Artist Spotlight

A little after midnight in the early morning of a cold February 3rd, 1959, a chartered single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza took off from an airstrip in Clear Lake, Iowa bound for Fargo, North Dakota. The plane’s serial number was N3794N and its passengers were three of the headliners from a short three-week Midwestern tour dubbed the “Winter Dance Party.” A few minutes after the craft rose into the snowy night air, it crashed into the hard earth along an Iowa fence-line. Everyone aboard was killed on impact.

Hispanic wunderkind Ritchie Valens (whose hits “La Bamba” and “Donna” were just hitting the radio waves), a flu-stricken J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson (the popular disc jockey whose summer hit “Chantilly Lace” had made him an overnight rock-n-roll star), and the 21-year-old pilot of the plane, Roger Peterson (a local boy who’d been flying already for 4 years) were on the plane. So was the young man who headlined the “Winter Dance Party,” and who, because he was sick of riding in buses through the heavy Midwestern snow, had chartered the flight. Buddy Holly had agreed to the ill-fated winter tour because he just married the beautiful Maria Elena Santiago, because he couldn’t fully wrangle out of old contracts, because he and Maria were going to have their first child and they needed money.

Only about 18 months stood between when Buddy (born Charles Hardin Holley) had his first hit record and that chilly night in Iowa. In that span of time, he only released two full-length albums — one under his band’s name, The Crickets, and the second a self-titled effort. In general, this period of rock and roll didn’t see much experimentation. It was so young that artists and record companies alike were just trying to harness the power of Chuck Berry and Elvis Presley’s explosion on the scene. New York-based songwriters (housed in the Brill Building) pumped out hits for quickly-thrown-together acts meant to grab the attention and allowances of ‘50s teens. Buddy Holly immediately cut against this grain. First of all, look at the guy. You’ve got to hand it to him for bucking trend of sexy teen idol and having the chutzpah to resemble a small-town accountant gee-whizzed in the big city. Second, aside from the inimitable Berry, he was the only early rocker who wrote and composed his own songs. At a time when songwriting was still considered a skill unrelated to performing, Holly and the Crickets pumped out hits of their own pen.

And the songs he penned were, by and large, completely different from his contemporaries. The lyrics were thoughtful and poetic, often stringing together a number of observations and rhymes on the going subject of popular music: love and romance. But Holly came to his use of language seriously, with the kind of careful attention to detail usually associated with the big musical songwriters of the era. Holly didn’t see songwriting simply as writing words, however. The advancements he made in instrumentation, studio production, and song structure and style have had a much larger impact than his lyrics. Holly and the Crickets, for instance, are credited with establishing the official guitar-guitar-bass-drums lineup synonymous with rock music. Rather than recording in the record label’s studio, under the constant surveillance of the executives, Holly kept to a studio in New Mexico to do most of his work. There, he and the band could experiment and try new sounds until they’d finished songs that sounded completely their own. Holly also toyed around with new technical possibilities. Check out the double-tracked vocal on “Words of Love” for a hint of where recording would be going in the following decade. Listen to the clear cymbal mic on the baffling “Well… All Right.” Note the echoed tinker of the lead guitar on “Listen to Me.”

Listen to “Words of Love”
Listen to “Well… All Right”
Listen to “Listen to Me”

Style and structure had previously been simple and straightforward in rock and roll. No one had yet come along to throw new ideas against the wall. But Holly perfected the call-and-response method on the hits “Oh Boy!” and “It’s So Easy.” He and the Crickets tightened up the relationship between lead guitar melody and the more chord-driven rhythm guitar, creating a harder-edge sound that would eventually develop into heavy metal and punk. He tried out polyrhythms in the classic “Not Fade Away.” He brought in California-jazz piano for “Look at Me.” One of the weirdest hit records of the era is “Everyday” with its muted-clap rhythm, clinky xylophone, and glottal-stop lyric delivery. “Take Your Time” throws together a simple thumping rhythm and a little boardwalk organ-playing. “Early in the Morning” delves into choir gospel. “Heartbeat” borrows from Pacific Island rhythms and melodies. On his final recordings, he began delving into full orchestration, creating the jazzy dream of “True Love Ways,” the pizzicato sophistication of “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” and the moody “Raining In My Heart.” This isn’t even mentioning the incredible rave-ups “Peggy Sue” and “Rave On.”

Listen to “Oh Boy!”
Listen to “Not Fade Away”
Listen to “True Love Ways”

In 1958, he and the Crickets went on tour in the UK. Members of the future Rolling Stones were in the audience. British television aired one of the concerts. This was viewed by young John Lennon and Paul McCartney, who would later name their band in honor of Holly’s own. If any single figure most influenced the sound and quality of the acts that only a few years later would be dubbed the “British Invasion,” it was without a doubt our young man from Lubbock. Stateside during the “Winter Dance Party” tour, a fellow by the name of Robert Zimmerman stood at the front of the crowd, and swore from then on that Holly met eyes with him a number of times, communicating something he would take with him to Greenwich Village under the name of Bob Dylan. Holly’s delivery on tracks like “Midnight Shift” prefigure Dylan’s explosive rambling. One of the great fallacies of music history is that the original ‘50s infancy of rock-and-roll and its more grown-up ‘60s incarnation as completely separate events. A bridge spanned the two decades, and it was Buddy Holly.

Listen to “Midnight Shift”

Buddy may have not looked the rebel part, and his personality (groomed by a supportive musical family) certainly didn’t exude the rebel attitude. But in his willingness to push the envelope of popular music and build a foundation for a more creative culture, Holly was an unabashed revolutionary. Now, 50 years on, it’s time that sort of rebel spirit is taken up by the rest of us.

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