(MCA)
!!! A+ COMPILATION !!!
but around probably like 11, other people started to show up and i was amused by how wrong i was to feel abnormal when i was younger at my fascination with all things outdated. pretty much it’s an epidemic. the dance floor ERUPTED when he played buddy holly. it was "oh boy." i have listened to a LOT of buddy holly lately; i fucking love him, he is so angry and his songwriting was fucking sick. and there was nothing quaint about his sound on those enormous speakers for serious. anyway that wasn’t the song i expected would start to tear off the roof but it was.
Pretend you've never heard of Buddy Holly for a moment. Therefore, pretend that you didn't grow up hearing "Everyday" and "Peggy Sue" on oldies stations and never glimpsed the telecine images and promo photos of the gawky chemistry-teacher physique and iconically clunky spectacles. Pretend it's just a thing that happened half a century ago and all that's left of it is maybe some records or mementos in a dusty attic somewhere, a forgotten teenybopper indulgence, and then do me a favor and listen to "Not Fade Away." I want you to do this because I want you to hear the carefully controlled but unvarnished human cry in Holly's voice, the tense, precise, but calm press of his band, the immediate, homey, beautiful upside-down Bo Diddley rhythm. Or take the swagger, the cunning John Wayne reference, the teasingly brutal brokenhearted subtext of "That'll Be the Day." It's not about importance; it's not about laying groundwork; it's about the unobstructed delivery of base emotion, the feat Buddy Holly achieved in his insanely short recording career, the feat no one else will ever have the balls or the blank slate to duplicate.
If we must, let's say this: from 1955 to 1959, Elvis Presley may have been the lightning rod, but Holly was the man who did it all from his gut. Yes, he did turn rockabilly around from its elements into a force of unmatched nature that would quickly become the line of the rock family tree that would see the most fruitful development in the coming decades; only Chuck Berry eclipses in influence, and even Berry might not have as many disparate subsequent notions easily traceable back to his catalog. A better comparison to Holly might be his friend Sam Cooke; it's not that rock & roll wasn't enough for them, it's that they saw how far rock & roll could be taken, then were silenced before they got the complete opportunity. In their wake, new fragmented branches developed, but never the unity of black and white, country and soul, aggression and peace, bullshit and expression that they envisioned. It would be a generation before any pop music could match the ruthless ambition and concise, stabbing directness Holly provided. His roadmap died with him, and the world was left hurtling in his wake.
Holly's twisting of rockabilly and his absorbing of R&B and gospel influences was quite directly the creation of rock's second wave. It was Presley that inspired him to begin -- all roads lead back to Elvis, no doubt -- but the many explosions for which Holly was the catalyst are unimaginable in the rock story without his presence. Most of them continue unabated as cultural forces. We have the dawn of the geek, the obsessive, the awkward as the rock & roll artist -- the true outsider, the true emotional force; on "I'm Looking for Someone to Love," track two here, he's staying at home while she runs around and finally learning to bust the fuck out -- it's joyous, and scarred. There is the invention of the rock band: the Crickets, the model of every group to follow, plus guitar solos that are to the instrument as "Hamlet" is to the theater. Holly offers, in turn, the dawn of the rock & roll artist as adventurous innovator -- the celesta and intimacy on "Everyday," the alarmingly moving compressed exotica of "Not Fade Away," the thrillingly obtuse confrontation of "I'm Gonna Love You Too," the moody, bottom-heavy shake of "Peggy Sue." The dawn of so much, maybe everything, that we as music fans care about.
And of course, the Beatles cribbed all of it. It's blatant. This compilation illustrates so much of the direct lineage it's initially shocking. How can the supposed dictators of the form have received such a jump start from outside? But all of it is here -- the inventively odd and lovely songwriting, the charged and clever but minimal lyrics, the spare, forceful production, and especially the expert application of so many crazed, bent and intricate vocal tics, the caterwauling that would become highest cultural art. The neuroses that the Beatles seemed to bring to light like Elizabethan orators, well, Holly's celebration of vast fuckedupness, the exposure of his emotional fray, his fearless and economical application of his darkness: there is no kitsch to be derived. No innocence, only purity: rock & roll as humankind's sole unmuddied line of communication -- a thing of screaming beauty and importance. After this moment, never again, for the baggage would build, but nothing could spoil these songs. Nothing linguistic or subtle could truly diminish their reach. His command is audible; he seems to understand more than was known by anyone else about his artform by the time he died.
Holly's catalog and the structure of his career now seem strangely modern -- singles plus albums divided neatly almost in half, the blazing shot-off rocker of "Rave On" and the unstoppable "Oh, Boy!" versus the hopeless romantic of "Words of Love" and "True Love Ways" both belying his modest outward appearance and polite reputation, all immaculately crafted -- but it's not hard to gather that this is the result more of racial casting off and disorganization of his black peers' recorded outputs than of his own quality control, solid though it was. There's a sense in which the brevity of his career supplies an elegance (this forty-minute fireball of a compilation covers the commercial peak of Holly's recorded output, a tiny range from 1957 to 1959), but that illusion is shattered when one hears his final recordings, which suggest a spiritually devastating potential with their beauty, charm, and dogged focus. The ambition and what it might have wrought outweighs all else, but we must compress our concern here down to the hits and all they reveal, which is plenty. After such a long life as oldies, these songs' vitality is striking; the Hank Williams-esque regret and resignation of "Maybe Baby" only seem more knowing today, and the brilliant kissoffs "Think It Over" and especially "It's So Easy" (a song that never gets credit for its bitterly adult cynicism) reveal themselves as monsters when the volume is pumped.
But it's the cheerily fractured, explosive revenge song "Early in the Morning," bothersome choral backup notwithstanding, that lays it all out. John Lennon owed the bulk of his entire fortune to this one 45. Holly's voice seems to be channeling some otherworldly force, as Lennon's later would, and it peaks and teases in the same places. His singing is something to witness, still; it alone sells many of the tender ballads from his experimental sugary sessions later on. "Fool's Paradise" and "Heartbeat" are deserved classics, both gorgeous and towering, but the lesser-by-default "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" and "Raining in My Heart" warrant attention if only for Holly's crooning, sophisticated readings of both.
And oh, impact, of course; it would be ignorant to suggest Holly hasn't had the farthest reach of any of the first generation of rock & roll performers. Of course he has. The problem is it's somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps because of that same miraculous reach, that stunning knack for unpretentious, conversational, but still brilliantly nutty expression (love, lust, hatred, dread), these songs don't age. I don't think Chuck Berry's songs have aged either, but Holly's sound as though they were preserved cryogenically and their year of origin became somehow of no consequence. After all, who in five hundred years (when I'm certain he's one of the handful who will have survived all the filters of scholarship and decay) when they listen to Holly will make a distinction between the 1950s and the 1990s? Holly's songs wonder why we do now. He sounds like he's a couple of rooms away, belting and wailing away as ever, and making it all such a workday thing, something to fight for and be passionate about. He's pissed off, he's in love, and he's hungry. In our illustrious career as humans we've yet to come up with any three ideas that cut to the bone more. I doubt we ever will.
Indeed, when rock & roll is studied seriously in however many centuries, there will be a giant thick bold line. Below it will be almost everyone, in small 10 point text. Above it will be James Brown, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly. It's not that no one else matters. It's that they created a form in which no one else would ever really have to matter, because the thesis was written. Every brilliant stretch of the form after (and there are many, no doubt) is somewhere in those four texts. And Holly could lay claim alone to one title: the most innovative pop musician of all time. It remains dismaying that he died so young. The tiny bit of work he got to put down on tape is so lively, universal, and ahead of its time, anticipating almost every subsequent movement in popular rock & roll, I think his full body of work would have been unbelievably dangerous. But what does it matter when kids still connect to him now as it is? And don't tell me they don't because I've witnessed it -- dancing and freaking out and declaring their love for him, fifty years after his death. It's like he's permanently ours, whoever's young enough. The man was the fucking tops, is all I’m saying.
No comments:
Post a Comment