The next show was on 2 February at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. The name, redolent of cobalt skies and warm waves, mocked the venue and its location. It was far up in Fargo country, a thousand miles away from any warming ocean and closer to the Great Lakes where the wind was apt to gather and, in January, scythe through anyone not properly protected by multiple layers of clothing. Following the most recent bus breakdown the police came and rescued them for the simple reason that otherwise they would have died. Buddy Holly and his band, which included hometown boy Waylon Jennings, were Texans and not good with cold. But compared to Angeleno Ritchie Valens, who had arrived for the tour in just a light cotton jacket and was soon actually whimpering in pain, they showed Russian levels of forbearance.
Even at their lowest ebb nobody was thinking of calling their manager to get them off this caravan from hell. They kept buggering on. It was only the laundry that forced the issue. Buddy Holly, who as the headliner was making more money than the rest of the bill, was interested in seeing whether he might be able to rent a small plane to take him to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota. Because Clear Lake didn’t offer any laundry services his only chance of getting his clothes clean was to get to Moorhead in time to be able to do the laundry there and collect it before the show. It was agreed. They finished the second Clear Lake show that night with their version of Jerry Lee’s ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ and then the promoter took them immediately to their plane.
They had found an airfield nearby and a twenty-one-year-old pilot who was prepared to fly them to Fargo, which was a taxi ride from Moorhead. It was supposed to be Buddy plus two members of his band but as soon as Valens and the Big Bopper heard of his plans they bought the $36 tickets from the band members and hurried with Buddy to the airfield after the show. It was dark, it was snowy, and the plane, a Beechcraft Bonanza, had room for just four people including the pilot. Either the pilot didn’t get the weather report or he did but was too excited by the idea of his cargo of stars to refuse to take off.
The Beechcraft climbed out of the airfield just before one in the morning on 3 February 1959. The owner of the flight company watched it go. He saw its tail light climb, turn and then slowly descend. Subsequent attempts to make radio contact with the plane failed.
It wasn’t until 9.30 the following morning that another plane took off to see if they could see any sign of what had become of the Beechcraft. They found the wreckage just eight miles north of the airfield. It had hit the ground right wing first and then ploughed into snow and earth at 170 miles per hour. The three musicians had all been thrown clear and died of massive brain trauma. The pilot was still in the wreckage.
The news spread all over the country from radio station to radio station. Holly’s own family learned of it from the radio. The rest of the musicians, who hadn’t been able to afford the plane ride, turned up at the next town following a bus ride that was relatively comfortable to be greeted by the news. There was no hysteria. The planned two shows were condensed into one. The promoter organized a quick audition for local talent to fill out the bill. The winners were a group from Fargo led by fifteen-year-old Robert Velline, who became better known two years later as Bobby Vee. The musicians in the tour party carried on and played the show that night. Waylon Jennings sang Buddy’s parts. The crowd was swelled to two thousand by walk-ups attracted by the publicity. Within days Irvin Feld had taken a couple of the big names from one of his other tours and transferred them to the Winter Dance Party. The tour completed its final two weeks with Jimmy Clanton and Frankie Avalon as reserves.
Two months after the crash, in the first sign that this particular tragic story would not die with its victims, Buddy Holly’s gun was found near the site, leading to rumours that some horseplay on the plane might have led to the crash. ‘Sure Buddy carried a gun,’ said good old boy Jerry Allison of the Crickets. ‘We all did. It’s fun to have a gun.’
What nobody predicted is how good the tragedy would be for business. The day after the crash young people were seen at the site, making away with items of the dead men’s clothing. By Wednesday afternoon the papers were reporting heavy demand for the victims’ records. Buddy Holly was buried in Lubbock, Texas a week later. A thousand people turned up. The following Monday his record company announced that they would release an album called The Buddy Holly Story. You need an ending to make a story. It appeared Buddy Holly would be the first rock star to have a story.
The longevity of Holly’s songs is guaranteed because the sadness of his passing places every note in a melancholy light. At the time he died he was very excited about his plans. He wanted to start his own record company back in Lubbock. He was going to do everything himself. He talked about having his own trucks. He was optimistic. Much the same was also said of most of the rock stars who died in years to come, whose deaths were inevitably linked with his as though in some sad but beautiful tradition. He was the first rock star of whom it was possible to say that he was worth more dead than alive. His heirs, his wife, his family and Norman Petty all said they didn’t wish to exploit his memory and then put out almost every fragment, out-take and demo.
Unlike Elvis there was nothing supernatural about Buddy Holly, either in appearance or in terms of the sound he made. He looked like a neighbourhood boy. The glasses made him appear more studious than he was. The ideas for his songs, which came from catchphrases in movies or the names of sweethearts, seemed within the compass of anybody. His voice didn’t have an unearthly range. It was the kind of noise any guy in an amateur band could imagine himself making. Furthermore, he and the Crickets were a band, far more of a band than any of the competition. You could see them playing the different roles that added up to the sound on their records. You could watch his fingers on the fretboard and then try to emulate it in your bedroom. You could practise the gently self-mocking hiccup in his voice. He was as popular with the boys as Elvis Presley was with the girls, but for different reasons. He was the most influential rock star of his time, possibly of all time. Influential is not a synonym for ‘good’ or ‘successful’. It denotes the extent to which other people feel they can pattern themselves after you. Buddy Holly is where the do-it-yourself ethos of rock and roll begins. He inspired thousands of people to play. There wasn’t a band with an electric guitar in the early sixties that didn’t play at least one Buddy Holly song.
Thirteen-year-old John Fogerty in Berkeley, California looked at the cover of The ‘Chirping’ Crickets and said to himself, ‘That’s a group. I’d never seen a group before. I’m gonna have a group.’ Although Holly and the Crickets dressed in tuxedos and bow ties and on TV at least put most of their energies into smiling, the fact that they played their own instruments was what made them huge. An electric guitar such as Holly’s Fender was as much a stage prop, workman’s tool and fan’s totem as it was an instrument. Men who would feel self-conscious merely clustering around a microphone and singing felt the guitar provided them with just enough of an alibi. They weren’t just performing. They were operating a machine. The guitar made it look as if they were there to do work.
John Lennon had sat rapt in front of the TV when Holly appeared on Sunday Night at the London Palladium in 1958, enthralled by his fingers, his Fender guitar and his glasses, taking in every nuance of this rare, precious, unique, three-minute, once-only demonstration of how this magical sound was accomplished. The first demo his group the Quarrymen made was their version of ‘That’ll Be The Day’. The Beatles took their name and their entire idea of what a group could be from the Crickets.
Even Mick Jagger, the blues snob, went to see Holly on tour in London in 1958. The Rolling Stones’ first real hit was ‘Not Fade Away’, a Holly song.
Among the crowd watching Holly at the Duluth Armory just a few days before he died was Robert Zimmerman of Hibbing. He later said, ‘He seemed to have a halo round him.’ By then he did, in a sense, have a halo around him. He had the purity of a martyr. He had also left behind songs and a way of writing which li
ved on. When the rock and roll renaissance came along at the beginning of the sixties it was the children of Buddy Holly who would lead it.
1959 PLAYLIST
Buddy Holly, ‘It Doesn’t Matter Anymore’
Wilbert Harrison, ‘Kansas City’
Bobby Darin, ‘Mack The Knife’
The Clovers, ‘Love Potion Number 9’
Ray Charles, ‘What’d I Say’
The Drifters, ‘There Goes My Baby’
Frankie Ford, ‘Sea Cruise’
Brenda Lee, ‘Sweet Nothin’s’
Santo & Johnny, ‘Sleep Walk’
Lloyd Price, ‘Personality’
1 JULY 1960
LONDON
Enter the guitar hero
BRIAN RANKIN IS one of the most influential rock stars ever to have come out of Britain. The fact that his real name isn’t familiar even to rock scholars doesn’t make this any less the case. Neither does the fact that he’s not known ever to have said or done anything particularly memorable. That he never did a great deal that was particularly original doesn’t change that fact either.
Brian was born in Newcastle in 1941, when England was one of the few regions of Europe not under Hitler’s rule. His father worked for the railway. The house he lived in had no bathroom. As a teenager he was keen to learn a musical instrument. The nearest to hand was a banjo, which he played in a New Orleans-style ‘traditional’ jazz band. On hearing Buddy Holly he traded the banjo for a Hofner Congress cello-bodied guitar, which cost sixteen guineas.
He then joined another Newcastle boy, Bruce Cripps, in a skiffle group called the Railroaders. Two hundred miles away on the opposite coast of England John Lennon had also formed a skiffle group with a similarly artisanal name. In an effort to sound more American, which they felt was naturally expected of all people who tried to play in this new idiom, Bruce Cripps changed his name to Bruce Welch and Brian Rankin coined a new identity by combining the name his school friends used to describe his cowboy’s walk with the first name of a country singer who had once played in Newcastle. Thus he became Hank Marvin. This seemed the ideal name for a noble loner who carried either a gun or a guitar. It was a name that had particular resonance for boys who grew up in the 1950s. Bob Dylan, born a few months earlier than Brian, ‘liked all kinds of Hanks’.
Both Hank Marvin and Bruce Welch came from modest backgrounds but they were grammar-school boys and therefore they could potentially have gone on to further education and a career. It says a lot about the disengagement between the children who had grown up during the war and their parents, who had served in that war, that nobody tried to stop Hank and Bruce going down to London in their teens to try and get some sort of start in the music business, a business about which they knew nothing at all. The two teenagers shivered and very nearly starved until they caught a break in the shape of an Anglo-Indian kid called Harry Webb who’d just had his name changed to Cliff Richard and needed a backing group. The other two members of the group were Tony Meehan and Terence Harris, who took the name ‘Jet’, and they came to be known as the Shadows. Cliff Richard’s career prospered immediately and some of the attention naturally spilled over to his backing band, who started to make instrumental records for the same record company.
Musicians, like golfers, tend to believe they’re just one piece of equipment away from achieving perfection. The young Hank was no exception to this rule. He persuaded Cliff that what he really needed was a guitar like the one he’d seen Buddy Holly posing with on the cover of The ‘Chirping’ Crickets. Cliff agreed and wrote to Leo Fender’s company in faraway California. A glossy catalogue of the Fender company’s products was mailed to them. The group pored over it as though it were the first Playboy. They finally decided on what added up to, with all the add-ons and refinements, the most expensive guitar in the book.
The Stratocaster was Leo Fender’s development of his earlier, more functional Telecaster. There was something about the Stratocaster that seemed to belong to the world of jet-age styling. It was so sensual it should have required a licence. This was certainly the case with the model Hank ordered: flamingo pink with bird’s-eye maple neck, tremolo arm and gold-plated hardware. The serial number was 34346. It cost around £120. The average man in Britain at the time would have had to work eight weeks to earn the price of that guitar. They could only get it into London at all by circumventing the strict regulations governing the supply of expensive overseas goods into the UK during post-war austerity. When Hank’s Stratocaster finally arrived in the spring of 1959 it was the very first to come into Europe. As a covetable item of equipment it combined the space-age lines of a supercar with the dazzling ingeniousness of a smartphone. As a unique object from the very country where this new music was being made it was greeted in London like a religious artefact. When Hank took it out to play in the kind of clubs where musicians gathered, the faithful would draw near as though in worship.
The Strat wasn’t merely for show. ‘It looked like something out of the future,’ recalled Marvin. ‘It was so sensual and sleek. But with the vibrato bar it enabled me to play with more expression.’ With it Hank could do things he hadn’t been able to do before, such as bend notes with the tremolo arm, helping him achieve his first objective, which was to make the guitar sound less like a guitar. The difference in sound was the kind of thing other musicians would note. Young men in Britain watching the Shadows play their tunes on TV were predominantly drawn to how it looked. Leo Fender said he’d thought of the contoured body before anything else. Hence it fitted on the hip like an item of clothing. With his shiny suit, windowpane spectacles (which he borrowed from Buddy Holly) and Stratocaster at the hip, Hank Marvin immediately became the most widely emulated British player.
Those who didn’t have a guitar or had one but couldn’t play it could take a tennis racket and mime along to his solos on Shadows records. The electric guitar was a natural extension of the war toys these same boys had grown up with. As they moved from boyhood into adolescence and their heroes turned from cowboys into rock musicians, the accompanying fascination with shiny kit was transferred from Colt 45s to Vox AC30s. At the same time the instrumental hits of guitar groups like the Shadows echoed the association with noble sacrifice traditionally at the core of Boy’s Own entertainment.
On 1 July 1960 the Shadows released their single ‘Apache’. ‘Hang on to your scalps’ advised the adverts. ‘Apache’ was a thrilling evocation of the atmosphere in a Native American encampment on the eve of battle. It was certainly thrilling to young ears who had learned most of what they knew of the world from Hollywood. It was as authentic as could be expected from its composer Jerry Lordan, an advertising man from Paddington. Lordan had got the idea from seeing Burt Lancaster play a Native American in a film of the same name. ‘I wanted something noble and dramatic, reflecting the courage and savagery of the Indian,’ he said. The Shadows wanted it to be the A-side of their single. Their producer, Norrie Paramor, wanted the A-side to be ‘Quartermaster’s Stores’, an old barrack-room tune which he could anonymously claim the composing credit for by putting it down as ‘traditional, arranged’. Amazingly the Shadows got their own way. ‘Apache’ became a number-one single in the UK and every young man in Britain suddenly wanted to be ‘in a group’. It was a pivotal moment.
Whereas girls had driven the first wave of rock and roll, the second was powered by the way it renewed the relationship between young men and technology. It had been taken for granted that rock and roll was mainly about love or having a good time, but the music played by groups like the Shadows hinted that it could also be dramatic, lyrical, even heroic. The names of singles like ‘FBI’, ‘Atlantis’ and ‘Man Of Mystery’ reflected their identification with action and adventure. Until then rock had been primarily about charismatic individuals, but following the emergence of the Crickets in the USA and the Shadows in the UK it became about something that was even more attractive to boys – the pull of the group. No longer tethered to the bandstand as their p
redecessors had been, the Shadows worked out how to play while weaving intricate patterns on stage, leading with their patent chisel toes. They had picked this up from watching the visiting R&B group the Treniers who had appeared down the bill from Jerry Lee on his ill-fated 1958 tour. TV was what the Shadows were really built for. The cameras went in tight on Hank’s fretboard and then travelled up to where his gaze would meet the lens with the pride of somebody who had mastered a party trick a large part of the nation were desperate to get in on. The Shadows were the boys’ band par excellence. There wasn’t a young male in the nation who didn’t want to be one of them.
Groups weren’t just efficient performing units, liberating you from the need to enlist the help of proper backing musicians; they were also gangs, and they were particularly attractive to the kind of boys who never would have got involved with a gang. Being in a rock band and being in a gang had features in common: both were founded on oaths of loyalty – oaths that were bound in time to be broken; the lion’s share of the power resided in one charismatic individual, even though the others would stoutly deny this was the case; and all the members secretly believed that they would be better off without the others. The mantle of leader of the gang tended to fall on the guitarist. When it came to guitarists, the kinship with the lone gunslinger setting out down the dusty main street to do battle with an adversary in a black hat was openly acknowledged. The dreams that had germinated in the dark in front of Western movies were blossoming into a whole new dream world with rock and roll. The transformation of Robert Zimmerman, storekeeper’s son from Minnesota, into Bob Dylan, poet-visionary to the world, was accomplished via a short spell during which he was known as Bob Dillon, a name he borrowed from the sheriff in TV’s Gunsmoke. Duane Eddy’s first album in 1959 was called Have ‘Twangy’ Guitar Will Travel. In 1960 Bo Diddley put out an album called Bo Diddley Is A Gunslinger. Rock and roll offered a new outlet for the adventure fantasies of boys and their obsession with kit. Even the guitar of folk troubadour Woody Guthrie bore the legend ‘This machine kills fascists’. This was a claim few were likely to make for the saxophone.
Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of the Rock Stars 1955-1994 Page 6