The Buddy Holly-Waylon Jennings Story again

[johnfowles]

I thought I would check youtube to see which videos might be available of my pre-Lighfoot favourite Buddy Holly
the usual four or five main clips were all there plus an interesting one at:-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QmyGZ64J9yg billed as:-
Buddy Holly - The Day The Music Died
08:45
The story behind the song American Pie by Don McLean. Featuring the Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin and
of course Buddy, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens.
I grabbed the original and highly compressed Flash video file
YouTube - Buddy Holly - The Day The Music Died.flv which is 19,519KB
using youtube grabber then converted it to an mpg user friendly format file:-
YouTube - Buddy Holly - The Day The Music Died.flv.MPG
where it had grown to a much larger 47,448KB
Naturally of course I followed my by now well practised grabbing/converting technique as explained in my superb tutorial at:-
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/Tutorials/saving_youtube_videos_tutorial.htm
thank heaven for 2 gigabyte Compact Flash memory cards and the simple built-in media card reader on my new desktop!!
this video has an almost 9 minutes running time because that is the length of the full American Pie recording by Don Mclean
as used by the creators
http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/images/lonestar.jpg
Who used that great recording and its enigmatic lyrics as the sound track for a great selction of images that are presented and panned in much the same way as Tom "Gahoendoe" Salter's Stonewall Studio masterpieces
Timely reminder his original 23 are at
http://www.corfid.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=004203#000000
I had mentioned Waylon Jennings in another topic
so towards the end of this video I made these two screenshots

http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/images/coin_flip.jpg

http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/images/waylon.jpg
Enjoy and discuss!!!
John

[ELizabeth]

Sir John,
Perhaps I am giving away my age but I recall w/ great clarity seeing Buddy H and the C.s live at the Brooklyn Paramount. For $1 you could see BH, the Everly Brothers, Sam Cook, (honey for a voice) Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers and the list goes on and on. No way today could you see almost all the top pop musicians for that little money. Musicians had not yet discovered that a few of them (greedy musicians, only in it for the $) were starting to turn 'music into gold'(John Stewart). Of course none of the greediness would have been fed w/o the huge number of well-heeled teenagers on the horizon...and then there were the stadium power ballad groups! An amazing story!

[johnfowles]

Originally posted by ELizabeth:
Sir John,
Perhaps I am giving away my age Crikey ELizabeth
That must have been around 48 years ago so yes
Now I know that Jessie Joe is envious that I got to see Gord in 1967 but this takes the biscuit, as, having in a longish lifetime managed to see most of the great from Bill Haley to Dire Straits to Art Blakey, Ken Colyer and the Count and the Duke, but my main regret musically was not getting out of boarding school in March 1958 to travel 35 miles to Salisbury to see Buddy. I have however since been to Lubbock Texas and the studio in Clovis NM, during my 1999 North American tour see my Holly anecdote at:-
http://www.anecdote.notlong.com
I have long wished I could have seen that Paramount concert which must have been magical.
what if anything given your advanced age can you recall of it??
As a reminder here is a scan of the front cover of my main Holly sheet music volume

http://www.johnfowles.org.uk/images/paramount.jpg
I don't see Mr Cooke on the billing though perhaps you were thinking of the Fat Man, who later inspired the choice of stage name of the
Twisting king (C C)

[ELizabeth]

John,
Advanced age my foot!
My roomate at boarding school and I went to more than 1 Alan Freed R&R Show. My memories are quite clear..thanks to 2 surviving programs from Alan Freed's shows. The roster of singers in the 1957 show was as follows: Little Richard (danced in the aisles to Lucille, Rip It Up, Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, and others ), Mickey and Sylvia (Love is Strange), the Diamonds (Little Darlin), The Cleftones, BH and the Crickets (That'll Be the Day), the Moonglows (Sincerely, Please Send Me Someone to Love)Jimmie Rogers (Honeycomb), the Del Vikings (Come Go With Me) (my boyfriend at the time always started singing that song when he had to go to the mens' room), Chuck Berry (Maybelline, Give Me that R&R Music), Big Joe Turner(fabulous blues),the Everlys, Paul Anka (Diane) and Sam Cooke (Darlin' You Send Me)(too bad that he died such a horrible death..totally uncalled for.

I have wonderful memories of my adventures w/ my roomate. For example, her Mother gave her a Mercury Monterrey convertible which we would drive to the B.Paramont. After one of the shows the convertible top got stuck in the up position and we were sunk because it was starting to rain...when who should come out of the theater but Don and Phil and being the gentlemen they were (are) helped us lower the top. I loved those shows and I love the picture of the BP.

I may have used up more than my alloted time so I'll sign off. It was indeed great to be young.

[ February 14, 2007, 19:46: Message edited by: ELizabeth ]

[ELizabeth]

John where are you? No comment on my memories of the Alan Freed R&r shows? 'Lizbet

[Affair on Touhy Ave.]

Originally posted by ELizabeth:
John,
Advanced age my foot!
My roomate at boarding school and I went to more than 1 Alan Freed R&R Show. My memories are quite clear..thanks to 2 surviving programs from Alan Freed's shows. The roster of singers in the 1957 show was as follows: Little Richard (danced in the aisles to Lucille, Rip It Up, Tutti Frutti, Long Tall Sally, and others ), Mickey and Sylvia (Love is Strange), the Diamonds (Little Darlin), The Cleftones, BH and the Crickets (That'll Be the Day), the Moonglows (Sincerely, Please Send Me Someone to Love)Jimmie Rogers (Honeycomb), the Del Vikings (Come Go With Me) (my boyfriend at the time always started singing that song when he had to go to the mens' room), Chuck Berry (Maybelline, Give Me that R&R Music), Big Joe Turner(fabulous blues),the Everlys, Paul Anka (Diane) and Sam Cooke (Darlin' You Send Me)(too bad that he died such a horrible death..totally uncalled for.

I have wonderful memories of my adventures w/ my roomate. For example, her Mother gave her a Mercury Monterrey convertible which we would drive to the B.Paramont. After one of the shows the convertible top got stuck in the up position and we were sunk because it was starting to rain...when who should come out of the theater but Don and Phil and being the gentlemen they were (are) helped us lower the top. I loved those shows and I love the picture of the BP.

I may have used up more than my alloted time so I'll sign off. It was indeed great to be young. Speaking of Mickey and Sylvia, I wonder if that song might of been conterversial when released considering the spoken parts such as "Come Here Loverboy!"

Perhaps some stations might of cut those parts out.

[ELizabeth]

I don't know if the radio stations cut the 'Loverboy' bit from the song. I don't think they did in Albany.
The song was certainly not cut at all in "Dirty Dancing'. That scene was the sexiest scene in the entire movie. Different time I suppose. When "Love is Strange" first came out, it was a known fact that the teenagers were going to Hell, led by Alan Freed. ;)

[Affair on Touhy Ave.]

Buddy Holly Forum.

http://www.buddyholly.com/forums/default.aspx

[Affair on Touhy Ave.]

Thought I'd post this interesting acticle on Buddy.


http://www.virtualubbock.com/stoCOBuddy.html

[ELizabeth]

Sir John, Thank you for the piece(s) on my favorite group.

[jeanbreckman]

thanks for the nice article as well. :D

[Yuri]

Hard to believe that it's been half a century since 'the day that music died'. I'm a great fan of Buddy Holly as well John. I've got a box set of around 8 albums releaced in the 70's including some rare Holly material.

Came across this article on the CBC site you may be interested in.

http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2009/01/30/f-buddy-holly-retrospective.html

Rave on
Remembering Buddy Holly, 50 years later

It’s been 50 years since the small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper (a.k.a. J.P. Richardson) went down in a field near Clear Lake, Iowa. Trapped on the seemingly endless “Winter Dance Party” tour of the U.S. Midwest, and faced with a bus that was constantly breaking down, the three rock ’n’ rollers each shelled out $36 to fly from Clear Lake to Fargo, N.D., which was minutes away from their next gig, in Moorhead, Minn. They were hoping to avoid a freezing all-night drive and get a decent sleep before the show. Instead, on Feb. 3, 1959, they became part of pop mythology: rock music’s first inadvertent martyrs.

Buddy Holly was 22 when he died. He had been rock 'n' roll star for a mere 18 months, but in that time he made immense contributions to the burgeoning art form.
The three are linked forever, but Holly left behind the most lasting legacy. At the time of the crash, the 28-year-old Richardson was riding high on the charts with his jaunty hit Chantilly Lace. Valens was just 17; his biggest smash had been a reworking of a Mexican folk song called La Bamba.

Holly was 22 when he died. The Baptist kid from Lubbock, Tex., had only been a star for 18 months, but in that time he made immense contributions to the burgeoning art form. One of the first white rock ’n’ roll performers to write his own material, Holly was also a studio whiz who introduced new instruments to the rock idiom (e.g., the celeste on Everyday) and experimented with technology (check out the vocal double-tracking on Words of Love). Near the end of his brief career, he started adding lush orchestration to the mix on tracks like True Love Ways and It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.

Five cool Buddy Holly references
Tribute to Buddy Holly, Mike Berry (1961)
Genius producer Joe Meek was a Holly devotee who got Berry (a.k.a. "The British Buddy Holly") to sing this heartfelt if slightly creepy "tribute." With a drum sound lifted almost directly from Peggy Sue, this single went to #24 on the U.K. charts.

American Graffiti (1973)
George Lucas's nostalgic look at California teenage life was set in 1962. At one point, tough guy John Milner (played by Paul Le Mat) offers this withering assessment of the state of pop music: "I don't like that surfin' s--t. Rock n' roll's been goin' downhill ever since Buddy Holly died."

I'm Gonna Love You Too, Blondie (1978)
Debbie Harry unleashed a scorching cover of this Holly tune on Blondie's Parallel Lines album. Punk and new wave artists consciously embraced straight-ahead rock 'n' roll from the pre-Sgt. Pepper era, which lead to another round of Buddy nostalgia.

Buddy Holly, Weezer (1994)
Rivers Cuomo fashions a tasty slice of nerd rock, likening himself to the bespectacled wonder. The Spike Jonze-directed video was inspired by Happy Days, the '70s sitcom set in 1950s Milwaukee.

Pulp Fiction (1994)
Quentin Tarantino's pop culture obsessions are on overdrive in this film, particularly during the famous dance scene with Vincent Vega (John Travolta) and Mia Wallace (Uma Thurman), which takes place at Jack Rabbit Slim's — a theme restaurant where the servers are look-alikes of 1950s stars. Indie icon Steve Buscemi plays Buddy Holly. – GD

Holly didn’t have the swagger of an Elvis. At 5-11 and 145 pounds, he didn’t exude animal magnetism. Those black, horn-rimmed glasses, coupled with that lanky frame, gave Holly the look of a genial geek, the kind of guy you’d want as your lab partner in chemistry class. He looked pleasant but ordinary, certainly more approachable than wild contemporaries like Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard.

Holly’s looks alone wouldn’t sweep an audience away, and his lyrics reflected that. Sure, he could write perfect two-and-a-half-minute odes to teenage love (Peggy Sue, Rave On, Oh Boy!), but many of his songs are about vulnerability and romantic insecurity. His 1957 breakthrough hit, That’ll Be The Day, is a frenetic plea to his girlfriend not to end their relationship. He relies on some pretty serious emotional blackmail: “You say you’re going to leave, you know it’s a lie/Cause that’ll be the day when I die.” His follow-up release, Maybe Baby, doesn’t ooze confidence, either: “It’s funny, honey; you don’t care/You never listen to my prayer/Maybe, baby, you will love me someday.” Elvis could sing Heartbreak Hotel, but when Holly emoted in his Hank Williams-influenced hiccup style, it seemed a lot likelier that he was speaking from painful personal experience. And while Presley relied on the words of others, Holly wrote his own.

Over in England, where Holly was also massively popular, a few especially talented teenagers were listening. “To me, Buddy was the first to click as a singer-songwriter,” John Lennon once said. “His music really moved and his lyrics spoke to us kids in a way no one ever bothered before.”

Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison were utterly besotted with Holly. On July 12, 1958, their band, The Quarrymen, went into a studio for the first time, where they recorded a cover of That’ll Be The Day. When the Liverpudlians changed the group’s name, they were inspired by the bug motif of Holly’s back-up band, The Crickets.***

The soldiers in the British invasion swore their allegiance to the singer openly and often. The Beatles covered Words of Love and The Rolling Stones’ first song to chart in the U.S. was their 1964 version of Not Fade Away. McCartney, who now owns the rights to Holly’s work, once admitted, “At least the first 40 songs we wrote were Buddy Holly-influenced.”
Still, no musician did more to mythologize Holly than Don McLean, author of the 1971 megahit American Pie. The song is an eight-and-a-half-minute jumble of pop culture references, the most obvious of which is a nod to the events of Feb. 3, 1959. Although McLean doesn’t mention Holly by name, it’s clear he’s referring to the fallen idol: “I can’t remember if I cried/When I read about his widowed bride/But something touched me deep inside/The day the music died.”

That final phrase, “the day the music died,” quickly caught on. McLean had tapped into the profound sadness surrounding that event, and the collective belief that something artistically pure had been lost. But let’s face it, rock ’n’ roll didn’t exactly die in that crash; it’d be more accurate to call Holly’s death “the day the music went into a five-year coma.”
With Holly gone, Elvis in the army, Chuck Berry in jail and Jerry Lee Lewis blacklisted after marrying his 13-year-old cousin, the music lost much of its edge in the early 1960s; that first glorious wave of rock ’n’ roll was over. Manufactured, inconsequential pop stars like Fabian and Frankie Avalon came to the fore and produced some extremely tepid material. It was only when the aforementioned Brits arrived stateside — and annihilated those fey imitators — that rock ’n’ roll came back to life.

Fifty years on, the residents of Clear Lake are marking the grim anniversary with a series of events, including a tribute concert at the Surf Ballroom, the venue for that last Winter Dance Party gig. The surviving Crickets will be on the bill; the “widowed bride,” Maria Elena Holly, appeared at a symposium there last week.
Holly would have been 72 today. His bespectacled face remains frozen in time, a smiling beacon for every awkward kid who ever thought of picking up a guitar.

Greig Dymond writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

***I recall that the Beatles were so taken by Holly's music that they once considered calling themselves "The Cricketeers" but thought that was too much of a rip-off. Choosing the more generic 'Beatles' (Beetles with a Beat), the rest became history. (y.)