This Day in Rock History (Buddy Holly Sets New Direction in Last Recording Session)

Oct. 21, 1958—Buddy Holly wrapped up his most recent recording session with songs that pointed to a new musical direction, yielding two more hits, including “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” covered by countless musicians. Little did he or his growing fan base imagine that the 22-year-old rock ‘n’ roller from Lubbock, Texas, had finished his last studio work. A little over three months later, this enormously influential singer-songwriter would die in a plane crash alongside fellow idols Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.

I have touched briefly on the influence of Holly before, in a blog post on John Fogarty’s speech inducting him posthumously into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. But the circumstances surrounding his last time in a studio represent one of the great might-have-beens in entertainment history.

Speed propelled his guitar sound and his often impulsive decisions in the last months of his life—so much so, friends said later, that they wondered if he had a premonition that his life would be truncated. Only six hours after meeting Maria Elena Santiago, a receptionist at his music publisher’s, he proposed marriage to her. 

Determined on larger horizons beyond Lubbock, he had relocated to Greenwich Village in New York, the home city of his bride. Although love provided the impetus for the decision, the relocation also put him closer to a metropolis with a whole mélange of musical styles beyond rockabilly that increasingly fascinated him. 

The move was paralleled by a major shift in his business and creative life: suspicions that his earnings were being diverted led to a split with manager Norman Petty, and the breakup precipitated an additional parting of the ways with backup band The Crickets. Facing an immediate cash-flow problem to cope with starting a new family and pending litigation with Petty, he reached out to form an alliance with a singer-songwriter he had once viewed as a potential rival: 17-year-old teen pop sensation Paul Anka. 

For a time in 1957, Holly had been annoyed that Anka’s “Diana” had prevented his own work from topping the charts. But he’d gotten friendly with the youngster while touring Australia early in 1958, and by autumn, as Holly charted a new course for his life, he even discussed forming a music company with him, according to Anka’s memoir, My Way. 

Anka let it be known that he had a song that Holly might use when he was done with it. By mid-October, Holly was so anxious to see it that Anka just managed to finish it the day of the session. Taking out his guitar, he quickly learned its structure before passing it along to Brunswick-Coral A&R head Dick Jacobs. "He told me it was a new song that Paul Anka had just written specially for him, called 'It Doesn't Matter Anymore,' and it had to be in the session," Jacobs recalled afterward.

It was Jacobs who had the responsibility for helping Holly work toward a new sound at Coral Studios, at the Pythian Temple at West 70^th Street. The year before, Holly had told a Canadian deejay, “I’d prefer singing…something a little more quieter.” “Less raucous” might have been a more apt description, because, for the four songs Holly wanted to perform, Jacobs was creating arrangements for an 18-piece studio orchestra, filled with strings, harp and tenor saxophone.

“I had no time to harmonize the violins or write intricate parts, so I wrote them all pizzicato,” Jacobs said later about “It Doesn't Matter Anymore.” “That was the most unplanned thing I have ever written in my life.”

Whatever astonishment Jacobs may have felt about Holly’s sudden request for a song that the singer had, uncharacteristically, not written himself, it was swallowed up by the needs of the moment and his great respect for Holly (whom he later termed the least temperamental singer he’d ever worked with). The musicians in the orchestra started out rather more skeptical, but by the time Holly was done with his vocal, they, too, had become converts, breaking into smiles and even applause.

The string-laden arrangements should not obscure the daring nature of Holly’s interpretation of the Anka tune. First, it can be regarded as a pioneering example of the post-breakup “kiss-off” song, best exemplified by The Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way,” Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name,” and Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone."

Second, his rapid evolution so soon in his career would show other rock ‘n’ rollers to follow the imperative to absorb new influences. Six years before George Martin employed strings on Paul McCartney’s plaintive ballad “Yesterday,” Holly had gotten there first. Beach Boy Brian Wilson's experimentation with French horns and other classical instruments on Pet Sounds was likewise made infinitely easier to promote to record company execs because of the success Holly had enjoyed in this last session.

Remarkably, though, this was the first time Holly had used strings so extensively in his work, and he was bursting with even more ideas. 

Maria Elena remarked years later that her husband had talked about also opening a London studio, and biographer Philip Norman has noted that Holly wanted to absorb jazz and classical music into his songs, and he was willing to range far afield: working with Ray Charles and Mahalia Jackson, and an album of South American songs that he would sing in Spanish. He was already showing a willingness to experiment, to push beyond limits—a propensity that would have prevented him from becoming confined in a creative straitjacket.

“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” became Holly’s last Top 20 single (and the first to reach #1 in the UK after an artist's death). But it was only one of four songs from that last session that each had their favorites. Holly himself told his brother Larry that “Raining in My Heart” would be regarded as “the best record I’ve ever put out.” “Moondreams” and “True Love Ways” also have their partisans.

Early on, Elvis Presley had opened Holly’s eyes to the possibilities of rock ‘n’ roll. But it is no disrespect to The King to suggest that Holly represented an even greater influence on the next crucial wave of rock ‘n’ rollers. 

Two groups at the forefront of the British Invasion even took on names that paid tribute to the budding legend: The Beatles (a play on The Crickets) and, more explicitly, The Hollies. But that hardly exhausts the list. Think also of the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Jimmy Page, Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Elvis Costello (whose nerdy early look mirrored the black horn-rimmed glasses that became Holly’s trademark).

 

Writing in Britain’s Independent on the 50^th anniversary of what Don McLean famously termed, in “American Pie,” “The Day the Music Died,” Spencer Leigh catalogued his influence succinctly: “Buddy Holly created a series of firsts, although most of them need qualification – the first singer/songwriter of the rock 'n' roll era; the first to have the lead/rhythm/bass/drums line-up; the first to use studio trickery such as double-tracking; the first to have strings on a rock 'n 'roll record; the first to use the Fender Stratocaster; and the first rock 'n' roll star to wear glasses.”

“He managed to forge a sound that was just unique, but it sounded simple enough for everyone to say, ‘I can have a go at that,’” recalls Keith Richards in an interview for a PBS documentary, Rave On: A Buddy Holly Biography. “You would get close, but it would be something to aim for. And I think for the body of musicians of my age at that time, that it was like a magnet.”

Quote of the Day (John Fogerty, on What Buddy Holly Meant to Him and Others)

“I just want to tell you what Buddy Holly meant to me. I was twelve years old, and I was working at a beach resort, and that voice and guitar came up over the PA. I went out and bought ‘That'll Be the Day,’ started learning the words. A few months later, I bought the album, and that album set a course in musical history…. There was a group pictured on the cover… and it was the first time you saw a group in rock ‘n roll. I thought, ‘I'm gonna have a group.’ Over in Liverpool, the same thing was going on with four other guys. They named their group the Beatles because Buddy Holly's group was called the Crickets. In 1963, these four guys chose to end their great song ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with the little syncopation Buddy Holly used in the chorus after the solo. Well, about twenty years later, a kid was writing a song about how it feels to be back [Fogerty’s ‘Centerfield’], and he ended his song with the same riff--came from the same place.”— John Fogerty, speech inducting Buddy Holly in the first class of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, Jan. 23, 1986

Considering that his life was cut tragically short in a plane crash at age 23, it’s hard to believe that Charles Hardin Holley was born 80 years ago today in Lubbock, Texas. But it’s even harder to believe that Buddy Holly, as singer, guitarist, songwriter, and producer, created a musical legend and legacy in a recording career that lasted only about 18 months—songs covered, on vinyl or in concert, not just by The Beatles and Creedence Clearwater Revival, but also by the Rolling Stones, The Beach Boys, Linda Ronstadt, The Grateful Dead, and Bruce Springsteen, to name just a few: “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” “Oh Boy!”, “It’s So Easy,” “Heartbeat,” “Everyday,” and “Rave On.”

Listen and marvel at a catalog that will “Not Fade Away.”

This Day in Rock History (Stones Score 1st US Hit With Holly’s ‘Not Fade Away’)

February 21, 1964—In a particularly auspicious day for the post-Beatle phase of the British Invasion, three singles destined to be classics were released. The first was Billy J. Kramer’s “Little Children”; the second, the Hollies’ “Just One Look.” The last, a cover version of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” did more than just provide the Rolling Stones with their first single to hit the U.S. pop charts; it also served as a seque into the songwriting that would make them pop forces in their own right in the next half century.

Like their contemporaries and competitors, the Beatles, the Stones began their careers by, in effect, reflecting back to American audiences rock ‘n’ roll songs seemingly familiar for the last dozen years, but now revivified. What the Beatles did for the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout,” for instance, the Stones did for the B side of Holly’s “Oh Boy!”—i.e., they made it fresh in their own interpretation.

Actually, they took it a step further: they unlocked potential that had been somewhat muted, substituting Mick Jagger’s growling, rougher vocals for Holly’s trademark hiccup (while stripping away the doo-wop harmonies), accentuating the Bo Diddley bomp, bomp-ba-bomp, bomp-bomp beat of the guitar, along with Brian Jones’ bluesy harmonica. The new take on the song was different enough from the original that manager Andrew Loog Oldman even termed it “the first song that Mick and Keith [Richards] wrote. The way they arranged it was the beginning of their shaping of them as songwriters.”

The idea that the longhaired British youths, with no real songwriting credits of their own, just signed to Decca Records, could have so reinvented a song by the brilliant, blazingly prolificTexas artist might have seemed laughable on the surface. It becomes even more astonishing when one recalls how green they were in the studio, and how unprepossessing that particular environment itself was. 

As Keith Richards recalled in his bestselling 2010 memoir, Life, Regent Sounds Studio in London was "just a little room full of egg boxes and it had a Grundig tape recorder, and to make it look like a studio, the recorder was hung on the wall instead of put on the table.” The space was cramped, allowing little definition between instruments, and so, by necessity, the sound approximated the band’s raw feel in concert at the time. The boys loved their primitive environment—especially the Stones’ guitarist, co-songwriter and ultimate pirate spirit, who learned the art of overdubbing there on a basic two-track tape recorder.

The Rolling Stones did for “Not Fade Away” what Frank Sinatra did for Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin”: refocus attention on a relatively neglected portion of a major song catalog to such a point that it became a standard. Clearly, Holly’s record company didn’t see it as a major commercial hit, but the British band took their version to #3 on the charts in their own country and #48 in the U.S. (Not quite “She Loves You” territory, perhaps, but the ground overseas was becoming prepared for bigger things soon.)

Over the years, other artists have followed the lead of the scruffy U.K. upstarts.  Florence and the Machine recorded a four-minute take on the song three years ago, and that only begins to scratch the surface of what others have done with it. The Grateful Dead jammed for an epic 10 minutes in their version. But, as longtime readers of this blog might guess, my favorite version was done by Bruce Springsteen, who made it the first half of a melody with his own, equally fiery “She’s the One” in a Madison Square Garden concert I attended back in August 1978. (Hear for yourself in these two YouTube clips—“Not Fade Away” and “She’s the One”—that are, admittedly, far better in sound than visual quality.)

Today, “Not Fade Away” is the second most-covered song by Holly, exceeded only by “Peggy Sue.” Rolling Stone has even listed it among its “500 Greatest Songs of All Time.” What accounts for the awesome power that the Rolling Stones sensed? Joe Ely, who’s been playing the song in concert for years, told an interviewer several years ago: “The easiest thing to do is get it started. The hardest thing to do is find a place to stop. It’s infectious. It’s like a freight train you can’t stop.”

This Day in Pop Music History (“The Day the Music Died”)

February 3, 1959—In one of the most grievous disasters ever to hit the American pop culture scene, young rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. (“The Big Bopper”) Richardson perished in a plane crash just hours after performing in Clear Lake, Iowa.

I have been fascinated by this terrible tragedy ever since an elementary school teacher taught my class the use of literary allusion by focusing intently on Don McLean’s 1971 epic pop hit “American Pie,” which took as its jumping-off point “The Day the Music Died.” Today, you can get some idea of the vast lost promise of these musicians—but especially Holly—by taking in the vast number of retrospectives that have appeared in the mass media about the disaster. I’ll focus here on two.

The current issue of Rolling Stone (the one with Bruce Springsteen on the cover) features a terrific article by Jonathan Cott on the circumstances surrounding the tragic day. It reviews:

* the extraordinary conditions that led the three musicians to make their risky flight (a blizzard with minus-30-degrees-below-zero temperatures; the unheated Baptist school bus that left them stranded for hours in the middle of nowhere; the unwashed laundry and lack of sleep that made them desperate for a warm hotel room);

* the camaraderie that developed in the long hours on the bus (Dion, on jamming with the group: “Man, that was heaven, that was family, that was the connection, that was a bit of salvation, that was touching the very center of my heart”); and

* the Bridge of San Luis Rey-type sense of fate as the musicians decided who’d board the plane and who’d stick with the bus (Waylon Jennings gave up his ticket on the plane to the flu-stricken Richardson; Dion balked at the $36 price, which reminded him too much of the rent his parents paid every month for their apartment; and Crickets musician Tommy Allsup losing a coin toss to Valens).

(And now, here, a gripe about how Rolling Stone showcased this piece—or, rather, how they didn’t. Not only is there no link to the article on the magazine’s Web site, but even on the front cover of the magazine, there’s not a mention of it—instead, it has teasers for articles about Franz Ferdinand and Howard Stern’s slob of a sidekick, Artie Lange. One consolation: the Web site does have a link where fans can offer views on the sad anniversary.)

Both this article and Barry Mazor’s article in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Buddy Holly’s Still-Living Legacy,” features poignant memories by the rock ‘n’ roll legend’s widow, Maria Elena Holly, recalling how he would, on the spur of the moment, go down to Washington Square in New York and counsel young musicians on the craft of songwriting.

Mazor’s apt summary of the amazing evolution of Holly in just a five-year span—“from covers of three-chord hits to increasingly sophisticated, memorable songwriting, from garage rock to string sessions orchestrated by himself”—hints at all that was lost with the singer’s death. Think of how young the flight victims were (Holly, 22; Valens, 17; Richardson, 28) and visualize what they might have accomplished if they’d been given even another 10 years of life, let alone a normal human life span of around 70-80 years old.

Here are some alternative ways of thinking about that:

* Holly already had a dozen hits at the time of his death. Give him another dozen years—just short of the lifespan of George Gershwin—and you would have had the first rock ‘n’ roller who would have had musicians performing entire songbooks of his material, as Ella Fitzgerald did with a well-publicized series dedicated to the likes of Gershwin, Porter, etc., and as Jennifer Warnes did with the songs of Leonard Cohen.

To visualize the loss, imagine what would have happened if the Beatles had gone down in a plane in the Atlantic Ocean, just before appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Imagine no “Yesterday,” no “Nowhere Man,” no “Day in the Life,” no “Let It Be.” (Push on into their solo careers and imagine no “Imagine.”)

Holly’s last hit was “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” But, as we thrill to his songs 50 years after his death, we realize that his career very much did.