and Versey Smith’s “When That Great Ship Went Down” from 1927, the Memphis Jug Band’s “K. C.Moan” from 1929, or Ken Maynard’s “Lone Star Trail” from 1930—they’ve found themselves drawn to the same phrase. “This music sounds like it came out of the ground,” people say, and that’s what “Not Fade Away” sounds like—which is to say it also sounds more like flying saucers rock ’n’ roll than Billy Lee Riley’s “Flyin’ Saucers Rock & Roll.”
There is “Maybe Baby,” a play on the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” except that here Clyde McPhatter’s pratfalls are replaced by something close to a stalker’s menace: not just words, “Maybe, baby, I’ll have you,” but the way Holly clips the last sound of each word, MAY be, BAY be, the slowness with which they’re delivered, the slowness with which the words drag against the beat, which pulls against itself. The first hint of a personal aesthetic of drift, of floating, that would take over in Holly’s apartment in New York the next year, is here in the ghostly backing vocals—it all seems to be happening in another dimension, where “maybe” is the ruling epistemological force, where nothing is certain and anything is possible. It’s the same spot Holly found “Well . . . All Right,” with its strange ellipsis, all but unknown in song-titling, where the drama is sealed at the end of each verse, the last word sliding into a dream the singer will dream for you if you won’t dream it for him. It’s the gentlest fuck off —to the world, to whoever might doubt a word he says, a fuck off that is also an extended hand.
There is “That’ll Be the Day,” written off of John Wayne’sever-more-exasperated “ That ’ll be the day” to Jeffrey Hunter across their five-year hunt for Natalie Wood in The Searchers. The Crickets first recorded it in Nashville for Decca in 1956; it was nothing, and the label shelved it along with everything else. The next year in Clovis they got it, the jangle of the guitar getting harder, sharper, with every note, and the band opening holes in the sound and then diving through them into some barely glimpsed other side, where they can look back at what they’ve already left behind. As if it had found and then become the template of all rock ’n’ roll before it and all to follow, the performance generates its own momentum. It takes your breath away, that anything could be this simple, and this complete.
But “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” the flipside of the “That’ll Be the Day” single, might be better. It begins as a thrill, a sound that seems huge because as with “That’ll Be the Day” its internal rhythm is so strong. It’s a sound that’s also an enormous room, full of air, full of space, room for anything to happen, and almost everything does.
There are the backing singers, two men and two women, who swing as if they’re on a swing, caught up in the fun, full of delight, real actors in this play, not props, every sound they make a shooting star of snapped-off cheerleader style. There’s the lack of care in the singer’s plea, the plea of someone looking for love, bereft, alone, but also cruising, not in any hurry, laughing at himself—and it’s the lack ofcare that makes the room in the song, room in its story, in its heart, room, in this case, for the cool walk of the last verse, which turns out to be as complete a definition of rock ’n’ roll as Holly’s guitar solos, the verse that was nothing but a Holly family saying, which here seems a Zen koan, a frontier password, and lines left out of “Not Fade Away” all at once: “Drunk man / Street car / Foot slip / There you are.”
Opening it up—as the first track on their first album, opening up the field of the Crickets’ music itself, of their future—there’s the lift, the crunch, and the release of what Holly does with his Fender Stratocaster. In “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” his solos are
There is “Maybe Baby,” a play on the Drifters’ “Money Honey,” except that here Clyde McPhatter’s pratfalls are replaced by something close to a stalker’s menace: not just words, “Maybe, baby, I’ll have you,” but the way Holly clips the last sound of each word, MAY be, BAY be, the slowness with which they’re delivered, the slowness with which the words drag against the beat, which pulls against itself. The first hint of a personal aesthetic of drift, of floating, that would take over in Holly’s apartment in New York the next year, is here in the ghostly backing vocals—it all seems to be happening in another dimension, where “maybe” is the ruling epistemological force, where nothing is certain and anything is possible. It’s the same spot Holly found “Well . . . All Right,” with its strange ellipsis, all but unknown in song-titling, where the drama is sealed at the end of each verse, the last word sliding into a dream the singer will dream for you if you won’t dream it for him. It’s the gentlest fuck off —to the world, to whoever might doubt a word he says, a fuck off that is also an extended hand.
There is “That’ll Be the Day,” written off of John Wayne’sever-more-exasperated “ That ’ll be the day” to Jeffrey Hunter across their five-year hunt for Natalie Wood in The Searchers. The Crickets first recorded it in Nashville for Decca in 1956; it was nothing, and the label shelved it along with everything else. The next year in Clovis they got it, the jangle of the guitar getting harder, sharper, with every note, and the band opening holes in the sound and then diving through them into some barely glimpsed other side, where they can look back at what they’ve already left behind. As if it had found and then become the template of all rock ’n’ roll before it and all to follow, the performance generates its own momentum. It takes your breath away, that anything could be this simple, and this complete.
But “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” the flipside of the “That’ll Be the Day” single, might be better. It begins as a thrill, a sound that seems huge because as with “That’ll Be the Day” its internal rhythm is so strong. It’s a sound that’s also an enormous room, full of air, full of space, room for anything to happen, and almost everything does.
There are the backing singers, two men and two women, who swing as if they’re on a swing, caught up in the fun, full of delight, real actors in this play, not props, every sound they make a shooting star of snapped-off cheerleader style. There’s the lack of care in the singer’s plea, the plea of someone looking for love, bereft, alone, but also cruising, not in any hurry, laughing at himself—and it’s the lack ofcare that makes the room in the song, room in its story, in its heart, room, in this case, for the cool walk of the last verse, which turns out to be as complete a definition of rock ’n’ roll as Holly’s guitar solos, the verse that was nothing but a Holly family saying, which here seems a Zen koan, a frontier password, and lines left out of “Not Fade Away” all at once: “Drunk man / Street car / Foot slip / There you are.”
Opening it up—as the first track on their first album, opening up the field of the Crickets’ music itself, of their future—there’s the lift, the crunch, and the release of what Holly does with his Fender Stratocaster. In “I’m Looking for Someone to Love,” his solos are
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