Buddy Holly: Biography (35 page)

Since Maria Elena didn’t have a driver’s license, she couldn’t take turns at the wheel and Buddy had to drive constantly, without anyone to relieve him. The long distances between one-night stands soon left him tired and testy. In mid-October 1958, following a performance in upstate New York and late for a show in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Buddy floorboarded the Cadillac as soon as they pulled onto the turnpike. The needle on the speedometer climbed steadily from seventy to ninety. Just behind the Cadillac, in the band’s car, Bob Linville noticed that Buddy was getting too far ahead and decided to catch up, although it meant breaking the speed limit. As their speedometers hovered around ninety-five, the sound of police sirens split the night air and suddenly the highway was full of flashing lights. They all stopped and waited for the inevitable confrontation. Did Buddy have any idea how fast he was going? the policeman inquired. Buddy made a wisecrack and got hauled into the station house. Later, under a bright light at the sergeant’s desk, the cop looked at Buddy, did a double take, and asked him if he was a performer.

Buddy irritably informed the cop that he was in Alan Freed’s “Biggest Show of Stars” tour. At that point the cop smiled brightly and asked for his autograph. Buddy looked at his watch. If they left immediately, they could make the Scranton show—maybe. The signature he scribbled on a piece of paper as he dashed from the station house was utterly illegible. They made it to Scranton’s Catholic Youth Center without a second to spare.

Toward the end of the tour Buddy told Jerry and Joe B. that he was firing Petty and moving to New York. One can only speculate about what finally pushed Buddy over the edge, but everyone involved seems to agree that it was his marriage to Maria Elena. Petty objected to her so viscerally that it became impossible for Buddy to continue his association with Petty. Also, Maria Elena was filling Buddy’s ears with “things that [Petty] didn’t want me to find or Buddy to find,” such as all those not very kosher business practices of Petty’s, of which Maria Elena and Aunt Provi had proof.

Buddy expected Jerry and Joe B. to go along with him on both decisions: Petty’s firing and the move to New York. Joe B. was against it. He was still under the influence of Petty, who had convinced him that he would be cheated by Yankee record executives. Jerry went along with Buddy on the understanding that he’d receive a share of Prism Records. Jerry then informed Petty that they were leaving Texas and resettling in Manhattan. For the present, no one told Petty that he was being fired.

After the tour, Buddy’s relations with the Crickets remained tenuous. They did not perform with him during the October 21 Pythian Temple “string session” in New York that produced, in three and a half hours, what writer Mark Steuer has called “the most inventive music of 1950’s rock”: “True Love Ways,” a song Buddy had just written, and “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which was composed expressly for Buddy by Paul Anka. In his book
The Best Rock ’n’ Roll Records of All Time,
Jimmy Guterman cites Buddy’s recording of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” as “perhaps the only instance of a great version of a song written by Paul Anka,” though Frank Sinatra, who would make Anka’s “My Way” his signature song, would hardly agree.

A number of Buddy’s friends were present in the studio, including Peggy Sue. “I met them after the Canadian tour right before the Pythian Temple session,” Peggy Sue recounted in 1994. “Maria Elena was there, as were Jerry, Joe B., Norman and Vi Petty, and Jo Harper from Peer-Southern.” Hal Buksbaune, Decca’s art director and session photographer, also attended. Dick Jacobs produced the session, though it had come about as a result of a conversation between Buddy and Petty, who advised Buddy that the new songs he’d been writing, such as “True Love Ways,” would be more effective with violins. In view of Buddy’s recent differences with the band, he feared that the Crickets would assume he was “going against them,” Buddy said, but Petty assured him that no one was trying to break up the band.

According to Dick Jacobs, Petty wanted to wean Buddy from rock ’n’ roll and turn him into a pop singer. Every time Petty visited Decca’s offices in New York, he continued to promote the idea of a string session. Finally Buddy admitted that the more he thought about violins, the more he liked the idea. “Buddy was growing up, and so, perhaps, was rock and roll,”
Rolling Stone
’s Ed Ward later wrote. Buddy was the first major Caucasian rock star to use a string session, Jacobs later told Wayne Jones. There is no question that Buddy’s decision was instrumental in expanding the vocabulary of rock ’n’ roll.

Journalist William J. Bush wrote in
Guitar Player
in 1982 that the violinists for Buddy’s string session were recruited from the New York Philharmonic and the old NBC Symphony, which had been founded for Arturo Toscanini’s radio concerts and survived as the American Symphony under the baton of Leopold Stokowski. Buddy selected four songs to record with the violinists and told Jacobs to create the orchestrations. One of the songs was dropped when Paul Anka’s “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” became a last-minute addition. The others were “Raining in My Heart” by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, “Moondreams” by Petty, and “True Love Ways” by Buddy. Referring to “Raining in My Heart,” Don Everly later told Kurt Loder that the song had been written for the Everly Brothers by the Bryants, but Don and Phil didn’t think it was “right” for them and decided to give it to Buddy.

Several hours before the Pythian Temple session began, Buddy rushed into Jacobs’s office carrying his guitar. Paul Anka had just finished writing a song and presented it to Buddy on an exclusive basis, Buddy informed Jacobs, and Buddy was determined to cut it during the session. It was impossible, Jacobs said; they were scheduled to go into the studio in three hours, at eight
P.M.
Buddy kept insisting that the Anka song was “fantastic,” Jacobs later told Wayne Jones. Finally Jacobs relented and asked Buddy for the lead sheet. Buddy looked at him blankly and admitted that he didn’t have one but would be glad to sing the song for Jacobs’s copyist. As Buddy sang, Jacobs devised the “pizzicato arrangement for the strings,” Jacobs later explained. By eight
P.M.
they were ready to start recording, beginning with “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” At the last minute Paul Anka burst into the studio. Years later he still recalled the moment with pride, telling TV host Phil Donahue in 1977, just before singing “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” on Donahue’s show, “I wrote this song for the late Buddy Holly.”

When Peggy Sue entered the Pythian Temple studio that day in October 1958, the atmosphere was heavy with excitement and tension. She was awestruck by the sight of the full orchestra, waiting for Buddy to take charge. The prospect of some of the finest classical musicians in New York working under the direction of a Lubbock rocker who couldn’t read a note of music was as incongruous as it was funny, though there was no laughter, at least at the beginning of the session. The musicians included violinists Sylvan Shulman, Leo Kruczek, Leonard Posner, Irving Spice, Ray Free, Herbert Bourne, Julius Held, and Paul Winter. David Schwartz and Howard Kay played violas, and Maurice Brown and Maurice Bialin were the cellists. Doris Johnson played harp; Al Caiola, guitar; Sanford Bloch, bass; Ernest Hayes, piano; Clifford Leeman, drums; and Abraham “Boomie” Richman, a veteran of Tommy Dorsey’s orchestra, played tenor sax. Peggy Sue would later tell Griggs that the violinists at first were “real snobbish” and made it clear that they disdained rock ’n’ roll, but Buddy “didn’t let anybody shake him up,” she added.

Before they started to work, Buddy posed for a photo with the musicians in the background. According to Peggy Sue, he then indicated that he knew exactly the sound he wanted and that the recording would be “the way he heard it or it wasn’t going to be.” Describing the moment to Griggs in 1987, Peggy Sue noted that rock ’n’ strings, as the new subgenre could be called, “had not been tried before, and there was a lot of prejudice against rock music at the time.” She lauded the “maturity” that twenty-two-year-old Buddy displayed in taking charge of the orchestra. He handled them “beautifully,” she said. Dick Jacobs later told Griggs that as they did a quick run-through of the arrangements, Buddy appeared “very apprehensive” but his conduct was “untemperamental” and later “completely relaxed.”

His extraordinary collaboration with the string section would take rock music into heretofore uncharted territory, with far-reaching consequences for the rock ballad, later perfected by Roy Orbison in grand opuses such as “It’s Over” and “In Dreams.” The Pythian Temple session would also have an impact on C&W music, though that impact would not be felt until the early 1960s, when Owen Bradley, who had failed Buddy in Nashville, added lush Holly-type string arrangements to Brenda Lee’s No. 1 hit “I’m Sorry” and Patsy Cline’s “True Love” and “So Wrong.”

After the playback of take one of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Buddy and the musicians looked at each other and broke into broad smiles, realizing they’d achieved a perfect recording on the first try. A grateful Dick Jacobs, who was expecting at least a three-hour session, predicted that at the rate Buddy was going they’d be finished in “one hour flat.” He was amazed that Buddy recorded the Anka tune exactly as rehearsed, changing nothing.

“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” has more in common with Paul Anka’s weightier compositions, such as “My Way” and “(You’re) Havin’ My Baby,” than it does with earlier Anka standards like “Diana” and “Lonely Boy.” With perception and power, the song lays out the successive stages of grief that one goes through at the end of a love affair: denial, anger, acceptance, and hope. Buddy offsets the seriousness of the song by giving it the same propulsive force that made “Maybe Baby” so zesty and stirring. Jacobs later told Griggs that Paul Anka “flipped out” when everyone in the studio agreed that Buddy had scored a surefire hit on take one; Anka walked around grinning, deliriously happy.

Jacobs found that it wasn’t necessary, as it was with all the other artists who recorded at the Pythian Temple, to place Buddy in an isolation booth or have him wear earphones. Those measures were normally taken in order to prevent “leakage” of the soloist’s voice and to ensure that the orchestra wasn’t picked up by the performer’s mike. Buddy sang quietly, and all Jacobs had to do was turn up the “gain” on his mike to achieve an ideal mix of voice and instrumentalists. Buddy stood “out cold in the studio, in front of the orchestra, just like the singers with the old dance bands,” Jacobs later revealed in
Rockin’ 50s
magazine.

They recorded “True Love Ways” next. Its serene and haunting melody was inspired by one of Buddy’s favorite black gospel hymns, “I’ll Be All Right,” as recorded by the Angelic Gospel Singers on Nashboro Records. Though “True Love Ways” would never make Billboard’s Top 40, it reached No. 25 in England. The song seems to glide along as if in perpetual motion, slowly enough to look back upon itself and admire its perfection. The singer portrays love as a state of being or a condition of the soul, compounded of joy, sighs, and tears. Along with happiness always come conflict and the necessity for acceptance. The term “true love ways,” like all the phrases Buddy coined—“it’s so easy,” “not fade away,” “words of love”—sounds so right that it seems always to have been part of the language.

A powerful feeling that Buddy wrote “True Love Ways” about and for Maria Elena comes over me when I meet her and spend some time with her in 1993. In a way, Maria Elena Holly reminds me of Janis Joplin, someone who is completely up-front, but she’s also very much a lady. When I ask her to pose with me for a photo, she smiles and puts her arms around me, as if we’ve known each other for years. With her love of show business and her ability to take “better to the touring than some others,” as she put it to Goldrosen in 1975, it’s easy to imagine the fun she brought to the marriage. When Maria Elena was by his side, it was because she was exactly where she wanted to be, whether they were in New York or on the road. If she’d had her way, there would have been no more lonely nights for Buddy, ever. What neither he nor she could have foreseen was that her pregnancy, which occurred soon after their marriage, would prevent her from accompanying him on tours and taking care of him as she had on the autumn 1958 trip.

At the string session, after recording the Bryants’ “Raining in My Heart” and Petty’s overripe but not unappealing “Moondreams,” Buddy expressed his satisfaction with all the cuts but added that he was worried about how the rock market would greet his experiment with violins. Maria Elena reassured Buddy, telling him that although he wrote neither “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” nor “Raining in My Heart,” they were among her favorite Buddy Holly performances.

During the session Peggy Sue announced that she liked everything Buddy had recorded that night equally, but years later, like Maria Elena, she decided “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” and “Raining in My Heart” were the best. Dick Jacobs preferred “Raining in My Heart” but added that he loved Buddy so blindly that he accepted everything Buddy recorded as perfect. Buddy himself favored “Raining in My Heart,” later telling his brother Larry that it would eventually be regarded as the “best record I’ve ever put out.” It took Buddy’s mother to spot the classic among the songs recorded that night. She singled out “True Love Ways,” and she was absolutely right.

When the triumph of his string session finally registered on him, Buddy grew more confident in his dealings with Decca and told Dick Jacobs that he wanted to record a Ray Charles album as his next project. Decca was receptive to the notion, considering Buddy to be “as good a ballad singer as anyone in the business,” Jacobs told Bill Griggs. Though Jacobs had recorded Louis Armstrong, Jackie Wilson, and Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, he told Griggs he ranked Buddy as the “most un-temperamental artist of them all.” Decca executives were inclined to accommodate his every wish, including a new idea he had for an album with a Count Basie sound, for which he’d require a full brass section and several saxophone players. Bob Thiele, the chief executive at Coral, Buddy’s label at Decca, agreed to the big-band recording, with stipulations. Buddy promised to make the record in New York and to use Thiele as his producer, overriding the objections of Norman Petty, who’d not yet been told he was fired. But Petty sensed the worst and returned to Clovis, resentful, bitter, and determined to break up the Crickets. If he couldn’t keep Buddy, he could at least keep Jerry and Joe B. Petty would sue, if necessary, to retain the Crickets’ name and money. As far as Petty was concerned Buddy Holly was finished in show business unless he got back in line.