Buddy Holly - The Singles Plus

Buddy Holly - The Singles Plus

About a century ago, we were talking about 89 essential albums and that, and Buddy Holly was on my list, only the Buddy Holly records I owned were on something called vinyl, long ago sold at a car boot.

So I ordered this from Amazon, and it finally arrived this week. It's an enormous collection, over 40 tracks, and it has everything that I used to own on two vinyl compilations and more. Some of them may be different versions, but it's too long ago for me to remember.

I had a brief discussion with Roy about Holly yesterday. Roy said, "Buddy Holly gives me the creeps. I know it's great, seminal, but there's something about it."

I actually know what he means. These tracks are seminal, archetypal even, but it's hard to be anything other than a detached observer. He was creepy-looking, and he had a creepy voice. Over and above that, you get the feeling that - even after a couple of years - he was being sucked into an entirely different kind of musical direction, and that, had he lived, he would have betrayed all his early promise.

People talk about his innovative arrangements - the strings on "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" for example - but what I hear is the attempt to repackage him, make him "commercial", to de-countryfy him, knock off the rough edges. And when I hear clarinet and saxophone on other tracks, I just think it sounds wrong in the same way those Elvis soundtrack songs sound wrong.

The key to Holly was that he was a skinny white boy and he wore glasses. In appearance, he was your standard all-American nerd. A nice boy who would represent no threat, who would go to college and become an insurance salesman. But then he was singing all this weird stuff, and if he could do it, then it was open to anyone. Buddy Holly wasn't, like Elvis, the white man who sang black music, and he wasn't, like Chuck Berry, a black man who played rock 'n' roll guitar. Holly's music sounded white, but still - obviously - came from the same place that Elvis' and Berry's music did.

When you read about the young Bob Dylan (or the young Robbie Robertson), tuning his radio late at night and picking up powerful stations, bounced across the heavyside layer from hundreds of miles further south, swimming up through the ether with strange-sounding music that opened windows and doors in the mind, this was very much the kind of thing. In fact, it's hard now to listen to Buddy Holly and not think about movie moments of radios tuned to distant sounds that were passing strange.

Don't think of "Peggy Sue" when you read that, or "It Doesn't Matter Anymore." There are songs on these records that are much stranger than that. For example, you know how sometimes (especially in childhood) you can cry so much that for ages afterwards you don't so much breathe as sob? How an intake of breath can have several stages, as the air passes into your lungs in lumps? On one of these tracks, every word that Holly sings sounds like that, every word a sob. Can you imagine being 14 years old and hearing that come over the airwaves late at night?

But how can such absolute anguish sound so cheerful?

It's important, too, that these songs are simple, brilliant, and short. They're easy to play, and they inspire you to try to write your own. You can hear the Beatles on here, from vocal mannerisms to guitar licks. But you can hear the Pixies, too. When Black Francis wanted to Gil Norton to understand why Pixies songs were so short, he pointed to a Buddy Holly record. I once joked that the songs on the Beatles' best album, Beatles for Sale were all around two minutes long: "some are even longer." As I was driving to work this morning, I was on disc 2, and at track 13 it was 7.13 a.m. By 7.32 a.m., track 22 was over.

There's a danger, with nostlagia, that entropy makes everything seem more or less the same, and history is rewritten to incorporate things that didn't fit. Six months ago, we were thinking about "Like a Rolling Stone," and what an amazing thing it must have been when that song first snarled out of a transistor radio. It's hard to imagine a world in which you don't know what someone looks like, where they come from, or what they're about. When you live in an era of Velvet Underground songs in commercial breaks, a world in which implacable foes reunite for the cash or for charidee, it's hard to believe that the world was ever shocked by Paul McCartney and appalled by Ringo.

But Buddy Holly, now. He still has the power to creep you out. And when you think about it, that's pretty powerful stuff.