“Ask moviegoers who invented the telephone. I asked Bauer about a statement he had made: “Whatever we put up there on the screen will be the truth.” “I’ll tell you what I meant by that,” he said. As I pointed out inaccuracy after inaccuracy to Cohen, Bauer and Rash, they agreed, but cited “dramatic license” in defense of their film. I sat with Ed Cohen, executive producer of The Buddy Holly Story, in his New York office, along with the film’s director, Steve Rash, and its producer, Freddy Bauer, and asked them about all the liberties their film had taken with the reality of Holly’s life, liberties that Holly’s family and friends are indignant about. As a result, The Buddy Holly Story now stands as the official version of his life, but the movie does not seem to be about the real Buddy Holly. No authoritative biography of Holly is currently available (John Goldrosen’s Buddy Holly: His Life and Music, published by Bowling Green University Popular Press in 1975, is out of print), and MCA’s reissues of Buddy Holly and the Crickets records are in disarray. The Rolling Stones’ first American release was Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” So it’s important to know just who Buddy Holly was. It is clear that the early Beatles were heavily influenced by him (Paul McCartney now owns the Holly song catalog) and that Bob Dylan’s phrasing owes him a great debt. Holly and the Crickets established the precedent for a self-contained rock & roll band, that is, one that wrote its own material and had enough studio freedom to do what it felt, in the process bridging country and rock. Everybody thinks it’s true - that’s the shame.Įven though Buddy Holly never had a Number One single in America, his legacy is immeasurable. The Crickets had also been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 14, 2012.It’s really a tinsel-town movie. After Holly’s death in 1959 at the age of 22, Sullivan died in 2004 and Mauldin in 2017. Over the ensuing decades, Allison also became an in-demand session player, recording with such artists as Bobby Vee, Eddie Cochran, Waylon Jennings, Paul McCartney and Nanci Griffith.Īllison was the last living member of the original line-up. “More Than I Can Say,” a 1960 Crickets single co-written by Allison and Curtis, later became a No. The band’s most famous latter-day album was 2004’s The Crickets and Their Buddies, which included star turns by Eric Clapton, John Prine, Nanci Griffith, Graham Nash, Rodney Crowell, and one-time Crickets member Jennings, among others. The Big Bopper), Allison continued recording and touring as The Crickets with a rotating cast of band members including Mauldin, Sonny Curtis, Glen Hardin, Earl Sinks, and Jerry Naylor. The song went on to become a rock standard, covered in later decades by Iggy Pop and others.įollowing Holly’s death in a plane crash in February 1959 alongside fellow rock ‘n’ roll pioneers Ritchie Valens and J.P. It was a lovely, lovely time and people liked it and we were really pleased they did.”Īllison himself scored a modest solo hit with “Real Wild Child” - a cover of Johnny O’Keefe’s “Wild One” - which was released under his middle name, Ivan, in 1958 and peaked at No. Whatever it was, Norman Petty’s engineering, Buddy’s guitar playing … it would’ve been hard to have been more commercial. There were some Cindy songs out at the time, but there weren’t any Peggy Sue ones. I said, ‘Let’s change the beat.’ I was dating Peggy Sue or had dated Peggy Sue at the time. We were riding around Lubbock and he had it written up as sort of a cha-cha beat or a rumba - a Latin feel. Of “Peggy Sue,” Allison said in an interview with Classic Bands, “ had it about half-finished. 3 on the Top 100 later that year as a solo single for Holly. “Peggy Sue,” on which Allison was also credited as a co-writer and which was named after his then-girlfriend and future wife Peggy Sue Gerron, hit No. 1 hit, The Crickets followed “That’ll Be The Day” with a string of successful singles including “Oh, Boy!”, “Maybe Baby” and “Think It Over” – the latter co-written by Allison. Wayne kept repeating the line, ‘That’ll be the day.’ Buddy said, ‘Let’s write a song,’ and I said, ‘That’ll be the day!’ We worked on it for about half an hour. We’d been to see the John Wayne movie The Searchers. Buddy and I rehearsed for hours, day after day. “My bedroom in Lubbock was real big - in fact, it had a piano in it. Allison explained to Texas Music Monthly how their breakout hit came to be.
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