I needed to read this book because all I knew about Buddy Holly, other than a dozen or so evergreen songs, was that movie, "The Buddy Holly Story," which is hardly accurate. Philip Norman gives you a much better sense of what Buddy's brief moment in the spotlight was all about.It was brief, just over a year and a half from the time he and his band, the Crickets, hit the U.S. charts with "That'll Be The Day" in the summer of 1957 to the fateful flight from Mason City, Iowa on February 3, 1959. It's hard to imagine making as much of the time as Buddy Holly did of his, starting a career, a business partnership, and a family, not to mention writing music that revolutionized rock n' roll.
Norman gives you a good sense of how Holly did this, in a book that is a clear work of love, not ignoring negative elements of the story but striving to put them in less lurid context. One weakness of the book is that this sometimes gets in the way (Holly's alleged gambling problems, dwelt on in other books, is only mentioned once in passing, while a tale backup Cricket guitarist Niki Sullivan offers up about Holly getting a girl pregnant is thrown up only to be knocked down in backhanded fashion.) But the overwhelming sense one gets from reading "Rave On" is Norman's contention that Buddy had everything going for him except luck.
I liked especially the English context of this book. Norman, a British author, pays close attention to Holly and the Crickets' impact on the British music scene, where he was a bigger sensation than his native land. Occasionally, as when the Crickets visit the U.K. and Norman itemizes hotel expenses and suchlike, it gets a bit precious, but Holly, the first rocker to write his own songs and perform them in a band context, obviously was laying some groundwork here that the British would emulate with great success in the coming decade.
Norman also takes on Norman Petty, producer and manager of the Crickets who was either duplicitous by design or by accident. "To some, he was the person who made it possible for Buddy Holly to come alive; others feel he could hardly be more to blame for Buddy's death if he'd gone out into the Iowa snows with a machine gun and pointed it straight into the sky." Given Buddy's reason for joining the 1959 "Winter Dance Party" tour had to do with Petty's reluctance to part with money Holly earned under Petty's wing that Holly needed for himself and his pregnant wife, you can understand the bitterness.
Norman was able to get a look at Petty's files, tape transcripts, and the like, which cast some new light on the fellow Norman dubs "Clovis Man," if not enough to figure out exactly who he was or what he was about. Petty makes an interesting character; Norman got more use out of Brian Epstein in his Beatles book, "Shout," but when the Holly story finds itself in the strange Clovis, New Mexico studio space where Petty, his wife, and their butch female companion lived, the story picks up a bit.
Ultimately, the focus stays with Buddy, though, where it belongs. Norman explains just what it was about his music that made it so innovative, both uniquely of its time and timeless. It's amazing that he not only established a new sound but moved so far beyond it in such a short time. Maybe not so amazingly, his songs were often ignored in the United States (just 3 Top 10 hits, by himself or with the Crickets) while embraced with greater fervor overseas (his last single release, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," was a #1 hit in England, but peaked in the U.S. at, natch, #13.)
The last images of the book are the most arresting. Norman gets a rare peak at the overnight bag Holly carried with him on his fatal flight, still encrusted with dirt from that frozen farmland where his single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza slammed down, still containing a tube of toothpaste, a lint brush, and a comb still entwined with a few hairs that never turned gray.
This book didn't really breathe Buddy; it skims over a good deal and Norman fails to corroborate stories he offers up from single sources. But it's a nice book that captures who this fellow named Buddy Holly was, and why he left such a deep imprint on culture, both directly and through his many followers.
