History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (10 page)

Thus did Bobby Vee begin to tell his own part of the greater rock ’n’ roll story, a story that—after he hired a young piano player in Fargo who was calling himself Elston Gunn and turned out to be a young Robert Zimmerman visiting from Hibbing, Minnesota; after Bob Veline became one of various post-Holly Bobbys, made over in terms of Holly’s anybodyness, with anything that made this particular anybody unique airbrushed out—took the form of such first-rate teen-angst hits as “Take Good Care of My Baby” (number 1, 1961), “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes” (number 3, 1962), and, in 1962,
Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets.
The plane crash gave Bobby Vee his big break; as he saw it, it also gave him a legacy to honor, a mission to fulfill.

Because of the way Holly died—cut off in the bloom of youth, with his whole life ahead of him, chartering a plane because his clothes were filthy from the bus and he wanted to look good on stage, because he wanted to sleep for a few hours in a warm bed and do a good show—he immediately became a mythic figure. A queer mythic figure: a mythic figure you could imagine talking to. One you could imagine listening to what you had to say. As if, when John Lennon, Paul McCartney, and George Harrison, as the Quarry Men, cut a version of “That’ll Be the Day” for their first recording, in Liverpool in 1958, and later named themselves the Beatles in imitation of Holly’s Crickets, they were not simply copying a hero but conducting a kind of séance with
him—just as the British rock ’n’ roll producer Joe Meek, who would make his name in 1962 with the weird sound of the Tornadoes’ “Telstar,” actually did hold a séance in which, he said, he received the knowledge that Buddy Holly was going to die in a plane crash on February the third, just before his scheduled tour of the U.K. As Cathi Unsworth retells the true story in her murder mystery
Bad Penny Blues,
Joe Meek is James, and it’s 1959:

Toby frowned. “Oh,” he said, not quite so amused now. “And when did he die again? It was early this year, wasn’t it?”

“Well, this is the thing,” Lenny looked round at all of us. “They did the séance in January of ’58, when Buddy was just about to come over. James sent him a message telling him not to get on a plane on that day, he was so convinced it was going to happen. But it didn’t. Not that time anyway. It was exactly a year later when Buddy did get killed in a plane crash. February the 3rd, 1959.”

It was Holly’s ordinariness, his seeming approachability, that made this event an ineradicable figment of modern cultural memory. “Elvis Presley, Bo Diddley, Bill Haley & the Comets / were lies created on recording tape by the same Group / who made the Bomb, with the same motive: rule the world,” the poet Charles Harper Webb wrote forty years after the fact. “Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, the Big Bopper died when their three / robots blew up in a thunderstorm.”
“Your idea that I might take a plane / Through sleet and freezing rain / is so vacuous,” Paul Muldoon wrote in his song “It Won’t Ring True” fourteen years after that. “Don’t forget the whopper / Buddy told the Big Bopper / About getting off the bus.” They are only two voices in a chorus that began singing the next day and will continue as long as there is anything in rock ’n’ roll worth talking about.

But that sense of ordinariness, which led people to so readily attach their lives to Buddy Holly’s, is also ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that a full-length biography—Philip Norman’s 1996
Rave On
—could be written about someone who never reached the age of twenty-three, written without padding, without discographical pedanticism, quotidian minutiae, a potted social history of the 1950s, banal or for that matter profound musings on the emergence of the American teenager, rock ’n’ roll, modern youth culture, or the meaning of the Alamo. And it’s ridiculous that anyone could have left behind a body of work as rich as that Buddy Holly set down between the beginning of 1957 and the first weeks of 1959. But in that body of work—dozens of short, concise songs, most of them about two minutes long, some sharply shorter than that—is a story that can be told again and again without its ever being settled.

Many of the songs are obvious, despite a charm that isn’t: “Everyday,” “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” “Raining in My
Heart,” “Heartbeat.” “Even the obvious rockers, things like ‘Rave On’ or ‘Oh Boy,’” Nik Cohn wrote, “were Neapolitan flowerpots after ‘Tutti Frutti.’” Cohn was right. But more of what Holly did is unlikely before it is anything else.

You could start with “Not Fade Away,” probably the oddest Buddy Holly record of all. On paper, it’s nothing but an under-orchestrated Bo Diddley imitation. But as you hear it, no matter how many times you’ve heard it, it sounds nearly impossible. You can’t date it by its sound, its style, the apparent recording technology. With Joe Mauldin on bass and Jerry Allison playing a cardboard box instead of drums, the music is all stop-time, every building theme cut off and brought up short, the whole song starting up again like the car it drops into the rhythm like a new dance step: “My love bigger than a Cadillac.” With verbs evaporating out of the lyric, the song feels less like any kind of pop song than a folk song, and less like the Rolling Stones’ 1964 wailing-down-the-highway version, their first American single, than the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” their first single anywhere, from 1962, which the late Ralph J. Gleason, the music columnist for the
San Francisco Chronicle,
would refer to as “that Liverpool folk song,” confusing some readers, like me, into wondering if perhaps it actually was.

The Rolling Stones heard the open spaces in “Not Fade Away,” and what they did with it is a proof of how much room there was in Holly’s songs. Mick Jagger had gone to
see Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Woolwich Granada theater in March 1958; supposedly they played “Not Fade Away.” But while the Crickets start with a broken beat that could accompany someone doing the moonwalk on crutches, the Rolling Stones start with take-it-or-leave-it: an acoustic guitar strumming a pattern twice, hard, then a split-second of silence, then a single, isolated bass note, tipping the music into the air. And then it’s a race, with Brian Jones’s harmonica pulling ahead of the pulse that’s pulling the music back, Bill Wyman’s bass and Charlie Watts’s drums watching the road while Keith Richards’s guitar drives blind and Mick Jagger’s voice says he’s seen it all before. You go back to that first moment, that double pattern, that step off the cliff, trying to make the rest of the song match it.

You can hear the hit in the Rolling Stones’ cover; the Crickets’ original remains in another world. With the hesitations in the beat, in the singing, matched by the words fitted to them—“You drivin’ me back”—the record isn’t easy to listen to, because it doesn’t quite make sense. Reaching at once for modernist abstraction and the symbolism of archaic ballads in which everybody dies, it speaks a defiantly absurdist language in the most modest, disappearing way. Always, when people have talked about the recordings Harry Smith brought to light on his anthology
American Folk Music
—the likes of William and Versey Smith’s “When That Great Ship Went Down” from 1927, the Memphis Jug Band’s “K. C.
Moan” from 1929, or Ken Maynard’s “Lone Star Trail” from 1930—they’ve found themselves drawn to the same phrase. “This music sounds like it came out of the ground,” people say, and that’s what “Not Fade Away” sounds like—which is to say it also sounds more like flying saucers rock ’n’ roll than Billy Lee Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll.”

There is “Maybe Baby,” a play on the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” except that here Clyde McPhatter’s pratfalls are replaced by something close to a stalker’s menace: not just words, “Maybe, baby, I’ll have you,” but the way Holly clips the last sound of each word,
MAY
be,
BAY
be, the slowness with which they’re delivered, the slowness with which the words drag against the beat, which pulls against itself. The first hint of a personal aesthetic of drift, of floating, that would take over in Holly’s apartment in New York the next year, is here in the ghostly backing vocals—it all seems to be happening in another dimension, where “maybe” is the ruling epistemological force, where nothing is certain and anything is possible. It’s the same spot Holly found “Well . . . All Right,” with its strange ellipsis, all but unknown in song-titling, where the drama is sealed at the end of each verse, the last word sliding into a dream the singer will dream for you if you won’t dream it for him. It’s the gentlest
fuck off
—to the world, to whoever might doubt a word he says, a fuck off that is also an extended hand.

There is “That’ll Be the Day,” written off of John Wayne’s
ever-more-exasperated “
That
’ll be the day” to Jeffrey Hunter across their five-year hunt for Natalie Wood in
The Searchers.
The Crickets first recorded it in Nashville for Decca in 1956; it was nothing, and the label shelved it along with everything else. The next year in Clovis they got it, the jangle of the guitar getting harder, sharper, with every note, and the band opening holes in the sound and then diving through them into some barely glimpsed other side, where they can look back at what they’ve already left behind. As if it had found and then become the template of all rock ’n’ roll before it and all to follow, the performance generates its own momentum. It takes your breath away, that anything could be this simple, and this complete.

But “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” the flipside of the “That’ll Be the Day” single, might be better. It begins as a thrill, a sound that seems huge because as with “That’ll Be the Day” its internal rhythm is so strong. It’s a sound that’s also an enormous room, full of air, full of space, room for anything to happen, and almost everything does.

There are the backing singers, two men and two women, who swing as if they’re on a swing, caught up in the fun, full of delight, real actors in this play, not props, every sound they make a shooting star of snapped-off cheerleader style. There’s the lack of care in the singer’s plea, the plea of someone looking for love, bereft, alone, but also cruising, not in any hurry, laughing at himself—and it’s the lack of
care that makes the room in the song, room in its story, in its heart, room, in this case, for the cool walk of the last verse, which turns out to be as complete a definition of rock ’n’ roll as Holly’s guitar solos, the verse that was nothing but a Holly family saying, which here seems a Zen koan, a frontier password, and lines left out of “Not Fade Away” all at once: “Drunk man / Street car / Foot slip / There you are.”

Opening it up—as the first track on their first album, opening up the field of the Crickets’ music itself, of their future—there’s the lift, the crunch, and the release of what Holly does with his Fender Stratocaster. In “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” his solos are taken almost note for note from Roy Orbison’s guitar solos on the B-side of his first single for the Sun label, “Go! Go! Go!”—but there’s a difference. In “I’m Looking for Someone to Love” there’s room in the song not only in terms of space and feeling, but in terms of time—there’s time to do something other than what the song says you’re supposed to be doing, that is, looking for someone to love. There’s time to fool around, to get that sound that up until now you’ve only heard inside your head.

“Go! Go! Go!”—especially Orbison’s solos and the rhythm behind him—is absolutely frantic. It’s so fast that as Orbison sings the song he’s also playing, he cannot keep up with himself. By the last verse he’s actually gasping for breath—no metaphor, you can hear it. But Holly’s solos, the same solos, have an elegance Orbison never thought of. As with
Bob Dylan’s runaway-train harmonica solo in “Absolutely Sweet Marie,” Orbison’s signature is the bluegrass pause, a silence at just that instant when the music is at its highest—Wile E. Coyote as he realizes there’s nothing beneath him but air, then the plunge down into what feels like an unthinkable increase in speed, in excitement, leaving the silence even more of a beckoning void that it was when the silence suspended the sound. That’s Holly’s signature too, here—but with a playfulness, a lack of fear, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid losing ground to the Pinkertons behind them and knowing they’ll get away somehow, one way or the other: “The fall’ll probably kill you.” A relaxing into speed, so that there’s no way in the world, in this song, that Buddy Holly could fall behind himself.

There is “Peggy Sue,” the number 3 hit from 1957, and the home recording, from 5 December 1958, of “Peggy Sue Got Married.” Here is where the ordinariness the singer projects creates an intimacy with the listener—even though the quiet, troubled, happy man in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is hardly the hard, even avenging man in “Peggy Sue,” a man who refuses to explain himself and demands that you believe him anyway.

This man rides the coldness of the music, as cold in “Peggy Sue” as the music in “Peggy Sue Got Married” is warm. There is the battering, monochromatic tom-tom rumble from Jerry Allison that opens “Peggy Sue,” named for Allison’s girlfriend,
when the song was written: the next year Peggy Sue was Allison’s wife, and eleven years after that his ex-wife. There is Joe Mauldin’s bass strum behind that; there is the instrument beneath both that you barely register, Niki Sullivan’s rhythm guitar. No leaps, no grand gestures, no gestures at all, just a head down into the wind the song itself is making, and then a harsh, cruel guitar solo, emerging as inevitably as any in the music, and also a shock. “If you knew, Peggy Sue”—the song is unexplainable, at least by me, but not by Jonathan Cott, writing in 1976.

“The women of Fifties rock ’n’ roll, about whom songs were written and to whom they were addressed,” Cott says, “were as interchangeable as hurricanes or spring showers, Party Doll ornaments of the song.” But

with Peggy Sue, Buddy Holly created the first rock and roll folk heroine (Chuck Berry’s Johnny B. Goode is her male counterpart). And yet it is difficult to say how he did it. Unlike the Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands—who Bob Dylan fills in as he invents and discovers her—Peggy Sue is hardly there at all. Most Fifties singers let it be known that they liked the way their women walked and talked; sometimes they even let on as to the color of their sweethearts’ eyes and hair.