HOW A SKINNY KID FROM LUBBOCK BROKE — AND REMADE — THE TEMPLATE FOR ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
Photo Courtesy Universal Music Archives
THERE’S A 1955 photo from Elvis Presley’s second visit to Lubbock in which the Memphis singer stands like a sun in the middle of a solar system of awestruck local teens. Even in the black-and-white photo, you feel the sex radiating off Presley and being absorbed by boys and girls alike. Standing at the far edge of the orbiting teens, the Neptune or Pluto of the room, is Charles Hardin Holley, a gawky, geeky kid with a big nose and bulky glasses.
He wears a different expression from any of the other kids. He doesn’t seem drunk on hormones — he seems to be studying the situation, as if he were thinking, “How do you do that?” He would never be a sun; he was too homely and plain-voiced for that. But if he could write songs and make records that sounded like the sun, maybe it wouldn’t matter how he looked or how he sang.
In less than a year, he would change his name to Buddy Holly and record the first version of “That’ll Be the Day” for Decca Records. A year and a half after that, a spruced-up version of “That’ll Be the Day” was No. 1 on the pop charts and No. 2 on the R&B charts. A year and a half after that — 50 years ago this February — he was gone, thrown from a broken plane onto a snowy field in Iowa. Holly was just 22.
In those four fast years, he had proven you didn’t have to look like Elvis to be Elvis. You could look like anybody, because maybe everybody had a little Elvis inside and you just had to find a way to get it out. Even if you were a nerdy kid at the absolute end of the earth in godforsaken West Texas.
“We were the first ugly band,” Crickets drummer Jerry Allison told the British music magazine Mojo in 2004. “Then the Rolling Stones came along.”
Pop music would never be the same. From the time of Holly’s first hit in 1958 to the advent of MTV in 1981, there was a 23-year golden era when pop-music success was open to no one’s idea of a pin-up, to performers as odd-looking as Mick Jagger, Brian Wilson, Levi Stubbs, Janis Joplin, George Clinton, Elvis Costello, Cass Elliott, Joe Strummer, Donald Fagen and Aretha Franklin. They all owed a debt to Buddy Holly.
And most of them owed a debt to Holly’s methodology. Holly was rock ’n’ roll’s first auteur, because he was the first to win the battle for control of his own music. He proved that if you wrote the songs, arranged them and produced them (with or without an official credit), you could get your vision intact from your head to the listener’s ears without the music industry screwing it up. And if that vision emitted enough solar glare, it didn’t matter what you looked like or where you came from.
In Holly’s vision, you didn’t have to choose between the rhythms of the new rock ’n’ roll music and the melodies of the old Tin Pan Alley, between the sexual urges of the beat and the romantic dreams of the tune. You could have it all. If you were in charge of everything — the songwriting, the band, the recording — you could make sure that the rhythmic accents lined up perfectly with the melodic accents and sent the song galloping forward, horse and rider fused together. This irresistible momentum was created by just guitar, bass and drums, with no piano or horns, and thus codified the core rock ’n’ roll combo for generations to come.
In just a few years, Holly had changed everyone’s idea of what a rock ’n’ roller could look like, where a rock ’n’ roller could come from, how a rock ’n’ roller could operate in the studio, how many instruments a rock ’n’ roll band needed and what those instruments could sound like. Very few figures in American music have caused so much change in such a short time.
— GEOFFREY HIMES
Words of Love
Buddy's Lubbock Legacy
by John T. Davis
Some said it was the ghost of Buddy
Some said the ghost of Cain
Some said the soul of the Prodigal Son
Is just stumblin’ back home again…
—“THE LUBBOCK TORNADO (I DON’T KNOW),” BY TERRY ALLEN
“Love is love and not fade away …”
— BUDDY HOLLY
TODAY, the world knows all about Buddy Holly — his innovations, his brief and meteoric career, the influence he had on rockers ranging from the Beatles to Bruce Springsteen. But less is known about the mark he made on the people he left behind when he blew out of Lubbock, bound for concert stages, the Ed Sullivan Show and rock ’n’ roll’s first martyrdom.
Just as he was transformed from a “Western and bop” bluegrass fan to a budding rocker by the sight of Elvis Presley thumping his guitar and shaking his hips at the Fair Park Coliseum and the Cotton Club, so did the example Holly set change the orbits of many of the creative souls bouncing around Lubbock’s dusty confines. He was an underground phenomenon who spoke strictly to the youth of the day. Many adults would not (and many still will not) acknowledge that a musician playing suspect, sinful rock ’n’ roll could ever emerge as Lubbock’s most famous son.
During his time in Lubbock, Holly played mostly in a trio with Bob Montgomery and Larry Wellborn. The Buddy and Bob Show was a Sunday fixture on KDAV, the popular local station, and the group often opened package shows that came through town on their way to the left or right coasts. In 1955, a few months after graduating from Lubbock High School, Holly formed the first incarnation of the Crickets.
Bobby Keys, who hailed from nearby Slaton and would go on to be the go-to sax player for the Rolling Stones, recalled the bewitching influence Holly’s music had on him.
“I was just a little kid; there was about six years’ difference in our ages,” Keys said in a 1986 interview. “I used to hear him practice in his garage from my Aunt Leonora’s tea room. All these ladies with purple hair would come in to play bridge, and I’d be exiled to the backyard and hear Buddy playing music in his garage across the street. He was the first guy I ever heard play electric guitar live in person. The first time I saw him play was on the back of a flatbed truck at the grand opening of a Humble gas station in Slaton. That had a profound effect on my little tiny mind. Boy! That, and chicks, too. I’d found nirvana.”
Lloyd Maines, who went on to achieve celebrity of his own as the groundbreaking steel guitarist for the Joe Ely Band, and later as the producer of choice for musicians from Robert Earl Keen to the Dixie Chicks, recalled that his Uncle Wayne gave Holly guitar instructions, teaching him the chords to the hits of the day.
It was like that for a lot of the kids who grew up in Lubbock in the ’50s and ’60s and wound up making art out of the artless raw materials of that dusty, flat landscape. Holly was like the Tennessee jar in the Wallace Stevens poem — he took dominion everywhere. Not many of the kids knew him personally or even saw him play, but he lit a fire under them that burns to this day. Here are some of their stories:
Jimmie Dale Gilmore
Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s transcendentally lonesome voice was the signature of the Flatlanders, the trio he formed with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. His relationship with Lubbock, like that of his peers, is typically conflicted: “Lubbock is a rural society that had urbanization thrust upon it very suddenly,” he recalls. “I grew up in a city lifestyle, but my daddy was a farm boy. And a lot of the conflict of that surfaces in art, and especially music.” Of his own music, he once proudly said, “I am a folk musician. But the folk tradition that I’m a product of is everything from Hank Williams and Elvis and Little Richard and the Beatles to Joan Baez, Chuck Berry and Brenda Lee. That is folk music to me.” After a long and successful solo career that included albums on Hightone and Elektra, Gilmore reunited with the Flatlanders following a 30-year break. The trio will release a new album, Hills and Valleys, this spring.
“In the mid-’60s, Buddy was pretty much forgotten, except by the real fans. In Lubbock, it wasn’t well-known that Buddy had become such a worldwide icon. But he had fans in Lubbock, most of my friends being among them, and me, too. The influence that Buddy had was so pervasive and in certain ways subliminal, just in the fact that he had become a true star with lasting power, and not just a one-hit wonder. It was like, ‘Wow, here’s somebody from Lubbock that really made it big!’
“There was a journalist from England who came to town to do research on Buddy and introduced me to Mr. and Mrs. Holley. I played some of my songs for them and they both just loved them. They were knocked out. They said from the outset that I reminded them of Buddy — I was tall and skinny, apparently physically similar to him. And also because the music I did was similar to his — folk and country. My music, both the old-timey stuff and the few things I had written at that point, was stuff that appealed to them immensely.
“Mr. Holley, who was not in the music business, said that he thought that I had a lot of potential. So he offered me the chance to make some demo recordings, which he would take to some of his friends — which of course included [producers] Norman Petty and Jimmy Bowen. That’s how the T. Nickel House Band got invented, to do those demos. I didn’t have a band background, so I asked the only band musicians I knew to come do this recording with me: John Reed, Jesse Taylor played guitars and T.J. McFarland on drums. Joe [Ely] played bass on it, and I don’t think he’d ever played bass before!
“That was the whole beginning of that group of us hanging out together then, and from then on. That group became the one, the pivot point. Most of the rest of what we did evolved from that. In a way, the flow started there, with who the gang of us was; later, it was the Flatlanders.
“The thing for me, personally, is that there were both influences — the overall influence that Buddy had on young Lubbock, and then the specific influence he had on me, indirectly through the connection with his dad. That was a real important milestone in my life. It affected the rest of what happened with me and a lot of other people. It caused some paths to intertwine that might not have done so otherwise.”
Terry Allen
Musician, sculptor, songwriter, painter and general artistic rabble-rouser Terry Allen had a literal ringside seat to the birth of rock ’n’ roll in West Texas. His dad, a former baseball player named Sled Allen, opened an arena that featured everything from wrestling matches to shows featuring the biggest R&B stars of the day, including Little Richard and Ray Charles. Later on, Allen’s father promoted shows at various venues in Lubbock, including some of Elvis’ appearances in the city. As a boy, Terry roamed the aisles during the shows, selling soda pop and lemons and ice to help cut the whiskey that patrons concealed in their coat pockets. The juxtaposition of the pious, daytime public face of Lubbock and its sin-loving after-dark incarnation made a profound and lasting impression on him.
“Buddy played at my dad’s place, Jamboree Hall, out by the airport, with Bob Montgomery, before the Crickets. I remember him at the old roller rink, too. But I never actually met him. And I never paid too much attention to him, until I thought about him in retrospect. I was very impressed that he wore glasses — that gave me hope! There was something about playing rock ’n’ roll that just didn’t go with glasses until he came along.
“I can also remember connecting with ‘That’ll Be the Day,’ not from the point of view of the song, but where it came from, which was The Searchers, which I really liked when I was a kid. Holly and the Crickets probably saw that movie the same time I did.
“Putting a statue of Buddy Holly up in Lubbock (by the downtown Civic Center) seemed to most people there like putting up a statue of Satan! I’m still kind of surprised that statue is there, but then he became this poster child for the Chamber of Commerce.”
“It wasn’t until after Buddy was killed that it dawned on me that he was a rock ’n’ roller; until then I had just thought of him as a local country musician. I remember getting his first album and it had misspelled Lubbock on it — ‘Bullock.’ That somehow made total sense.
“I think you feel a kinship with anybody that makes music and writes songs and tries to play and get other people to hear them. Especially in those times, when everything was so new, and nobody knew the procedure to getting records made or getting them out. That was a pretty rough-and-tumble time for those guys. You can’t help but feel close to them and have an admiration for them. Then for somebody to come out of it like Holly, just a dumbass with bad teeth and good songs — it’s pretty remarkable!
“That’s why rock ’n’ roll got you. It wasn’t about the church or the community or the school, or civic anything. It was just about you, addressed directly to you. And it was probably the first thing ever in your life that connected to you in that way.”
Tommy Hancock
Today, Tommy Hancock calls himself “more a dancer than a musician.” But in his six decades plus on the bandstand at the helm of a series of ensembles, most famously the Roadside Playboys and the Supernatural Family Band — and later as the owner and booker for Lubbock’s famous Cotton Club, the largest venue between Dallas and Los Angeles — Hancock has probably been witness to more West Texas music history than almost anyone living. He remembers Holly as a hard-driving kid who wasn’t universally liked around town. As for Hancock himself, his life has been a wonderful journey through music, and one on which his entire family has embarked (his wife, Charlene, and two daughters still perform in Austin as the Texana Dames). From Bob Wills to Buddy Holly, Hancock had a front-row seat for the whole circus.
(The quotes below incorporate some remarks Hancock made during a seminar at the 2001 Buddy Holly Symposium.)
“I was a contemporary of his older brothers, Larry and Travis — I knew them guys. Buddy was just kind of a kid that was around and I didn’t really know him. He was too young to want to get acquainted with, but I knew his brothers real well. They were pretty good musicians themselves.
“My first real experience in finding out what rock ’n’ roll was was when I was booked at a big deal over in Artesia. The promoter said, ‘Do you know a young people’s band we can get?’ Well, I thought I was a young people’s band! But I said, ‘Yeah, Buddy Holly.’ So I put them in touch with Buddy Holly and he played the job, too. All of us had a good time over there. That’s when I realized that music was generational. There wasn’t anybody in Lubbock except his age’s generation who knew who he was. So I never did notice him.
“When he was there, living and playing around Lubbock, he was catering to teenagers. The young people and the old people didn’t want to go to the same place, you know? So the adults didn’t know who he was, but then the teenagers got grown and the Beatles kind of made him famous. It’s the thing about a prophet in his own home town.
“I was surprised by his impact because I did not particularly care for his music. I know his songs are recognized as good songs, but I liked Elvis. I liked several rockabilly stars at the time, but I didn’t care much for Buddy, because he wasn’t well-liked around Lubbock. I didn’t know him well enough to know why. That being said, I think his songs are consistently good, and his musicianship was real good.
“Buddy had a real terrific country band before Elvis. I was a real fan of his then. He and Jack Neal had a radio show on KDAV that I listened to consistently. He never had a fiddle, but he was a great country musician as well as a rocker. His music today would probably be classed as country music. I think he helped form what rock ’n’ roll is thought of to be, with the country influence. The influence of Elvis, seeing Elvis doing his style the way he wanted to, caused that merger. I think what Buddy got from Elvis was the feeling of freedom to do as he pleased and play his own kind of music. He imitated Elvis in a free-form style of music. All of us were looking for something new and interesting to do, and Elvis was the guy who made that popular and fashionable.
“I think rock ’n’ roll is the greatest thing that’s ever happened to popular music. To me, rock ’n’ roll was freedom — you could dance to it any way you wanted to, and it was easy to play, so it was a wonderful thing for music.”
Joe Ely
Of all the musicians who have come out of West Texas, it is possible that Joe Ely is the truest to Buddy Holly’s spirit. His willingness to mix genres (everything from Cajun to flamenco), his bottomless zest for music and, most of all, his incendiary live performances, make him the natural heir to Holly’s rock ’n’ roll throne. Listen to his hair-raising in-concert version of “Not Fade Away” from his 1980 Live Shots recording and you can hear the ghost of Buddy Holly, still rocking on.
“Only in Lubbock would somebody knock on your door and it would be a door-to-door salesman selling steel guitar lessons! That’s exactly what happened. There was this guy standing at the door with a guitar case and an amplifier with a little palm tree on it. And he asked if he could come in and demonstrate Hawaiian guitar. My mother invited him in and got him a chair, and it was like magic. There was a dust storm going on outside, but to hear this beautiful Hawaiian music coming out of this little speaker, it was like being transported to a whole different world. So I just jumped at the chance to learn to play the Hawaiian guitar at that point.
“There was a guy down the street who lived seven or eight houses down on the other side of the street, and I went to school with his stepson. My friend’s stepfather was named Bob Blasingame, and he was the first guy I ever heard who could play a Strat or a Telecaster through an amplifier with lots of reverb on it. And he knew all the Ventures songs and all the Jimmy Reed songs, and I was dumbfounded. He started teaching me how to play electric guitar; I took my old Hawaiian guitar apart after about a year of Hawaiian lessons, and put the pickup in an acoustic guitar and made me an electric guitar, and that kind of started the whole thing.
“And here comes the coincidence — jump ahead 20 years, around 1980, when I was invited to come over to Clovis and play the Buddy Holly Memorial Street Dance. The president of the Buddy Holly Fan Club came over and gave me this booklet with all these interesting facts about Buddy. The first thing I saw was that he had studied Hawaiian guitar at the Dunnigan School of Music. Then it mentioned a place on 28th Street where he had lived, and that he had gone to Hutchinson Junior High School. And I thought, that’s interesting — I lived on 28th Street and I went to Hutchinson. And I started counting the houses to the address and I’ll be damned if the Holley family hadn’t lived in that house where Bob Blasingame lived and gave me guitar lessons. That kind of blew me away — they didn’t even know the Holleys had lived in it two years before.
“So I’d moved from Amarillo to Lubbock right after Buddy Holly died, and here’s a guy down the street with a Stratocaster, and a steel guitar salesman, and I was suddenly in guitar heaven. Everywhere around Lubbock there were bands popping up in garages playing rockabilly, plus a string of musicians who knew or had played early on with Buddy.
Lubbock was full of mysteries like that. Everywhere you went … the old guy at the boot store knew Buddy and Waylon Jennings. And it was all related to Buddy Holly, even though at the time I didn’t know Buddy Holly was from Lubbock. Even after he died, it was like a secret. Lubbock didn’t want to be known as a town where a great sinner was from. Lubbock at the time was an ultra-conservative cotton town and nobody wanted to stir up any trouble. Rock ’n’ roll was the devil’s music and they didn’t want to be associated with it. So for us it was like a secret club — ‘Oh, you know, Buddy Holly was from here …’ You didn’t dare let your parents know that you knew!
“I was amazed that such a small town — and a town that tried so hard not to be a music town — had that kind of interesting stuff around every corner. It’s a funny place — its only international acclaim is via music, but it continually squashes projects. Any time there’s movement, it gets squashed. When Natalie [Maines] spoke out [against President Bush in 2003], this guy who owned several radio stations in Lubbock took all the Dixie Chicks’ records off. And then because [her father] Lloyd defended her in the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, he decided to take off every record Lloyd had ever produced or played on or even been in the same room while it was being made — half of Texas music! That really put a squash on the Lubbock bands getting any radio play. Word got out in Lubbock that Lloyd was the new Satan. But now that guy is on the City Council, so he’s in the hot seat, so we’ll see.
“When the Clash first came to see us in London (in the late ’70s), a lot of it was because of the whole Lubbock thing. They were big Buddy Holly fans. They didn’t know anything else about the whole rest of the state of Texas. It was that way with a lot of people in England. They didn’t know about Willie Nelson or Ernest Tubb, but they knew Buddy Holly. He was huge in England — it was as if he was one of the most prominent singer-songwriters ever. You got the sense that he was right up there with Shakespeare. Being from Lubbock, I thought I knew about him, but I learned stuff about him in England. Like, I thought the hiccup-style vocal was something he made up, but he actually got it from a Beaumont rockabilly singer named Charlie Feathers, who invented it.
“When the Clash came to Lubbock in 1979, they wanted to see Buddy’s grave and the high school he went to. They were amazed at how wide the streets were and how low the buildings were. They were amazed at the wide-open spaces. Damn near horrified! They were scared shitless of looking out in every direction. My house was out by a cotton field and they could not comprehend the flatness and emptiness in every direction.
“I feel a ton of kinship with Buddy Holly. It developed from those coincidences I told you about, but I feel a real brotherly kind of thing with him. Like an older brother. I’m sorry I never got to actually meet him or hear him play. But I did get to record stuff with the Crickets and I still see them.
“Because of growing up there, I just understand where he came from. I understand his melodies and his rhythms — there’s a Latin beat to some of them, a sense of Mexican roots to them, beautiful melodies.
“His entire recorded history was done in an 18-month period of time, from the time he started recording with Norman Petty. And when you think of what a great body of work that is, it’s kind of staggering. It’s incredible.”
More Buddy Holly in the Winter 2009 Issue of Texas Music.
