggles which had the teenage audience squealing with delight. The rest of the group consists of a bass player whose ability was lost in the noise and a drummer who plays with sledge-hammer precision.
At every gig, among the thousands of squealing girls there were dozens of teenage boys looking on in wonder and thinking: ‘I could do that. I want to do that!’ On 14 March, one of those kids at the Woolwich Granada was fourteen-year-old Mick Jagger, attending his first-ever rock ’n’ roll show, and hearing ‘Not Fade Away’ for the first time anywhere. The ‘giant-sized’ amplifier (a 50-watt Fender Bassman, with four ten-inch speakers, designed for electric bass but much favoured by guitarists of the day) would seem pathetically small by modern standards, but one of the wonders of the British tour for those boys was how Buddy and J. I. managed to play so loud (Joe B., as the review suggests, couldn’t be heard at all more than a couple of rows back from the stage). The other wonder was that the Crickets sounded exactly the same on stage as they did on record. This was literally unheard of.
In order to appreciate the Buddy Holly story, you need to know what kind of British package tour the Crickets were on. This wasn’t a Show of Teenage Recording Stars like the American package tours, but a variety show including an orchestra playing Glenn Miller-type music, ballad singers, and even a juggling act. Buddy and the Crickets were the only rock ’n’ roll act, top of the bill, and the group everyone wanted to see, but first the audience had to sit through all the rest. The compere of the show, introducing the acts, was a young comedian called Des O’Connor.
He recalls: ‘We were touring with the Ronnie Keene Orchestra, which had 28 musicians with a front line of 16 brass, then out come the Crickets, just three of them, and I couldn’t make out how they were making ten times as much noise. It was so exciting and vibrant and I knew that something exciting was happening.’ (Memories)
Buddy used to watch the comedian’s act from the wings, fascinated by his interaction with the audience, and got Des to teach him a few jokes, which he tried out between the Crickets’ numbers. Getting a good response, he added more patter as the tour went on. Writing home on 22 March, he told his parents: ‘Everyone commented on how my jokes get bigger laughs than the comedian on the show, Des O’Connor.’ Des says that this is not surprising, since he had been using O’Connor’s jokes, but delivering them ‘in a real Southern drawl … the audience loved his accent, and jokes that I wouldn’t get laughs with would be downright funny when he delivered them’ (Memories). In exchange, at the end of the tour Buddy gave Des an acoustic guitar he’d bought in England. Des never learned to play, but it’s still one of his treasured possessions.
As an example of Buddy’s stage banter, on this tour he used to introduce ‘Rip It Up’ like this:
Here’s a sad little song with tender lyrics that really tell a story. This tune is likely to reduce you all to tears, not because of the sadness of the words, but on account of the pathetic way we sing it.
The audiences loved it.
The Crickets played their last show in London on 25 March 1958. As soon as they were back in the States, they joined an exhausting 44-day tour as part of Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show. Many old friends were on the tour, including Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis, but that didn’t make it any less tiring. One thing that did make it less tiring was that on this well-organised tour many of the journeys between gigs were made by air – even if the planes involved were often rickety ex-World War Two DC3 Dakotas.
By now, Buddy, J.I. and Joe B. had realised that sending money back to Clovis as Norman Petty demanded (they were often paid, in cash, a share of the receipts at the shows) was equivalent, for all their chances of seeing it again, to throwing it out of the window of one of the DC3s. So Buddy took care of the finances. Sometimes he would share the money out on a ‘one for you, one for me’ basis, counting out each dollar bill with mock seriousness. More often, he would throw it in a heap on the bed of one of their hotel rooms, and the three of them would dive in to grab what they could. While they were on this tour, on 20 April Coral released ‘Rave On’/‘Take Your Time’ as the latest Buddy Holly single. This was the first single under Buddy’s solo name to feature backing vocals; since the Jivetones were recorded with Buddy at the same session, the feel is, ironically, more like ‘That’ll Be The Day’ than any of the other Crickets singles to date, with the backing vocals in the background where they belong, instead of being too intrusive as a result of being overdubbed later with too heavy a hand. One of the great records of the rock ’n’ roll era, ‘Rave On’ reached a pathetic number 37 in the US pop chart, but soared to number five in the UK.
The tour ended early in May, a few days prematurely, after trouble broke out during a show in Boston and a Navy sailor was stabbed. This happened outside the arena where the show was on, but inside the arena there was also a disturbance caused by white youths who objected to black and white performers appearing on stage together. This became known as the ‘Boston riot’, and led to the cancellation of the last few legs of the tour by city authorities looking for an excuse to ban rock ’n’ roll.
With money in their pockets and the first free time they had had in months, on the way home the trio stopped off in Dallas to buy motorcycles. They wanted Harley-Davidsons, but the sales staff at the Harley dealership didn’t believe they had the money to pay for them, and treated them as timewasters. So the Crickets went across town to the Triumph dealership, where they and their money were welcomed with open arms. They bought an Ariel Cyclone for Buddy, a Triumph Trophy for J.I., a Thunderbird for Joe B., and all the appropriate clothing carrying the Triumph emblem, for a total of around $3,000. Then they headed off for Lubbock, taking care to roar past the Harley dealership on the way.
With cash in hand, Buddy was also eager to repay his debts – the $1,000 he owed Larry, and, to their astonishment, twice what they had lent him, and long since written off, to all the friends who had supported him in the hard times.
On 25 May, after a short break relaxing, fooling around on their motorbikes and generally having a good time, the Crickets returned to Clovis for more recording sessions. There, they joined up with a guitarist called Tommy Allsup. Allsup, who was five years older than Buddy, was an established musician from Oklahoma, who had been doing session work in Clovis. His style, picking one string at a time, was a world away from Buddy Holly’s ‘rhythm lead’, which involved playing chords across all six strings at once, as on the ‘Peggy Sue’ solo – this technique derived partly from Buddy’s experience playing banjo. But Allsup was a brilliant guitarist who Holly immediately invited to join the recordings. Buddy didn’t care about playing second fiddle – or second guitar – behind someone who could contribute something new and worthwhile to the Buddy Holly sound.
The first two tracks recorded with Allsup were ‘Lonesome Tears’ (Holly) and ‘It’s So Easy’ (Holly–Petty), both featuring Buddy on vocal and acoustic guitar, Tommy Allsup on lead guitar, Joe B. on bass and J. I. on drums. Next came a beautiful Bob Montgomery song, ‘Heartbeat’, recorded using the same line-up except that Joe B. was replaced by a session musician, 37-year-old George Atwood. Norman (and, by his acquiescence, presumably Buddy as well) had got tired of trying to work around Joe B.’s mistakes. According to Atwood (Memories), he is also the uncredited bass player on some of the earlier Holly records; sometimes, he says, Norman Petty would record a new track by the Crickets twice, once with them all miked up and once with a board between Joe B. and the others, so that his bass couldn’t be heard on the tape. ‘If Joe B. got it wrong, I’d go in and add a bass to it.’ ‘Heartbeat’ should have been a huge hit for Buddy; but the song had to wait until 1992 for Nick Berry to take an anaemic cover of it to number two in the UK, admittedly on the back of its use in the TV series of the same name.
In a clear sign of the way (one of the ways!) Buddy saw his career developing, the next session, a week later, didn’t involve any other Crickets at all. With Bob Montgomery, Buddy had written two songs that he wanted to offer to his friends the Everly Brothers, and had no intention of releasing himself. With Buddy singing lead (and dual-tracking himself to produce an Everly Brothers-type sound) and playing acoustic guitar, Allsup on lead guitar, Atwood on bass and Bo Clarke on drums, he recorded ‘Love’s Made A Fool Of You’ and ‘Wishing’.
Ever the perfectionist, Holly didn’t dash these off as mere demos, but produced (and by now he was the producer, even if it was Norman Petty’s studio) complete, finished recordings of the highest standard. It is impossible to imagine anyone else who could have produced such perfect hit material and then offered it to someone else; nor is it easy to understand why, when the songs were eventually released, Petty found it necessary to add more instrumentation. Don and Phil were eager to record the songs, especially ‘Wishing’, but their management wouldn’t allow this, because the songs weren’t published by the people with whom they had a financial connection. They wanted the brothers to record only songs that would bring the management publishing income – preferably songs by husband-and-wife team Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, part of the same outfit. To soften the blow, the official reason given for the rejection was that the Holly versions were so good that the Everlys wouldn’t be able to compete if Coral decided to issue them.
In the week between the recording of ‘Heartbeat’ and the session for the two Holly–Montgomery songs, Buddy received his formal request to report for a medical examination to see if he was fit for his statutory period of military service. His 20/800 eyesight and ulcer were more than enough to have him classified 4-F and leave him free to continue his career. But he was in no hurry. Apart from these sessions, which hardly counted as work, having been touring or recording almost continuously from the beginning of August 1957 until the beginning of May 1958, for the first time the Crickets had a few weeks to enjoy the fruits of their success. Even then, an offer of another tour came in, but Buddy turned it down flat. When J. I. suggested that they should grab the opportunity to make money while the offers were still coming in, he replied: ‘What if you get killed tomorrow? And you didn’t have any time to enjoy the money we’ve already made? What about that? If we just work all the time and don’t enjoy ourselves? And I said, “You’re right!” That was a whole new thought for me.’ (J. I., The Real Buddy Holly Story). Allison remains grateful to this day that he took Buddy’s advice, and his friend did indeed enjoy his holiday.
June 1958 gave the Crickets a rare opportunity to do some promotional work, flying to California, where among other things they visited Buddy’s publishers, Southern Music, in Hollywood, and Buddy was interviewed on TV in San Francisco. On 18 June, J. I. and Joe B. flew back to Lubbock, but Buddy went to New York to carry out a solo recording session at the request of Dick Jacobs, who had recently taken over from Bob Thiele as head of A&R at Coral.
The background to the request was unusual. A young singer-songwriter called Bobby Darin had been making unsuccessful records on the Atco label, and was coming to the end of his contract. Fed up with Atco, he was planning to move to Brunswick, and had already recorded two songs for them, a great rocker called ‘Early In The Morning’ and the very inferior ‘Now We’re One’, to be used as his first single for them, under the name the Ding Dongs. But just before his contract with Atco ran out, they released a novelty number by Darin called ‘Splish Splash’, whose lyric, incidentally, includes a reference to Peggy Sue and girls from other songs.
When ‘Splish Splash’ proved a surprise hit, Atco renewed Darin’s contract; when they learned about the Brunswick session, they demanded the tapes so that they could release ‘Early In The Morning’ themselves. Furious at losing both Darin and the song, Dick Jacobs got Buddy to record the same two songs, using the same producer (himself), the same arrangement, the same musicians, and the same backing singers, in the same location, the splendidly named Pythian Temple studio in New York. This recording, made on 19 June 1958, gives a whole new depth of meaning to the term ‘cover version’. Rushed into the shops on 5 July, the single reached number 32 on what was by August, when the record charted, the Hot 100, and number seventeen in the UK. Darin’s version got to number 24 on the Hot 100.
‘Early In The Morning’ was the first Buddy Holly record that I actually saw, since one of my uncles had a copy; he later passed it on to me, and I still have it. Apart from this personal connection, the significance of these events lies not so much in the record, although it’s excellent, but the fact that Buddy was acting completely independently of the other Crickets or Norman Petty. ‘Early In The Morning’ was the first genuine Buddy Holly solo single.
Around this time, Buddy made another significant move away from his West Texas background and towards a future in New York; he decided to marry Maria Elena Santiago. As with the recording of ‘Early In The Morning’, though, the story is not quite what it seems at first sight.
The romantic version of the story, promoted by Maria Elena after Buddy’s death, says that on some unspecified date in June 1958, Buddy, J.I. and Joe B. paid a visit to Murray Deutch at Peer–Southern in New York. Maria Elena, who was then 25 years old, was a Puerto Rican from a middle-class family who was living with her aunt, an executive who ran the Latin-American division at Peer–Southern. Because of this connection, she was filling in as a receptionist at Peer–Southern, where her Spanish came in useful. So she happened to be sitting at her desk outside the door to Deutch’s inner office when the Crickets arrived. While waiting for Deutch to be free, the boys got to fooling around and flirting with her, and there was an instant spark between her and Buddy. Buddy begged her to go on a date that night, but even at the age of 25 Maria Elena was in the strict care of her aunt, Provi, who only reluctantly agreed after checking round the company with people like Murray Deutch to find out what kind of a young man Buddy was.
Over dinner, Buddy proposed. Maria Elena thought he was kidding, but in the spirit of the game said he would need her aunt’s permission – sure that he would never ask, and that if he did he would never get it. At nine o’clock the next morning, Buddy turned up at the apartment Maria Elena and Provi shared, and charmed the aunt, a strict, Catholic, Latin American lady, into agreeing. The rest, as they say, is history.
Only, it couldn’t have happened quite like that. Over the years, after reading this story many times in different places, I’d always wondered why Buddy had never met Maria Elena on his previous visits to Peer–Southern. He could hardly have failed to notice a pretty, petite Puerto Rican girl sitting outside Murray Deutch’s door! It was only when I was researching the material for this book that I learned about an interview Maria Elena gave to 16 magazine early in 1959, which gives an only slightly less romantic account of the only slightly less whirlwind romance that actually took place.
In that interview, Maria Elena says that the pair met ‘early’ in January 1958, which probably means before the Teenage Recording Stars tour. Since then, she had often seen Buddy around Peer–Southern, but at first only to say hello or nod a greeting in passing. The spark between them occurred when she was lunching with a friend at Howard Johnson’s one day and the Crickets, accompanied by Norman Petty, turned up and were invited to join the girls. This would probably have been in late January 1958, around the time of the ‘Rave On’ session. It was after this meeting, according to the 16 interview, that Buddy turned to Petty and said: ‘You see that girl? I’m going to marry her.’
The date of this remark explains why the later exchanges between Petty and Buddy about J. I.’s plans to get married were so heated. But it was ‘months’ later, probably around the time of the Big Beat tour, that Buddy and Maria Elena got closer together and shared a kiss in the back of a taxi. Maria Elena certainly attended one of the early performances of Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show in New York in March, accompanied by Sonny Curtis. While Buddy was touring, they kept in touch by phone three or four times a day, and it was in June, around the time of the ‘Early In The Morning’ session, that they jointly sought and got Aunt Provi’s approval of the marriage.
This account fits the dates when Buddy was in New York, allowing that nobody’s memory is perfect. The romantic myth version of the story seems to have combined the events of January, March and late June 1958 into one hectic couple of days. But whatever the details of the romance, what matters in personal terms is that Buddy and Maria Elena fell in love, and determined to get married in spite of the obvious problems of a white Baptist boy marrying a Catholic Latina girl. In professional terms, what matters is that Norman Petty rightly saw Maria Elena as a threat to his already-slipping grip on Buddy Holly, not least since her family connections would give her access to the true records of how much money he was siphoning off from the Crickets. He must have realised that Buddy would soon be gone, and he was right. But the momentum of the Crickets sustained the increasingly rocky professional relationship for another four months before the inevitable split.