History of Rock 'n' Roll in Ten Songs (11 page)

But Buddy Holly didn’t even give you this much information. Instead, he colluded with his listeners, suggesting that they imagine and create Peggy Sue
for him.
Singing in his characteristically shy, coy, ingenuous tone of voice, Holly seems to let us in on a secret—just as later, in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” he continues his complicit arrangement with his listeners, half-pleading with them, and with himself, not to reveal something which he himself must hesitatingly disclose. In this brilliantly constructed equivocation, Holly asks us to suspend disbelief . . . until that inexorable last stanza when we realize that no longer can Holly sing “You’re the one” but only “She’s the one.” He has become one of his own listeners as Peggy Sue vanishes, like Humbert Humbert’s Lolita, into the mythology of American Romance.

Buddy Holly “suggests” that his listeners “imagine and create Peggy Sue for him,” Cott says. The idea sounds so unlikely, and yet in “Peggy Sue Got Married” it’s literal: “I don’t say / That it’s true / I’ll just leave that up to you.”

And there are, finally, the remainder of Holly’s last recordings, the solo pieces with guitar, acoustic or electric, that he taped in his and his new wife Maria Elena’s apartment in Greenwich Village—though the word
finally
seems wrong, because these are also the recordings most suggestive of the music Holly had yet to make, and the life he had yet to live. There is a version of Mickey and Sylvia’s “Love Is Strange” that is more than anything strange—so abstract, so much an idea of an idea, that the strings added after Holly’s death let you imagine the singer resisting them in advance. Even odder, and far more affecting, is a reworking of Mickey and Sylvia’s “(Ummm, Oh Yeah) Dearest” that is most of all a
whisper—and, here, pure Holly, taken very slowly, as if the feeling the song calls up is so transporting that it would be a crime to let the song end. There is Holly’s own “Learning the Game,” sung with tremendous confidence, the singer moving right into the music, into the fatalism of the theme, riding the clipped guitar strum, no hesitation, no lingering—no speed, but no pauses, either. He never raises his tone, never increases the pressure.

And there is “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” from December 14, again an embrace of fatalism, but a step past anything he’s done before. You can feel the great weight Holly gives the title words as the song begins. He follows a melody almost too sweet to bear, a melody hiding ghosts of countless other tunes, from a neighbor’s “Shenandoah” when Holly was five to Johnny Cash’s “I Still Miss Someone,” playing on the radio as Holly sang into his tape recorder that December; as the melody turns toward the singer, then away from him, he tries to understand how each of the three words works as life. At the end he repeats the words again, isolating them from the rest of the song, and each from the other. They are a manifesto, a flag he’s unfurling. “Crying—Waiting—Hoping”—the end.

It’s this music that allows anyone to picture Buddy Holly in the years to come: to imagine his style deepening, his range increasing, his music taking shapes no one, not Holly, not his fans, could have predicted. When he died, Holly had
plans for his own label, production company, publishing firm, management company, all under the name Prism; the business cards were printed, and a session with Waylon Jennings for Prism Records had already been produced. Holly saw himself recording with Ray Charles, or making a gospel album with Mahalia Jackson. He was spending time in Village jazz clubs and coffeehouses, at the Village Vanguard, the Blue Note, the Bitter End, Café Bizarre; he’d registered at the Actors Studio. But his career was slipping in late 1958, and his life was squeezed. He and the Crickets had split up. The money he’d made, a fortune, was sitting in a bank in Clovis, New Mexico, and sitting on that money was his producer and publisher Norman Petty, forcing him to live off loans from his wife’s aunt, and finally to headline a tour in the upper Midwest in the dead of winter to make the rent and keep the idea of his own company alive. If you can see Buddy Holly as an entrepreneur in the music business, president of Prism Music, you can also see him, a year or two down the line, as a contract songwriter, side by side with the likes of Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Cynthia Weil, Barry Mann, Ellie Greenwich, and Jeff Barry at Don Kirshner’s Aldon Music, at 1650 Broadway, Kirshner’s Brill Building adjunct, Buddy Holly like everyone else writing songs for Bobby Vee. You can see him a year or two after that, Buddy Holly too wondering about the person everyone in the Village
seemed to be talking about, and perhaps Holly, unlike the others, venturing out to see for himself.

As songwriters, Carole King and Gerry Goffin found levels of warmth and longing, hesitation and release, seduction and embrace, that escaped their peers. As recorded by the Chiffons, the Shirelles, and the Drifters, “One Fine Day,” “Will You Love Me Tomorrow,” and “Up on the Roof” are works of art. But there is no overstating how terrified the people at Aldon Music were of Bob Dylan and “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

“Unlike most of the songs nowadays being written uptown in Tin Pan Alley,” Dylan would say in 1963, at the start of his “Bob Dylan’s Blues,” “that’s where most of the folk songs come from nowadays, this wasn’t written up there—this was written somewhere down in the . . .
United States.
”
You’re fakes,
heard Goffin and King, nightclub prince Bobby Darin, Dion, and so many others:
You’re fakes, and this is real.
In 2001, for a documentary on the Brill Building, Goffin spoke in broken, coulda-been-a-contender cadences, sounding used up, passed by: “I wish we had tried some songs that—really meant something . . . Dylan managed to do something that not one of us was able to: put poetry in with rock ’n’ roll, and just stand up there like a mensch and sing it. And Carole felt the same way too, and so we had to do something dramatic, so we took all the [demos of] songs that
hadn’t been placed, not the songs there had been records on, and smashed them in half. We said, we gotta grow up, we gotta start writing better songs now.” “There was a cultural phenomenon around us that had nothing to do with songwriting,” King said on the same show, sitting around a table with Goffin, Weil, and Mann, a hint of contempt for the rest of them in her voice. “So it was:
Wait a minute! What’s happening, what’s going on? Things are changing. How do we write this stuff? Where do we fit in?
”

Buddy Holly might have been asking himself the same questions—or he might have already known the answers, might have already begun to live them out. If you can see Buddy Holly in his cubicle at Aldon Music, you can also glimpse the whole country of songs that, if he’d made his way only a few more years into the future, would have begun to gather around his. You can see him in the audience at Gerdes Folk City in 1960, perhaps there to catch the Texas folk singer Carolyn Hester: in 1957 he’d backed her on guitar in Norman Petty’s studio in Clovis on his own “Take Your Time” and other tunes. He’d heard her sing the ancient “Black Is the Color (Of My True Love’s Hair)”; when he and the Crickets played a movie theater in London, the show began with a ghostly organ sound, but no organ, no musician; then a platform rose from beneath the stage, revealing Holly alone at the keyboard, playing “Black Is the Color” as if it was the only song anyone needed to hear.
You might have found him in the backroom at the Gaslight Café, trading gossip with the folk-scene insider Fred Neil, a one-time pop singer and songwriter—Holly had recorded his “Come Back Baby” in 1958—or telling hometown stories with the Oklahoma blues and jazz singer Karen Dalton. You can spot him a year or so later, maybe at the Café Wha? watching Bob Dylan, who himself backed Carolyn Hester on harmonica for her third album, on, as it happened, a different “Come Back Baby,” which she’d remember as an old blues he taught her, now getting up to sing “The Cuckoo” or “Moonshiner.”

And you can see Bob Dylan back in the crowd not long after, watching as Holly, who Dylan would have noticed the minute he walked in, himself stood up to play “Not Fade Away,” stamping his foot for the rhythm, or “Well . . . All Right,” Dylan watching the smile on Holly’s face for the “Well all right so I’m going steady / It’s all right when people say / That these foolish kids can’t be ready / For the love that comes their way” lines, Holly daring the hip crowd to laugh and no one laughing, everyone frozen by the way Holly let “the love that comes their way” drift into the haze of its own air.

It would have all come back to Bob Dylan, making notes that day on how Buddy Holly had somehow changed “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” into a blues, dropping the last word from a line and letting his guitar fill in the space with an invisible slide on the strings, that on 31 January 1959, he was
present in the Duluth Armory for Buddy Holly’s second-to-last show. He would have remembered that, as he would declare to the nation and the world when in 1998 he accepted the Grammy for Album of the Year for
Time Out of Mind,
“Buddy Holly looked right at me”—meaning that, on that night, Buddy Holly had passed on the secret of rock ’n’ roll, of all music, of life itself, one avatar to another: a secret which, as of that night at the Grammys, Bob Dylan was plainly unready to pass on in turn.

Buddy Holly had not been dead for six months before his label, coral, a subsidiary of Decca, got its hands on those last home recordings and brought in a staff producer to turn them into at least facsimiles of pop songs. The single “Peggy Sue Got Married” / “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” was released in September; passing unnoticed in the U.S., in the U.K. it was a hit. Just months away from the start of two years’ work in the Augean stables of the Hamburg dives that would turn them into as tough a bar band as any in the world, playing five sets a night to drunken sailors, brawling locals, and hookers cruising the toilets, using every song they knew to make it to the next day, the Beatles played the record over and over, as if it were itself the séance Joe Meek had performed two years before.

With Holly’s voice blown up far beyond the position it held in his real records, the overlay of piano, bass, guitar,
and the Ray Charles Singers—a radio and TV chorus led by a Ray Charles who as a music-business professional went back to the thirties—was almost believable. At least it was for “Crying, Waiting, Hoping”—in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” the way the backing singers answered Holly’s “understand” with “
under-staah-haah-hand
” made Holly sound as dead as he was. For “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” there was a skittering, unpredictable guitar solo, as if a real person, someone who was working out the song with its composer, was part of the job. Most of all, the melody—in its essentials, the same melody Holly found for “Peggy Sue Got Married,” the songs going into his tape recorder nine days apart—came through, and in both songs it was the melody that carried what the songs had to say, what they were trying to put into the world. It would have done so if Holly had recorded the songs without any words at all—the most modern attempts at “Crying, Waiting, Hoping,” bitter, head-down performances by Keith Richards in 1993 and Cat Power in 2007, in both cases the pace slowed and the melody flattened, only highlight how strong, how resistant to any other element a performer might bring to it, the melody really is.

The melody describes innocence betrayed. Both the innocence and the betrayal are somehow embodied whole, but the power of the statement comes from the way they combine with each other, the innocence bright and sweet, the betrayal dank and full of rot, the innocent’s shock at the first betrayal,
the cold eye the betrayer casts back at the innocent, the innocent now seeing through the eyes of the betrayer, seeing himself, seeing herself. That was the engine of the song, and it was why the song never let go of those who tried to play it.

When Brian Epstein brought the Beatles, still with their drummer Pete Best, to Decca Records in London for an audition, “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” was one of the demos they recorded. The Beatles had everything riding on the session, which led to their rejection; so did Epstein. “Who can say with certainty that I was not born with a disability unfit for society to tolerate?” he once wrote in his diary; in 1956 in London he had been solicited by an undercover policeman, at first responded to and then rejected his entreaties, and was arrested for “persistently importuning.” Homosexuality was still illegal; as a Jew who was ten years old when British soldiers liberated Bergen-Belsen and opened a new book of evil for all to read, a Jew whose rabbi was cursed and chased on the streets of Liverpool, Epstein knew himself as an outcast among those with whom he had been first cast out. By the mere facts of his life he was doubly a criminal—and this ugly fact too is part of where the Beatles came from, one of the motives behind their charm and their conquest.

“I was determined to go through the horror of this world,” Epstein wrote in 1956, knowing nothing of his future. If his story is that “of an individual who had a hand in changing the world,” as Debbie Geller wrote in 2000, then Epstein
was a man who had to change the world to find a place in it. He had to make it bigger, wider, more open, less fixed and certain: along with the Beatles’ pledge “To the toppermost of the poppermost,” that was what was riding on “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” as the Beatles played it on New Year’s Day, 1962. So famously, nothing came of the audition, at least not with Decca—a publishing executive at EMI, the most powerful and prestigious music company in Britain, heard something in Epstein’s demos that Decca didn’t and pulled strings to get the Parlophone producer George Martin to sign the group—as, less famously, nothing came of the Beatles’ stab at Buddy Holly’s song. George Harrison sang a stiff lead, and did a nice copy of the overdubbed guitar solo, but it was a second-class imitation of a record that was only half-alive to begin with. Still—is it an accident, or serendipity, that the Beatles escaped the same label that almost sank Buddy Holly? In 1957 Holly and the Crickets had re-recorded “That’ll Be the Day” for Norman Petty in his Clovis studio. It was everything the 1956 Decca version, which the label had no intention of releasing, wasn’t; they had to put it out. Holly called Decca to make sure the rights were clear, only to be told by the A&R man Paul Cohen (“The worst no-talent I ever worked with,” he once said of Holly) that under no circumstances would Decca permit him to record any song he’d already recorded for them. For five minutes Holly is polite, probing, and calm as Cohen all but
blows cigar smoke at him through the line, which Holly had hooked up to his tape recorder. Ignoring Decca, Petty sold the new record to the Brunswick label; Decca was about to sue when it realized it already owned Brunswick, and would thus be suing itself.