There are a lot of “what ifs” in popular music, just like everything else I guess; the career of the Beatles is full of them, like, what if young Ivan Vaughn hadn’t introduced Paul McCartney to John Lennon at the Woolton church fete in July, 1957? What if they’d never met artsy bohemians Astrid Kercher and Klaus Voormann in Hamburg? What if tough-as-nails bouncer Horst Fascher hadn’t taken a liking to them, to the point that he made it clear to all the hard cases and petty criminals on the seedy Reeperbahn that the skinny kids from England were with him, and it was hands off? What if Pete Sutcliffe had lived? What if Brian Epstein had never developed the curiosity to go see this new group playing at the Cavern? What if producer George Martin hadn’t sensed something about the lads during their last-chance, not very impressive audition at Parlophone? What if Brian had lived?
I suppose you could play this game with just about any group you liked, listing off the chance encounters, missed opportunities, happy coincidences, and accidents of fate that made or broke them – a hearse with Ontario plates spotted in the midst of a Sunset Boulevard traffic jam comes to mind – and none of it would matter much to anybody outside of the true fans (and everybody, it seems, has at least a few true fans, as hard as that is to believe sometimes, see: Insane Clown Posse and Rammstein). Sometimes, though, it’s more than trivia. Sometimes it’s epochal. For me, about the biggest, and surely the saddest arose from a plane crash on February 3, 1959, 65 years ago today. What if Buddy Holly hadn’t died that day?
It’s hard to believe, given the success he’d already achieved, and the growing maturity of his many well-known compositions, that he was only 22 years old. His catalogue is stuffed so full of memorable songs that you can pretty much select a few of his album tracks at random, slap them together on a compilation, and call it his Greatest Hits. We lost so very much on what’s been referred to ever since as “the day the music died”. Only 22! What would he have done?
He burned so brightly that the short time he was with us was still long enough for his work to become an almost incalculable influence on all who came after him. The Wikipedia article sums it up pretty well:
He is often regarded as the artist who defined the traditional rock-and-roll lineup of two guitars, bass, and drums. Holly was a major influence on later popular music artists, including Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Hollies, Elvis Costello, Dave Edmunds, Marshall Crenshaw, and Elton John. Holly was among the first artists inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, in 1986. Rolling Stone magazine ranked him number 13 in its list of “100 Greatest Artists” in 2010.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddy_Holly
Attached above are a couple of my own favourites, and if they aren’t the ones you’d have picked, just go to YouTube and plug his name into the search engine. Up pops a cornucopia. Not Fade Away, later covered by the Rolling Stones, perhaps proves John Lennon’s quip that all songwriting has an element of theft to it, as it’s based on the seminal “Bo Diddley Beat”, toned down a bit and made more friendly (let’s not call it “copying”, and instead think of it as an homage). I sometimes think that half of rock n’ roll would never have happened but for this:
Nobody did it like Bo, but Holly made a pretty good go of it.
Words of Love is simple, but lovely. You can sense its DNA in a lot of McCartney’s most pleasing ballads. Obviously, Holly was a huge influence on the Beatles (even their name, according to the conventional wisdom, was a tribute to Holly’s “Crickets”), and you can sense the Fab Four’s respect for him in their pitch-perfect version of Words of Love, also attached above, as well as the extent to which many “Beatlesque” harmonies have ancestors in Holly’s work (ditto the Everly Brothers). Not for nothing is the attached Tweet, commemorating the anniversary of the plane crash that changed everything, extracted from a Beatles fan feed. Maybe there really is something akin to balance in the Universe; a chance encounter in 1957 had already ensured that there’d be someone to pick up the baton after that awful accident of 1959. That doesn’t make it all right, but it helps.
the needlefish 