Not Fade Away
I know, I know, “Is that the best you can do for a title?” I’m tired, it’s been a long couple of days.
I won’t retread on things I wrote about Buddy Holly before, read it if you want to, but suffice it to say, I didn’t just drive to Lubbock, TX and Clovis, NM from Colorado because I needed something to do. Buddy, Norman Petty and the music that came out of Clovis is important.
I drove down on September 7th, Buddy’s birthday and headed straight to Lubbock. I didn’t mind the museum was small, but I was bummed I couldn’t take pictures. Pictures are a great way to travel back in time and experience something again. His first electric guitar was a 1953 Gibson Les Paul Gold Top with P90s, not all that different than mine. He had the matching Gibson amplifier as well. They also had the 1959 Tobacco Sunburst Stratocaster he played on that last tour (the gear went on the bus).
And they had the glasses he was wearing when he died.
I forced myself to stand there for a moment, but I had to walk away and compose myself. I don’t know how much more personal you can get than something someone was wearing when they left this life for the next. In one way, I felt really close to him in a way that’s difficult to do given the circumstances, but in another way, I felt like I was violating his personhood. It’s like seeing someone naked that you shouldn’t see naked. It doesn’t belong to us. Just because he was a great artist and was famous, doesn’t mean we should be able to violate his privacy, even though he’s not here to be upset by it. I’m not making a judgment call on the museum here, I don’t know if they should be showing it or not, I’m just saying I felt conflicted about it.
The next morning, I left early and visited the cemetery. I’m not much of a grave site guy, but I wanted to pay my respects. Most of the famous people’s graves I’ve visited over the years have been, “because we’re here” (Pope John Paul II, Balzac, Johnny Ramone, etc.), but Buddy joins the list with James Dean, Ernest Hemmingway, Ritchie Valens and most of the Old West gunslingers of people I went to go see on purpose. It’s just a stone marking, what’s now, nothing but bones, but I went and said thanks and left.
After that, I drove up US 84 to Littlefield, the home of Waylon Jennings, took some pictures and drove various Texas state highways across the countryside until I made my way back to 84 and to Clovis. I got into town, took some pictures on Main Street, went into an antiques store, bought an old Zenith radio and to the Norman and Vi Petty Rock and Roll Museum. Very short tour, learned a few things and then bummed around for the day.
On Saturday morning, I went to meet Ken Broad at Norman Petty Studios. Right off the bat, in the reception room, he told me the room was also used as an isolation booth. “Jerry Allison’s drums would have been right here where I’m standing when he recorded ‘Peggy Sue’.” Talk about staring with a bang!
We walked into the control room and he pointed out the first chair and told me that was the chair Buddy would sit in when listening to playbacks. Then we sat down to talk, me in that chair. He played some Buddy songs through the console and all the original equipment that was there in the 1950s. That was the first moment I knew I was going to have to hold back the water works while I was there. Recreating history like that often is overwhelming for me. Especially, when it’s surrounding someone like Buddy. This wasn’t just a nobody in a recording studio 65 years ago, this was the guy from whom the Beatles and the Stones and everyone after borrowed from.
Aside from the sound quality produced by the equipment available at the time, what was impressive was the ability to capture every sound clearly in one room. They recorded at night to minimize the noise from the highway and to be able to draw more electricity without worry of interruption than they would have during the day.
After ten or fifteen minutes, he retreated to the lounge in the back with his wife and daughter and Maryline Bigham took me into the main room. Maryline was the wife of David Bigham of the Roses, a vocal group that backed up Roy Orbison and Buddy as well as many others and had a few hits of their own. She gave me the history of the instruments in the room and we talked about the artists, their influence and some of her stories.
We ended in the lounge in the back, chatting for another ten or fifteen minutes, me sitting on the couch right where Buddy had sat (there was a picture right above the couch). I got a little choked up a couple of times and Ken must have noticed me holding it back because he told me that Robert Plant had gotten emotional when he had sat right there too. There is definitely a connection to the past through things and places, but the greatest connection to the past is through the people who were there. Ken told me that he and Norman were closer than brothers and it showed through all the work Ken has done over the years to preserve Norman and Vi’s work and their history. But the farther away we get from these things, the more that happens and the less people care. This isn’t a knock, it’s just the nature of things. What’s important to us is less important to our kids and even less important to our grandkids. They have their own memories and experiences to be passionate about. What’s important is that we keep highlighting how one event led to the other. Our experiences had to occur in order for the next generation’s to be able to. Elvis on Ed Sullivan had to happen in order for the Beatles on Ed Sullivan to happen. They didn’t happen in a vacuum.
I haven’t told every story here, they’re not my stories to tell, but one-on-one, I will share them and I will encourage you to go to Clovis and visit and you’ll come away with your own stories.
Once again, many thanks to Ken and Maryline and everyone involved with keeping that history alive and thriving. All of us who visit are enriched by our time with them in that special place.