![]() While working around Lubbock with his next partner Bob Montgomery (Neal had married in 1954), Holly introduced himself to Presley at Lubbock’s Cotton Club in early 1955. KDAV owner Dave Stone remembers, ‘We thought of rockabilly as just being another kind of country music, so we always played it.’ … Tommy Allsup remembers frequently seeing Holly’s records, and those of similar artists, on jukeboxes in country & western nightclubs. …Artists such as Holly, Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and the Everly Brothers were always thought of as country artists in the west Texas area, and their records were played as heavily on the country stations as on pop stations. Everything on the West Texas airwaves told him he was right: on Lubbock’s KDAV playlist, DJ “Hipockets” Duncan played Elvis Presley and Carl Perkins next to Hank Williams and Lefty Frizzell.Īs Holly’s British biographers John Goldrosen and John Beecher write: To Holly’s ear, this raucous style shot straight out of the perfectly respectable country-and-western he grew up on and its wayward cousin, honky-tonk. Here was the easy-to-overlook kid, the Class Generic, who stole the talent show by unleashing rabid, lascivious rockabilly on his unsuspecting classmates. Holly’s success spoke for all the like-minded classmates who thrilled to Presley’s singing and rebellion but found his sexual bravado out of reach. ![]() Metaphorically, this meant accentuating your strangeness was a game anybody could play-even, or perhaps especially, if you were the squarest looking guy in the class. Like a lot of other kids in Elvis Presley’s audience, he understood that the genius of the new Teen Jesus from Memphis was sui generis by definition. ![]() Holly first embraced rock’n’roll as a natural outgrowth of country-and-western. In a style crowded with ‘hipsters,’ ‘Marlon Brando with a guitar’ as Jackie Gleason dismissed Elvis Presley, Holly pushed “normal” to extremes. His guileless smile still contains multitudes. Like fellow Texan Roy Orbison, who had also worked with producer Norman Petty, Holly personified rock’s transformative power, and his influence reached far beyond his hiccups, songwriting, virile guitar work, stiff but arresting stage presence, and deceptively simple recordings. Together, the CD box and 30-minute DVD comprise the most comprehensive picture of Holly ever published. Now the Chick has assembled a companion Complete Buddy Holly DVD, which compiles all extant performance and tour footage into a montage of Holly’s infinitely brief career. On disc four, during several outtakes of Bo Diddley’s “Mona,” Holly sounds like Pete Townshend warming up for “Pinball Wizard.” It’s a set to get lost in. The final four volumes (7-10) are devoted to stereo and mono remasters, the mid-’60s string overdubs, Holly’s guitar sessions, radio feeds, and singles by others Holly treasured enough to arrange for himself. It opens with a 1949 home recording of Hank Snow’s “My Two-Timin’ Woman,” before Buddy’s voice has changed (with a respectable guitar solo), and closes six CDs later with Holly’s solo acoustic “Apartment Demos,” which include the bizarrely slow takes of “Slippin’ and Slidin’,” sped up for Chipmunks effect. His chart action wedges a creative infinity into two years, from 1957 up to his plane crash on February 3, 1959. ![]() This grand, sprawling patchwork weaves early 1953 appearances on KDAV with Jack Neal as “Buddy and Jack” with radio spots, alternate takes, even phone messages to reluctant executives. This persona, the ordinary as cosmic, consumes the Complete Buddy Holly, last year’s underground epic, a 10-CD remaster of everything Holly touched. In musical terms, squeezing the eccentric from the banal meant deconstructing all the elements of song as recording, from verse-refrain-bridge constructions to bending analog tape to do your song’s will. On his records, everyday stuff turned radical. His futuristic Stratocaster guitar gave his horn-rimmed glasses sudden but certain panache, and in a style crowded with “hipsters,” “Marlon Brando with a guitar” as Jackie Gleason dismissed Elvis Presley, Holly pushed “normal” to extremes. Holly, the “King of the Sixth Grade,” hiccuped his hormones out loud, flipping everybody’s high school jitters into metaphor. LONG BEFORE “POST-MODERN” became pure jargon, Buddy Holly put quotes around his “normalcy” to disarm rock machismo.
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