THIS WAS THE DAY HE DIED

Fifty years ago a small plane crashed in Iowa, killing three young musicians at the height of their careers. Daniel Arizona remembers Buddy Holly, who was pure rock 'n' roll behind a veneer of golly-gee ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

Today marks the anniversary of rock 'n' roll’s star-crossed relationship with aviation: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson met their tragic end in a cornfield in Iowa one snowy night on February 3rd 1959. The music didn’t die, strictly speaking, but one of rock 'n' roll’s most talented and promising songwriters and performers did. Buddy Holly was 22.

In the handful of years that Holly was active, only Chuck Berry could boast of having penned such a catalogue of standards (a craft that was, at the time, not at all commonplace). One reason the two men were so prolific is because they weren’t trying to sound like somebody else. Their work is so identifiable and very much of a piece because they were competing with themselves, like visual artists exhausting the possibilities of movements that they themselves invented. (It’s the same effect that distinguishes Hank Williams’s songs as miraculously varied, although there were only a few key ingredients.)

Holly’s shiny suits were standard show-business, but the combination of the most famous horn rims in history and his sunburst solid body Stratocaster was pure rock 'n' roll, embodying a reluctance to fit in. (Elvis Costello appropriated this blatant disregard for norms years later.) Holly had style as well as attitude, a mix of understated cool that permeates his best recordings.

Eschewing the popular hollow-body guitars of that era favoured by bluesmen, jazz players and country pickers, Holly mistreats and massages his, strumming in a primal, electrified rhythmic chord-lead style. He made his pain, his happiness, instantly palpable, viscerally direct, by whipping the strings fiercely or ringing the high strings with a flourish (such as the chanky chank guitar "solo" on "Oh Boy"). His recordings with the Crickets still deliver a wallop because they were done in a private studio. With ample time to work out their arrangements, a more sophisticated, energetic sound populates each of their releases. This aggressive interplay between guitar and drums is what makes "Not Fade Away" and "Peggy Sue" sound so good today.

Then there's Holly’s lead on “That’ll Be the Day”. After a repeating blues lick, he stops in the middle and just strums the rhythm, locking into the down and dirty stripper beat for two measures before heading back into the famous opening arpeggio. It’s as sexy and suggestive as anything the Pelvis ever did, but it smoulders right behind those golly-gee, he’s-such-a-nice-boy glasses.

Holly’s distinctive singing style, his drawn out syllables (the “uh-ohs-ohs” and “a hey-heys”) and choked hiccups are easily imitated, but never bettered. Writing all of his own material, Holly didn’t have to change his phrasing to accommodate anyone else’s idea of what was commercial. Holly could growl, he could croon and he could harmonise, moving smoothly back and forth between the demands of rock 'n' roll and plaintive balladry, offering something for everyone and proving that rock 'n' roll could be as raw and as sophisticated as it wanted to be.

Holly’s influence during his brief career is staggering, setting the stage for countless performers and songwriters in the 1960s and onward. Touring England in 1958, Holly spread the gospel of rock 'n' roll to thousands of British teenagers. In that same year, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison pooled what little money they had to take a bus across town and pile into a closet-sized recording booth to cut their first, one-take shellac disc: they chose “That’ll Be The Day”. The next time those amateur Crickets covered Buddy Holly, they’d be the Beatles. (McCartney doesn’t own the rights to all of his own material, but he does own Holly’s.) A couple of nights before Holly’s last concert, he played in Duluth, Minnesota where a young Bob Dylan stood in the front row.

When I was a kid, I remember hearing my mother’s story about being 13 and devastated by the news of Holly’s death when it came over the kitchen radio. I sought him out myself and was entranced by the effervescent, stripped-down “Everyday” with its leg-pat percussion and chiming celesta. That was all I had to hear. Before the age of Mega Deluxe Completist Box Sets, I had to wait until my family would travel so I could check every cassette rack in every truck-stop on the Eastern seaboard in the hopes that between Boz Skaggs and Carole King I’d find that precious Buddy Holly compilation that might contain those one or two tracks I’d never heard—I must have bought dozens of ‘em. Today, a light snow is falling and I can’t help reminiscing.

Picture credit: Whatsername? (via Flickr)

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in New York.)