B009HOTHPE EBOK (13 page)

Phil was about eighteen at the time and I was all of sixteen. We started walking a little faster as we got off the escalator because by now we could see these guys had turned around and were coming down the escalator in our direction. We started high-stepping it down the street. It was a small town, and once we made it to the corner we pretty much thought we had gotten away with it. So we went into a movie theater. We were still in our motorcycle jackets when we hear them come into the theater and sit right behind us. The theater was mostly empty but you could hear a horde of people muttering and mumbling in the row behind us. Phil turned around, and glanced sideways from the side of his eye without moving his head. “Aw, don’t worry about it,” he said, “it’s just a bunch of kids.” So we continued watching the movie.

Suddenly we start hearing this tough-guy talk behind us. “That was one hell of a fight on Saturday, was it not?” one of them says. “But nothing like it’s gonna be here,” says the other goon. And they started laughing in this brutish way. Suddenly this is starting to smell like trouble. Phil, still thinking it was just a bunch of obnoxious kids, turned around and asked, “What did you say?” And right then a guy with the head of the gorilla in a biker jacket with the sleeves cut off so he could show his muscles has his face right next to his. “Why?” he said in a threatening voice. Now Phil was concerned. He turned back around to us and said, “We’ve got to get out of here.”

They turned out to be the same bunch of louts that we encountered in the department store. We waited a few more minutes and very quickly exited the theater and as we were leaving we could hear that whole row getting up. There were some fourteen people back there. They looked like juvenile delinquents—the genuine article. As we came out of the theater we knew we were in trouble. They were gonna start some kind of a rumble. Just at that moment the whole orchestra came walking down the street, some twenty black guys. We traveled on these tours with a big black R&B band, the Paul Williams Band. They played in the background behind everybody. They could sense something odd was going on so they said, “What’s happening, guys?” “Well, see, these guys are after us.…” “Hey, you mean
those
guys?” they said with disdain. The goon with the jacket with the cut-off sleeves saw this group of big black guys coming toward them and all of a sudden these gang members who’d been after us came to a screeching halt. They went into shock. This was in Canada where they weren’t used to seeing that many black people. The big guy with the cut-off sleeves had on a Mickey Mouse watch. He looks at it and goes, “Oh, Jeez, looks like I might be late for work,” and dashes off. And that was the end of that close shave.

After that Phil put that jacket in his suitcase and shipped it home. I continued to wear it on the airplane but not on the streets of strange cities ever again.

To this day I still see Phil—I love being in his company. Don I don’t see at all. It’s well known that Don and Phil Everly had a contentious relationship—they fought all the time. The two brothers were opposites in so many ways. It was insane! Phil was warm and ingratiating; Don was very quiet and shy. They fought so much some nights you wondered if they could ever go on stage together, and yet they sounded so angelic with those incredible high Appalachian harmonies. They were great-looking guys—James Dean-ish. Phil went on to marry the stepdaughter of Archie Bleyer, who owned Cadence, their record company. It was through them I first met Wesley Rose of Acuff-Rose Music, the big Nashville publishing house. They had the finest catalog of country-western music, including all the great Hank Williams songs. Wesley was very much the Southern gentleman with the
Gone with the Wind
moustache and cowboy hat, courtly, polite, but very shrewd.

Unlike today, these guys were true song-pluggers, publishers who went out and worked their catalog and had a sensitivity to the material and placed songs with other artists. That’s how you got records made and made money for your artists. Now the publishing business is more like the banking business.

When we got back from our big Australian tour Irv Feld signed us up to do Alan Freed’s Big Beat Show at the Brooklyn Paramount Theatre from March 28 through May 1958. No Jerry Lee, but me, Buddy Holly and The Crickets, and The Everly Brothers joining up again with Chuck Berry, Clyde McPhatter and The Drifters, and Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers.

After we did that show, Alan Freed, the disc jockey, wanted to manage me. He was chasing me around, calling the record company. In those days, you could be a disc jockey
and
manage someone. Different set of rules back then. There’s a definite conflict of interest there, but the business was looser.

I was wearing fancy suits, trying to act like an adult but basically I was still just a kid. I’m pretty sure I was still watching
The Mickey Mouse Club
and stuff like that. It got confusing. I remember doing this interview with May Okon of the
Daily News
in March 1958 when I was doing the Big Beat Show and telling her how I’d watch the other kids going to school from my hotel window and a smile would come over my face because I didn’t have to go to school but that I felt two contradictory emotions: on the one hand I seemed to be so beyond kids of my own age but I’d buy toys and claim they were gifts for my kid brother back in Canada when they were really for me. The contradictions in my life were piling up. It was a poignant moment for me as I realized that in one way I’d leap-frogged over my schoolmates into fame, money, and mock adulthood, but at the same time realizing I’d forfeited my childhood—something that you are never going to be able to get back. I think that irony was one of the things I felt I had in common with Michael Jackson when I began to work with him.

Freed was a kind of forceful, tall, imposing-type guy, who had an ego and a half. All attitude, because he knew he was the guy. He had the power and he really worked it. He was a true innovator in radio programming, but he ended up a kind of a tragic figure, getting caught up in the payola scandal. Payola was a common industry practice whereby record companies would make under-the-table payments to deejays to get their records played on the radio. Everybody did it—you could barely walk into a men’s room in the Brill Building without seeing someone handing a deejay a big envelope of bills. But Freed got nailed as the fall guy for the practice—which didn’t stop, by the way.

September 1958 was my first tour of Japan. I played the Shinjuku Koma Theater and the Asakusa Kokusai Theater. When I got to Japan that’s where I really got into that girl action. We were introduced to some hot young Japanese girls and I was inviting them left and right onto the train. The mothers would be following me to the next city. I was feeding my sexual appetite; I’ve never been that accessible with girls at home. You couldn’t get any action. But in Japan the girls were throwing themselves at me. I wasn’t even looking for them; they were just coming to me. In Germany there were the Kessler twins. When I got to Paris I wanted to meet Brigitte Bardot. And I did. Let’s leave it at that.

Buddy was getting even more dissatisfied with The Crickets: he wanted to go out on his own, he was outgrowing them. There was some dissention going on in the ranks. I saw that Buddy had an amazing future ahead of him.

We became close, tight friends. We got to the point where we were talking about writing songs together and combining our different strengths as songwriters and producers, creating a situation where we could work together. We planned to start a publishing company together. By the end of the all-star tours we were separating ourselves out from the rest of the pack.

During much of the time I knew him, Buddy was involved in some form of litigation with his manager (over money issues), and disputes with The Crickets (over the direction the band was going).

Sometime that fall, after I got back, Buddy called Irv and me. He was sounding a bit desperate. He’d broken up with The Crickets and was having problems with his manager. He told us he was out of money, and was going through problems with his management—his manager, Norm Petty, had apparently stolen money from him and his band. While he was away and before he could explain what he was doing, The Crickets had sided with his manager and he felt betrayed. He married this woman he’d met in New York, Maria Elena—she was the secretary at his record company—and wanted to move there. Buddy said he needed money fast, and could we bring him out on a tour?

So we created a sister tour, a parallel tour to the one we were on, just for Buddy. The tour was called the Winter Dance Party, just some name to make it sound lively and fun because it was in the middle of the winter and it was way out in these remote ballrooms and arenas in the Midwest. It was Buddy, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens. Waylon Jennings was Buddy’s guitar player at that point—Buddy I think was paying him 75 bucks a week, and incidentally, he never got paid for that tour.

In 1958, Buddy went into the studio to record what turned out to be his final hit, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.” I really loved the way it came out. Right before Buddy went in to record it, he told Dick Jacobs, the A&R guy at Brunswick Records, that he had this new song I’d written for him. Jacobs got his copyist to quickly write the lead sheets from Buddy’s guitar version. They wrote the arrangement very quickly that afternoon, for strings and rhythm.

When I got to the studio there was this eighteen-piece orchestra, including eight violins, two violas, two cellos, and a harp, as well as string players recruited from the New York Symphony Orchestra. These were top session players, like Al Caiola and Abraham “Boomie” Richman from the Benny Goodman Band on tenor sax. Buddy sang it in his classic up-tempo Texas voice. His characteristic “buy-bees,” “golly-gees,” and hiccuppy vocals were so infectious and worked so well against the lush orchestration that when he finished he got a round of applause from those initially dubious studio musicians.

He talked about his new wife, Maria Elena, endlessly. Maria Elena had wanted to come on the tour, but she was pregnant and throwing up, and Buddy wouldn’t let her. Bizarrely, before going on the tour, Buddy had had a dream that he was flying with his brother and they landed on top of a building. They had to leave Maria Elena and he said, “Wait right here, I’ll be back to pick you up.” Buddy would tape songs for her on his Ampex tape recording machine at his apartment. He’d written the song “Maria Elena” for her, recorded a few years later by Los Indios Tabajaras.

Buddy Holly’s story was that of love. He sang about what he knew and the pureness and the simplicity of his voice reinforced that sincerity. Elvis, on the other hand,
performed
his songs; he personalized them with his own theatrical delivery, but by the sixties this type of song interpreter had become less convincing than groups and singers like Buddy writing their own material.

Chuck Berry wrote some great teenage anthems—“Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Sweet Little Sixteen”—but Chuck was in his thirties when he was writing these songs. I was writing about teenage problems from inside. Chuck
described
teenage problems—they were great Kodachrome slides of teenage life—while I was living it and expressing it as a teenager. What we both had in common, along with Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran, was that kids believed these were musical autobiographies, our own personal stories, that they weren’t songs made up by writers in the Brill Building. It was Buddy Holly’s story in the same way that it would be John Lennon or Paul McCartney’s story.

My style was the result of studying the dynamics of everyone who came before me. I have that Semitic, Middle Eastern cry in my voice. Buddy’s approach and the sound of his voice were very different. He wrote in major keys: A, E, and D. That was Buddy’s magic. Buddy’s vibe was always very upbeat, optimistic—The Beatles picked up on that, that major key, very true and very simple, and all about love.

He was happy to be working with Tommy Allsup and Waylon Jennings (on the brand-new Fender bass guitar Buddy had bought him). He was very up; he wasn’t as preoccupied and defensive as he had been on the Summer Dance Party tour. He was happy he’d finally gotten rid of Norman Petty. He wasn’t the only one with problems with his manager. Don and Phil Everly were fighting their ex-manager over money, too.

When Buddy talked about all the plans he had for a new studio and his European tour, he was just bursting with energy and optimism. He was planning to create a songwriting partnership with me and Niki Sullivan, guitarist with The Crickets.

One of the reasons he did the Winter Dance Party deal was that it was a General Artists Corporation production and he knew they were planning a British tour and wanted to be on that. He had really loved England—and they loved him there like crazy.

By now Buddy was getting to be a real spiffy dresser: polka-dotted ascots, leather shortie overcoats, the whole deal. He had grown up in poverty, wearing Levis and T-shirts, but as soon as he got the opportunity he became a serious clothes hound. Stage tuxedos, cummerbunds, a blue blazer. He also went and got his hair done, taking his dark curls and putting them in a permanent wave.

I don’t know if a lot of people know this, but in the interim period—between splitting up with The Crickets and getting his own thing together—Buddy was taking flying lessons in New Jersey. He was fascinated with planes. Loved flying. He was about to qualify for his pilot’s license to fly light aircraft.

And since he was a pilot himself he believed he knew as much about flying and weather conditions as the pilot and that’s what emboldened him to make the pilot take off that fateful day, February 3, 1959. Before takeoff there was a big discussion as to who was going to go. It shook down—disastrously—to those three guys: Buddy, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper.

They all went round and round as to who was getting on that plane, you know. Six or seven people were earmarked because they were all chipping in to buy a share in the cost of the flight. They all wanted to get to the next city, to the hotel, get their laundry done, and get a good night’s sleep. It was back and forth as to who was going to fly. Dion decided he didn’t want to pay the thirty-six dollars it was going to cost. Waylon Jennings also took a pass that night.