Buddy Holly: The man who put the beat in Beatles

Jan 12 2009 by Emma Johnson, Liverpool Daily Post

Liverpool Rock 'n' Roll archivist Spencer Leigh _158

As Holly had fallen out with his manager over financial matters, he accepted top billing on the Winter Dance Party, which was touring the American Mid-west. It was the tour from Hell: the weather was Arctic and the buses, which were nothing like today’s luxury coaches, kept breaking down.

When they reached the Surf Ballroom, Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 2, 1959, Buddy chartered a plane to take himself, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens to the next venue. It crashed five minutes after take-off with no survivors. Feburary 3, 1959, has become known, through Don McLean’s American Pie, as “the day the music died”.

John Lennon, at the Liverpool College of Art, was unusually quiet that day. He had lost his mother, a huge influence on his early music, the previous July, and now he had lost one of his heroes.

In October, 1959, they auditioned, as Johnny and the Moondogs, for Carroll Levis’s TV Star Search, at the Empire. They sang the Buddy Holly songs, Think It Over and It’s So Easy, and qualified for the final in Manchester. Unfortunately, they had to return to Liverpool before the public vote.

The group took an insect name, The Beatles, as a tribute to The Crickets, and during 1960, they were performing many of their songs. Over the years, they would jam Buddy’s numbers backstage, and they smoothed the waters during the fractious making of what became Let It Be in 1969. Many of the other bands – Searchers, Undertakers, Big Three, Fourmost, Merseybeats – were singing Buddy Holly songs. On The Beatles’ original demo of How Do You Do It?, John Lennon sounds like Holly at the end of the middle eights, the only inspired moments on that recording.

More importantly, Holly’s simple style and mannered vocals were influencing the way that John and Paul wrote songs. Paul has often cited Holly’s I’m Lookin’ For Someone To Love as a great example of economical lyric writing. There’s an unreleased rehearsal from 1960 of John’s first composition, Hello Little Girl, and it sounds straight out of Lubbock; but, by the time it got to the studio, in 1962, it had been re-arranged. One of their earliest songs, I’ll Be On My Way, sounds as if it were written for Buddy, and we also know that Love Me Do started out in the Holly vein, too, though unfortunately no such recording exists.

John and Paul developed fast and soon were emulating the more sophisticated songs from the Brill Building, in New York. They performed Don’t Ever Change, a Brill Building song written for The Crickets after Holly’s death.

In January, 1963, all four Beatles signed a letter to The Crickets thanking them for the interest shown in their work while they were touring the UK: “We’d just like to say that we take this as a great compliment and appreciate it very much.”

In the Melody Maker poll for 1963, the top three vocal groups were, in order, The Four Seasons, The Beatles and The Crickets.

The Beatles recorded a fine version of Words of Love, for Beatles For Sale, in 1964. The reference to “The sun is up, the sky is blue” in Dear Prudence on The White Album is surely a nod to Holly’s Raining In My Heart.