| December 4th, 2005 09:45 PM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
ROCKIN’ ROUTES
Will Lubbock give Holly his due? That’ll be the day
By ROBERT PHILPOT
Knight Ridder Newspapers
LUBBOCK, Texas — If the road to rock ’n’ roll takes you to Lubbock, birthplace and hometown of Buddy Holly, be sure to tune in to KDAV/1590 AM.
Not only is it a great oldies station — one that plays seminal rock ’n’ roll songs such as Ike Turner’s “Rocket 88” and Elvis’ version of “That’s All Right, Mama,” as well as such pre-rock crooners as Rosemary Clooney and Frank Sinatra — but it’s also a key stop in Holly’s past.
In 1953, a couple of years before Holly saw Elvis at a concert out of town and got all shook up, he and high school friend Bob Montgomery did the country-flavored “Buddy & Bob Show” as part of the “Sunday Party” on KDAV.
Buddy and Bob already had a name around town, performing at school assemblies and skating rinks, but it wasn’t till Buddy saw Elvis that he would take the artistic turn that would make him part of rock’s Mount Rushmore.
Curiously, during a weekend trip in which I kept the car radio glued to KDAV, I heard not one Buddy Holly song. The station plays him, of course; his picture even graces its Web site. I was just never listening at the right time.
That’s the thing about Buddy Holly in Lubbock: He’s everywhere and nowhere; all over the place yet still teasingly elusive.
“The ones that really know about Buddy Holly probably are the ones that have lived here all their life, like me,” says Bud Andrews, who co-hosts KDAV’s 6-9 a.m. show and met Holly on several occasions. “But the general public here, they never met him. They didn’t know who he was. They just knew that he was a kid that made records.”
Great records, that is.
You can still start an argument by saying that if Buddy Holly had lived longer, he could have been bigger than Elvis. That’s probably not the case, yet it’s easy to get a sense that rock ’n’ roll was robbed of something when Holly was killed in the February 1959 plane crash that also took the lives of J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens.
Holly was restless, and that restlessness came out in his music when he, the Crickets and producer Norman Petty experimented with sound and instrumentation on such classics as “Peggy Sue,” “Every Day” and “True Love Ways.”
But his career lasted only three years, and it wasn’t until the 1978 movie “The Buddy Holly Story” was released that he started getting the respect that he deserved.
Or some of the respect. Andrews says it took two decades for Lubbock to erect a Buddy Holly statue. The Buddy Holly Center, which honors the singer with a comprehensive exhibit about his life and art, didn’t open till the ’90s, when it became the anchor of Lubbock’s nightspot-dotted Depot District. But if you’re not looking for Holly, Andrews says, you’re not going to find him.
“I think the center is great,” Andrews says. “They covered it like a blanket. But as far as the Depot District is concerned, even though they renamed the street that used to be Avenue H to Buddy Holly Avenue, what does it have to do with Buddy Holly? The museum’s not on Buddy Holly Avenue. The bars don’t have anything to do with Buddy Holly.”
All things Holly
If you want a snapshot of Lubbock then and Lubbock now, start at the Buddy Holly Center and then drive the streets of the Depot District. The center, as Andrews says, is great. The curators have gathered a wealth of Holly memorabilia: report cards, notes from school, 45s, vinyl album covers, recording contracts, instruments, clothing, tour itineraries — including one for the Winter Dance Party, during which the fatal plane crash occurred.
In the center of the guitar-shaped main room is a lengthy timeline detailing Holly’s life and career; at the front of the room is another timeline about rock history, including such important pre-rock artists as Jimmie Rodgers, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Louis Jordan. Other galleries are dedicated to changing exhibits.
But you can sense incongruities in the Depot District merely by looking across the street: There’s a club called South Beach, which recently hosted such hard-rockers as Chevelle and Rob Zombie. The clubs — Bleacher’s, a sports bar; Hub City Brewery, the city’s first and only brewpub; the self-explanatory Daiquiri Palace — attract a young clientele.
If you are looking for other Holly locales, they’re easy to find, thanks to some Web sites dedicated to keeping his memory alive. You probably won’t find a better Holly-centric tour than the one at Buddy Holly Online ( www.buddyhollyonline.com ).
Thanks to a street system made up of lettered north-south avenues and numbered east-west streets, Lubbock is easy to navigate. If you can find the Buddy Holly Center, you can do this tour without a map.
One of the sites is the former home of Holly’s parents, Lawrence and Ella Holley (the ‘e’ was dropped from Buddy’s last name when it was misspelled on a recording contract). Holly married Maria Elena Santiago there in 1958, and the modest house still stands on 39th Street, in a quiet neighborhood.
The tour is organized to start as you leave the Buddy Holly Center, so it doesn’t follow his life in any particular order. But a visitor could follow him from elementary to junior to high school (where he was already performing gigs), to early hangouts and recording spots, to performance halls and, finally, to his grave.
The latter, in the City of Lubbock Cemetery, is the only extant site that’s hard to find, but if you follow signs carefully, you can navigate the maze that takes you to the cemetery on 31st Street. The grave is not very far inside the gate. There’s a tradition that says you should place a guitar pick on the grave (I bought one at the Buddy Holly Center specifically for that purpose), but picks were far outnumbered by pennies on my visit.
Times change
Not all of the tour’s Holly sites are in Lubbock: The Cotton Club (rebuilt after an early fire), where Holly’s life was changed when he saw Elvis perform in 1955, is 15 miles east of town in Slaton, on U.S. 84.
And not all of the tour’s sites are still standing: The Hi-D-Ho Drive-in, a popular carhop joint where the young Holly and the Crickets hung out, has been demolished and replaced with a newer burger place. The house where Buddy was born was moved from its Sixth Street location, which is now vacant.
But the biggest indication of changing times is near Cricket Jerry Allison’s former house, which is now a growing area of apartments and stores not far from Texas Tech.
The tour concludes at the Buddy Holly statue, which is near the Lubbock Memorial Civic Center, flanked by a Holiday Inn and a La Quinta. The 8-foot statue is surrounded by the West Texas Walk of Fame, honoring such artists as Holly’s one-time sideman and former Lubbock DJ Waylon Jennings, as well as non-Lubbockites Roy Orbison and actor Barry Corbin.
A hardcore Holly fan could argue that Lubbock should have done more to honor this artist, who influenced the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and that’s just for starters. But at least it has done something.
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Tuneful town
Buddy Holly isn’t the only musician to come out of Lubbock, Texas.
The city has inspired such unique artists as singer-songwriter Mac Davis, singer Jimmie Dale Gilmore, rocker Joe Ely and their Flatlanders cohort Butch Hancock; Dixie Chicks lead singer Natalie Maines and her musician/producer father, Lloyd; and others.
But Bud Andrews of Lubbock’s KDAV-AM points out that most of those artists became famous after leaving Lubbock. Even Holly did his classic recordings at producer Petty’s studio in Clovis, N.M., about 100 miles away, and became famous touring outside of town.
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| December 5th, 2005 06:28 AM |
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| corgi37 |
I think it would be more appropriate for Lubbock to hold a "Bobby Keys" day. |
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