Alaska Employment Law

You all remember Buddy Holly of Lubbock, Texas. February 3, 1959, the day the music died, all that sort of thing – that’s part of our cultural history now. That wretched tour, the one on which Holly’s plane went down, killing him and a couple of other rock and rollers – he was on that tour to make money because that creep, Norman Petty, was holding up payment of all his back royalties, and arguing that Buddy was not even a Cricket, for gosh sakes, while Buddy and his new, and newly pregnant, wife Maria Elena were not able to cover their rent in their expensive Manhattan apartment.

That was an important tour, for a lot of reasons. Future country star and “outlaw” Waylon Jennings got his start on that tour, playing bass in Buddy’s band. The Big Bopper and Richie Valens went to Rock and Roll Heaven, of course. And a kid named Robert Zimmerman saw that tour in Duluth the night of January 31, 1959, just three days before the end.

That’ll be the day-hey-hey/When I die.

The fascinating saga of Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley appears in Rave On, by Philip Norman, a biography from the late 90s (but just re-issued, I think), written by a man better known for his books on the Beatles and, more recently, John Lennon. It’s a bit of a fan letter, too, as most biographies of Holly seem to be. His biographers are drawn to him and his music at a personal level, and not infrequently they report their personal observations about how it affected them. When younger, I didn’t pay too much attention to Buddy until I bought a 1972 double LP on Decca called A Rock and Roll Collection, which is disparaged by collectors today because it had no liner notes and contained what some thought was an odd choice of songs. I don’t agree. No one cared about liner notes then, and the songs were all pretty great. What I learned later is that a number of them were overdubbed raw tapes recorded by Buddy in his New York apartment just before that tour. Not long after his death, Coral Records released six of those overdubbed “apartment tapes,” as they became known, that had been “sweetened” to sound like the Crickets (sort of) by a Coral A&R man named Jack Hansen. I like those versions. Later on, Norman Petty, Buddy’s original producer and manager, got control of the songs and re-overdubbed the apartment tapes. Pretty bad, I thought. (Norman Petty died at age 57 of cancer. Paul McCartney eventually bought Buddy Holly’s music publishing. Which reminds me that the first song recorded by the Beatles (then known as the Quarrymen) in 1958 was… “That’ll Be the Day,” a title based on John Wayne’s line from the John Ford film The Searchers.) Those “apartment tapes” became legendary. When NPR ran a story about them a couple of years ago, sales of a bootleg collection of Buddy Holly songs that included those apartment tapes went bonkers. I saw that 4-CD set going for over $1000 on eBay. (The tapes have since been officially released on CD.)

With original songs, Hansen overdubs, and Petty overdubs, plus new “versions” overdubbed by a wretched group known as The Picks in the 90s, Buddy’s catalog got very messy. MCA, which owned the songs in the 80s, attempted to remedy the matter by putting out The Complete Buddy Holly on six LPs or six cassettes (I have the cassettes) in a terrific box set with superb liner notes, full of information no one had ever heard about before. But when the CD era dawned, MCA did not produce an updated digital set. Nor did Bear Family Records, the leading compiler of American roots music, notwithstanding that it’s a German company. We infer that Bear Family could not get the rights.What’s out there now is a mess. However, if you want just one compilation, get

Buddy Holly Gold , a 2-CD set (beware a few Petty overdubs). If you want to see the evolution of his music, try to find a couple of collections on El Toro Records (sold in America on www.cdbaby.com): Hollybilly: The Complete 1956 Recordings, and Not Fade Away: The Complete 1957 Recordings, which include pretty much everything, including songs by other country artists on which Holly played or sang. I sure hope El Toro keeps going; these are great sets. For absolute completists, there is also a 10-CD set out there in the dimmer recesses of the internet which appears to have every last blasted snippet of music from the man who gave us some phenomenal music. For those who believe in fate, the last record Buddy Holly released before he died was “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”