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Holly would have been 72

 
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User ID: 141379
Canada
02/04/2009 02:12 AM
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Holly would have been 72
Rave On

It’s been 50 years since the small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper (a.k.a. J.P. Richardson) went down in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa. Trapped on the seemingly endless “Winter Dance Party” tour of the U.S. Midwest, and faced with a bus that was constantly breaking down, the three rock ’n’ rollers each shelled out $36 to fly from Clear Lake to Fargo, N.D., which was minutes away from their next gig, in Moorhead, Minn. They were hoping to avoid a freezing all-night drive and get a decent sleep before the show. Instead, on Feb. 3, 1959, they became part of pop mythology: rock music’s first inadvertent martyrs.

Buddy Holly was 22 when he died. He had been rock 'n' roll star for a mere 18 months, but in that time he made immense contributions to the burgeoning art form.

The three are linked forever, but Holly left behind the most lasting legacy. At the time of the crash, the 28-year-old Richardson was riding high on the charts with his jaunty hit Chantilly Lace. Valens was just 17; his biggest smash had been a reworking of a Mexican folk song called La Bamba.

Holly was 22 when he died. The Baptist kid from Lubbock, Tex., had only been a star for 18 months, but in that time he made immense contributions to the burgeoning art form. One of the first white rock ’n’ roll performers to write his own material, Holly was also a studio whiz who introduced new instruments to the rock idiom (e.g., the celeste on Everyday) and experimented with technology (check out the vocal double-tracking on Words of Love). Near the end of his brief career, he started adding lush orchestration to the mix on tracks like True Love Ways and It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.
Five cool Buddy Holly references

Tribute to Buddy Holly, Mike Berry (1961)

Genius producer Joe Meek was a Holly devotee who got Berry (a.k.a. "The British Buddy Holly") to sing this heartfelt if slightly creepy "tribute." With a drum sound lifted almost directly from Peggy Sue, this single went to #24 on the U.K. charts.

American Graffiti (1973)

George Lucas's nostalgic look at California teenage life was set in 1962. At one point, tough guy John Milner (played by Paul Le Mat) offers this withering assessment of the state of pop music: "I don't like that surfin' s--t. Rock n' roll's been goin' downhill ever since Buddy Holly died."

I'm Gonna Love You Too, Blondie (1978)

Debbie Harry unleashed a scorching cover of this Holly tune on Blondie's Parallel Lines album. Punk and new wave artists consciously embraced straight-ahead rock 'n' roll from the pre-Sgt. Pepper era, which lead to another round of Buddy nostalgia.

Buddy Holly, Weezer (1994)

Rivers Cuomo fashions a tasty slice of nerd rock, likening himself to the bespectacled wonder. The Spike Jonze-directed video was inspired by Happy Days, the '70s sitcom set in 1950s Milwaukee.

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Quentin Tarantino's pop culture obsessions are on overdrive in this film, particularly during the famous dance scene with Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), which takes place at Jack Rabbit Slim's — a theme restaurant where the servers are look-alikes of 1950s stars. Indie icon Steve Buscemi plays Buddy Holly. – GD

Holly didn’t have the swagger of an Elvis. At 5-11 and 145 pounds, he didn’t exude animal magnetism. Those black, horn-rimmed glasses, coupled with that lanky frame, gave Holly the look of a genial geek, the kind of guy you’d want as your lab partner in chemistry class. He looked pleasant but ordinary, certainly more approachable than wild contemporaries like Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

Holly’s looks alone wouldn’t sweep an audience away, and his lyrics reflected that. Sure, he could write perfect two-and-a-half-minute odes to teenage love (Peggy Sue, Rave On, Oh Boy!), but many of his songs are about vulnerability and romantic insecurity. His 1957 breakthrough hit, That’ll Be The Day, is a frenetic plea to his girlfriend not to end their relationship. He relies on some pretty serious emotional blackmail: “You say you’re going to leave, you know it’s a lie/Cause that’ll be the day when I die.” His follow-up release, Maybe Baby, doesn’t ooze confidence, either: “It’s funny, honey; you don’t care/You never listen to my prayer/Maybe, baby, you will love me someday.” Elvis could sing Heartbreak Hotel, but when Holly emoted in his Hank Williams-influenced hiccup style, it seemed a lot likelier that he was speaking from painful personal experience. And while Presley relied on the words of others, Holly wrote his own.

Over in England, where Holly was also massively popular, a few especially talented teenagers were listening. “To me, Buddy was the first to click as a singer-songwriter,” John Lennon once said. “His music really moved and his lyrics spoke to us kids in a way no one ever bothered before.”

Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were utterly besotted with Holly. On July 12, 1958, their band, The Quarrymen, went into a studio for the first time, where they recorded a cover of That’ll Be The Day. When the Liverpudlians changed the group’s name, they were inspired by the bug motif of Holly’s back-up band, The Crickets.

The soldiers in the British invasion swore their allegiance to the singer openly and often. The Beatles covered Words of Love and The Rolling Stones’ first song to chart in the U.S. was their 1964 version of Not Fade Away. McCartney, who now owns the rights to Holly’s work, once admitted, “At least the first 40 songs we wrote were Buddy Holly-influenced.”

Still, no musician did more to mythologize Holly than Don McLean, author of the 1971 megahit American Pie. The song is an eight-and-a-half-minute jumble of pop culture references, the most obvious of which is a nod to the events of Feb. 3, 1959. Although McLean doesn’t mention Holly by name, it’s clear he’s referring to the fallen idol: “I can’t remember if I cried/When I read about his widowed bride/But something touched me deep inside/The day the music died.”
Buddy Holly performs on stage. Buddy Holly performs on stage. (Archive Photos/Getty Images)

That final phrase, “the day the music died,” quickly caught on. McLean had tapped into the profound sadness surrounding that event, and the collective belief that something artistically pure had been lost. But let’s face it, rock ’n’ roll didn’t exactly die in that crash; it’d be more accurate to call Holly’s death “the day the music went into a five-year coma.”

With Holly gone, Elvis in the army, Chuck Berry in jail and Jerry Lee Lewis blacklisted after marrying his 13-year-old cousin, the music lost much of its edge in the early 1960s; that first glorious wave of rock ’n’ roll was over. Manufactured, inconsequential pop stars like Fabian and Frankie Avalon came to the fore and produced some extremely tepid material. It was only when the aforementioned Brits arrived stateside — and annihilated those fey imitators — that rock ’n’ roll came back to life.

Fifty years on, the residents of Clear Lake are marking the grim anniversary with a series of events, including a tribute concert at the Surf Ballroom, the venue for that last Winter Dance Party gig. The surviving Crickets will be on the bill; the “widowed bride,” Maria Elena Holly, appeared at a symposium there last week.

Holly would have been 72 today. His bespectacled face remains frozen in time, a smiling beacon for every awkward kid who ever thought of picking up a guitar.

[link to www.cbc.ca]
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User ID: 141379
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02/04/2009 02:56 AM
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Re: Holly would have been 72
Buddy Holly Live in New York With Peggy Sue 1958


Buddy Holly Send Me Some Loving


The Crickets - Send Me Some Lovin´ (Demo)





GLP