Holly’s, is also ridiculous. It’s ridiculous that a full-length biography—Philip Norman’s 1996 Rave On —could be written about someone who never reached the age of twenty-three, written without padding, without discographical pedanticism, quotidian minutiae, a potted social history of the 1950s, banal or for that matter profound musings on the emergence of the American teenager, rock ’n’ roll, modern youth culture, or the meaning of the Alamo. And it’s ridiculous that anyone could have left behind a body of work as rich as that Buddy Holly set down between the beginning of 1957 and the first weeks of 1959. But in that body of work—dozens of short, concise songs, most of them about two minutes long, some sharply shorter than that—is a story that can be told again and again without its ever being settled.
Many of the songs are obvious, despite a charm that isn’t: “Everyday,” “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” “Raining in MyHeart,” “Heartbeat.” “Even the obvious rockers, things like ‘Rave On’ or ‘Oh Boy,’” Nik Cohn wrote, “were Neapolitan flowerpots after ‘Tutti Frutti.’” Cohn was right. But more of what Holly did is unlikely before it is anything else.
You could start with “Not Fade Away,” probably the oddest Buddy Holly record of all. On paper, it’s nothing but an under-orchestrated Bo Diddley imitation. But as you hear it, no matter how many times you’ve heard it, it sounds nearly impossible. You can’t date it by its sound, its style, the apparent recording technology. With Joe Mauldin on bass and Jerry Allison playing a cardboard box instead of drums, the music is all stop-time, every building theme cut off and brought up short, the whole song starting up again like the car it drops into the rhythm like a new dance step: “My love bigger than a Cadillac.” With verbs evaporating out of the lyric, the song feels less like any kind of pop song than a folk song, and less like the Rolling Stones’ 1964 wailing-down-the-highway version, their first American single, than the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” their first single anywhere, from 1962, which the late Ralph J. Gleason, the music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, would refer to as “that Liverpool folk song,” confusing some readers, like me, into wondering if perhaps it actually was.
The Rolling Stones heard the open spaces in “Not Fade Away,” and what they did with it is a proof of how much room there was in Holly’s songs. Mick Jagger had gone tosee Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Woolwich Granada theater in March 1958; supposedly they played “Not Fade Away.” But while the Crickets start with a broken beat that could accompany someone doing the moonwalk on crutches, the Rolling Stones start with take-it-or-leave-it: an acoustic guitar strumming a pattern twice, hard, then a split-second of silence, then a single, isolated bass note, tipping the music into the air. And then it’s a race, with Brian Jones’s harmonica pulling ahead of the pulse that’s pulling the music back, Bill Wyman’s bass and Charlie Watts’s drums watching the road while Keith Richards’s guitar drives blind and Mick Jagger’s voice says he’s seen it all before. You go back to that first moment, that double pattern, that step off the cliff, trying to make the rest of the song match it.
You can hear the hit in the Rolling Stones’ cover; the Crickets’ original remains in another world. With the hesitations in the beat, in the singing, matched by the words fitted to them—“You drivin’ me back”—the record isn’t easy to listen to, because it doesn’t quite make sense. Reaching at once for modernist abstraction and the symbolism of archaic ballads in which everybody dies, it speaks a defiantly absurdist language in the most modest, disappearing way. Always, when people have talked about the recordings Harry Smith brought to light on his anthology American Folk Music —the likes of William
Many of the songs are obvious, despite a charm that isn’t: “Everyday,” “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” “Raining in MyHeart,” “Heartbeat.” “Even the obvious rockers, things like ‘Rave On’ or ‘Oh Boy,’” Nik Cohn wrote, “were Neapolitan flowerpots after ‘Tutti Frutti.’” Cohn was right. But more of what Holly did is unlikely before it is anything else.
You could start with “Not Fade Away,” probably the oddest Buddy Holly record of all. On paper, it’s nothing but an under-orchestrated Bo Diddley imitation. But as you hear it, no matter how many times you’ve heard it, it sounds nearly impossible. You can’t date it by its sound, its style, the apparent recording technology. With Joe Mauldin on bass and Jerry Allison playing a cardboard box instead of drums, the music is all stop-time, every building theme cut off and brought up short, the whole song starting up again like the car it drops into the rhythm like a new dance step: “My love bigger than a Cadillac.” With verbs evaporating out of the lyric, the song feels less like any kind of pop song than a folk song, and less like the Rolling Stones’ 1964 wailing-down-the-highway version, their first American single, than the Beatles’ “Love Me Do,” their first single anywhere, from 1962, which the late Ralph J. Gleason, the music columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, would refer to as “that Liverpool folk song,” confusing some readers, like me, into wondering if perhaps it actually was.
The Rolling Stones heard the open spaces in “Not Fade Away,” and what they did with it is a proof of how much room there was in Holly’s songs. Mick Jagger had gone tosee Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Woolwich Granada theater in March 1958; supposedly they played “Not Fade Away.” But while the Crickets start with a broken beat that could accompany someone doing the moonwalk on crutches, the Rolling Stones start with take-it-or-leave-it: an acoustic guitar strumming a pattern twice, hard, then a split-second of silence, then a single, isolated bass note, tipping the music into the air. And then it’s a race, with Brian Jones’s harmonica pulling ahead of the pulse that’s pulling the music back, Bill Wyman’s bass and Charlie Watts’s drums watching the road while Keith Richards’s guitar drives blind and Mick Jagger’s voice says he’s seen it all before. You go back to that first moment, that double pattern, that step off the cliff, trying to make the rest of the song match it.
You can hear the hit in the Rolling Stones’ cover; the Crickets’ original remains in another world. With the hesitations in the beat, in the singing, matched by the words fitted to them—“You drivin’ me back”—the record isn’t easy to listen to, because it doesn’t quite make sense. Reaching at once for modernist abstraction and the symbolism of archaic ballads in which everybody dies, it speaks a defiantly absurdist language in the most modest, disappearing way. Always, when people have talked about the recordings Harry Smith brought to light on his anthology American Folk Music —the likes of William
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