Buddy Holly: Biography (62 page)

At the airport, I recognized Sonny Curtis, a cool cat with a short silver beard and bright, friendly eyes. He wore Levi’s and a trendy leather patchwork jacket. Mike Berry was in a long, navy-blue cashmere topcoat, very British and elegant. In England Mike was famous for his “Tribute to Buddy Holly” record. Recently he’d been starring in the hilarious television farce
Are You Being Served?

Once we’d made it through baggage, collecting Sonny’s Fender Stratocaster, which was encased in stainless steel, we drove back to Iowa, talking about Buddy the whole way. When we delivered Sonny and Mike to the Best Western Hotel in Mason City, Hans and I went to Sonny’s room with him. As Sonny unpacked, Hans called the Surf and spoke with the manager, Bruce Christensen, who’d inquired if Sonny and Mike would make a brief appearance at the sock hop, even though they were not to perform until the following night. “It’s not advisable to come on before you do your act,” Mike Berry commented. Sonny agreed, so we skipped the hop and went out for something to eat.

At Perkins Restaurant, we chose eggs and pancakes, then wound up in the cocktail lounge at the Best Western, where the only other customer was a woman, thirty-fivish, alone and obviously sizing us up. “J.I. [Jerry Ivan Allison] wants me to go ice fishing with him tomorrow,” Sonny said. Ice-fishing, he explained, is a popular local sport. “You drive out on the frozen lake, set up a tent right on the ice, bore a hole, and always catch plenty of fish.”

The next day, Saturday, February 6, when Hans and I returned to the hotel to drive Sonny and Mike to the Surf for a rehearsal, I found Sonny sitting on the edge of his bed, restringing his acoustic guitar. When he finished, he sang his song, “The Real Buddy Holly Story,” for us. Listening to him, it struck me that his eyewitness account of Buddy’s life differed radically from the sanitized Gary Busey movie: Sonny concentrates on all the girls, fun, and booze.

“Why did Buddy die?” I asked him. “Why did he take a small plane in bad weather?”

“His alligator mouth did in his hummingbird ass,” Sonny said.

“Come again?” It was Mike Berry, who’d just entered the room.

“He talked the pilot into taking the big rock stars up in dangerous weather, took on a bigger commitment than they could handle.”

Sonny played something else, but I was lost in thought, pondering Buddy’s final decision. He hadn’t given it any more consideration, I was sure, than I had a few days ago when I’d decided to take a small plane from Minneapolis to Mason City in very soupy weather. Just like Buddy, I was doing a job, and flying’s part of getting it done, or so we tell ourselves, when we’re in a hurry.

Sonny was singing snatches of various songs he’d written, “I Fought the Law” and his sprightly theme for
The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Afterward we drove to Clear Lake, and while Sonny and Mike rehearsed in the Surf Ballroom, I came upon Maria Elena and Chris Hughes in the Surfside 6 Café, which adjoins the dance hall (“Food line features breakfast roll, hamburgers, pizza, french fries, onion rings, shakes, and malts”). Maria Elena chatted briefly with a Vietnam vet in a wheelchair. Craggy and bearded, like Tom Cruise in
Born on the Fourth of July,
he asked her to sign his Iowa lottery ticket, which was currently featuring a picture of Buddy. When he left, I arranged for an interview with Maria Elena. She was delighted when I told her she was pretty, which is the truth. She is no more than five-one or five-two, but has a big smiling face. Her skin is light and smooth. She speaks English with a slight Hispanic accent, but with great fluency. Her costume—a baseball cap and black jogging togs—was hardly flattering, but it was easy to see, even three decades later, what Buddy saw in her. Her smile remains contagious, her warm eyes dance with fun, and she exudes a sense of joie de vivre. Playful about her dress and accessories, she had evidently raided her jewel box that day; every finger, including the index, was festooned with baubles. She readily posed for a photograph. When I asked for her address and telephone number, handing her a sheet of paper on which I’d written
MARIA HOLLY
, she carefully crossed it out and substituted
MARIA ELENA HOLLY
, adding the other details I’d requested in a scrupulously neat and stylish script.

At a VIP party later the same day, held in a bar across from the Surf, Chris Hughes and I talked about the Dallas Cowboys while Maria Elena again signed autographs. She was unfailingly courteous and friendly to Buddy’s fans. In the nostalgic spirit of the fifties hop to be held later that evening, she had done herself up in an eye-catching outfit—a Technicolor novelty sweater, a long blue-denim skirt, and the ubiquitous baseball cap.

Standing beside me, the always personable and accommodating Chris Hughes noted that Maria Elena’s glass of club soda was empty and stepped over to refill her glass. Maria Elena said she lived in Colleyville, a town of sixty-seven hundred near the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, which includes Irving, Texas, home of the Cowboys.

At the Buddy Holly Tribute Concert and Dance on Saturday night, February 6, in the Surf, I hung out at Maria Elena’s table, which was on the promenade, a couple of steps above the dance floor. Sonny Curtis did a solo turn that was the high point of the evening, for me at least. Later, Maria Elena came alive when Frankie Ford of “Sea Cruise” fame performed a riotious medley of Jerry Lee Lewis hits. At one point the Gretna, Louisiana, rocker appeared to rip the keyboard off the piano and drape it around his neck; it took me a second to realize that he’d been pounding the keyboard through a thin silk scarf imprinted with all eighty-eight keys. Maria Elena became so excited that she did a kind of seated dance, snapping her fingers and tossing her hands over her shoulders, really grooving on Frankie Ford’s expert interpretation of Jerry Lee. Then the Crickets came on—Jerry, Joe B., Gordon Payne, and Sonny—and Maria Elena stood up and left the dance hall.
Brava, Maria,
I thought.

I couldn’t take much of the Crickets, either. Gordon Payne was singing off-key. To make matters worse, Jerry and Joe B. seemed to be playing at a different pace from Sonny. Later I asked Frankie Ford, “What happened to the Crickets’ set?”

“There was a lot of tension between them in the band room,” Frankie said. “I asked Sonny Curtis what happened when they ended one song in such a raggedy way. ‘Was that a clash of wills?’ I asked. ‘More of a train wreck,’ Sonny said.”

Early Sunday morning, before flying home to sunny Key West, Florida, I drove out to the crash site, 5.4 miles north of Clear Lake, past farms where the only creatures stirring in the subfreezing air were pigs rooting around in farmyards. The crash site is difficult to find, buried deep in snowy, foggy fields, remote from the nearest house or barn. I managed to get lost, a harrowing ordeal, and it occurred to me that, if a blizzard blew up, you’d be lucky to make it back to the road. In 1988, after fans complained for decades about losing their way in the field, Ken Paquette, a shipyard worker from Portersfield, Wisconsin, constructed a steel marker: a large guitar and a set of three records, one for each star. Speaking for the W. H. Nicholas family, who own the field, Jeff Nicholas stated in the
Globe-Gazette
in 1992 that “the family allows people on the crash site as long as fans are respectful.” Nicholas subsequently planted four oak trees, one each for Buddy, Ritchie, the Bopper, and Roger Peterson.

I finally had to trudge back to the road, 835 yards through hip-deep snow, and start all over, a bit further down. This time I found the stainless steel marker, which was barely visible above the snowline. I had stood at Buddy’s birthplace with Griggs and later at his grave in Lubbock, and now I felt the desolation of the barren pasture in Iowa. A couple of years later, listening to the tape I made that morning, I hear in my voice a compound of grief and fear. I bravely try singing “Peggy Sue,” one of the songs commemorated on the stainless steel record in the snow, but give it up for the Lord’s Prayer. I remember walking away from the fenceline, down a slight depression, and finding the exact spot where the plane first hit the ground. Robert Frost once wrote a poem called “A Soldier.” In it, the soldier falls in battle, but Frost says the force of his fall shoots his soul on to heaven. And so it was, I like to think, with the singers who fell so hard on this cold and merciless ground.

I recall looking up and seeing two distant figures approaching through the snow, a man and a woman. In a few minutes they introduce themselves as Pat and Marv Jurek of St. Cloud, Minnesota. “It’s raw out here,” Pat says. Then we speak of the dance the previous night. Buddy’s music had brought a lot of strangers together for a honky-tonkin’ good time, just like in ’59.

*   *   *

The following year—1994—it was announced that the Surf Ballroom was closing. The Val Air Ballroom in West Des Moines was also for sale, possibly slated for conversion to a strip mall or lumberyard. The scuttlebutt around Clear Lake was that the Surf would be bulldozed and turned into condos as commercial progress continued its march through rural Iowa. The main problem, as expressed by manager Bruce Christensen, was lack of business during the five winter months when the whole area virtually shuts down. In February 1994 Maria Elena and most of the key figures in the Buddy Holly legend showed up for the last dance. Don McLean, Peggy Sue, Tommy Allsup, Ritchie’s girlfriend Donna Fox, Niki Sullivan, Jerry, and Joe B. were all present. Maria Elena once said that she’d never let go of Buddy, that everything she went through after his death was like walking in her sleep. She’d never changed from the girl Buddy knew and loved, she said, because she “froze” on February 3, 1959.

Peggy Sue shook hands with fans who wanted to meet the girl behind the famous song. Tommy Allsup revealed that he’d played as a session man or recording artist on fifty-five hundred records and added that coming to Clear Lake for the first time since 1959 had proved to be a healthy catharsis and that he was leaving feeling good. “My favorite of the whole bunch would be Donna Fox by about ten yards,” writer and PR man Jeremy Powers said in a 1995 interview. Powers at the time was raising money to save the Surf and have it declared a nonprofit living museum, with government support. At the main event, Donna Fox pitched in and helped, carrying a large Alhambra water bottle around the dance floor and soliciting donations. “She came back with the whole bottle full of money,” says Powers. “You can tell how somebody who was seventeen years old [Ritchie] would definitely have fallen in love with her.”

Powers was also “real excited about seeing Don McLean,” he recalls. “I’ll soon be forty, and the first I knew of Buddy Holly was ‘American Pie.’ I’m glad I was instrumental in bringing Don McLean to the Surf on the thirty-fifth anniversary of Buddy’s death.”

Niki Sullivan, now employed in a research division of Sony Corporation, came from his home in Blue Springs, a suburb of Kansas City, Missouri, with his wife, Fran, whom he married in 1965, and their two grown twin sons, Marty and Eryn. While in Clear Lake, the Sullivan twins accepted an offer to open a bar called Sully’s. Following the final dance at the Surf, which was attended by twenty-four hundred, Niki returned to Clear Lake almost every weekend in early 1994 to help his sons get Sully’s Bar started.

After the Holly memorial dance, the Surf shut its doors, presumably forever. Bruce Christensen resigned as manager and moved away, entering the credit-card business in Nashville. Though Waylon Jennings had said he’d never come back to Clear Lake, his bus and Wayne Newton’s bus pulled up at the Surf one day, and Waylon took a final look. In an attempt to save the Surf, Christensen had asked Paul McCartney in 1991 to invest in the ballroom, but MPL Productions had replied that Paul McCartney was not interested in American real estate. Niki wanted to buy the Surf but couldn’t raise the funds.

Despite its significance in the history of rock, the ballroom wasn’t even on the National Registry of Historic Places. The Surf became another poignant image of small-town America dying; whether in Texas or Iowa, the changes had long since trampled the Mom & Pop establishments that had given birth to Holly and the first-generation rockers. And now the legendary dance halls seemed doomed.

“It is one of those big, glittering ballrooms that once dotted the interior of America like Christmas tree lights, somehow making the world a bigger place to people landlocked in all but dreams,” a
New York Times
reporter wrote after a 1968 trip to Clear Lake. Local people waxed nostalgic about their famous landmark. One couple, farmer Laurence Radloff and his wife Evelyn, recalled dancing to the music of Guy Lombardo in the 1930s. Bob Ellsbury, who attended Buddy’s concert in 1959 and whose father once managed the Surf, remembered sitting on Louis Armstrong’s knee. “The Surf was like having our own major league ballpark,” Ellsbury said. “It was a chance to see the stars of the world. It opened up a fantasy world for the whole region.” From Glenn Miller to Lawrence Welk, all the greats of the era prior to stadium rock and MTV played one-night stands on the ballroom circuit, sandwiching a gig at the Surf between horrendous bus rides. If the Surf fell to the wrecking ball, it would mark an ignominious end of a musical era in America.

*   *   *

January 1995, Clear Lake
—Like the mythical phoenix that rises from its own ashes, the Surf Ballroom was given a reprieve in 1995. The Buddy Holly Tribute Dance and Concert would go on, after all, thanks to the courage of a public-spirited family, the Snyders, and the Clear Lake Chamber of Commerce. The Dean Snyder Construction Company bought the ballroom and undertook an extensive $250,000 renovation. “We’ve restored it as it was in 1959,” said Dale Snyder, one of the three brothers who now run their father’s construction firm. A new roof and a new heating system were installed; the old gas turbine boilers were replaced by a water-heating system. The air-conditioning ducts below the Surf were cleaned and painted white, dispelling the ballroom’s musty odor. The dance floor was sanded and resealed, and new carpeting was laid down in the lobby. “We now have palm trees and eighty pineapples, just the way it was when Buddy played here,” Snyder added. The pineapples, signifying hospitality, were stenciled on the lobby walls. As if to herald the the Surf’s gorgeous new facelift, Weezer, a new rock band, started burning up MTV in January with a scorching video called “Buddy Holly.”