I knew something was wrong. I didn’t know what, except that it was likely to be bad. You could hear it in his voice. I said no; that’s just what I said. No.
I turned around to Tommy. “You go.”
Tommy went outside and came back a moment later. “Boys,” he said, “the guys didn’t make it. Their plane crashed.”
I was just numb.
Back in Littlefield, my mother thought I was dead. Over the radio they’d announced that “Buddy Holly and his band” had been killed. They had found a bunch of our clothes and Tommy’s billfold in the wreckage, and that’s what caused all the confusion.
I didn’t think to call home. I could see the newspaper headlines across the lobby, something about rock and roll stars, and the word “killed.” I wouldn’t go over and look at the pictures. I was thinking of Mr. and Mrs. Holley, of how much they loved their son. That’s when I thought to ring my folks, and that was the first time they found out I was alive. My brother Tommy had heard the news down at the cafe and had just come through the door all bent over when the phone rang and Maxine answered.
It was just chaos. Buddy hadn’t a chance in that plane. They were flying into a front, a blizzard, and the pilot hadn’t been checked out on instruments. There were some rumors that the altimeter on the plane was reversed from what they were used to. They thought they were going up when they were going down. They knocked snow off the top of a roof about a mile back. Maybe if they hadn’t hit a fence post, they might’ve landed.
I’ve often wondered if Buddy wasn’t flying that plane. Every time we’d go in a plane in West Texas, the minute we got off the ground, he’d say “Let me take the wheel.” That young pilot—who’s going to say no to Buddy Holly?
I don’t know if it makes any difference. Even with the bad weather, Buddy wouldn’t have hesitated taking that flight. Even if they said it wasn’t safe to fly, he might’ve given the pilot more money to do it. He wasn’t afraid.
They found a gun in the wreckage that probably belonged to Ritchie Valens. Years later, they found Buddy’s glasses. He could hardly see. If I’d go in his room in the morning and wake him up, he didn’t know who it was. He couldn’t see that far, to the foot of the bed. And he couldn’t see into the future.
I just wanted to go home, but they wouldn’t stop the tour. Irving Feld from GAC called us and promised to fly us to Lubbock first-class for the funeral if we would just play that night. He begged me. I said I didn’t want to do anything. “Just stay with us until the day before the funeral when we fly you home, and then make up your mind.”
That night we played the show in Moorhead. I was trying to get drunk, but I couldn’t. The boy that imitated Buddy, Bobby Vee, was on the bill. He’d won a talent show for local performers that afternoon, when they needed artists to fill out the program. The promoters had told us when we got to the Armory that they were grateful we were letting the show go on, thanking us, saying “we know this is so hard for you” and telling us they’d have lost everything if we’d cancelled the night. Then they tried to dock us because Buddy and Ritchie and the Big Bopper hadn’t shown up. They tried not to pay us.
The tour manager came out to the bus and told us they were holding up our money. I said, “If they don’t give us our money, we’ll tear that damn place up to where it will cost them more to fix it than to pay us.” He went back and got paid.
The money to fly us home for the funeral never came in, despite all the promises. They just screwed us around, not giving us a dime until after the tour was over, making sure we stayed out there, finishing up the dates. Everybody pointed the finger at everybody else. It’s not us, it’s GAC. It’s not GAC, it’s Irving Feld. I couldn’t believe people would act so unfeeling. If that was the way things were, I didn’t want any part of the business. I thought, I don’t ever want to go out in the world when there’s people like that.
We stumbled through the rest of the tour. We got lots of telegrams from other performers, like the Teddy Bears and Jimmy Bowen. Frankie Avalon and Jimmy Clanton came in to substitute for the three stars. I thought Clanton was trying to walk off with Buddy’s guitar, and I got it back. I was about to whip his ass but Tommy came between us. I was so torn up I would have whipped anyone’s ass.
Dion took care of me as best he could. I was out there all alone, lost and scared to death. I had no clue. It seemed to take forever, crawling through Ohio and Iowa and Illinois. In Chicago, we played the Aragon Ballroom, and a girl named Penny took me under her wing. She was the wife of a Chicago disc jockey, and when we got to Springfield, she took me out to see Lincoln’s house. She looked so much like JoAnne Campbell, and tried to act like her. Years later, I was out in California, playing at the John Wayne Theatre, and there was a picture of JoAnne on the wall. It got me thinking of Penny. That night we stopped on Santa Monica Boulevard for coffee. This girl across the room was looking at me, and finally she got up and came over.
“You don’t remember me, do you?” she asked.
“Yes, I do. I was talking about you this afternoon.” It was Penny, and when I looked over at a calendar on the wall, I saw it was February 3.
One of the strangest things that happened was when “Bill Parsons” came on that tour. He had a song out called “All American Boy,” which was kind of a takeoff on the Elvis theme—“Get yourself a guitar, put it in tune / You’ll be a-rockin’ and a-rollin’ soon”—that ended with the singer going into the army. I was trying to drink a little then; I was all messed up. He was rehearsing, and I was watching him. Finally I said, “That ain’t you doing that record.” He sounded more like Ernest Tubb.
“No, he’s in the army now,” replied “Bill.” “His name is really Bobby Bare.” Later, Bobby played such a big part in my life, and still does, and that was the first time I’d ever heard of him.
Tommy and I never got along after Buddy died. I think he was jealous of the friendship Buddy and I shared. Dion said, “Waylon should sing,” but Tommy immediately sent for this hotshot Elvis-looking guy named Ronnie Smith to take Buddy’s place. Buddy hadn’t been that crazy about Tommy himself, and I guess Tommy didn’t think I had very much to give to the world.
He slipped me the first pill I ever took. We were going home, on our way back to New York. After the last show, I had a beer, and for a joke, Tommy put a couple of Benzedrines in when I wasn’t looking. I was awake all the way from Chicago to New York, my mind racing, thinking all these horrible things. The bed started moving and shaking. I didn’t know what was wrong with myself or the world. Everything I’d hoped for was gone.
I had no intention of ever playing another note. When we got back to the train station, I put the bass and amplifier in a locker at Grand Central Station, mailed the key to Maria Elena, and walked away.
I’d known very few people who had died, and I was heartsick about missing Buddy’s funeral, especially since they’d promised to fly us down and back, and give us what Buddy would have normally gotten if we’d just finish the tour for them. They never gave us half of our money, and screwed us around besides.
It just broke me up. It seemed like, of all the people on the tour, me included, fate picked the best ones and killed them. As I look back, we were the only ones who cared. At GAC, they didn’t give a shit. They just wanted somebody out there.
After the tour they called a meeting in Irving Feld’s office to see who would continue as the Crickets. Sonny, J.I., Joe B., and their new singer, Earl Sinks—or Earl Henry or Snake Richards; he had several names—had been scheduled to record on February 14 at Bell Sound Studios on West Fifty-fourth Street as the Crickets for Brunswick, and had driven up from Texas. They met the tour as we came in from Chicago.
Irving Feld said “Now, Waylon,” and offered the singing job to me, and of course J.I. and Joe B. “We can’t have two groups of Crickets.”
Maybe he thought I was going to play guitar. I said no. “All I want is my money and to go home. I’m not a Cricket.”
He said, “You can be a p
art of it if you like,” and I said, “I don’t want to be.”
Tommy stayed on, because he was a lead player, and J.I. and Joe B. got Earl to stand in front. They had already cut the record with him. Sonny and Goose were left out in the cold. I guess Goose was used to that. I don’t think his feet had unfrozen yet.
Sonny didn’t want to do it, either. Everybody had always thought Sonny was the one that would make it, and here Buddy had torn up the world. We used J.I.’s ’58 Chevrolet Impala to come home in; Sonny and I, the kid—Ronnie—who Tommy had brought up there, and Goose. It was about sundown when we left town, the last twilight of day shining off the Empire State Building, and as we went out the Lincoln Tunnel toward the New Jersey Turnpike, I looked back at New York and thought, well, I’ll never be here again. That’s all over. But I was here once.
Sonny and I didn’t trust the other two to drive, so we took turns at the wheel. Goose couldn’t see, and we didn’t know about Ronnie. That boy finally OD’d on glue. He was into drugs really strong, even then.
It was cold, and we were hungry. I think I had about ninety dollars rat-holed, and they gave us enough gas money to get home. We bought popcorn and Cokes and tried to drive as far as we could without stopping.
As we passed through Ohio along Route 22, we looked up and saw what I thought was a town on fire. There was a hotel burning, sitting on a hill. We stopped and stared at it awhile. Things going up in smoke; there was a moral there somewhere.
I slept for a while, and then woke as we topped a rise overlooking Cambridge, Ohio. The antifreeze in the car was only good to five below, and it must have been at least minus fifteen. It was so cold we blew a freeze plug, and we coasted into the town, silent as ghosts. We didn’t have enough money between us to fix the car. The airbags had gone out as well.
We waited until morning and pushed the car to a Chevy dealership. We didn’t know what else to do. Finally Sonny walked over to the manager and asked, “Is anybody a Mason here?” The guy said he was, and though Sonny had only gotten to the second degree, he agreed to fix the car for the thirty-five dollars that we could scrape together. “You’re on your way, boys,” he said, and we took off.
It was Saturday night. A truck driver gave us some pills to help us keep going. We were listening to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio, riding right over the top of it. We were so tired, but we wouldn’t let the other boys drive. To stay awake we got to playing a game. If you could sell yourself right now, how much would you ask for yourself? I said ninety thousand dollars, because I had ninety dollars that I was hiding in my pocket. Sonny always wishes he’d had enough money to buy me then. I sure wasn’t feeling I was worth too much at the time.
We finally had to sleep by the time we hit Texas. We told Ronnie we were going to let him drive, but if we looked up and saw he was going over fifty miles an hour, we’d take him out of the car and beat the crap out of him. We climbed in the back and passed out. We were all over each other, flopping around. I woke up one time and my head was behind his back, and I’d done fallen down in the seat. When we finally got to Amarillo, we broke out some of the money and bought Mexican food.
Sonny took me by my mother’s house in Littlefield, and he continued on to Lubbock. I got out of the car and went in the door. It was like somebody who had been through a hurricane and survived it. I had no earthly idea what I was, or what it was all about, or what had happened. I just knew I was back where I’d started.
CHAPTER 3
PHOENIX, ARIZE
My whole world was destroyed.
I didn’t know what I was going to do. I thought it was all over for me, even though I was the center of attention. Everybody wanted to talk about the crash, and why I gave my seat to the Big Bopper, and what Buddy was like in his final hours; but I didn’t have anything to say.
How could I? He was the first person to believe in me. He was my friend. All I could think about was what a good soul he was, and what a happy man. He loved living. He was in love with his wife and in love with his music. He was so young. To this day it doesn’t seem fair.
He had all these plans. Instruments don’t make music, Buddy liked to say; it’s what you do with them. He thought Ray Charles was the greatest, and wanted to use his arranging style, only move the licks over to guitars. It was like the strings on “I Guess It Doesn’t Matter Anymore” and “Raining in My Heart.” “That guy who put his name on as arranger, all he did is what I do on the guitar,” Buddy told me. He made me see that music was personal, and it didn’t have anything to do with what people called it. All through my life, there isn’t a couple of days that go by that I don’t think about him.
Buddy was the biggest thing to ever come out of Lubbock. His folks never got over his loss. It just broke them in two. You’d visit Mr. and Mrs. Holley’s house, and it was always 1959, until the day they died. His pictures were on the wall, and everywhere you’d look, there’d be something of Buddy’s. They were such sweet people. I’d go over to the house, and they’d show me his shoes, and things they had in the closet. They gave me his guitars one time, but people would try to steal that Stratocaster, so I took them back. Mr. Holley wanted to promote me, because he said Buddy believed in me, but I had enough sense to know that wouldn’t be right. He bought me clothes and things like Buddy would. I wrote a song called “Buddy’s Song,” using all of his titles, and I gave that to them. I also signed over any royalties I might receive from “You’re the One.” I said, we didn’t write any of that; we just finished the one line and Buddy took it and straightened it out.
I went back to work at K-triple-L, but I was useless. All the sparkle had gone out of me. I was supposed to be a wildman disc jockey, though I couldn’t turn it on the way I used to. Even if I’d play Buddy’s records, I wouldn’t say much. I had lost my center of gravity. I wasn’t worth shooting.
I didn’t want to sing; I didn’t want to play guitar. I had no interest in anything. I left my guitar at Momma’s house and couldn’t even pick it up. I was empty, drained of hope. Maybe I felt a little like my dream had slipped through my fingers. I didn’t know that hard work and paying your dues was how you got ahead. I thought people like Buddy could just make it happen, and now I’d blown it.
At the station, Sky and Slim Corbin tried to help me along, but the only one who made any sense was Hi Pockets. He knew what was wrong. He was an older guy, and he understood what I was going through. Hi Pockets could see I was messed up, and that I was feeling guilty, because I was the one who survived.
One day he sat down and talked to me. He spoke for over an hour, saying it wasn’t my fault and that I didn’t have anything to do with what happened. “What makes you think you’re so powerful that you could cause something like that?” he asked. “If you could bring them back here, and make them alive and standing in this room, would you do that?” I said yeah.
He said, “Can you do that?” I shook my head no.
“You couldn’t kill them either. You couldn’t will them to die. You don’t have that ability. Unless you take a gun and shoot them, you can’t make them die. And you weren’t anywhere near them.”
Hi Pockets had to get it down to that level for me to understand. I had to admit he was right. He was kind of an old country philosopher, though he liked playing the fool. Every once in a while he’d hit on something that would just raise the top of my head off, speaking with the simple honesty and wisdom of a man who home-spun records and jockeyed discs, and made me feel that maybe my life could begin again.
I came home. I’d been out working, and I was probably late. Maxine was standing on a chair with a necktie around her neck, tied to a light bulb. As I walked through the door, she jumped.
Of course, the light bulb broke. She collapsed to the floor. Still alive. I don’t know what she was trying to prove; I knew she couldn’t have been serious. It seemed more like a sick joke. She had a strange temper, and by this time, we both knew we’d never get along.
Maxine and I shouldn’t have been ma
rried. I hardly knew her, and we were just kids; pretty soon we started having them. I was nineteen when Terry, our oldest, was born on January 21, 1957, and Julie Rae followed a year and a half later on August 12, 1958. Buddy came along on March 21, 1960.
Terry had Maxine’s eyes on my face, and he was pure energy, a buzzsaw. If you let him, he’d stay up two or three nights running, always on the move, a bullet tearing from here to there. He was a peacemaker. He needed to be, around Julie. She was the first girl in the Jennings family in generations, and she showed a lot of my temperament, as in Bad Temper. Nobody could tell her what to do. She learned to cuss from her Grandpa Shipley and me when she was about two years old. She was never afraid of anything, and even then she showed she could switch immediately from mad to glad and back again. We used to call her Froggy because she used to swell up when she got angry. Buddy was laid-back and easygoing, and we were worried when he didn’t talk for years. He’d jabber, and his brothers and sisters would tell us what he said. Then we realized he didn’t have to talk, since they were doing it for him; and he still doesn’t unless he has something to say. That’s why I always ask him for advice.
We both loved the children, but they were all we had in common. I felt trapped. Each time we thought we were going to get out of the marriage, that we’d had enough of driving each other up a wall, we’d have another child. I didn’t see any way out, and it wasn’t all her. I was doing my share of messing around, a hot-shot disc jockey with a lot of leftover guilt.
I wanted to do the right thing. I was determined to see the family through, even though I was on a downhill slide that kept getting steeper. Things were going from bad to worse. I thought, that was a good try, but it just wasn’t meant to be. My hopes had been in one little basket, and even though I went back to life as it had been before Buddy, it wasn’t the same. Especially since he was my friend. What if he were my brother? I don’t see how you can get blindsided by some of these things fate hands you, and come back from them. It was too sudden. It got to where I just didn’t give a shit.
Waylon Page 8