Makes me think of Spinal Tap’s “Gimmie some Money” song leading up to their later stuff.
Maybe he’d just be waiting in the wings, to one day come out as a 40 year old Hair Metal Band leader!
One reason he sounds odd is because he only strummed on the downstroke. Try it: It’s hard to do, especially as fast as Buddy played, and it sounds unusual because every chord is only played from the lowest to the highest note. As far as I know, few have followed in his footsteps.
About that tribute concert a couple days ago in Clear Lake, Iowa where Los Lobos and other bands played - there was an album that came out awhile back entitled “Not Fade Away: Remembering Buddy Holly” which had a great version by Los Lobos of one of Holly’s raunchiest and most atypical songs, ‘Midnight Shift’:
If Annie puts her hair up on her head
Paints them lips up bright bright red
Wears that dress that fits real tight
Starts stayin’ out ‘til the middle of the night
Says that a friend gave her a lift
Well Annie’s been workin’ on the midnight shift
After that I eventually picked up an album of Los Lobos’ original stuff and realized that hey, these guys are good.
Holly recorded himself solo on his tape recorder while living in New York City in his last months, and surprisingly, his recordings show some influence from the Village folk scene. Wouldn’t that have been interesting, if Holly would have taken a route similar to Bob Dylan or Arlo Guthrie through the '60s?
Some rockers did end up as country artists – Rick Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis, ect. Those are people I think that found that it was the country part of Rock ‘n’ Roll that really moved them. I don’t feature Buddy Holly having gone that way because I figure Buddy went to rock from the country he and his family played because he couldn’t leave well enough alone. He heard a sound out there and he incorporated it into his music. Then as a rocker he heard still more sounds, and wove them in. Popular tastes might have steered him, but popular tastes are steerable in a way that we credit the Beatles for having pulled off.
In fact, JP Richardson is to be heard contributing to the “oom-pah, oom-pahs” on Johnny Preston’s version of “Running Bear”. I assume he recorded them before he died (rather than after…).
Staying on the Village folk scene tangent, yeah I can’t imagine a music culture that supported John Sebastian not supporting Buddy Holly.
I think the difficult thing about imagining Buddy Holly having success in the 60s is that pretty much nobody else from 50s Rock had significant success in the 60s. Elvis did- but at the expense of “street cred”, and he was out of touch enough that his television special in December if 68 had to be called a “Comeback Special”.
Little Richard did well in the 60s, but it took that long for white kids to be allowed to listen to black music anyway.
Since none of Holly’s peers had success in the 60s- or at least not in a way that we can imagine working for Holly- it’s easy to come to the conclusion that Holly would not have done well in the 60s.
But, as an artist, Holly was such an individual- quirky, very much his own thing- that it wouldn’t be possible to predict his career path based on the careers of his “classmates”.
I would say that Holly would have done better through the 60s than the Everly Brothers did- and the Everly Brothers did pretty darn well during the 60s. As we think of them in historical context, the Everly Brothers get pegged as a 50s act- so their 60s work gets omitted from memory. But they actually held on respectably well. Holly would have done at least as well as the Everly Brothers. I think he would have done considerably better. To do considerably better than an act that actually did quite well translates to pretty solid success.
Being a songwriter, Holly would have absorbed more of the new musical sensibility. In his short career he showed himself to be a songwriter who was steadily growing and adapting. The Everlys wrote few of their songs, relying heavily on outside songwriters. Johnny Cash didn’t write near the percentage of his own catalogue that Holly wrote, and he managed to absorb 60s culture in a way that came through in his music. Holly would have known what was going on and would probably even have been ahead of the curve. 1967 Buddy Holly would have been very different than 1957 Buddy Holly- in a way that can’t be said of 1967 Chuck Berry vs 1957 Chuck Berry.
Of course, all of this is fantasy and speculation. Still, in his time he stood apart from the crowd, I think he’d have stood out just as distinctly had he had the chance to continue.
I would like to take exception to the words “only” and “every” in this post. Downstrokes predominate in most rock rhythm playing, but Buddy Holly did not restrict himself to downstrokes or even use them more extensively than normal. I have limited ability to listen to music while I’m at work, but I just listened to “Oh Boy” on Amazon. The guitar is somewhat buried during the vocals, but the between verse instrumental breaks definitely use alternating strums. For me, the distinctive thing about Holly is his voice.
+1 - Crotalus, I did a quick youTube search and found this clip of Buddy and the Crickets playing Oh Boy. Definitely an up-down, alternating stroke during the chorus. He spanks the downstroke at times to push the beat along, but it is not exclusive.
Peggy Sue, IIRC, was all downstrokes - yep - see here. But it sounds very rhythmically different vs. many of his other hits…
Joe Ely’s recorded version of “Midnight Shift” rocks, too. Of course, he rocks every song he performs. And he’s another Lubbock escapee. Los Lobos provided the music for the *La Bamba *movie & had a hit with their version of the tune. Which they followed up with an acoustic LP of Mexican folk tunes.
Which makes me repeat that I wish my middle-aged self had made it up to the frozen north to see that set. Rock & Roll will never die.
Whether Buddy would have continued with Rock & Roll, gone a bit Pop, returned to Country or hung out with the Folks–it’s quite evident that we lost a lot when he died so young.
A month or so ago I put up a picture of Buddy Holly in my Internet Messenger, because the anniversary was coming up and I’d been thinking about it. My younger co-workers, members of what I believe is called Generation Y, didn’t recognize him. I had been accustomed to assuming he was an iconic figure, but somehow that slipped away without my noticing. It saddened me, but in another sense I found it remarkable that it took this long, especially given that his idiom had faded a long time ago. I generally think of rock as a dead genre, though I hear tales of a thriving rockabilly scene. I never see these young people in ducktails (except at an El Vez: the Mexican Elvis concert, and to a lesser extent at a Red Elvises show), and I’ve never seen peg pants on sale at Wal-Mart, but I’ll take your word for it. But it doesn’t capture anything like the spirit of youth except perhaps a few mutants who scatter when the lights come on. If Rock ‘n’ Roll isn’t dead already, and some of you will presumably argue it isn’t, it must surely be a bad omen when the image of Buddy Holly is no longer a cultural touchstone.
Every time I think rock might be dead an album comes out that convinces me it will be around forever. The most recent one to do that was Costello Music by The Fratellis.