There's no question Buddy Holly deserves the big reissue treatment. For less than two years during the late 1950s, he helped revolutionize rock'n'roll with his hiccupping vocal style, inventive arrangements, tenderly exuberant songwriting, and gut-wringing guitar-slinging. He has been exalted in the dead-rock-star pantheon and overly romanticized in the process, but his music still encourages starry-eyed wonder. For a catalog so deeply entrenched in the rock canon, it sounds unusual even today: stripped down but with mind-boggling range, at once sweetly romantic yet revved and horny. Recording most of his best-known songs in a small dive studio in Clovis, New Mexico, he embodies the DIY spirit. Although anyone could play these chords and follow these riffs, who else could make them sound so lively? The list of artists Holly has influenced includes-- directly and indirectly-- just about anyone who has picked up a guitar in the last half-century. He's been covered by everyone from the Rolling Stones to M. Ward; Elvis Costello wouldn't have worn those nerd-punk specs without Holly's example; and a million twee bands wouldn't exist without "Everyday".
But does the world need another Buddy Holly collection? That's a trickier question. The single-disc, 20-track From the Master Tapes is his most persuasive collection from start to finish, and the 2xCD, 50-track Buddy Holly Collection dilutes the quality only minimally. Statistically speaking, the new, 3xCD, 60-track Memorial Collection-- released to correspond, somewhat morbidly, with the 50th anniversary of Holly's death, or, as the boomers call it, the Day the Music Died-- must be the least of the three. It includes all the likely songs and encompasses all of Master Tapes and most of the Buddy Holly Collection: hits like "Oh Boy!" and "Maybe Baby"; covers like "Brown Eyed Handsome Man" and "Ready Teddy", which is more ferocious than even Elvis' version; and "Not Fade Away", which provided a career roadmap for a generation of musicians. Like any Holly comp, the Memorial Collection showcases his talent for minimalist and intimate arrangements. Especially with the original line-up of the Crickets (bass player Joe B. Mauldin and drummer Jerry Allison), he constantly looked for new sounds, either employing new instruments-- like the celesta on "Everyday"-- or eliciting new sounds from old instruments. Allison, one of rock's unsung drummers, is crucial: he uses mallets to soften the beat on "Words of Love", slaps his knees on "Everyday", and switches to what sounds like a boxtop on "Not Fade Away", forming a playful patter against Holly's jumpy guitar.
The Memorial Collection, however, also culls from the margins of Holly's career, starting with his earliest recordings. In Lubbock, Texas, he joined a "Western and bop" band with his junior high friend Bob Montgomery, and the three tracks, all previously unreleased in the U.S., are all originals, showcasing Montgomery's songwriting and the duo's rollicking dynamic. These three tracks, especially the staticky "Soft Place in My Heart", bear the crackle and warp of years in storage, but the duo's energy comes through nevertheless, creating a context for the music that follows.
Buddy & Bob formed and disbanded in 1955; two years later, Holly would start notching a few hits; two years after that, he would be dead. He left a deep vault of recordings, including alternate takes of popular hits, unfinished demos, undubbed instrumentals, and assorted potential B-sides. The Clovis label continued releasing new Holly material for the next tent years, often piecing together vocal and instrumental tracks to create "finished" versions of "Peggy Sue Got Married", "Crying, Waiting, Hoping", and others. The Memorial Collection includes several of the raw, undubbed tracks: intimate takes featuring Holly singing and playing an acoustic guitar. They're skeletons of songs he intended to flesh out, and as such, they nicely showcase his inimitable vocals, which could move effortlessly from a staccato whoop to a velvety croon. Still, it seems odd to include these rough cuts without the final releases. On one hand, it highlights the person above the legend, quarantining his output from others' influence, yet those versions are part of his biography now, as indispensible as any of his other hits.
Those undubbed songs might be better relegated to Down the Line, a 2xCD, 59-track rarities collection that gathers similarly unfinished tracks from every phase of Holly's brief career. It opens with a home recording of Hank Snow's "My Two-Timin' Woman" that Holly made when he was just 13 years old. It's barely intelligible, but shows his grounding in country music. You can hear the point when he saw Elvis perform in Lubbock, an event that had a profound impact on the Texas teen: I'd put it right between the loping "You and I Are Through" and the revved-up "Down the Line". His music sounds newly energized, more dependent on his harmonies with Bob Montgomery than on uncorked rock-and-roll energy.
That newfound bravado is on full display throughout the Garage Tapes, which Holly recorded in the family garage with drummer Jerry Allison and an unknown bass player. They're mostly covers: Holly's Bo Diddley is anemic, his Clarence "Frogman" Henry is hilarious, his Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins more than respectable, and his Elvis nearly out-Elvises Elvis on "Good Rockin' Tonight". Compare them with the mostly acoustic Apartment Tapes, which Holly recorded shortly before his death in the Manhattan apartment he shared with his new bride, Maria Elena. They're intimate settings for these casual demos. You can hear what sounds like a sink running during the opening chords of "Love Is Strange" and what could be a breeze through an open window on most other songs.
At times it's too intimate-- the three minutes of "Buddy & Elena Maria talking in apartment" makes you an eavesdropper-- but recordings like "Learning the Game" and "Crying, Waiting, Hoping" display his light interpretive touch, and the tremolo-laden "Untitled Instrumental" shows an interesting direction he might have pursued. While it's important to have both the Garage and Apartment tapes in print, Down the Line nevertheless feels like an addendum to the Memorial Collection rather than a stand-alone release, a fans-only collection that will likely fatigue newcomers with its repeated songs and fluctuating sound quality. Ultimately, these two releases might have sounded better compressed into one enormous chronological tracklist, as they need each other for context and comparison. As is, neither feels especially definitive, but both are certainly welcome.
