B009HOTHPE EBOK (11 page)

People called Bobby Darin obnoxious and arrogant, brash and cocky. Darin’s real name was Walden Robert Cassotto. He wasn’t exactly a pretty boy. He had the rugged good looks of a bulbous-nosed, crooked-mouthed hood, but still attractive—a John Garfield type. Like me, Bobby sprang from obscurity in 1958 and became famous with a recording of one of his own compositions, a rock ’n’ roll ditty called “Splish Splash.” Later on he made a hip transition into the adult field with “Mack the Knife,” from Kurt Weill’s
Threepenny Opera
. Louis Armstrong had made a successful recording of it a few years earlier.

Darin’s dad was a hoodlum, but he’d died several months before Bobby was born, so he never knew him. Darin used to say, “I have a chip on my shoulder. Who wouldn’t? The only person I loved until I met my wife Sandra Dee last year was my mother, and she died, too.” He talked this tough-guy dialogue straight out of the movies. He’d been brought up by his grandmother, a vaudeville singer, and one of the odd things about his childhood was that he only learned years later, at age thirty-two, that Giovannina Cassotto, who he thought was his elder sister, was actually his mother.

Bobby was kind of an acrobat, very agile, and would try anything. I think if the microphone cord had been long enough, he would have climbed the curtains! He was the king of the finger snappers. He picked up the old Sinatra trick of snapping his fingers with sexy innuendo to the beat of the music.

Buddy Holly was an entirely different story. He had a soft shyness about him. Very straightforward kind of guy. I was impressed with his guitar-driven sound and he respected what I did as a songwriter and business-wise. Buddy was aware of me even before his record, “That’ll Be the Day,” climbed the charts. In the beginning I was Buddy Holly’s nemesis. Buddy and I were neck-and-neck all the way with “That’ll Be the Day” and “Diana.” He’d look at my picture in record-shop windows and say, “Who is this kid Anka, anyway? And who does he think he is, pushing me off the charts?”

Buddy’s closest friends on the tours were The Everly Brothers, especially Phil. Phil was very high-strung and fastidious—meticulous, very organized but with a sense of humor. They were all from the South, the Everlys and Buddy, and had both started out in country music. Like me, Buddy wrote his own songs so he wasn’t dependent on outside writers like Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, who wrote the Everlys’ songs. He also had his own group, The Crickets; he didn’t play with pickup bands like the Everlys. We were all buddies, but those guys had that country-western, Southern clique thing going, and at the end of the day were in a bag all of their own.

The difference between me and the Southern boys was that I wasn’t a guitar player, I had no idea where all of that was going, that guitar-driven rock sound. But in 1957, who could have guessed what the next wave of rock would be: the group sound with wailing electric guitars. The incredible sound that Buddy got on his guitar was the secret ingredient he passed on to The Beatles and The Rolling Stones—all the British bands. They were all ultimately disciples of Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry. They were very influential with everybody in the next generation that way. You found that out as time went by and you talked with English musicians that the guitar was the key to the new sound. When we would go to Great Britain, you could see his influence right away, how his guitar-playing style was adopted by the bands over there along with Bo Diddley’s and Chuck Berry’s.

Buddy was not a sophisticated person at all. He was very raw, simple, modest, and sensitive, a country boy, guided by Norman Petty, his manager, and not unlike a lot of us on tour with our managers. Whether it was Irv Feld or Norman Petty, we were always told to keep it clean. No smoking or drinking or drugs. Buddy was a beer drinker, all the Southern boys were, but it was not something you would see very often out in the open.

In the beginning we all used to tease Buddy about the dopey glasses he wore when we first went on tour together. We talked him into wearing the big black glasses that became his trademark. Buddy liked the way the Everlys dressed—they always looked very natty in their Brooks Brothers suits, that three-button British look. As soon as Buddy hit New York he went straight to Brooks Brothers.

Buddy’s influence was in the simplicity of his approach—he was hip in the sense that he was quick to pick up on things. The influence of his Fender Stratocaster sound was where all his genius lay. In Britain they’d never seen anything like it. They thought it was an outer-space guitar. English kids found his guitar sound sexy, and the glasses only added to his appeal among British teenagers. And then there was that great hiccupy way he sang, “Love like yours will surely come my way,
A-hey, A-hey-hey
.” His ’55 Stratocaster got stolen on that tour and he had to finish it with a blond Gibson.

In comparison, Elvis was a different animal altogether—sexy and dangerous. The look couldn’t have been more different. There was no overt sexuality with Buddy like there was with Elvis. Buddy was also a singer-songwriter and that was the big difference between Elvis the entertainer and Buddy the confessional storyteller of his own life. That was the key change for The Beatles, The Stones, etc., so Buddy’s influence in the end was more far-reaching than Elvis’s. Elvis was a larger-than-life CinemaScope American image. Buddy provided the scaled-down guitar-band blueprint for most of the ’60s bands, especially in Great Britain.

I was the kid—and a singer to boot. Like kids in bands are today, the Southern boys were guitar mechanics. I barely knew one guitar from another. They’d tease me with questions like, “Hey kid, what’s the difference between a Stratocaster and a Les Paul?” Who knew? Buddy gave me an old acoustic guitar and that’s what I wrote “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” on.

Eddie Cochran was the other guitar slinger who had a huge influence on the next generation of rockers. Eddie Cochran became a rock hero in the sixties on the basis of “Nervous Breakdown” and “Summertime Blues.” In terms of attitude he was way ahead of his time.

On these big tours with as many as twenty different acts on the bill, I always had to combat the fact that I was a young unsophisticated kid, a little different from anyone else in the show and a little too successful for my own health. Kids can be cruel and they are even crueler in their teens. I’m not black, I’m not a Southern boy, and I was doing Canada and my own thing and was very outspoken, so the other acts started out with a real attitude toward me. They had no intention of becoming buddy-buddy with me, but despite that we ultimately became friends. As you can imagine it was a constant battle of egos, and I was their prime target. I was always thinking differently and I looked different. My ambitions were alien to them. Vegas and that whole Sinatra Rat Pack thing is what I aspired to, and they couldn’t identify with that at all.

*   *   *

After playing in Pittsburgh, we headed into the southern United States to places that I had never been to or knew much about. In the late 1950s, the civil rights protests were happening and I saw horrendous scenes of racism firsthand in those cities that I’ll never forget. It was a depressing spectacle. On the tours we had white and black performers traveling together and this caused problems when we stopped at places in the Deep South.

On the way from Atlanta to New Orleans, police stopped the bus and segregated us, putting all the white performers on one bus and all the blacks on the other.

In Canada I hadn’t been exposed to any of that. I was disgusted by it. The magic of rock ’n’ roll may have brought black and white kids together, but it didn’t keep people from getting their heads cracked. Police dogs attacking defenseless blacks on the street, police spraying crowds with water hoses and swinging their clubs at protesters. We performed in cities where both audiences and performers were segregated, the black acts invariably treated like second-class citizens. The black performers could sing on stage, but offstage they encountered prejudice whenever they tried to enter segregated public places.

When black acts couldn’t get into hotels and restaurants we’d all eat and sleep on the bus. We couldn’t go to restaurants together, either. I had to go in and get food for my black friends. There were separate bathrooms for the black performers, who could only get to use them by going in through the back door, so what we’d do was slow the bus down, open the door, and piss outside.

I was the only white kid on the bus in some cases. The only redeeming thing about it was being thrown into that experience. Going down South and seeing how they treated black artists was eye-opening. Outside the realm of show business it was a racist world—North or South. For a young Canadian kid it was a scary time.

The black acts—Chuck Berry, Fats Domino, the guys who had a string of hits and had the most exciting acts—closed the shows. You wouldn’t want to follow these guys anyway. Black experience is what’s driven every decade of American music. Back then I didn’t have the experience. I had the hits, but the older black acts like Fats Domino had the chops. Anyway Irv would be the one to decide who closed the show—there was no argument about it.

By rights Chuck should have closed the shows, but mid-tour he bizarrely insisted he
open
the show. This puzzled everyone until we realized that if he went on early he could cruise the audience for girls while the other acts were playing. Chuck Berry was the guy, but touring got kind of funky for him because of the racial laws on the road. When we were in North Carolina, Chuck stopped the bus at a roadside café, and everybody piled out. The owner, backed up by some scary-looking patrons, shouted out, “We don’t serve niggers!”

“That’s all right, I don’t eat ’em,” Berry replied and everybody laughed. Nobody ate and the bus moved on. Buddy Holly always joined the protest; he was very vocal, as we all were. We would tell these bigoted restaurant owners, “If you won’t feed these guys, we’re not going to eat here, either.” Not that they cared.

At another show the son of the white mayor bought a ticket to the show and then found himself sitting among black kids. He went to the box office and said there must be a mistake and wanted to get another seat. But they told him, “Sorry, son, the show is sold out.” He asked for his money back.

Since the tours of the late ’50s always featured black performers, we tried to figure out ways to get around the absurd rules in the South.

When we performed in certain areas one side of the audience would be divided into two sections: blacks on the left, whites to the right, with a curtain dividing them down the center!

Even backstage the restrictions didn’t break down: the black performers had their section and we had ours. When we got to Birmingham, the chief of police came to check out all the performers because of The Crests. They had a hit with “Sixteen Candles.” It was a truly interracial group. The lead singer, Johnny Maestro, was Italian-American, and there were three blacks (including one female) and a Puerto Rican. As you can imagine Southern cops had a serious problem with that. When they came backstage, they were horrified to see whites, blacks, and Puerto Ricans all mingling together. The police chief was apoplectic. “There’s a nigger on stage with white musicians!” he yelled. “We don’t abide that kinda behavior down here.” “What kind of behavior would that be?” Irv asked. The police chief just stomped out of the theater. Allen and Irv tried to protect the black kids from the worst excesses of racist cops, but it wasn’t easy.

It was right on the cusp of integration so everyone was pushing the boundaries from both sides. If you didn’t provoke the racist bullshit by defying their stupid rules, you weren’t really pushing the envelope—you were just acquiescing. The situation down South seriously aggravated the black performers, they’d do things to deliberately piss people off, like bringing white girls up to the room. That was either asking for trouble or the beginning of integration, depending on the way you looked at it.

The racist element only added fuel to the fire: rock ’n’ roll was the new plague and the press, even the so-called respectable press, exploited the situation ruthlessly. One of the worst incidents I remember was in Hershey, Pennsylvania. It was a phony alarm—but when has that ever stopped the press? Most of the stuff you read about was instigated by the press. At that show
Life
magazine was trying to get kids to take off their shirts—they were actually
paying
kids to act up, so they’d have good photographs of a rock ’n’ roll riot. And once
Life
had started this nonsense, all the other magazines started trying to get kids to do the same thing and up the ante. They’d give them money and say, “Tear up the seat!” “Throw trash!’ “Start a fight!” “Take your shirts off.” They wanted to stage it. To show that rock-and-roll was running wild.

Back then we were getting criticized like crazy, they were all over us, saying, “This music’s abominable, it’s a menace, it turns kids into juvenile delinquents!” Allen and Irv got tipped off what they were up to and kept a close eye on the concerts to make sure that didn’t happen.

The white Southern boys and the blacks all smoked weed in those days, but it was never out in the open. Pot smoking was pretty much hidden behind closed doors—the window open, the wet towel under the door—because the managers strictly forbade it on the tours. They were all sneaking, hiding it. Everybody had to be very cool about it or you got thrown off the tour, but we all knew who was getting high and who wasn’t, for sure. Even as far back as Ray Charles, pot, cocaine, heroin, and all that stuff was around.

Frankie Lymon, he’d be shooting up in the stall in the bathroom, you know, before the show, or late at night when nobody’s looking on the bus. He’d tie up, get high. We all knew what he was doing, it was so out there. Nobody said anything but you’d see it through the crack in the door of the stall. When they needed it, they needed it, that’s all there was to it. Nobody wanted to go cold turkey on tour. We all knew who in the cast was doing what. And it wasn’t just the black performers. Dion DiMucci, polite little Italian boy from New York, I remember him doing heroin, too. There’s so many times Irv or Allen Bloom had to go down to the local jail, bail him out.