Podcast appearances and mentions of bob montgomery

Desde Norteamérica dos grandes… El canadiense Sam Roberts está de nuevo de gira por España con todo su banda para ofrecernos lo mejorcito de sus seis álbumes editados hasta la fecha. Entrevista y actuación acústica, lo mismo que Kevin Montgomery, procedente de Nashville y con una decena de álbumes en su haber, es, además, hijo de Bob Montgomery, el mismo que creció con Buddy Holly y que grabó junto a Holly por vez primera como “Buddy & Bob”. El australiano Bryan Estepa también está girando por aquí.DISCO 1 BUDDY & BOB Wishing (ESCA) DISCO 2 BRYAN ESTEPA Saved (10) DISCO 3 SAM ROBERTS BAND We’re All In This Together (LO-FANTASY - 2) DISCO 4 SAM ROBERTS Them Kids (LOVE AT THE END… - 6) DISCO 5 SAM ROBERTS BAND Urprising Down Under CHEMICAL CITY - 5) DISCO 6 KEVIN MONTGOMERY Tryin’ To Fly With One Wing (ESCA) TRUE 2007 DISCO 7 KEVIN MONTGOMERY Breaking Me Down (ESCA) SOME COMFORT 2012 DISCO 8 KEVIN MONTGOMERY Another Long Story (TROUBADOURS - CD 1- 8)Escuchar audio

Alex Heffron is a jazz guitarist located in Denver, CO.  Alex has a degree in Jazz Guitar from the University of Colorado Boulder. He is a member of numerous groups around Colorado and has performed with many of the local legends, including Ken Walker, Eric Gunnison, Paul Romaine, John Gunther, Paul Warburton, Bob Montgomery, Paul McKee, Jeff Jenkins, Joe Anderies, Gabe Mervine, and Todd Reid, to name a few. He has performed with noted artists such as Tony Monaco, John Riley, Kenwood Denard, Pat Coil, Greg Gisbert, Matt Wilson, Melvin Butler, Corey Christiansen, Earl Klugh, John Von Ohlen, Marvin Stamm, Cody Moffett, Howard Levy, Donald Harrison, Chuck Lamb, Dave Roitstein, Brad Goode, and many others.  Alex was also selected as one of 89.3 KUVO's 30 musicians under 30 initiative, which highlighted young and upcoming musicians around the Denver area.  He has been playing guitar since he was 9 years old and studied with the best in Denver and around the world. Alex continues to learn and study from the incredible tradition of jazz and classical music while trying to refine his own voice in jazz guitar.   --- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/backstagejazz/message

California Ramblers New York, December 9, 1926 Stockholm stomp, Sidewalk blues Chelsea Quealey, Bill Moore (tp) Lloyd "Ole" Olsen (tb) Jimmy Dorsey, Arnold Brilhart (cl,as) Freddy Cusick (cl,ts) Adrian Rollini (bassax,xyl) Irving Brodsky (p) Tommy Felline (bj) Stan King (d,kazoo) Arthur Fields (vcl) Arthur Hand (ldr,vln) California Ramblers New York, May 26, 1927 Yes she do, no she don't (ek vcl), Vo-do-do-de-o blues Carl Loeffler (tb) replaces Ivan Johnston, Bob Montgomery (cl,as) Red Nichols and The Arkansas Travellers New York, May 10, 1927 Boneyard shuffle, Ja-da, Stompin' fool Red Nichols (cnt) Miff Mole (tb) Jimmy Dorsey (cl,as) Fred Morrow (as) Arthur Schutt (p) Vic Berton (d) Red Nichols and The Arkansas Travellers New York, September 14, 1927 Birmingham breakdown Red Nichols (cnt) Miff Mole (tb) Pee Wee Russell (cl) or Fud Livingston (cl) Fred Morrow (as) Rube Bloom (p) Vic Berton (d) Chocolate Dandies New York, December 31, 1930 Cloudy skies (2), Got another sweetie now (jh vcl), Bugle call rag (bc arr,2), Dee blues (bc plays cl;bc) Bobby Stark (tp) Jimmy Harrison (tb,vcl) Benny Carter (as,cl,vcl,arr) Coleman Hawkins (ts) Horace Henderson (p) Benny Jackson (g) John Kirby (b-1,tu-2) Erskine Hawkins And His 'Bama State Collegians - New York, August 8, 1940 Someone's rocking my dreamboat (jm vcl), Jumpin' in a julep joint (ij vcl) Sammy Lowe (tp,arr) Wilbur "Dud" Bascomb, Marcellus Green, Erskine Hawkins (tp) Ed Sims, Bob Range (tb) William Johnson (as,arr) Jimmy Mitchell (as,vcl) Julian Dash (ts) Haywood Henry (bar) Avery Parrish (p) Skeeter Best (g) Leemie Stanfield (b) James Morrison (d) Erskine Hawkins And His 'Bama State Collegians - New York, November 6, 1940 Riff time, I know a secret (jm vcl) Sammy Lowe (tp,arr) Wilbur "Dud" Bascomb, Marcellus Green, Erskine Hawkins (tp) Ed Sims, Bob Range (tb) William Johnson (as,arr) Jimmy Mitchell (as,vcl) Julian Dash (ts) Haywood Henry (bar) Avery Parrish (p) Skeeter Best (g) Leemie Stanfield (b) James Morrison (d)

Bob Montgomery could have been an early rock n roll star, on THIS DAY, September 7th with Chris Conley.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In 1946, 77 years ago this week, Edith Houghton walked into the Phillies office with a binder of press clippings and asked for a job. Team owner Bob Montgomery reportedly hired her on the spot, making her the first professional scout in Major League history who also was a woman. Mike and Bill welcome special guest Meg Rowley (@megrowler) of Fangraphs to discuss Houghton's life and career, how women's history in baseball is still a neglected area of study, and how the role of women in the game today is slowly, but steadily, expanding. Plus, happy birthday to Roger Craig and Bill Pecota!

Born in Lubbock, Texas, on September 7, 1936, Charles Hardin  Holley (he later dropped the "e"), after both grandfathers    the fourth child of Lawrence Odell "L.O." Holley and Ella Pauline Drake.    older siblings were Larry, Travis, and Patricia Lou.    nicknamed Buddy from a young age, and it stuck with him throughout his life.    Oddly enough, the newspaper announcement claimed that Buddy was actually a little girl. “A daughter weighing 8.5 lbs”, the Lubbock evening journal wrote. He was also only 6.5 pounds. And a boy. Buddy's family was mainly of English and Welsh descent and had some native American ancestry. During the Great Depression, the Holleys frequently moved residences within Lubbock; 17 in all.    His father changed jobs several times.    The Holley family were a musical household.  Except for Buddy's father, all family members could play an instrument or sing. His older brothers frequently entered local talent shows, and one time, his brothers signed up and Buddy wanted to play violin with them. However, Buddy couldn't play the violin.  Not wanting to break little Buddy's heart, his older brothers greased up the strings so it wouldn't make a sound. Buddy started singing his heart out and the three ended up winning the contest!  When WWII started, the U.S. government called his brothers into service. His brother Larry brought back a guitar he bought from a shipmate, and that guitar set Buddy's off. At 11 years old, Buddy started taking piano lessons.  Nine months later, he quit piano lessons and switched to guitar after seeing a classmate playing and singing on the school bus.    His parents initially bought him a steel guitar, but Buddy insisted he wanted a guitar like his brothers. They bought him a guitar, a gold top Gibson acoustic, from a pawn shop, and his brother Travis taught him to play it.  By 15, Buddy was proficient on guitar, banjo, and mandolin. During his early childhood, Holley was influenced by Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Snow, Bob Wills, and the Carter Family.  He started writing songs and working with his childhood friend Bob Montgomery. The two jammed together, practicing songs by the Louvin Brothers and Johnnie & Jack. They frequently listened to Grand Ole Opry's radio programs on WSM, Louisiana Hayride on KWKH (which they once drove 600 miles to okay just to be turned away), and Big D Jamboree.  If you're not familiar with the Grand Ol Opry, it's a weekly American country music stage concert in Nashville, Tennessee, founded on November 28, 1925, by George D. Hay as a one-hour radio "barn dance" on Clearchannel's WSM, which first hit the airwaves on October 5, 1925. Its the longest-running radio broadcast in U.S. history.    At the same time he was practicing with Bob, Holley played with other musicians he met in high school, including Sonny Curtis and Jerry Allison.    In 1952 Holley and Jack Neal participated as a duo billed as "Buddy and Jack" in a talent contest on a local television show.    After Neal left, he was replaced by his buddy Bob, and they were billed as "Buddy and Bob." By the mid-'50s, Buddy & Bob played their style of music called "western and bop ."    Holley was influenced by late-night radio stations that played the blues and rhythm and blues. Holley would sit in his car with Sonny Curtis and tune to distant “black” radio stations that could only be received at night when bigger stations turned off local transmissions.    Holley then changed his music by blending his earlier country and western influence with Rhythm and Blues. After seeing the legendary Elvis perform, Holly decided to pursue his career in music full-time once he graduated high school. By mid-1955, Buddy & Bob, who already worked with an upright bass player (played by Larry Welborn), added drummer Jerry Allison to their lineup. After seeing Elvis Presley performing live in Lubbock, who Pappy Dave Stone of KDAV booked, Buddy really wanted to get after it. In February, he opened for Elvis at the Fair Park Coliseum, in April at the Cotton Club, then again in June at the Coliseum. Elvis significantly influenced the group to turn more towards Rock n Roll. Buddy and the king became friends, with Buddy even driving Elvis around when he was in town. Eventually, Bob Montgomery, who leaned toward a traditional country sound, left the group, though they continued writing and composing songs together. Holly kept pushing his music toward a straight-ahead rock & roll sound, working with Allison, Welborn, and other local musicians, including his pal and guitarist Sonny Curtis and bassist Don Guess. In October, Holly was booked as the opener for Bill Haley & His Comets (Rock Around the Clock), to be seen by Nashville scout Eddie Crandall. Obviously impressed, Eddie Crandall talked Grand Ole Opry manager Jim Denny into finding a recording contract for Holley. Pappy Stone sent Denny a demo tape, which Denny forwarded to Paul Cohen. Cohen signed the band to Decca Records in February 1956.    In the contract, Decca accidentally misspelled Holley's surname as "Holly," From that point forward, he was known as "Buddy Holly." On January 26, 1956, Holly went to his first professional recording session with producer Owen Bradley. He was a part of two more sessions in Nashville.    the producer selected the session musicians and arrangements, Holly became frustrated by his lack of creative control. In April 1956, Decca released "Blue Days, Black Nights" as a single and "Love Me" on the B-side.    "B-sides" were secondary songs that were sent out with single records. They were usually just added to have something on the flip side. Later they became songs that bands would either not release or wait to release.  Jim Denny added Holly on tour as the opening act for Faron Young. While on this tour, they were promoted as "Buddy Holly and the Two Tones." Decca then called them "Buddy Holly and the Three Tunes." The label released Holly's second single, "Modern Don Juan," along with "You Are My One Desire."    Unfortunately, neither one of these singles tickled anyone's fancy. On January 22, 1957, Decca informed Holly that they wouldn't re-sign him and insisted he could not record the same songs for anyone else for five years. The same shit happened to Universal and me. A couple of classics, like "Midnight Shift" and "Rock Around with Ollie Vee," did come out of those Decca sessions, but nothing issued at the time went anywhere. It looked as though Holly had missed his shot at stardom.  Holly was disappointed with his time with Decca. inspired by Buddy Knox's "Party Doll" and Jimmy Bowen's "I'm Stickin' with You" he decided to visit Norman Petty, who produced and promoted both of those successful records.    Buddy, Jerry Allison, bassist Joe B. Mauldin, and rhythm guitarist Niki Sullivan pulled together and headed to Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico. The group recorded a demo of the now-classic, "That'll Be the Day," which they had previously recorded in Nashville. Now rockin' that lead guitar, Holly finally achieved the sound he wanted. They got the song nailed down and recorded. Along with Petty's help, the group got it picked up by Murray Deutsch, a publishing associate of Petty's, and Murray got it to Bob Thiele, an executive at Coral Records. Thiele loved it. Ironically, Coral Records was a subsidiary of Decca, the company Holly had signed with before. On a side note, a subsidiary is a smaller label under the major label's umbrella. For instance, Universal signed my band to Republic, a subsidiary of Universal Music that dealt primarily with rock genres, like Godsmack. Norman Petty saw the potential in Buddy and became his manager. He sent the record to Brunswick Records in New York City. Thiele saw the record as a potential hit, but there were some significant hurdles to overcome before it could be released.  According to author Philip Norman, in his book Rave On, Thiele would only get the most reluctant support from his record company. Decca had lucked out in 1954 when they'd signed Bill Haley & His Comets and saw their "Rock Around the Clock" top the charts. Still, very few of those in charge at Decca had a natural feel or appreciation for Rock & Roll, let alone any idea of where it might be heading or whether the label could (or should) follow it down that road. Also, remember that although Buddy had been dropped by Decca the year before, the contract that Holly signed explicitly forbade him from re-recording anything he had recorded for them, released or not, for five years. However, Coral was a subsidiary of Decca, and Decca's Nashville office could hold up the release and possibly even haul Holly into court.  "That'll Be the Day" was issued in May of 1957 mainly as an indulgence to Thiele, to "humor" him. The record was put out on the Brunswick label, more of jazz and R&B label, and credited to the Crickets. The group chose this name to prevent the suits at Decca -- and more importantly, Decca's Nashville office -- from finding out that this new release was from the guy they had just dropped. The name “The Crickets” was inspired by a band that Buddy and his group followed, called “the Spiders” and they initially thought about calling themselves “The Beetles”, with two E's, but Buddy said he was afraid people would want to “squash them.” So, they picked “The Crickets.” Petty also became the group's manager and producer, signing the Crickets, identified as Allison, Sullivan, and Mauldin, to a contract. Unfortunately, Holly wasn't listed as a member in the original document to keep his involvement with "That'll Be the Day" a secret. This ruse would later become the source of severe legal and financial problems for Buddy.    The song shot to #1 on the national charts that summer. But, of course, Decca knew Holly was in the band by then. So, with Thiele's persuasion and realizing they had a hit on their hands, the company agreed to release Holly from the five-year restriction on his old contract. This release left him free to sign any recording contract he wanted. While sorting out the ins and outs of Holly's legal situation, Thiele knew that Buddy was far more than a one-hit-wonder and that he could potentially write more and different types of hits. So, Holly found himself with two recording contracts, one with Brunswick as a member of the Crickets and the other with Coral Records as Buddy Holly, all thanks to Thiele's ingenious strategy to get the most out of Buddy and his abilities. By releasing two separate bodies of work, the Crickets could keep rockin' while allowing its apparent leader and "star" to break out on his own.    Petty, whose name seems fitting as we go through this, acted as their manager and producer. He handed out writing credits at random, gifting Niki Sullivan and Joe B. Mauldin (and himself) the co-authorship of the song, "I'm Gonna Love You Too," while leaving Holly's name off of "Peggy Sue." at first. The song title, “Peggy Sue” was named after Buddy's biggest fan. Petty usually added his own name to the credit line, something the managers and producers who wanted a more significant piece of the pie did back in the '50s. To be somewhat fair, Petty made some suggestions, which were vital in shaping certain Holly songs. However, he didn't contribute as much as all of his credits allow us to believe. Some confusion over songwriting was exacerbated by problems stemming from Holly's contracts in 1956. Petty had his own publishing company, Nor Va Jak Music, and Buddy signed a contract to publish his new songs. However, Holly had signed an exclusive agreement with another company the year before. To reduce his profile as a songwriter until a settlement could be made with Petty and convince the other publisher that they weren't losing too much in any compensation, buddy copyrighted many of his new songs under the pseudonym "Charles Hardin." So many names!   The dual recording contracts allowed Holly to record a crazy amount of songs during his short-lived 18 months of fame. Meanwhile, his band -- billed as Buddy Holly & the Crickets -- became one of the top attractions of the time. Holly was the frontman, singing lead and playing lead guitar, which was unusual for the era, and writing or co-writing many of their songs. But the Crickets were also a great band, creating a big and exciting sound (which is lost to history, aside from some live recordings from their 1958 British tour). Allison was a drummer ahead of his time and contributed to the songwriting more often than his colleagues, and Joe B. Mauldin and Niki Sullivan provided a solid rhythm section.   The group relied on originals for their singles, making them unique and years ahead of their time. In 1957-1958, songwriting wasn't considered a skill essential to a career in rock & Roll; the music business was still limping along the lines it had followed since the '20s. Songwriting was a specialized profession set on the publishing side of the industry and not connected to performing and recording. A performer might write a song or, even more rarely, like Duke Ellington (It Don't Mean A Thing), count composition among his key talents; however, this was generally left to the experts. Any rock & roller wanting to write songs would also have to get past the image of Elvis. He was set to become a millionaire at the young age of 22. He never wrote his songs, and the few songwriting credits he had resulted from business arrangements rather than writing anything.   Buddy Holly & the Crickets changed that seriously by hitting number one with a song they'd written and then reaching the Top Ten with originals like "Oh, Boy" and "Peggy Sue," They were regularly charging up the charts based on their songwriting. This ability wasn't appreciated by the public at the time and wouldn't be noticed widely until the '70s. Still, thousands of aspiring musicians, including John Lennon and Paul McCartney, from some unknown band called "The Beatles," took note of their success, and some of them decided to try and tried to be like Buddy. Also unknown at the time, Holly and his crew changed the primary industry method of recording, which was to bring the artist into the label's studio, working on their timetable. If an artist were highly successful, they got a blank check in the studio, and any union rules were thrown out, but that was rare and only happened to the highest bar of musicians. Buddy Holly & the Crickets, however, did their thing, starting with "That'll Be the Day," in Clovis, New Mexico, at Petty's studio. They took their time and experimented until they got the sound they were looking for. No union told them when to stop or start their work, and they delivered terrific records; not to mention, they were albums that sounded different than anything out there. The results changed the history of rock music. The group worked out a new sound that gave shape to the next wave of rock & Roll. Most definitely influenced was British rock & Roll and the British Invasion beat, with the lead and rhythm guitars working together to create a fuller, more complex sound. On songs such as "Not Fade Away," "Everyday," "Listen to Me," "Oh Boy!," "Peggy Sue," "Maybe Baby," "Rave On," "Heartbeat," and "It's So Easy," Holly took rock & roll's range and sophistication and pushed it without abandoning its excitement and, most importantly, it's fun. Holly and the band weren't afraid to push the envelope and try new things, even on their singles. "Peggy Sue" used changes in volume and timbre on the guitar that was usually only used in instrumental albums. "Words of Love" was one of the earliest examples of double-tracked vocals in rock & Roll, and the Beatles would jump on that train the following decade. Buddy Holly & the Crickets were extremely popular in America. Still, in England, they were even more significant; their impact was compared to Elvis and, in some ways, was even bigger. This success was because they toured England; Elvis didn't. They spent a month there in 1958, playing a list of shows that were still talked about 30 years later. It also had to do with their sound and Holly's persona on stage. The group's heavy use of rhythm guitar fit right in with the sound of skiffle music, a mix of blues, folk, country, and jazz elements that most of the younger British were introduced to playing music and their first taste of rock & Roll. Also, Holly looked a lot less likely a rock & roll star than Elvis. He was tall, skinny, and wore glasses; he looked like an ordinary dude who was good at music. Part of Buddy's appeal as a rock star was how he didn't look like one. He inspired tens of thousands of British teenagers who couldn't compare themselves to Elvis or Gene Vincent. (Be Bop A Lula) In the '50s, British guitarist Hank Marvin of the Shadows owed his look and that he wore his glasses proudly on-stage to Holly, and it was brought into the '70s by Elvis Costello.  Buddy may have played several different kinds of guitars but, he was specifically responsible for popularizing the Fender Stratocaster, especially in England. For many wannabe rock & rollers in the UK, Holly's 1958 tour was the first chance they'd had to see or hear this iconic guitar in action, and it quickly became the guitar of choice for anyone wanting to be a guitarist in England. In fact, Marvin is said to have had the first Stratocaster ever brought into England.   The Crickets became a trio with Sullivan dipping out in late 1957, right after the group's appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, but a lot more would transpire over the next year or so. The group consolidated its success with the release of two L.P.s, The Chirping Crickets, and Buddy Holly. They had two successful international tours and performed more in the United States. Holly had also started to have different ideas and aspirations than Allison and Mauldin. They never thought of leaving Texas as their home, and they continued to base their lives there, while Buddy wanted to be in New York, not just to do business but to live. His marriage to Maria Elena Santiago, a receptionist in Murray Deutsch's office, made the decision to move to New York that much easier. By this time, Holly's music had become more sophisticated and complex, and he passed off the lead guitar duties in the studio to session player Tommy Alsup. He had done several recordings in New York using session musicians such as King Curtis. It was around this time that the band started to see a slight decline in sales. Singles such as "Heartbeat" didn't sell nearly as well as the 45s of 1957 that had rolled out of stores. It's said that Buddy might even have advanced further than most of the band's audience was willing to accept in late 1958. Critics believe that the song "Well...All Right" was years ahead of its time.   Buddy split with the group -- and Petty -- in 1958. This departure left him free to chase some of those newer sounds, which also left him low on funds. In the course of the split, it became clear to Holly and everyone else that Petty had been fudging the numbers and probably taken a lot of the group's income for himself. Unfortunately, there was almost no way of proving his theft because he never seemed to finish his "accounting" of the money owed to anyone. His books were ultimately found to be so screwed up that when he came up with various low five-figure settlements to the folks he robbed, they took it.   Holly vacationed with his wife in Lubbock, TX, and hung out in Waylin Jennings's radio station in December 1958. With no money coming in from Petty, Holly decided to earn some quick cash by signing to play the Midwest's Winter Dance Party package tour. For the start of the Winter Dance Party tour, he assembled a band consisting of Waylon Jennings (on bass), Tommy Allsup (on guitar), and Carl Bunch (on drums). Holly and Jennings left for New York City, arriving on January 15, 1959. Jennings stayed at Holly's apartment by Washington Square Park on the days before a meeting scheduled at the headquarters of the General Artists Corporation, the folks who organized the tour. They then traveled by train to Chicago to meet up with the rest of the band. The Winter Dance Party tour began in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on January 23, 1959. The amount of travel involved created problems because whoever booked the tour dates didn't consider the distance between venues. On top of the scheduling conflicts, the unheated tour buses broke down twice in the freezing weather. In addition, Holly's drummer Carl Bunch was hospitalized for frostbite to his toes while aboard the bus, so Buddy looked for different transportation.  Buddy actually sat in on drums for the local bands while Richie Valenz played drums for Buddy.    On February 2, before their appearance in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly chartered a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza airplane for Jennings, Allsup, and himself, from Dwyer Flying Service in Mason City, Iowa, for $108.  Holly wanted to leave after the performance at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake and fly to their next venue, in Moorhead, Minnesota, through Fargo, North Dakota. This plan would allow them time to rest, wash their clothes and avoid being on that crappy bus. The Clear Lake Show ended just before midnight, and Allsup agreed to flip a coin for the seat with Richie Valens. Valens called heads, and when he won, he reportedly said, "That's the first time I've ever won anything in my life" On a side note, Allsup later opened a restaurant in Fort Worth, Texas called Heads Up, in memory of this statement. Waylon Jennings voluntarily gave up his seat to J. P. Richardson (the Big Bopper), who had the flu and complained that the tour bus was too cold and uncomfortable for a man of his stature. When Buddy heard Waylon wouldn't be flying with him, he jokingly said, “I hope your old bus freezes up!” Then Waylon responded, “well, I hope your old plane crashes!” The last thing he would ever say to his friend. Roger Peterson, the pilot and only 21, took off in pretty nasty weather, although he wasn't certified to fly by instruments alone, failing an instrument test the year before. He was a big fan of Buddy's and didn't want to disappoint, so he called a more seasoned pilot to fly the trio to their destination. “I'm more of a Lawrence Welk fan.”  Sadly, shortly after 12:55 am on February 3, 1959, Holly, Valens, Richardson, and Peterson were killed instantly when the plane crashed into a frozen cornfield five miles northwest of Mason City, Iowa, airport shortly after takeoff. Buddy was in the front, next to the pilot. He loved flying and had been taking flying lessons. The three musicians were ejected from the plane upon impact, suffering severe head and chest injuries. Holly was 22 years old.   Holly's funeral was held on February 7, 1959, at the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Lubbock, TX. It was officiated by Ben D. Johnson, who married the Hollys' just months earlier. Jerry Allison, Joe B. Mauldin, Niki Sullivan, Bob Montgomery, and Sonny Curtis were pallbearers. Some sources say that Phil Everly, the one half of The Everly Brothers, was also the pallbearer, but he said at one time that he attended the funeral but was not a pallbearer. In addition, Waylon Jennings was unable to participate because of his commitment to the still-touring Winter Dance Party. Holly's body was buried in the City of Lubbock Cemetery, in the city's eastern part. His headstone has the correct spelling of his last name (Holley) and a carving of his Fender Stratocaster guitar. His wife, María Elena, had to see the first reports of her husband's death on T.V. She claimed she suffered a miscarriage the following day. Holly's mother, who heard the news on the radio in Lubbock, Texas, screamed and collapsed. Because of Elena's miscarriage, the authorities implemented a policy against announcing victims' names until the families were informed. As a result, Mary did not attend the funeral and has never visited the gravesite. She later told the Avalanche-Journal, "In a way, I blame myself. I was not feeling well when he left. I was two weeks pregnant, and I wanted Buddy to stay with me, but he had scheduled that tour. It was the only time I wasn't with him. And I blame myself because I know that, if only I had gone along, Buddy never would have gotten into that airplane."    The accident wasn't considered a significant piece of news at the time, although sad. Most news outlets were run by out-of-touch older men and didn't think rock & Roll was anything more than to be exploited to sell newspapers or grab viewing audiences. However, Holly was clean-cut and scandal-free, and with the news of his recent marriage, the story contained more misery than other music stars of the period. For the teens of the time, it was their first glimpse of a public tragedy like this, and the news was heartbreaking. Radio station D.J.s were also traumatized. The accident and sudden way it happened, along with Holly and Valens being just 22 and 17, made it even worse. Hank Williams Sr had died at 29, but he was a drug user and heavy drinker, causing some to believe his young death was inevitable. The blues guitarist Johnny Ace had passed in 1954 while backstage at a show. However, that tragedy came at his hand in a game of Russian roulette. Holly's death was different, almost more personal to the public.     Buddy left behind dozens of unfinished recordings — solo transcriptions of his new compositions, informal jam sessions with bandmates, and tapes with songs intended for other musicians. Buddy recorded his last six original songs in his apartment in late 1958 and were his most recent recordings. In June 1959, Coral Records overdubbed two of the songs with backing vocals by the Ray Charles Singers and hired guns to emulate the Crickets sound. Since his death, the finished tracks became the first singles, "Peggy Sue Got Married"/"Crying, Waiting, Hoping." The new release was a success, and the fans and industry wanted more. As a result, all six songs were included in The Buddy Holly Story, Vol. 2 in 1960 using the other Holly demos and the same studio personnel. The demand for Holly records was so great, and Holly had recorded so many tracks that his record label could release new Holly albums and singles for the next ten years. Norman Petty, the alleged swindler, produced most of these new songs, using unreleased studio masters, alternative takes, audition tapes, and even amateur recordings (a few from 1954 with recorded with low-quality vocals). The final Buddy Holly album, "Giant," was released in 1969 with the single, "Love Is Strange," taking the lead.   These posthumous records did well in the U.S. but actually charted in England. New recordings of his music, like the Rolling Stones' rendition of "Not Fade Away" and the Beatles' rendition of "Words of Love," kept Buddy's name and music in the hearts and ears of a new generation of listeners. In the States, the struggle was a little more challenging. The rock & roll wave was constantly morphing, with new sounds, bands, and listeners continuously emerging, and the general public gradually forgot about Buddy and his short-lived legacy. Holly was a largely forgotten figure in his own country by the end of the '60s, except among older fans (then in their twenties) and hardcore oldies listeners. Things began to shift toward the end of the '60s with the start of the oldies boom. Holly's music was, of course, a part of this movement. But, as people listened, they also learned about the man behind the music. Even the highly respected rock zine Rolling Stone went out of its way to remind people who Buddy was. His posing images from 1957 and 1958, wearing his glasses, a jacket, and smiling, looked like a figure from another age. The way he died also set him apart from some of the deaths of rockers like Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison, musicians who, at the time, overindulged in the rock in roll lifestyle. Holly was different. He was eternally innocent in all aspects of his life. Don McLean, a relatively unknown singer/songwriter, who proudly considered himself a Buddy Holly fan, wrote and released a song called "American Pie," in 1971, catapulting him into the musical ethos. Although listeners assumed McLean wrote the song about President Kennedy, he let it be known publicly that he meant February 3, 1959, the day Holly died. Maclean was a holly fan and his death devastated him when he was only 11. The song's popularity led to Holly suddenly getting more press exposure than he'd ever had the chance to enjoy in his lifetime.     The tragic plane accident launched a few careers in the years after. Bobby Vee became a star when his band took over Holly's spot on the Winter Dance Party tour.  Holly's final single, "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," hit the British charts in the wake of his death and rose to number one. Two years after the event, producer Joe Meek and singer Mike Berry got together to make "Tribute to Buddy Holly," a memorial single. But, unfortunately, rumor has it that Meek never entirely got over Holly's death, and he killed himself on the anniversary of the plane accident.   The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame included Holly among its first class in 1986. Upon his induction, the Hall of Fame basked about the large quantity of material he produced during his short musical career. Saying, "He made a major and lasting impact on popular music ." Calling him an "innovator" for writing his own material, experimenting with double-tracking, and using orchestration. He was also revered for having "pioneered and popularized" the use of two guitars, bass, and drums by rock bands. He was also inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, saying his contributions "changed the face of Rock' n' Roll." Along with Petty, Holly developed techniques like overdubbing and reverb and other innovative instrumentation. As a result, according to the Songwriters Hall of Fame, Holly became "one of the most influential pioneers of rock and roll" who had a "lasting influence" on genre performers of the 1960s.   Paul McCartney bought the rights to Buddy Holly's entire song catalog on July 1, 1976.   Lubbock TX's Walk of Fame has a statue honoring Buddy of him rocking his Fender, which Grant Speed sculpted in 1980. There are other memorials to Buddy Holly, including a street named in his honor and the Buddy Holly Center, which contains a museum of memorabilia and fine arts gallery. The Center is located on Crickets Avenue, one street east of Buddy Holly Avenue.  There was a musical about Buddy. Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, a “pioneering jukebox musical which worked his familiar hits into a narrative,” debuted in the West End in 1989. It ran until 2008, where it also appeared on Broadway, as well as in Australia and Germany, not to mention touring companies in the U.K. and U.S.   In 1994 "Buddy Holly" became a massive hit from the band Weezer, paying homage to the fallen rocker and is still played on the radio and whenever MTV decides to play videos on one of their side stations. Again, in ‘94, Holly's style also showed up in Quentin Tarantino's abstract and groundbreaking film Pulp Fiction, which featured Steve Buscemi playing a waiter impersonating Buddy.   In 1997, Buddy received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He was inducted into the Iowa Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame in 2000, as well. In 2010, Grant Speed's statue of Buddy and his guitar was taken down for repairs, and construction of a new Walk of Fame began. On May 9, 2011, the City of Lubbock held a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Buddy and Maria Elena Holly Plaza, the new home of the statue and the Walk of Fame. The same year, on why would be Buddy's 75th birthday, a star with his name was placed on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.   There were two tribute albums released in 2011: Verve Forecast's Listen to Me: Buddy Holly,  featuring Stevie Nicks, Brian Wilson, and Ringo Starr plus 13 other artists, and Fantasy/Concord's Rave on Buddy Holly, which had tracks from Paul McCartney, Patti Smith, the Black Keys, and Nick Lowe, among others.  Pat DiNizio of the Smithereens released his own Holly tribute album in 2009. Universal released True Love Ways, an album where original Holly recordings were overdubbed by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2018, just in time for Christmas. That album debuted at number 10 on the U.K. charts. Groundbreaking was held on April 20, 2017, to construct a new performing arts center in Lubbock, TX, dubbed the Buddy Holly Hall of Performing Arts and Sciences, a $153 million project in downtown Lubbock completed in 2020 located at 1300 Mac Davis Lane.   Recently, on May 5, 2019, an article on gearnews.com had a pretty cool story, if it's true.   The famous Fender Stratocaster played and owned by Buddy Holly that disappeared after his death in 1959 has been found, according to a new video documentary called "The '54".   Gill Matthews is an Australian drummer, producer, and collector of old Fender guitars. According to the documentary, he may have stumbled upon Buddy Holly's legendary guitar. The film is The '54 and tells the history of one particular 1954 Fender Stratocaster Gil purchased two decades after the plane crash that claimed Buddy's life. Experts cited in the film say there is a good chance that the guitar in Matthews' possession is indeed Buddy Holly's actual original '54 Fender Stratocaster. If this is true, it is possibly one of the most significant finds in guitar history. You can watch the video at gearnews.com and see all the evidence presented during the film.     Sources: A biography on allmusic.com written by Bruce Eder was the main source of information here with other info coming from the following Rave on: The Biography of Buddy Holly written by Phillip Norman   Buddy Holly : Rest In Peace by Don Mclean "Why Buddy Holly will never fade away" an article on The Telegraph website written by Phillip Norman   Various other articles were used and tidbits taken from wikipedia.   And Adam Moody   Consider becoming a producer of the show. www.accidentaldads.com www.iconsandoutlaws.com       

Portlock Alaska & Other haunted ghost towns   Today we're talking about a ghost town in Alaska that is rumored to have been abandoned because of…. Wait for it….a killer bigfoot!! dun dun duuuuuuuuuuun!!! We're going to look at Portlock Alaska and after that maybe take a look at other haunted and creepy ghost towns!    History of Portlock: As per wikipedia   Portlock is a ghost town in the U.S. state of Alaska, located on the southern edge of the Kenai Peninsula, around 16 miles south of Seldovia. It is located in Port Chatham bay, after which an adjacent community takes its namesake. Named after Nathaniel Portlock, Portlock was established in the Kenai Peninsula in the early-twentieth century as a cannery, particularly for salmon. It is thought to have been named after Captain Nathaniel Portlock, a British ship captain who sailed there in 1786. In 1921, a United States Post Office opened in the town.  The population largely consisted of Russian-Aleuts, indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands. Both the Aleut people and the islands are divided between the US state of Alaska and the Russian administrative division of Kamchatka Krai.   In the early 1900s there were a series of deaths and disappearances in the town. Many people started to blame this on a killer cryptid! It is said that this big bad beast is the reason behind the town being abandoned and left to become a legend.   Nantiinaq:   First off let's talk about the cryptid that is believed to be the cause of all of this mess.   Nantinaq is a large Bigfoot-like creature that is believed to be a key factor in the abandonment of the Alaskan fishing village Portlock. Elders from the nearby town of Nanwalek have kept oral traditions of the creature alive since Portlock's abandonment in 1950. Stories differentiate Nantinaq from the North American Sasquatch or Bigfoot through its abilities, which many believe to be supernatural and evil in nature.   The earliest descriptions and accounts of Nantinaq can be traced back to European expedition logs in the 1700's. When Native Alaskans began inhabiting the Portlock area stories and encounters with a mysterious creature began occurring with increasing regularity.   In the early 20th century, as Portlock's population grew, local and national sources began to record unexplained occurrences in the area. An abnormally high number of disappearances, catastrophes, and deaths eventually lead to village elders to move the population to nearby Nanwalek.    The physical characteristics of Nantinaq are typically described to be similar to the North American Sasquatch. Eye witnesses and historians describe the creature as being upwards of 8 feet tall and being covered in dark fur. Sharp claws capable of ripping mammals with ease have also been identified.   Despite the creatures imposing physical characteristics, many locals identify Nantinaq more through its invisible traits. Strange illnesses, smells and noises have all been recorded in the Portlock area with no known explanation. This has led many locals and elders to believe Nantinaq is spiritual in nature.   The craziness: Even before Portlock had even existed there had long been sinister stories told by the Natives of the area. They had long told of a creature stalking the wildernesses of the region, which they referred to as a Nantiinaq, roughly translating to “half man- half beast.” The Natives were apparently terrified of these creatures, and would avoid any area in which they were known to lurk. At first Portlock seemed safe, but whether the Nantiinaq had anything to do with it or not, strange things began happening in and around the area, not long after its settlement. In 1900, a group of hair-covered creatures ran at a prospector who had climbed a tree in an attempt to get his bearings near Thomas Bay. The prospector said they were, “the most hideous creatures. I couldn't call them anything but devils…” The prospector, upon seeing the creatures advancing on him, was able to drop down out of the tree, get to his canoe and make his escape in the nick of time. He had no doubt in his mind that, had he not seen the creatures when he did, they would have made short work of him. Another bizarre incident allegedly happened in as early as 1905, just a few years after the cannery had opened. At this time, many of the workers at the cannery suddenly stopped coming to work and refused to come back, but this wasn't due to poor pay or working conditions, but rather because the men were deeply spooked. They claimed that there was “something in the woods,” commonly reported by the men as being large dark shapes that would stare at them from the tree line at the shore and sometimes display menacing behavior. The workers were eventually convinced to come back the following season, but this was not the end of the town's problems.   In the 1920s and 30s there were several mysterious deaths in the area that seemed to have been caused by something very large and powerful. The first was a local hunter by the name of Albert Petka, who was out hunting with his dogs in the 1920s when he came across a massive hairy creature that materialized from the trees to strike him in the chest, sending him flying. Petka's dogs allegedly managed to chase the beast off, and when rescuers arrived he explained what had happened, before dying from his wounds later. Natives at the time saw this as a bad sign, believing it to be evidence that a Nantiinaq had come to haunt the area. Rumors like this persisted for years, only further perpetuated by stories of miners, loggers, hunters, or cannery workers finding huge tracks in the woods, or of seeing fleeting large dark shapes and sometimes hearing eerie howls at night. Making it even more ominous is that there were some reports from frightened Natives that there was a ghostly entity in the area as well, which took the form of a woman wearing a long black dress and who would appear at the top of the cliffs near town to scream and moan before vanishing.   Brian Weed is the co-founder of a group called Juneau's Hidden History that primarily keeps track of things through their Facebook page. He has traveled all over Juneau and many other Alaskan towns in search of natural history and stories. His group plans frequent hikes in the area to places that have some sort of story to tell or just to see the natural beauty of the state. He related another story of a mysterious death.                       "A logger was out working and something or someone hit him over the head with a huge piece of logging equipment, something that one man couldn't have lifted. When they found his body, there was blood on the equipment and there was no way that one person could have done it. He was a good ten feet from the logging equipment, so it's not like he slipped, fell, and hit his head. It looked more like someone picked it up and bonked him over the head."           In 1940 it was reported that a search party had been sent out to look for one such missing hunter, which would claim that they had come across his body in a creek, mutilated and torn apart in a way not consistent with a bear attack. Other bodies would reportedly be found as well, apparently washed down from the mountains into a nearby lagoon, with others still discovered washed up on the shores of Port Chatham, all of them ripped apart and maimed as if by some immensely powerful animal. At the time there were so many people turning up in that lagoon dead that it began to truly freak out the locals, to the point that they spent much time cowering indoors away from those creepy ass woods.   By the 1950s, locals were sick and tired of living in fear so they completely fled the town and left it abandoned. Years later when hunters returned, it is said that they reported seeing 18-inch long human-like footprints with patterns similar to a deer or wolf.   Former Portlock resident Malania Helen Kehl was interviewed by Naomi Klouda of the Homer Tribune back in October of 2009 and said things in Portlock started out well enough but degenerated to such a point that the family left their home and fled to Nanwalek.The family had endured the murder of Malania's godfather, Andrew Kamluck in 1931. Kamluck was the logger who was killed when someone, or something, hit him over the head.           "We left our houses and the school and started all new here (Nanwalek),” said Kehl.   Port Graham elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff told of the unexplained disappearance of a gold miner near the village during this time.   “He went up there one time and never came back,” said Kvasnikoff. “No one found any sign of him.”   Another interesting aspect of the Portlock story was relayed to Klouda by an Anchorage paramedic who preferred to remain anonymous.   “In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.” En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut'' from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to DogFish Bay and was once stuck there due to bad weather.   “This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?' Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.' “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said, “No, did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”   Ok so that's pretty jacked up….a killer bigfoot! That's one hell of a story. The town had been abandoned ever since and sightings continue to this day. In fact there is a TV series about this place called Alaskan Killer Bigfoot! The series followed a 40 day expedition to the area to try and see if they can get to the bottom of all the mystery! Moody hasn't watched it yet but I'm sure he'll get high and binge it soon.    So on the side of fairness we do have to disclose an interview we found. The interview was with a woman named Sally Ash. Sally is Sugpiaq of Russian-Aleut descent. She has lived in Nanwalek for most of her life and continues to speak her native language Sugt'stun. Her mother was born in Dogfish Bay, near Port Chatham.            “Our people were nomadic, went by the seasons, whatever was in season they would move from one place to another. They went through Port Chatham, Dogfish Bay, Seldovia, Homer, even to Kodiak.”               "Portlock was kind of a creepy place,” she admitted.  “They'd tell us don't go out on a foggy day.  That's when he's walking around. You could run into him and you never know what he might do.”   The ‘he' that she is talking about is their local form of Sasquatch, known as Nantiinaq.  Nantiinaq pronounced ‘non-tee-nuck,' is not your typical, everyday Sasquatch brute. Nantiinaq is more of a supernatural being.      “I think he is part-human,” Sally describes. “He lived with people and then didn't want to be around them anymore so he moved to the forest; away from everybody. He started growing hair and he looked like a bigfoot — scary… My uncles, my grandfathers, they all talked about him. They'd tell us they live far away from people. They don't mix with people.”   “My brother went up to the lake. He was tying off his skiff. He started smelling something really bad in the bushes, so he opened it, moving the branches. Something's going on here.  Then he looked in there and there was a man with his hands — in the back way (turned around). It looked like a man, but he was all hairy and he looked really scary. So he and our cousin took off running and didn't want to be up there.  He wasn't sure if it was a bigfoot, but there was a horrible smell,” she said.   “I think it's a he; he has been living for a long time,” Sally says. “He's old, he's tall, he's strong, he's hairy.  It lives in the woods and you can tell when he's getting near. You can smell him.  My mom used to talk about it a lot.  She'd tell stories of the bigfoot, like in Dogfish area, her and her brother would talk about how bigfoot was around. They were getting too close to him and they would be nice to him. Respect him. Keep distance. They live with him but not so close. He moved around — he was quick.”   Sally served as translator for her cousin, Malania Kehl during her historic interview for the Homer Tribune in 2009, that has since taken the bigfoot-believing world by storm. Malania told the reporter that the entire town evacuated Port Chatham in 1949 due to this murderous Nantiinaq. Her story has been perceived as being factual by authors, documentarians, and bigfoot buffs.   Buuuuuuuuttttttt…..   “My cousin Malania was being interviewed and we were sitting with her,” Sally recalls. “Malania kind of made up a story, because she was getting tired of people asking if this (story) is true. She made up this story about how Bigfoot was killing people. It wasn't true.  Everybody knows that, but it was not our place to say nothing. We all knew but we couldn't just stop her. We were brought up in a way where we can't tell our elders they are wrong.”   "And that was her story,” Sally giggles…  “we knew it. There was me and my sisters and my cousins and we all just sat there. We couldn't tell her, ‘Don't say that Malania,'  because she might get mad at us. We were younger than her and we were not allowed in front of her to say anything like that… Malania knew that we knew about her story that she made up and we all had a laugh about it with her.”   Sally said the reason for the exodus from Port Chatham was more practical in nature.   “People would see Nantiinaq, but that wasn't the reason why people moved this way to Seldovia and Nanwalek. They moved because of the economy, schools and the church.  There really was no killing of people.”     Well…that's disappointing…but we here at The train are gonna stick to the fact that there's a killer bigfoot to blame!   Wow so that's fun! But you know what…it's not enough. We strive to bring you the best in podcast entertainment here so we're going to do some of our patented quick hitters and throw in some more crazy ghost towns for ya!  Let's roll!   First up we're off to Italy. The ghost town of Craco to be more specific.    Craco is a ghost town and comune in the province of Matera, in the southern Italian region of Basilicata.    Haunted, surreal and moving, it's not surprising that the Craco ghost town and the beautiful surrounding landscape was chosen as the setting for several movies such as Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ and 007 Quantum of Solace.   The first written evidence of the town's existence shows that it was under the possession of a bishop named Arnaldo in 1060 A.D. The town's oldest building, the tall Torre Normanna, predates the bishop's documented ownership by 20 years.   From 1154 to 1168, after the archbishop, the nobleman Eberto controlled the town, establishing Feudalistic rule, and then ownership passed onto Roberto di Pietrapertos in 1179.   A university was established in the 13th century and the population kept growing, reaching 2,590 in the year 1561. By this time, the construction of four large plazas was completed. Craco had its first substantial landslide in 1600, but life went on, and the monastery of St. Peter went up in 1630.   Then, another tragedy hit. In 1656, the Black Death began to spread. Hundreds died and the population dipped.   But Craco wasn't down for the count quite yet. In 1799, the town successfully overthrew the feudal system — only to then fall to Napoleonic occupation. In 1815, a still-growing Craco was divided into two separate districts.   After Italy's unification in the mid-19th century, the controversial gangster and folk hero Carmine Crocco briefly conquered the village.   Mother Nature had more in store for Craco. Poor agricultural conditions caused a severe famine in the late 19th century. This spawned a mass migration of the population — about 1,300 people — to North America.   Then came more landslides. Craco had a series of them — plus a flood in 1972 and an earthquake in 1980. Luckily, in 1963, the remaining 1,800 inhabitants were transferred down the mountain to a valley called Craco Peschiera.   Not everyone was willing to move, however. One man native to the tiny town resisted the relocation, choosing to live the rest of his more than 100 years in his native land.   Some houses still hold traces of the life that once was: old appliances, abandoned tools, a lonely chair in the middle of a room where no one will ever sit anymore. A few facades still bear the signs of their past beauty in what has remained of their decorations.   And of course there are the tales of hauntings that come with most ghost towns. While there isn't a whole lot on a cursory search, if you dig a little you can find some stories of late night expeditions finding some interesting things. There are stories of groups seeing shadow people and apparitions. People hearing strange sounds. Pictures containing orbs and other anomalies. It's a great looking place, definitely check it out.   Next up is Rhyolite Nevada.   The ghost town of Rhyolite and its remnants are definitely a popular destination among those who like seeking out Nevada's abandoned places. Home to many of the town's original and now crumbling buildings, it's a fascinating place to see and think about Nevada's past.    According to the national parks service This ghost town's origins were brought about by Shorty Harris and E. L. Cross, who were prospecting in the area in 1904. They found quartz all over a hill, and as Shorty describes it “... the quartz was just full of free gold... it was the original bullfrog rock... this banner is a crackerjack”! He declared, “The district is going to be the banner camp of Nevada. I say so once and I'll say it again.” At that time there was only one other person in the whole area: Old Man Beatty who lived in a ranch with his family five miles away. Soon the rush was on and several camps were set up including Bullfrog, the Amargosa and a settlement between them called Jumpertown. A townsite was laid out nearby and given the name Rhyolite from the silica-rich volcanic rock in the area.   There were over 2000 claims covering everything in a 30 mile area from the Bullfrog district. The most promising was the Montgomery Shoshone mine, which prompted everyone to move to the Rhyolite townsite. The town immediately boomed with buildings springing up everywhere. One building was 3 stories tall and cost $90,000 to build. A stock exchange and Board of Trade were formed. The red light district drew women from as far away as San Francisco. There were hotels, stores, a school for 250 children, an ice plant, two electric plants, foundries and machine shops and even a miner's union hospital.   The town citizens had an active social life including baseball games, dances, basket socials, whist parties, tennis, a symphony, Sunday school picnics, basketball games, Saturday night variety shows at the opera house, and pool tournaments. In 1906 Countess Morajeski opened the Alaska Glacier Ice Cream Parlor to the delight of the local citizenry. That same year an enterprising miner, Tom T. Kelly, built a Bottle House out of 50,000 beer and liquor bottles.   In April 1907 electricity came to Rhyolite, and by August of that year a mill had been constructed to handle 300 tons of ore a day at the Montgomery Shoshone mine. It consisted of a crusher, 3 giant rollers, over a dozen cyanide tanks and a reduction furnace. The Montgomery Shoshone mine had become nationally known because Bob Montgomery once boasted he could take $10,000 a day in ore from the mine. It was later owned by Charles Schwab, who purchased it in 1906 for a reported 2 to 6 million dollars.   The financial panic of 1907 took its toll on Rhyolite and was seen as the beginning of the end for the town. In the next few years mines started closing and banks failed. Newspapers went out of business, and by 1910 the production at the mill had slowed to $246,661 and there were only 611 residents in the town. On March 14, 1911 the directors voted to close down the Montgomery Shoshone mine and mill. In 1916 the light and power were finally turned off in the town.   Today you can find several remnants of Rhyolite's glory days. Some of the walls of the 3 story bank building are still standing, as is part of the old jail. The train depot (privately owned) is one of the few complete buildings left in the town, as is the Bottle House. The Bottle House was restored by Paramount pictures in Jan, 1925.   And according to only on your state, It also happens to be home to one of Nevada's spookiest cemeteries. After all, nothing says "creepy" like a ghost town graveyard! Known as the Bullfrog-Rhyolite Cemetery, it definitely looks the part of a haunted destination you probably shouldn't visit at night.   The Bullfrog-Rhyolite Cemetery was actually shared between two towns. Home to just a handful of rugged graves, including some that look like nothing more than a human-shaped mound of rocks, it definitely has a serene type of beauty to it...during daylight, that is.   There's no telling what kind of creepy experiences you could have in Rhyolite once the sun sets. In fact, paranormal enthusiasts make trips out here to challenge just that! Disembodied voices and orbs are often reported in this area. And while most of the action seems to be centered on this area there are also reports of the same strange goings on in the town itself. Strange sounds and voices and orbs, as well as strange shadows and apparitions. Sounds awesome to us!   Next up we head to Calico California.   Calico is a ghost town and former mining town in San Bernardino County, California, United States. Located in the Calico Mountains of the Mojave Desert region of Southern California, it was founded in 1881 as a silver mining town, and was later converted into a county park named Calico Ghost Town. Located off Interstate 15, it lies 3 miles (4.8 km) from Barstow and 3 miles from Yermo. Giant letters spelling CALICO are visible, from the highway, on the Calico Peaks behind it. Walter Knott purchased Calico in the 1950s, and architecturally restored all but the five remaining original buildings to look as they did in the 1880s. Calico received California Historical Landmark #782, and in 2005 was proclaimed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to be California's Silver Rush Ghost Town.   In 1881 four prospectors were leaving Grapevine Station (present day Barstow, California) for a mountain peak to the northeast. After they described the peak as "calico-colored", the peak, the mountain range to which it belonged, and the town that followed were all called Calico. The four prospectors discovered silver in the mountain and opened the Silver King Mine, which was California's largest silver producer in the mid-1880s. John C. King, who had grubstaked the prospectors who discovered the silver vein (the Silver King Mine was thus named after him), was the uncle of Walter Knott founder of Knott's Berry Farm. King was sheriff of San Bernardino County from 1879 to 1882. A post office at Calico was established in early 1882, and the Calico Print, a weekly newspaper, started publishing. The town soon supported three hotels, five general stores, a meat market, bars, brothels, and three restaurants and boarding houses. The county established a school district and a voting precinct. The town also had a deputy sheriff and two constables, two lawyers and a justice of the peace, five commissioners, and two doctors. There was also a Wells Fargo office and a telephone and telegraph service. At its height of silver production during 1883 and 1885, Calico had over 500 mines and a population of 1,200 people. Local badmen were buried in the Boot Hill cemetery   An attempt to revive the town was made in about 1915, when a cyanide plant was built to recover silver from the unprocessed Silver King Mine's deposits. Walter Knott and his wife Cordelia, founders of Knott's Berry Farm, were homesteaded at Newberry Springs around this time, and Knott helped build the redwood cyanide tanks for the plant.   The last owner of Calico as a mine was Zenda Mining Company. After building Ghost Town at Knott's Berry Farm in the 1940s, Walter Knott, his son, Russell, and Paul von Klieben, who was Knott's art director, made a road trip to Calico. The three of them came back filled with enthusiasm. If they could build an imaginary ghost town at Knott's Berry Farm, would it not be possible to restore a real ghost town? In 1951, Walter Knott purchased the town of Calico from the Zenda Mining Company and put Paul von Klieben in charge of restoring it to its original condition, referencing old photographs.   Using the old photos, and Walter's memory and that of some old-timers who still lived in the area, von Klieben was able to not only restore existing structures, but also design and replace missing buildings. Knott spent $700,000 restoring Calico. Knott installed a longtime employee named Freddy "Calico Fred" Noller as resident caretaker and official greeter. In 1966 Walter Knott decided to donate the town to San Bernardino County, and Calico became a County Regional Park.   The site is now a thriving tourist attraction, and is quite interesting to visit despite being neither original nor very atmospheric, as only about four of the buildings are largely unchanged from the mining era, and the whole place is rather commercialized. Some of the replica houses have only a frontage, as if part of a movie set.    The best part?…yup…its friggin haunted. You can take ghost tours through the town to find out for yourself!    According to Haunted Rooms. Com, Amid the claims of paranormal activity, there are 3 main entities who have been identified as residing in Calico Ghost Town and these are the ones that visitors should be on the lookout for.   One of the most commonly spotted entities haunting Calico Ghost Town is said to be a woman by the name of Lucy Lane. History suggests that Lucy ran Calico's General Store alongside her husband John Robert Lane. Just like so many of the residents, the Lanes moved away from Calico when the town began rapidly depopulating. However, they ended up returning in 1916 after the town was abandoned and live the rest of their days in the town. Lucy was well into her 90s when she finally passed.   It seems only natural then that she would want to stick around in the town where she lived and died. Visitors to Calico Ghost Town have frequently reported seeing Lucy walking between what was once her home and the General Store. She is easily recognizable by her attire – the beautiful black lace dress in which she was buried. Although most of the reports describe seeing Lucy Lane walking from her home to the General Store, there have also been sightings of her inside both buildings as well. Her former home is now a museum dedicated to Lucy and John Robert Lane and she is sometimes seen sitting in a rocking chair slowly rocking back and forth. Some visitors also claim to have seen Lucy behind the counter in the General Store.   Another of the paranormal hotspots in the Calico Ghost Town is definitely the schoolhouse! The names of the teachers have long since been lost, but it is said to be their spirits who are responsible for the plethora of paranormal activity happening in the old schoolhouse. There are frequent reports that the teachers like to stand in the windows of the schoolhouse peering out at those passing by on the outside! There are also reports of a red ball of light moving around inside the schoolhouse. This phenomenon has been witnessed by many visitors to Calico Ghost Town.   The former teachers are certainly not the only ones who are up to mischief! There have also been reports of various ghostly students in the schoolhouse as well. These children's spirits can be seen flitting around inside the building. They do seem to keep themselves to themselves most of the time, but there is one girl aged around 11 or 12 who is far more outgoing. However, she is most likely to appear to children and teens who will often comment on seeing her only for their parents to turn around and the girl to vanish!   The most prominent ghost that roams around Calico Ghost Town is probably the entity known as ‘Tumbleweed' Harris. He is actually the last Marshal of Calico and it seems as though he has not yet stepped down from his duty! He is often seen by the boardwalks on Main Street and you will be able to recognize him by his large frame and long white beard. If you do visit Calico Ghost Town be sure to stop by Tumbleweed's gravestone and thank him for continuing to keep Calico's peace even in death.   And finally we double back and head back to Alaska for one more ghost town. Kennecott Alaska is our final destination.   In the summer of 1900, two prospectors, "Tarantula" Jack Smith and Clarence L. Warner, a group of prospectors associated with the McClellan party, spotted "a green patch far above them in an improbable location for a grass-green meadow." The green turned out to be malachite, located with chalcocite (aka "copper glance"), and the location of the Bonanza claim. A few days later, Arthur Coe Spencer, U.S. Geological Survey geologist independently found chalcocite at the same location.   Stephen Birch, a mining engineer just out of school, was in Alaska looking for investment opportunities in minerals. He had the financial backing of the Havemeyer Family, and another investor named James Ralph, from his days in New York. Birch spent the winter of 1901-1902 acquiring the "McClellan group's interests" for the Alaska Copper Company of Birch, Havemeyer, Ralph and Schultz, later to become the Alaska Copper and Coal Company. In the summer of 1901, he visited the property and "spent months mapping and sampling." He confirmed the Bonanza mine and surrounding by deposits were, at the time, the richest known concentration of copper in the world.   By 1905, Birch had successfully defended the legal challenges to his property and he began the search for capital to develop the area. On 28 June 1906, he entered into "an amalgamation" with the Daniel Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan & Co., known as the Alaska Syndicate, eventually securing over $30 million. The capital was to be used for constructing a railway, a steamship line, and development of the mines. In Nov. 1906, the Alaska Syndicate bought a 40 percent interest in the Bonanza Mine from the Alaska Copper and Coal Company and a 46.2 percent interest in the railroad plans of John Rosene's Northwestern Commercial Company.   Political battles over the mining and subsequent railroad were fought in the office of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt between conservationists and those having a financial interest in the copper.   The Alaska Syndicate traded its Wrangell Mountains Mines assets for shares in the Kennecott Copper Corporation, a "new public company" formed on 29 April 1915. A similar transaction followed with the CR&NW railway and the Alaska Steamship Company. Birch was the managing partner for the Alaska operation.   Kennecott Mines was named after the Kennicott Glacier in the valley below. The geologist Oscar Rohn named the glacier after Robert Kennicott during the 1899 US Army Abercrombie Survey. A "clerical error" resulted in the substitution of an "e" for the "i", supposedly by Stephen Birch himself. Kennecott had five mines: Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode, Erie and Glacier. Glacier, which is really an ore extension of the Bonanza, was an open-pit mine and was only mined during the summer. Bonanza and Jumbo were on Bonanza Ridge about 3 mi (4.8 km) from Kennecott. The Mother Lode mine was located on the east side of the ridge from Kennecott. The Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode and Erie mines were connected by tunnels. The Erie mine was perched on the northwest end of Bonanza Ridge overlooking Root Glacier about 3.7 mi (6.0 km) up a glacial trail from Kennecott. Ore was hoisted to Kennecott via the trams which head-ended at Bonanza and Jumbo. From Kennecott the ore was hauled mostly in 140-pound sacks on steel flat cars to Cordova, 196 rail miles away, via the Copper River and Northwestern Railway (CRNW).   In 1911 the first shipment of ore by train transpired. Before completion, the steamship Chittyna carried ore to the Abercrombie landing by Miles Glacier. Initial ore shipments contained "72 percent copper and 18 oz. of silver per ton."   In 1916, the peak year for production, the mines produced copper ore valued at $32.4 million.   In 1925 a Kennecott geologist predicted that the end of the high-grade ore bodies was in sight. The highest grades of ore were largely depleted by the early 1930s. The Glacier Mine closed in 1929. The Mother Lode was next, closing at the end of July 1938. The final three, Erie, Jumbo and Bonanza, closed that September. The last train left Kennecott on November 10, 1938, leaving it a ghost town.   From 1909 until 1938, except when it closed temporarily in 1932, Kennecott mines "produced over 4.6 million tons of ore that contained 1.183 billion pounds of copper mainly from three ore bodies: Bonanza, Jumbo and Mother Lode. The Kennecott operations reported gross revenues above $200 million and a net profit greater than $100 million.   In 1938, Ernest Gruening proposed Kennecott be preserved as a National Park. A recommendation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 18 Jan. 1940 for the establishment of the Kennecott National Monument went nowhere. However, 2 Dec. 1980 saw the establishment of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.   From 1939 until the mid-1950s, Kennecott was deserted except for a family of three who served as the watchmen until about 1952. In the late 1960s, an attempt was made to reprocess the tailings and to transport the ore in aircraft. The cost of doing so made the idea unprofitable. Around the same time, the company with land rights ordered the destruction of the town to rid them of liability for potential accidents. A few structures were destroyed, but the job was never finished and most of the town was left standing. Visitors and nearby residents have stripped many of the small items and artifacts. Some have since been returned and are held in various archives.   KCC sent a field party under the geologist Les Moon in 1955. They agreed with the 1938 conclusion, "no copper resource of a size and grade sufficient to interest KCC remained." The mill remains however.   Most of this historical info came from an awesome article called A Kennecott Story by Charles Hawley in the University of Utah Press.   So you know we love our history and we thought it was cool cus this was such an important town in Alaska's history and then boom…ghost town. But you know that's not why we're there…it's also haunted!   Reports of paranormal activity along the abandoned train tracks abound and have for decades. That's not all that makes it one of the most haunted places in America. Some claim to have seen old tombstones along the route. The gravestones then vanish by the time the visitors make their return trip. Others have reported hearing disembodied voices and phantom children laughing. Reportedly, a 1990s construction project here halted after workers were scared away by spooky sounds and inexplicable events.   Ok, last little tid bit of fact. There's actually a little town up in the far northwest territory of Alaska called Diomede which is located on the island of Little Diomede in the middle of the Bering Straight. During the winter months the water can freeze and you can actually walk… to Big Diomede … an island in Russia. The stretch of water between these two islands is only about 2.5 miles wide. There are two reported cases of people walking from Alaska to Russia in modern history. The last were Karl Bushby, and his American companion Dimitri Kieffer who in 2006 walked from Alaska to Russia over the Bering Straight in 14 days.   So there you have it…killer bigfoot and some cool haunted ghost towns! Maybe we'll drive into some more ghost towns in a future episode!   Bigfoot horror movies   https://filmschoolrejects.com/bigfoot-horror/

Episode one hundred and thirty-eight of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “I Fought the Law", and at the mysterious death of Bobby Fuller. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a fifteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Hanky Panky" by Tommy James and the Shondells. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com No Mixcloud this week due to the large number of tracks by the Bobby Fuller Four Resources Information about the Crickets' post-Holly work comes from Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh. There are two books available about Bobby Fuller -- the one I consulted most is Rock and Roll Mustangs by Stephen McParland, which can be bought as a PDF from https://payhip.com/cmusicbooks I also consulted I Fought the Law: The Life and Strange Death of Bobby Fuller by Miriam Linna and Randell Fuller. One minor note -- both these books spell Bob Keane's name Keene. Apparently he spelled it multiple ways, but I have chosen to use the spelling he used on his autobiography, which is also the spelling I have used for him previously. There are several compilations available of the Bobby Fuller Four's material, but the best collection of the hit singles is Magic Touch: The Complete Mustang Singles Collection.  And this is an expanded edition of the Crickets' In Style album. Erratum I say Sonny Curtis wrote "Oh Boy!" -- I meant Sonny West. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A warning, before I begin. This episode, more than most, deals with events you may find disturbing, including graphic descriptions of violent death. Please check the transcript on the podcast website at 500songs.com if you are worried that you might be upset by this. This episode will not be a pleasant listen. Now on with the episode... More than anything, Bobby Fuller wanted desperately to be Buddy Holly. His attitude is best summed up in a quote from Jim Reese, the guitarist with the Bobby Fuller Four, who said "Don't get me wrong, I thought the world of Bobby Fuller and I cared a lot for him, so I say this with the best intentions -- but he was into Buddy Holly so much that if Buddy Holly decided to wear one red sock and one blue sock and Bobby Fuller found out about it, Bobby Fuller would've had one red sock and one blue sock. He figured that the only way to accomplish whatever Buddy Holly had accomplished was to be as much like Buddy Holly as possible." And Reese was right -- Bobby Fuller really was as much like Buddy Holly as possible. Buddy Holly was from Texas, so was Bobby Fuller. Buddy Holly played a Fender Stratocaster, Bobby Fuller played a Fender Stratocaster. Buddy Holly performed with the Crickets, Bobby Fuller's biggest hit was with a Crickets song. Buddy Holly recorded with Norman Petty, Bobby Fuller recorded with Norman Petty. Of course, there was one big difference. Buddy Holly died in an accident when he was twenty-two. Bobby Fuller lived to be twenty-three. And his death was no accident... [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "I Fought the Law"] After Buddy Holly quit the Crickets in 1958, they continued recording with Norman Petty, getting in guitarist Sonny Curtis, who had been an associate of the band members even before they were a band, and who had been a frequent collaborator with Buddy, and vocalist Earl Sinks. But while they kept recording, Petty didn't release any of the recordings, and the group became convinced that he wasn't really interested in doing so. Rather, they thought that he was just using them as leverage to try to get Buddy back. "Love's Made a Fool of You" was the record that made the Crickets lose their faith in Norman Petty. The song was one that Buddy Holly and Bob Montgomery had written way back in 1954, and Holly had revived it for a demo in 1958, recording it not as a potential song for himself but to give to the Everly Brothers, reworked in their style, though they never recorded it: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] When Holly and the Crickets had parted ways, the Crickets had recorded their own version of the song with Petty producing, which remained unreleased like everything they'd recorded since Buddy left. But on the very day that Buddy Holly died, Petty shipped a copy of the tape to Decca, express mail, so that a single could be released as soon as possible: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] The Crickets never worked with Norman Petty again after that, they were so disgusted at his determination to cash in on the death of their friend and colleague. Petty continued to exploit Holly's work, getting in a band called the Fireballs to add new instrumental backing to Holly's old demos so they could be released as new singles, but the split between Petty and Holly's living colleagues was permanent. But the Crickets didn't give up performing, and continued recording new material, mostly written either by Sonny Curtis or by the group's drummer Jerry Allison, who had co-written several of the group's earlier hits with Holly. "More Than I Can Say" was written by Curtis and Allison, and didn't make the top forty in the US, but did become a top thirty hit in the UK: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "More Than I Can Say"] That was later also covered in hit versions by Bobby Vee and Leo Sayer. The B-side, "Baby My Heart", wasn't a hit for the Crickets, but was covered by the Shadows on their first album, which made number one on the UK charts. That performance was one of the few Shadows records at this point to have vocals: [Excerpt: The Shadows, "Baby My Heart"] The group's first post-Holly album collected all their singles without Holly to that point, plus a few new filler tracks. The album, In Style With the Crickets, didn't chart in the US, but was a success in the UK. Around the time that album was released, Earl Sinks quit the group, and became a songwriter. He collaborated with Buddy Holly's old musical partner Bob Montgomery on a variety of hits for people like Brenda Lee, and in the seventies went back into performing for a while, having minor solo country hits as Earl Richards, and then bought a chain of abbatoirs. Allison and Curtis supplemented their income from the Crickets with session work -- Allison backed the Everly Brothers on "Til I Kissed You": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Til I Kissed You"] and both of them played on Eddie Cochran's last studio session, playing on "Three Steps to Heaven", with Curtis playing the electric lead while Cochran played the acoustic: [Excerpt: Eddie Cochran, "Three Steps to Heaven"] After that, the group went on tour in the UK as the backing band for the Everly Brothers, where they coincidentally bumped into Cochran, who told them "If I knew you guys were coming, I'd have asked you to bring me a bottle of American air.” They would never see Cochran again. Shortly after that tour, Sonny Curtis was drafted -- though while he was in the army, he wrote "Walk Right Back" for the Everly Brothers, as we discussed in the episode on "Cathy's Clown": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Walk Right Back"] Joe Mauldin gave up on music for a while, and so for a while The Crickets consisted of just Jerry Allison, new singer Jerry Naylor, and guitarist Tommy Allsup, who had played with Holly after Holly left the Crickets. That lineup recorded the "Bobby Vee Meets the Crickets" album, with Bobby Vee singing lead: [Excerpt: Bobby Vee and the Crickets, "Well... All Right"] Curtis would return once his time in the army was over, and eventually, in the 1970s, the group would stabilise on a lineup of Curtis, Mauldin, and Allison,  who would play together more or less consistently until 2015. But for a few years in the early sixties there was a lot of lineup shuffling, especially as Allison got drafted not long after Curtis got out of the Army -- there was one UK tour where there were no original members at all, thanks to Allison's absence. When Curtis was out of the group around the time of the Bobby Vee album, Snuff Garrett tried to get a friend of his to join as the group's new lead singer, and brought him to LA, but it didn't work out. Garrett later said "He and Jerry didn't hit it off in the way I imagined. After a few months, it was over and the guy started playing clubs around LA. I did demos with him and took them to my boss, the president of Liberty, and he said, ‘You've got enough of your friends signed to the label. You've signed the Crickets and Buddy Knox and they're not doing much business, and this guy can hardly speak English.' I said, ‘Well, I think he's going to be something.' ‘Okay,' he said, ‘Drop one of the acts you've got and you can sign him.' I said, ‘Forget it.' A year later, he was an international star and his name was Trini Lopez" Lopez's big hit, "If I Had a Hammer", was recorded in a live show at a club called PJs: [Excerpt: Trini Lopez, "If I Had a Hammer"] PJs was owned by a gangster named Eddie Nash, who is now best known as the prime suspect in a notorious case known as the Wonderland Murders, when in 1981 four people were horribly beaten to death, either with the assistance of or to send a message to the porn star John Holmes, depending on which version of the story you believe. If you're unfamiliar with the case, I advise you not to google it, as it's very far from pretty. I bring this up because PJs would soon play a big part in the career of the Bobby Fuller Four. Bobby Fuller was born in the Gulf Coast of Texas, but his family moved about a lot during his formative years, mostly in the Southwestern US, living in Lubbock, Texas, Hobbs, New Mexico, and Salt Lake City, Utah, among other places, before finally settling down in El Paso. El Paso is a border town, right up close to the border with Mexico, and that meant that it had a complicated relationship with Juarez, the nearest large town on the Mexican side of the border. Between 1919 and 1933, the selling and consumption of alcohol had been made illegal in the United States, a period known as Prohibition, but of course it had not been criminalised in Mexico, and so during those years any time anyone from El Paso wanted to get drunk they'd travel to Juarez. Even after Prohibition ended, Juarez had a reputation as a party town, and Randy Fuller, Bobby's brother, would later tell a teen magazine "You can grow up in El Paso and get really bad -- it's Juarez that makes it that way. Whatever personality you have, you have it 100%. You can go to Juarez and get drunk, or stay in El Paso and get religion" Of course, from the outside, that sounds a whole lot like "now look what YOU made ME do". It's not the fault of those white people from Texas that they travel to someone else's city in someone else's country and get falling-down drunk and locked up in their jails every weekend, but it's the fault of those tempting Mexicans. And when Bobby and Randy Fuller's older brother Jack disappeared in 1961, while Bobby was off at university, that was at first what everyone thought had happened -- he'd gone to Juarez, got drunk, and got locked up until he could sleep it off. But when he didn't reappear after several days, everyone became more concerned. It turned out that Jack had met a man named Roy Handy at a bus depot and started chatting with him. They'd become friendly, and had gone off to do some target shooting together in the desert. But Handy had seen what looked like a wad of thousand-dollar bills in Jack's sun visor, and had decided to turn the gun on Jack rather than the target, killing him. The thousand-dollar bills had been play money, a gift bought for a small child who lived nearby. Because of the murder, Bobby Fuller moved back to El Paso from Denton in North Texas, where he had been studying music at university. He did enroll in a local college, but gave up his studies very quickly. Bobby had been something of a musical prodigy -- his original plan before going to North Texas State University had actually been to go to Juilliard, where he was going to study jazz drumming. Instead, while Bobby continued his drumming, he started living a party lifestyle, concentrating on his car, on women -- he got multiple women pregnant in his late teens and early twenties -- and on frequent trips to Juarez, where he would spend a lot of time watching a local blues musician, Long John Hunter: [Excerpt: Long John Hunter, "El Paso Rock"] Meanwhile, a music scene had been growing in El Paso since the late 1950s. A group called the Counts were at the forefront of it, with instrumentals like "Thunder": [Excerpt: The Counts, "Thunder"] The Counts splintered into various groups, and one of them became The Embers, who Bobby Fuller joined on drums. Fuller was also one of a tiny number of people at this time who actually had a home studio. Fuller had started out with a simple bedroom studio, but thanks to his parents' indulgence he had repurposed a big chunk of their house as a studio, including building, with his brother Randy, an echo chamber (though it didn't work very well and he stuck with tape echo). It was in that home studio that the Embers recorded their first single, "Jim's Jive", with Fuller on drums and Jim Reese on lead guitar: [Excerpt: Jerry Bright and The Embers, "Jim's Jive"] That was released on a tiny local label, Yucca Records, which also released the Embers' second single -- and also released two Bobby Fuller solo singles, starting with "You're in Love": [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "You're in Love"] That was recorded at Fuller's home studio, with the Embers backing him, and became the number one single locally, but Yucca Records had no national distribution, and the record didn't get a wider release. Fuller's second single, though, was the first time his Buddy Holly fixation came to the forefront. Fuller was, by many accounts, *only* interested in sounding like Buddy Holly -- though his musical tastes were broad enough that he also wanted to sound like Eddie Cochran, Ritchie Valens, and the Crickets. But that was the extent of Fuller's musical world, and so obviously he wanted to work with the people who had worked with Holly. So his second single was recorded at Norman Petty's studio in Clovis, New Mexico, with Petty's wife Vi, who had played keyboards on some Buddy Holly records, on keyboards and backing vocals: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "Gently My Love"] But as it turned out, Fuller was very underwhelmed by the experience of working with Petty, and decided that he was going to go back to recording in his home studio. Fuller left the Embers and started performing on his own, playing rhythm guitar rather than drums, with a band that initially consisted of his brother Randy on bass, Gaylord Grimes on drums, and Jim Reese on lead guitar, though there would be constant lineup changes. Two of the many musicians who drifted in and out of Fuller's revolving band lineup, Larry Thompson and Jerry Miller, were from the Pacific Northwest, and were familiar with the scene that I talked about in the episode on "Louie, Louie". Thompson was a fan of one of the Pacific Northwest bands, the Frantics, who had hits with tracks like "Werewolf": [Excerpt: The Frantics, "Werewolf"] Thompson believed that the Frantics had split up, and so Fuller's group took on that name for themselves. When they found out that the group *hadn't* split up, they changed their name to the Fanatics, though the name on their bass drum still read "The Frantics" for quite a while. Jerry Miller later moved back to Seattle, where he actually joined the original Frantics, before going on to become a founder member of Moby Grape. Fuller started his own record label, Eastwood Records, and put out another solo single, which covered the full breadth of his influences. The B-side was "Oh Boy!", the song Sonny Curtis had written for Buddy Holly, while the A-side was "Nervous Breakdown", which had originally been recorded by Eddie Cochran: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "Nervous Breakdown"] Everything was very fluid at this point, with musicians coming and going from different lineups, and none of these musicians were only playing in one band. For example, as well as being lead guitarist in the Fanatics, Jim Reese also played on "Surfer's Paradise" by Bobby Taylor and the Counts: [Excerpt: Bobby Taylor and the Counts, "Surfer's Paradise"] And Bobby's record label, renamed from Eastwood to Exeter, was releasing records  by other artists as well as Bobby and the Fanatics, though none of these records had any success. In early 1963 Fuller and his latest lineup of Fanatics -- Randy, drummer Jimmy Wagnon, and guitarist Tex Reed -- travelled to LA to see if they could become successful outside El Paso. They got a residency at the Hermosa Biltmore, and also regularly played the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa, where the Beach Boys and Dick Dale had both played not long before, and there they added some surf instrumentals to their repertoire. Bobby soon became almost as keen on surf music as he was on rockabilly. While in LA, they tried all the record companies, with no success. The most encouragement they got came from Bob Keane at Del-Fi, the label that had previously been Ritchie Valens' label, who told him that the tapes they brought him of their El Paso recordings sounded good but they needed better songs, and to come back to him when they had a hit song. Bobby determined to do just that. On their return to El Paso, Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics recorded "Stringer" for Todd Records, a small label owned by Paul Cohen, the former Decca executive who had signed Buddy Holly but not known what to do with him: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, "Stringer"] Fuller also opened his own teen nightclub, the Teen Rendezvous, which he named after the Balboa ballroom. The Fanatics became the regular band there, and at this point they started to build up a serious reputation as live performers. The Teen Rendezvous only stayed open for a few months, though -- there were complaints about the noise, and also they booked Bobby Vee as a headliner one night. Vee charged a thousand dollars for his appearance, which the club couldn't really afford, and they didn't make it back on the doors. They'd hoped that having a prestigious act like Vee play there might get more people to come to the club regularly, but it turned out that Vee gave a sub-par performance, and the gamble didn't pay off. It was around this time that Fuller made his first recording of a song that would eventually define him, though it wasn't his idea. He was playing the Crickets In Style album to his brother Randy, and Randy picked up on one song, a Sonny Curtis composition which had never been released as a single: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "I Fought the Law"] Randy thought the Crickets' actual record sounded horrible, but he also thought the song had the potential to be a really big hit. He later explained "The James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause had made a big impression on me, and I told Bobby, 'Man, let's do that one... it oughta sell a million copies'. Everyone was into the whole rebel thing, with switchblades and stuff like that. It just seemed like a natural thing for us to do." Fuller recorded his own version of the song, which once again became a local hit: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, "I Fought The Law (El Paso version)"] But even though the record did get some national distribution, from VeeJay Records, it didn't get any airplay outside the Southwest, and Fuller remained a local star with absolutely no national profile. Meanwhile, he was still trying to do what Bob Keane had asked and come up with a hit song, but he was stuck in a musical rut. As Jim Reese would later say, "Bobby was a great imitator. He could sing just like Holly, McCartney, Lennon, or Eddie Cochran. And he could imitate on the guitar, too. But Bobby never did Bobby". To make matters worse, the Beatles came on to the American musical scene, and caused an immediate shift in the public taste. And Bobby Fuller had a very complicated relationship with the Beatles. He had to play Beatles songs live because that's what the audiences wanted, but he felt that rock and roll was *American* music, and he resented British people trying to play it. He respected them as songwriters, but didn't actually like their original material. He could tell that they were huge Buddy Holly fans, like him, and he respected that, but he loathed Motown, and he could tell they were listening to that too. He ended up trying to compromise by playing Buddy Holly songs on stage but introducing them by talking about how much the Beatles loved Buddy Holly. Another person who was negatively affected by the British Invasion was Bob Keane, the man who had given Fuller some encouragement. Keane's Del-Fi Records had spent the previous few years making a steady income from churning out surf records like "Surf Rider" by the Lively Ones: [Excerpt: The Lively Ones, "Surf Rider"] And the Surfer's Pajama Party album by the Bruce Johnston Surfing Band: [Excerpt: Bruce Johnston, "The Surfer Stomp"] But as surf music had suddenly become yesterday's news, Del-Fi were in financial trouble, and Keane had had to take on a partner who gave the label some financial backing, Larry Nunes. Now, I am going to be very, very, careful about exactly what I say about Nunes here. I am aware that different people give very, very, different takes on Nunes' personality -- Barry White, for example, always said that knowing Nunes was the best thing that ever happened to him, credited Nunes with everything good in his career, and gave him credit on all his albums as his spiritual advisor. However, while White made Nunes out to be pretty much a saint, that is not the impression one gets from hearing Bob Keane or any of Bobby Fuller's circle talk about him. Nunes had started out in the music business as a "rack jobber", someone who ran a small distribution company, selling to small family-owned shops and to secondary markets like petrol stations and grocery stores. The business model for these organisations was to get a lot of stock of records that hadn't sold, and sell them at a discount, to be sold in discount bins. But they were also a perfect front for all sorts of criminal activity. Because these were bulk sales of remaindered records, dead stock, the artists weren't meant to get royalties on them, and no real accounting was done of the sales. So if a record label "accidentally" pressed up a few thousand extra copies of a hit record and sold it on to a rack jobber, the artists would never know. And if the Mafia made a deal with the record pressing plant to press up a few thousand extra copies, the *record label* would never know. And so very, very, quickly this part of the distribution system became dominated by organised crime. I have seen no proof, only rumours, that Nunes was directly involved in organised crime, but Bob Keane in particular later became absolutely convinced he was. Keane would later write in his autobiography: “I wondered if I had made a deal with the Devil. I had heard that Larry had a reputation for being associated with the Mob, and as it turned out three years later our relationship ended in deception, dishonesty, and murder. I consider myself very lucky to have come out of my relationship with Nunes in one piece, virtually unscathed." Again, this is Keane's interpretation of events. I am not saying that Larry Nunes was a mobster, I am saying that Bob Keane repeatedly made that accusation many times, and that other people in this story have said similar things. By late 1964, Bobby Fuller had come up with a song he was pretty sure *would* be a successful single, like Keane had wanted, a song called "Keep on Dancing" he'd written with Randy: [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller, “Keep On Dancing”] After some discussion he managed to persuade Randy, Jim Reese, and drummer DeWayne Quirico to move with him to LA -- Bobby and Randy's mother also moved with them, because after what had happened to her eldest son she was very protective of her other children. Jim Reese was less keen on the move than the others, as he thought that Fuller was only interested in himself, not in the rest of the Fanatics. As Reese would later say, "Bobby wanted us all to go to California, but I was leery because it always had been too one-sided with Bobby. He ran everything, hired and fired at the least whim, and didn't communicate well with other people. He was never able to understand that a musician, like other people, needs food, gasoline, clothes, a place to live, etc. I often felt that Bobby thought we should be following him anywhere just for the thrill of it." Eventually, Fuller got them to go by agreeing that when they got to LA, everything would be split equally -- one for all and all for one, though when they finally made a deal with Keane, Fuller was the only one who ended up receiving royalties. The rest of the group got union scale. Keane agreed that "Keep on Dancing" could be a hit, but that wasn't the first record the group put out through one of Keane's labels. The first was an instrumental titled "Thunder Reef": [Excerpt: The Shindigs, "Thunder Reef"] That wasn't released as by the Fanatics, but as by The Shindigs -- Keane had heard that Shindig! needed a house band and thought that naming the group after the show might be a way to get them the position. As it happened, the TV show went with another group, led by James Burton, who they called the Shindogs, and Keane's plan didn't work out. The Shindigs single was released on a new Del-Fi subsidiary, Mustang, on which most future records by the group would be released. Mustang was apparently set up specifically for the group, but the first record released on that label was actually by a studio group called The Surfettes: [Excerpt: The Surfettes, "Sammy the Sidewalk Surfer"] The Surfettes consisted of Carol Connors, the former lead singer of the Teddy Bears and writer of "Hey Little Cobra", and her sister Cheryl. Carol had written the single with Buzz Cason, of Brenda Lee's band, and the session musicians on that single included several other artists who were recording for Del-Fi at the time -- David Gates, Arthur Lee, and Johnny Echols, all of whom we'll be hearing more about in future episodes. Almost simultaneously with the Shindigs single, another single by the Fanatics was released, "Those Memories of You": [Excerpt: Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, "Those Memories of You"] That single, backed by a surf instrumental called "Our Favourite Martian", was released on Donna Records, another Del-Fi subsidiary, as by Bobby Fuller and the Fanatics, which made the other group members furious -- what had happened to one for all and all for one? Randy Fuller, who was a very aggressive young man, was so annoyed that he stormed into Bob Keane's office and frisbeed one of the singles at his head. They didn't want to be Bobby's backing band, they wanted to be a proper group, so it was agreed the group's name would be changed. It was changed to The Bobby Fuller Four. Jim Reese claimed that Keane and Fuller formed The Bobby Fuller Four Inc, without the other three members having participation, and made them employees of the corporation. Reese said "this didn't fit in with my concept of the verbal agreement I had with Bobby, but at least it was better than nothing". The group became the house band at the Rendezvous, playing their own sets and backing people like Sonny and Cher. They then got a residency at the Ambassador Hotel in Hollywood, and then Jim Reese quit the band. Fuller phoned him and begged him to come back, and as Reese said later "I again repeated my conditions about equal treatment and he agreed, so I went back -- probably the biggest mistake I ever made." The group's first single as the Bobby Fuller Four, released on Mustang as all their future records were, was "Take My Word": [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Take My Word"] The record was unsuccessful -- Keane's various labels, while they were better distributed than Bobby's own labels back in El Paso, still only had spotty distribution, and Mustang being a new label it was even more difficult to get records in stores. But the group were getting a reputation as one of the best live acts in the LA area at the time. When the club Ciro's, on the Sunset Strip, closed and reopened under its new name It's Boss, the group were chosen to perform at its grand reopening, and they played multiple four- to six-week residencies at PJ's. The next record the group released, "Let Her Dance", was a slight rewrite of "Keep on Dancing", the song the Fuller brothers had written together, though Bobby was the only credited writer on the label: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Let Her Dance"] That was the first single they recorded at a new state-of-the-art studio Keane had opened up. That studio had one of the first eight-track machines in LA, and a truly vast echo chamber, made up from a couple of unused vaults owned by a bank downstairs from the studio. But there were big arguments between Fuller and Keane, because Fuller wanted only to make music that could be reproduced live exactly as it was on the record, while Keane saw the record as the important thing. Keane put a percussion sound on the record, made by hitting a bottle, which Fuller detested as they couldn't do it live, and the two would only end up disagreeing more as they continued working together. There's a lot of argument among Fuller fans about this -- personally I can see both sides, but there are people who are very much Team Bobby and think that nothing he recorded for Mustang is as good as the El Paso recordings, because of Bob Keane diluting the raw power of his live sound. But in an era  where studio experimentation was soon to lead to records like "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Good Vibrations", I think a bit of extra percussion is hardly an unforgivable dilution: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Let Her Dance"] KRLA radio started playing "Let Her Dance" every hour, at the instigation of Larry Nunes -- and most of the people talking about this have implied that he bribed people in order to get this to happen, or that it was through his alleged Mob connections. Certainly, he knew exactly when they would start playing the record, and how frequently, before they did. As a result of this exposure, "Let Her Dance" became a massive local hit, but they still didn't have the distribution to make it a hit outside California. It did, though, do well enough that Liberty Records asked about putting the record out nationally. Keane came to a verbal agreement, which he thought was an agreement for Liberty to distribute the Mustang Records single, and Liberty thought was an agreement to put out the single on their own label and have an option on future Fuller recordings. Liberty put the record out on their own label, without Keane having signed anything, and Keane had to sue them. The result was that the record was out on two different labels, which were suing each other, and so it hardly had any chance at any kind of success. The legal action also affected the next single, "Never to Be Forgotten": [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Never to Be Forgotten"] That's often considered the best of the band's originals for Mustang, and was written by the Fuller brothers -- and both of them were credited this time -- but Liberty sued Keane, claiming that because they'd released "Let Her Dance", they also had an option on the next single. But even though the group still weren't selling records, they were getting other opportunities for exposure, like their appearance in a film which came out in April 1966. Though admittedly, this film was hardly A Hard Day's Night. Indeed, a lot of people have claimed that The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini was cursed. The film, which went through the working titles Pajama Party in a Haunted House, Slumber Party in a Haunted House, Bikini Party in a Haunted House, and Ghost in a Glass Bikini, was made by the cheapy exploitation company American International Pictures, and several people involved in it would die in the next four years, starting with Buster Keaton, who was meant to appear in the film, but had to back out due to his health problems and died before the film came out. Then on the first day of filming, a grip fell to his death. In the next four years, two of the film's young stars, Sue Hamilton and John Macchia, would die, as would Philip Bent, an actor with a minor role who died in July 1966 in a plane crash which also took the life of Peter Sachse, an extra on the film who was married to a cast member. Three more stars of the film, Francis X Bushman, Basil Rathbone, and Boris Karloff would also all be dead within a handful of years, but they were all elderly and unwell when filming started. I don't believe in curses myself, but it is a horrible run of bad luck for a single film. To make matters worse, the group weren't even playing their own music in the film, but lipsynching to tracks by other musicians. And they had to play Vox instruments in the film, because of a deal the filmmakers had made, when the group all hated Vox instruments, which Jim Reese thought of as only good for starting bonfires. For the next single, Keane had discussed with Fuller what songs the group had that were "different", but Fuller apparently didn't understand what he meant. So Keane went to the rest of the group and asked them what songs always went over well in live performances. All three band members said that "I Fought the Law" should be the next single. Bobby disagreed, and almost got into a fistfight with his brother over it -- they'd already released it as a single once, on his own label, and he didn't want to do it again. He also wanted to record his own material not cover versions. But the others prevailed, and "I Fought the Law" became the record that would define the group: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "I Fought the Law"] "I Fought the Law" became the group's breakthrough hit. It made the top ten, and turned the song, which had previously been one of the Crickets' most obscure songs, into a rock and country standard. In the seventies, the song would be recorded by Hank Williams Jr, the Clash, the Dead Kennedys and more, and all of them would be inspired by the Bobby Fuller Four's version of the song, not the Crickets' original. Around this time, the group also recorded a live album at PJs, in the hope of duplicating Trini Lopez's success with his earlier album. The album was shelved, though, because it didn't capture the powerhouse live act of the group's reputation, instead sounding rather dull and lifeless, with an unenthused audience: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Oh Boy!"] While "I Fought the Law" was a huge success, it started a period of shifts within the band. Shortly after the PJs album was recorded, DeWayne Quirico quit the band and moved back to El Paso. He was temporarily replaced by Johnny Barbata, who would later become a member of the Turtles, before Fuller's preferred replacement Dalton Powell was able to get to LA to join the band. There seems to have been some shuffling about, as well, because as far as I can tell, Powell joined the band, then quit and was replaced by Barbata returning, and then rejoined again, all in about a six month period. Given the success of "I Fought the Law", it only made sense that at their first recording session with Powell, the group would record more tracks that had originally been on the Crickets' In Style album. One of these, their version of "Baby My Heart", went unreleased at the time, though to my taste it's the best thing the group ever did: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Baby My Heart"] The other, "Love's Made a Fool of You", became the group's next single: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "Love's Made a Fool of You"] "Love's Made a Fool of You" was also a success, making number twenty-six in the charts, but the group's next session, which would produce their last single, was the cause of some conflict. Keane had noticed that soul music was getting bigger, and so he'd decided to open up a sister label to Mustang, Bronco, which would release soul and R&B music. As he didn't know much about that music himself, though of course he had worked with Sam Cooke, he decided to hire an A&R man to deal with that kind of music. The man he chose was a piano player named Barry White, still several years from making his own hit records. White had had some success as an arranger and producer already, having arranged "The Harlem Shuffle" for Bob and Earl, on which he also played piano: [Excerpt: Bob and Earl, "The Harlem Shuffle"] Despite White's remit, the records he produced for Bronco and Mustang weren't especially soulful. "Back Seat 38 Dodge" by Opus 1, for example, is a psychedelic updating of the kind of car songs that the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean had been doing a couple of years earlier: [Excerpt: Opus 1, "Back Seat 38 Dodge"] White was present at what became the final Bobby Fuller Four session, though accounts differ as to his involvement. Some have him arranging "The Magic Touch”, others have him playing drums on the session, some have him co-producing. Bob Keane always said that the record had no involvement from White whatsoever, that he was there but not participating, but various band members, while differing on other things, have insisted that White and Fuller got into huge rows, as Fuller thought that White was trying to turn his music into Motown, which he despised. The finished record does sound to me like it's got some of White's fingerprints on it: [Excerpt: The Bobby Fuller Four, "The Magic Touch"] But "The Magic Touch" flopped -- it departed too far from the updated Buddy Holly sound of the group's hit singles, and audiences weren't responding. “The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini” came out and was an embarrassment to the band – and on July the eleventh the next in that horrible series of deaths linked to the film happened, the plane crash that killed Philip Bent and Peter Sachse. On July the sixteenth, William Parker, the long-serving chief of the LAPD, had died. If, hypothetically, someone wanted to commit a crime in LA and not have it investigated too closely, the few days after Parker's death, when the entire department was in mourning and making preparations for a massive public funeral, would have been a good time to do so. Two days after Parker's death, July the eighteenth 1966, was going to be the crunch point for the Bobby Fuller Four. They had a recording session scheduled for 8:30AM, but they also were planning on having a band meeting after the session, at which it was likely the group were going to split up. Jim Reese had just got his draft notice, Bobby and Randy were getting on worse, and nobody was happy with the music they were making. They were going to finish the album they were working on, and then Bobby was going to go solo. Or at least that was what everyone assumed -- certainly Ahmet Ertegun had been sniffing round Bobby as a solo artist, though Bobby kept saying publicly he wanted to continue working with the band. There were also later rumours that Morris Levy had been after Bobby, and had even signed him to a deal, though no documentary evidence of such a deal has surfaced. It seemed that if there was to be a group at all, it would just be a name for any random musicians Bobby hired. Bobby also wanted to become a pure recording artist, and not tour any more -- he hated touring, thought people weren't listening to the band properly, and that being away from home meant he didn't have time to write songs, which in turn meant that he had to record what he thought of as substandard material by other people rather than his own original material. He wanted to stay in LA, play clubs, and make records. But even though making records was what he wanted to do, Bobby never turned up for the recording session, and nor did he turn up for the group meeting afterwards. The group's next single had been announced as "It's Love Come What May": [Excerpt: Randy Fuller, "It's Love Come What May"] When that was released, it was released as a Randy Fuller solo single, with Randy's voice overdubbed on top of Bobby's. Because there was no use putting out a record by a dead man. Here's what we actually know about Bobby Fuller's death, as far as I can tell. There are a lot of conflicting claims, a lot of counternarratives, and a lot of accusations that seek to tie in everyone from Charles Manson to Frank Sinatra, but this is as close as I can get to the truth. Bobby and Randy were living together, with their mother, though Randy was out a lot of the time, and the two brothers at that point could barely stand to be in the same room with each other, as often happens in bands where brothers work together. On the night of July the seventeenth, Bobby Fuller left the house for a couple of hours after getting a phone call -- some people who were around said he was going to see a girlfriend named Melody to buy some acid from her, but she says he didn't see her that night. Melody was a sex worker, who was also reputedly the girlfriend of a local nightclub owner who had Mob connections and was jealous of her attachments to other men -- though she denies this. Nobody has ever named which club owner, but it's generally considered to be Eddie Nash, the owner of PJs. Melody was also friends with Larry Nunes, and says she acted as a go-between for Nunes and Fuller. Fuller got back in around 2:30 AM and spent some time having beer with the building manager.  Then at some point he went out again -- Bobby was a night owl. When his mother, Lorraine, woke up, she noticed her car, which Bobby often used to borrow, wasn't there. She had a terrible bad feeling about her son's whereabouts -- though she often had such feelings, after the murder of her eldest son. She kept checking outside every half hour or so to see if he was coming home. At 5PM, two musicians from El Paso, Ty Grimes and Mike Ciccarelli, who'd come to LA to see Fuller, pulled into the parking lot near his apartment block. There were no other cars nearby. A car pulled in beside them, but they didn't pay any attention. They went up the stairs and rang the doorbell. While they were ringing the doorbell, Lorraine Fuller was out checking the mail, and noticed her car, which hadn't been there earlier. She opened the door. Ty Grimes later said "When we walked back to Mike's car, Bobby's car was now parked next to Mike's, and he was laying in the front seat already dead. We also saw his mom being helped toward the apartment." Fuller had been dead long enough for rigor mortis to have set in. While Lorraine Fuller later said that his hand had been on the ignition key, there was actually no key found in the car. He had apparently died from inhaling petrol. His body was covered in bruises, and the slippers he was wearing looked like they'd been dragged across the ground. His body was covered in petrol, and his right index finger was broken. Bob Keane has later said that Larry Nunes knew some details of the crime scene before he was told them. According to the other members of the band, there was an eight hundred thousand dollar life insurance policy on Bobby's life, held by the record company. Keane didn't get any money from any such policy, and stated that if such a policy existed it must have been taken out by Nunes, who soon stopped working with Keane, as Keane's labels collapsed without their one remaining star. The death was initially ruled a suicide, which would not pay out on an insurance claim, and later changed to accidental death, which would. Though remember, of course, we have only the word of Bobby's other band members that any insurance policy existed. No real police investigation was ever carried out, because it was such an open-and-shut case. At no point was it ever considered a murder by the famously corrupt LAPD. Bob Keane hired private investigators to investigate the case. One of them was shot at, and the others gave up on the investigation, scared to continue. The autopsy report that was issued months after the fact bore no resemblance to what any of the witnesses said they saw of the state of Fuller's body. More than thirty years later, Keane tried to get the information the LAPD held about the case, and was told that it could only be accessed by a family member. Keane contacted Randy Fuller, who was then told that the entire case file was missing. So all we can go on as far as the official records go is the death certificate. Which means that I lied to you at the start of the episode. Because officially, no matter what impression you might have got from everything I just said, Bobby Fuller's death *was* an accident.

RockerMike and Rob discuss The legendary career of Buddy Holly. Charles Hardin “Buddy” Holley (September 7, 1936 – February 3, 1959) was an American singer-songwriter who was a central and pioneering figure of mid-1950s rock and roll. He was born in Lubbock, Texas, to a musical family during the Great Depression, and learned to play guitar and sing alongside his siblings. His style was influenced by gospel music, country music, and rhythm and blues acts, which he performed in Lubbock with his friends from high school. He made his first appearance on local television in 1952, and the following year he formed the group "Buddy and Bob" with his friend Bob Montgomery. In 1955, after opening for Elvis Presley, he decided to pursue a career in music. He opened for Presley three times that year; his band's style shifted from country and western to entirely rock and roll. In October that year, when he opened for Bill Haley & His Comets, he was spotted by Nashville scout Eddie Crandall, who helped him get a contract with Decca Records. Holly's recording sessions at Decca were produced by Owen Bradley, who had become famous for producing orchestrated country hits for stars like Patsy Cline. Unhappy with Bradley's musical style and control in the studio, Holly went to producer Norman Petty in Clovis, New Mexico, and recorded a demo of "That'll Be the Day", among other songs. Petty became the band's manager and sent the demo to Brunswick Records, which released it as a single credited to "The Crickets", which became the name of Holly's band. In September 1957, as the band toured, "That'll Be the Day" topped the US and UK singles charts. Its success was followed in October by another major hit, "Peggy Sue". https://www.biography.com/.amp/musician/buddy-holly https://www.buddyholly.com/ https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/buddy-holly https://www.npr.org/artists/100151886/buddy-holly-the-crickets https://m.facebook.com/officialbuddyholly/ http://www.buddyhollycenter.org/ https://mobile.twitter.com/buddyholly https://www.instagram.com/buddyhollycenter/?hl=en Please follow us on Youtube,Facebook,Instagram,Twitter,Patreon and at www.gettinglumpedup.com https://linktr.ee/RobRossi Get your T-shirt at https://www.prowrestlingtees.com/gettinglumpedup And https://www.bonfire.com/store/getting-lumped-up/ https://app.hashtag.expert/?fpr=roberto-rossi80 https://dc2bfnt-peyeewd4slt50d2x1b.hop.clickbank.net https://8bcded2xph1jdsb8mqp8th3y0n.hop.clickbank.net/?cbpage=nb Subscribe to the channel and hit the like button --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/getting-lumped-up-with-rob-rossi/id1448899708 https://open.spotify.com/show/00ZWLZaYqQlJji1QSoEz7a https://www.patreon.com/Gettinglumpedup #buddyholly #buddyhollyandthecrickets #buddyhollystory #buddyhollyandthecricketers #guitarist #guitarists #guitaristsofinstagram #music #musicvideo #musician #musicproducer #musicstudio #musicproduction --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rob-rossi/support

Conor Sweetman reports on the history of motor racing in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. He speaks to Leanne Blaney, Bob Montgomery, Mike Cronin, and Neal Bascomb

Bob Montgomery was one of Australia's most famous psychologists. But he was hiding a dark secret. Josh Robertson has the story of how he got away with it for so long.

Bob Montgomery was one of Australia's most famous psychologists. But he was hiding a dark secret. Josh Robertson has the story of how he got away with it for so long.

Yo Yo Yo brothers and sisters......I've been a little remiss in posting shows so I'm gonna try to get the last 2 uploaded!I'm back in the game as far as Record Shows go and spent the last 2 weekends up Woodstock way buying records. Woodstock is about a 75 mile drive from my current digs. Did I mention I love living up here in Sullivan County NY? *Opening Salvo - the Usual Suspects- Little Walter- Juke [Checker 1952] His 1st for a major label taken from my 78 rpm* Bed - Rolling Stones - 2120 S. Michigan AveSet 1       What do Link Wray, Rbt. Gordon, Bob Montgomery and Jerry Madison have in common.....Answer: they're all Cool- Link Wray - I gotta ramble [Polygram 1974] LP - The Link Wray Rumble* Ryan Adams phone rant on Jim DeRogatas' answering machine- Rbt. Gordon & Link Wray - The Fool [Private Stock 1977] 12" EP with 78 rpm version!- Bob Montgomery - Down the line [Decca 1964] recorded earlier as Buddy & Bob- Jerry Madison & his Spacemen - Von Hutch [mad martian pinstriper] [Tops 45 rpm* Bed - see aboveSet 2      Some more Kool Kats- NRBQ - Come on everybody [Columbia 1969] 45 rpm* Rob Barth from TV Toy - Tick Report- Jose Feliciano - If I really bug you [RCA 1966] LP - A Bagful of Soul- Echo & the Bunnymen - The Cutter [Sire 1983] LP - Porcupine- Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3_ Ambassador of Soul [ Black Rose 2003] lp - Static Transmission- The Ink Spots - That cat was high [Decca 1938] 78 rpm* Bed - see aboveSet 3      The Devil in Me- James Brown & Fabulous Flames - Tell me what I did wrong [Federal 1958] 45 rpm- Rising Star Gospel Singers - Brother Noah [Globe 1945] 78 rpm- Mothers - I ain't got no heart [Verve 1966] LP - Freak Out!- Zuchero & Co. w/ Solomon Burke - The Devil in me [No Label] CD* Bed - see aboveSet 4       Groves & Flakes- Del Shannon - Under my thumb [Liberty 1966] 45 rpm- Chrysalis - April Grove [MGM 1968] LP - Definition- Max Ochs - Imagination Anthem [Fonotone 1969] 45 rpm* Scoop Nisker Montage- Rolling Stones - Street fighting man [Decca 1968] LP - Beggar's Banquet- The Mescaleros - Coma girl [Hellcat 2004] LP - Streetcore- Harvey Mandel - Peruvian flake [Janus 1972] LP - The Snake* Bed - see aboveOver & Out - Larry Coryell - Call to the higher consciousness [ Vanguard 1970] LP - Spaces

In the other episode that was recorded in person this season (though safely socially distanced across a table, outside) Kevin welcomes his former co-worker Madeline Davenport, AKA Mattiekinz, to the program where the two enjoy an autumnal evening while Madeline shares myriad memories (many of them involving camping) associated with the very eclectic tunes selected for the show. For additional information about the verbose and depressive music website Anhedonic Headphones, click here!   Episode Musical Credits: Theme Music- "Flava In Ya Ear" (Instrumental); written by Osten Harvey Jr, Craig Mack, Roger Nichols, and Paul Williams. Bad Boy Records, 1994.  "Back in Baby's Arms," written by Bob Montgomery; performed by Patsy Cline. Decca, 1963. "Man! I Feel Like A Woman!," written by "Mutt" Lange and Shania Twain; performed by Shania Twain. Come On Over, Mercury Nashville, 1997. "Dreams," written by Stevie Nicks; performed by Fleetwood Mac. Rumors, Warner Brothers, 1977. "Heartbreak Warfare," written and performed by John Mayer. Battle Studies, Columbia, 2009. "Sunshine," written by Sean Daily and Anthony Davis; performed by Atmosphere. Sad Clown Bad Summer, Rhymesayers, 2007. "Love on Top," written by Beyonce Knowles, Terius Nash, and Shea Taylor; performed by Beyonce. 4, Columbia, 2011/ "Hard Way Home," written by Brandi Carlile, Tim Hanseroth, and Phil Hanseroth; performed by Brandi Carlile. Bear Creek, Columbia, 2012. "You and I," written by Lotta Lingren; performed by Léon. Léon, Columbia, 2019. "So Hot You're Hurting My Feelings," written by Caroline Polachek, Teddy Geiger, and Daniel Nigro; performed by Caroline Polachek. PANG, Sony/Perpetual Novice, 2019. 

No More Ladies (1935) is a highbrow take on how to turn the tables on a cheating husband. It has style for days--in the dialogue, performances, fashion. Even better, the picture boasts a collection of sass mouth dames such as Edna May Oliver, Gail Patrick, and Joan Fontaine, in her screen debut. After Joan's through with Bob Montgomery, he's more submissive than the giant sheepdog on a leash.

  Episode sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “That’ll Be the Day” by The Crickets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry —-more—- Before I get to the resources and transcript, a quick apology. This one is up many hours later than normal, almost a full day. I’ve been dealing with a combination of health issues, technical problems, and family commitments, any two of which would still have allowed me to get this up on time, but which in combination made it impossible. Errata I say in here that Larry Welborn lent Holly a thousand dollars. That money was actually lent Holly by his brother, also called Larry. I also at one point say “That’ll Be the Day” was co-written by Joe Allison. I meant Jerry Allison, of course — Joe Allison was also a Texan songwriter, but had no involvement in that song.   Resources   I’ve used two biographies for the bulk of the information here — Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman.  There are many collections of Buddy Holly’s work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection, which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. A lot of the early recordings with Bob, Larry, and/or Sonny that I reference in this episode are included in Down The Line: Rarities, a companion set to the Memorial Collection. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so, far later in the story than many people might have been expecting, we finally come to Buddy Holly, the last of the great fifties rockers to appear in our story. Nowadays, Holly gets counted as a pioneer of rock and roll, but in fact he didn’t turn up until the genre had become fairly well established in the charts. Which is not to say that he wasn’t important or innovative, just that he was one of the greats of the second wave — from a twenty-first-century perspective, Buddy Holly looks like one of the people who were there when rock and roll was invented, but by the time he had his first hit, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent had all had all their major chart hits, and were on their way down and out. Little Richard was still touring, but he’d already recorded his last rock and roll record of the fifties, and while Fats Domino was still making hit records, most of the ones he’s remembered by, the ones that changed music, had already been released. But Holly was arguably the most important figure of this second wave, someone who, more than any other figure of the mid-fifties, seems at least in retrospect to point the way forward to what rock music would become in the decade after. So today we’re going to look at the story of how the first really successful rock group started. Because while these days, “That’ll Be The Day” is generally just credited to “Buddy Holly”, at the time the record came out, it didn’t have any artist name on it other than that of the band that made it, The Crickets: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “That’ll Be the Day”] Charles Hardin Holley grew up in Lubbock, Texas, a town in the middle of nowhere that has produced more than its fair share of famous musicians. Other than Buddy Holly, the two most famous people from Lubbock are probably Waylon Jennings, who briefly played in Holly’s band in 1959 before going on to his own major successes, and Mac Davis, who wrote several hits for Elvis before going on to become a country singer of some note himself. Holly grew up with music. His elder brothers performed as a country duo in much the same style as the Louvin Brothers, and there’s a recording of Holly singing the old country song, “Two Timin’ Woman”, in 1949, when he was twelve, before his voice had even broken: [Excerpt: Charles Holley, “Two Timin’ Woman”] By his mid-teens, he was performing as “Buddy and Bob” with a friend, Bob Montgomery, playing pure country and western music, with Buddy on the mandolin while Bob played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, “Footprints in the Snow”] He would also appear on the radio with another friend, Jack Neal, as “Buddy and Jack”. Some early recordings of that duo survive as well, with Jack singing while Buddy played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Jack, “I Saw the Moon Crying Last Night”] When Jack Neal, who was a few years older than Buddy, got married and decided he didn’t have time for the radio any more, the Buddy and Jack Show became the Buddy and Bob Show. Around this time, Buddy met another person who would become important both to him and the Crickets, Sonny Curtis. Curtis was only a teenager, like him, but he had already made an impression in the music world. When he was only sixteen, he had written a song, “Someday”, that was recorded by the country star Webb Pierce: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Someday”] Buddy, too, was an aspiring songwriter. A typical early example of his songwriting was one he wrote in collaboration with his friend Scotty Turner, “My Baby’s Coming Home”. The song wasn’t recorded at the time, but a few years later a demo version of it was cut by a young singer called Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, “My Baby’s Coming Home”] But it wasn’t until he saw Elvis live in 1955 that Buddy Holly knew he didn’t want to do anything other than become a rock and roll star. When Elvis came to town, the promoter of Elvis’ show was a friend of Buddy and Bob, and so he added them to the bill. They became friendly enough that every time Elvis passed through town — which he did often in those early years of his career — they would all hang out together. Bob Montgomery used to reminisce about going to the cinema with Elvis to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Elvis getting bored with the film half an hour in, and leaving with the rest of the group. After seeing Elvis, Buddy almost immediately stepped up his musical plans. He had already been recording demos with Bob and Sonny Curtis, usually with Bob on vocals: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, “I Gambled My Heart”] The bass player on that song, Larry Welborn, believed in Buddy’s talents, and lent him a thousand dollars — a *massive* amount of money in 1955 — so he could buy himself a Fender Stratocaster, an amp, and a stage suit. Holly’s friend Joe B. Mauldin said of the Strat that it was the first instrument he’d ever seen with a gear shift. He was referring there to the tremelo arm on the guitar — a recent innovation that had only been brought in that year. Buddy kept playing guitar with various combinations of his friends. For example Sonny Curtis cut six songs in 1955, backed by Buddy on guitar, Larry Wellborn on bass, and Jerry Allison on drums: [Excerpt: Sonny Curtis, “Because You Love Me”] Curtis would later talk about how as soon as Elvis came along, he and Buddy immediately switched their musical style. While it was Buddy who owned the electric guitar, he would borrow Curtis’ Martin acoustic and try to play and sing like Elvis, while Curtis in turn would borrow Buddy’s Strat and play Scotty Moore’s guitar licks. Buddy was slowly becoming the most popular rock and roll singer in that part of Texas — though he had an ongoing rivalry with Roy Orbison, who was from a hundred miles away in Wink but was the only serious competition around for the best local rock and roller.  But while Buddy was slowly building up a reputation in the local area, he couldn’t yet find a way to break out and have success on a wider stage. Elvis had told him that the Louisiana Hayride would definitely have him on at Elvis’ recommendation, but when he and Sonny Curtis drove to Shreveport, the radio station told them that it wasn’t up to Elvis who got on their show and who didn’t, and they had to drive back to Texas from Louisiana without getting on the radio. This kind of thing just kept happening. Buddy and Bob and Sonny and Larry and Jerry were recording constantly, in various combinations, and were making more friends in the local music community, like Waylon Jennings, but nothing was happening with the recordings. You can hear on some of them, though, exactly what Sonny Curtis meant when he said that they were trying to sound like Elvis and Scotty Moore: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Don’t Come Back Knockin'”] These songs were  the recordings that got Buddy a contract with Decca Records in Nashville, which was, at the time, one of the biggest record labels in the country. And not only did he get signed to Decca, but Buddy also got a songwriting contract with Cedarwood Music, the publishing company that was jointly owned by Jim Denny, the man in charge of the bookings for the Grand Ole Opry, and Webb Pierce, one of the biggest country music stars of the period. So it must have seemed in January 1956 as if Buddy Holly was about to become a massive rock and roll star. That first Decca recording session took place in Owen Bradley’s studio, and featured Sonny Curtis on guitar, and a friend called Don Guess on bass. The session was rounded out by two of the regular musicians that Bradley used on his sessions — Grady Martin on rhythm guitar, so Buddy didn’t have to sing and play at the same time, and Doug Kirkham on drums. The songs they cut at that initial session consisted of two of the songs they’d already demoed, “Don’t Come Back Knockin'” and “Love Me”, plus “Blue Days, Black Nights”, a song written by Ben Hall, a friend of Buddy’s from Lubbock. But it was the fourth song that was clearly intended to be the hit. We’ve talked before about the Annie songs, but that was back in March, so I’ll give you a brief refresher here, and if you want more detail, go and listen to episode twenty-two, on “The Wallflower”, which I’ll link in the show notes. Back in 1954, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had recorded a song called “Work With Me Annie”, a song which had been, for the time, relatively sexually explicit, though it sounds like nothing now: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Work With Me Annie”] That song had started up a whole series of answer records. The Midnighters recorded a couple themselves, like “Annie Had a Baby”: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Annie Had a Baby”] Most famously there was Etta James’ “The Wallflower”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “The Wallflower”] But there were dozens more songs about Annie — there was “Annie Met Henry”, “Annie Pulled a Hum-Bug”, even “Annie Kicked the Bucket”: [excerpt: the Nu Tones, “Annie Kicked the Bucket”] And the fourth song that Buddy recorded at this first Decca session, “Midnight Shift”, was intended to be another in the Annie series. It was written by Luke McDaniel, a country singer who had gone rockabilly, and who recorded some unissued sides for Sun, like “My Baby Don’t Rock”: [Excerpt: Luke McDaniel, “My Baby Don’t Rock”] Jim Denny had suggested “Midnight Shift” for Buddy — though it seems a strange choice for commercial success, as it’s rather obviously about a sex worker: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Midnight Shift”] Perhaps the label had second thoughts, as “Blue Days, Black Nights” was eventually chosen as the single, rather than “Midnight Shift”. When the paperwork for it came through for Buddy to sign, he discovered that they’d misspelled his name. He was born Charles Holley — h-o-l-l-e-y — but the paperwork spelled it h-o-l-l-y. As he was told they needed it back in a hurry, he signed it, and from then on he was Buddy Holly without the e. For the rest of 1956 Buddy continued recording with Owen Bradley for Decca, and kept having little success. Bradley became ever more disillusioned with Holly, while Paul Cohen, the executive at Decca who had signed Holly, at one point was telling his friends “Buddy Holly is the biggest no talent I have ever worked with.” One of the songs that he recorded during that time, but which wasn’t released, was one that Owen Bradley described as “the worst song I’ve ever heard”. It had been written by Holly and Joe Allison after they’d been to see the John Wayne film The Searchers — a film which later gave the name to a band from Liverpool who would become hugely influential. Holly and Allison had seen the film several times, and they kept finding themselves making fun of the way that Wayne said one particular line: [Excerpt: The Searchers, John Wayne saying “That’ll Be The Day”] They took that phrase and turned it into the title of a song. Unfortunately, the first recording of it wasn’t all that great — Buddy had been told by Webb Pierce that the way to have a hit single was to sing in a high voice, and so he sang the song far out of his normal range: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “That’ll Be The Day”] Around this time, Sonny Curtis stopped working with Holly. Owen Bradley didn’t like his guitar playing and wanted Holly to record with the session musicians he used with everyone else, while Curtis got an offer to play guitar for Slim Whitman, who at the time was about the biggest star in country music. So as 1956 drew to a close, Buddy Holly was without his longtime guitarist, signed to a record company that didn’t know what to do with him, and failing to realise his musical ambitions. This is when Norman Petty entered the story. Petty was a former musician, who had performed crude experiments in overdubbing in the late forties, copying Les Paul and Mary Ford, though in a much less sophisticated manner. One of his singles, a version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”, had actually been a minor hit: [Excerpt: The Norman Petty Trio, “Mood Indigo”] He’d gone into the recording studio business, and charged bands sixty dollars to record two songs in his studio — or, if he thought the songs had commercial potential, he’d waive the charge if they gave him the publishing and a co-writing credit. Petty had become interested in rockabilly after having recorded Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings’ first single — the version of “Ooby Dooby” that was quickly deleted: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je_Wel Records version] When he heard Sam Phillips’ remake of the song, he became intrigued by the possibilities that echo offered, and started to build his own echo chamber — something that would eventually be completed with the help of Buddy Holly and Buddy’s father and brother. Petty recorded another rockabilly group, Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, on a song, “Party Doll”, that went to number one: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, “Party Doll”] When the Rhythm Orchids passed through Lubbock, they told Buddy about Norman Petty’s studio, and Buddy went there to cut some demos. Petty was impressed by Holly — though he was more impressed by Sonny Curtis, who was still with Buddy for those demo sessions — and when his contract with Decca expired, Petty and Holly agreed to work together. But they had a problem. Buddy’s contract with Decca said that even though they’d only released two singles by him, and hadn’t bothered to release any of the other songs he’d recorded during the year he was signed to them, he couldn’t rerecord anything he’d recorded for them for another five years. Buddy tried to get Paul Cohen to waive that clause in the contract, and Cohen said no. Holly asked if he could speak to Milt Gabler instead — he was sure that Gabler would agree. But Cohen explained to him that Gabler was only a vice president, and that he worked for Cohen. There was no way that Buddy Holly could put out a record of any of the songs he had recorded in 1956. So Norman Petty, who had been secretly recording the conversation, suggested a way round the problem. They could take those songs, and still have Holly sing them, but put them out as by a group, rather than a solo singer. It wouldn’t be Buddy Holly releasing the records, it would be the group. But what should they call the group? Buddy and Jerry Allison both really liked New Orleans R&B — they loved Fats Domino, and the other people that Dave Bartholomew worked with — and they particularly liked a song that Bartholomew had co-written for a group called the Spiders: [Excerpt: The Spiders, “Witchcraft”] So they decided that they wanted a name that was something like the Spiders. At first they considered “the Beetles”, but decided that that was too creepy — people would want to squish them. So they settled on The Crickets. And so the version of “That’ll Be The Day” that Buddy, Larry, Jerry, and Niki Sullivan had recorded with Norman Petty producing was going to be released as by the Crickets, and Buddy Holly’s name was going to be left off anything that the heads at Decca might see. Amusingly, the record ended up released by Decca anyway — or at least by a subsidiary of Decca. Norman Petty shopped the demos they’d made around different labels, and eventually he took them to Bob Thiele. Thiele had had a similar career to Milt Gabler — he’d started out as a musician, then he’d formed his own speciality jazz label, Signature, and had produced records like Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “The Man I Love”] Like Gabler, he had been taken on by Decca, which of all the major labels was the only one that really understood the way that the music business was changing. He’d been put in charge of two labels owned by Decca — Coral, which was being used mostly for insipid white cover versions of black acts, and Brunswick, which was where he released rockabilly tracks by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio. The Crickets were clearly a Brunswick group, and so “That’ll Be the Day” was going to be released on Brunswick — and the contract was sent to Jerry Allison, not Buddy Holly. Holly’s name wasn’t mentioned at first, in case Thiele decided to mention it to his bosses and the whole thing was blown. Norman Petty had assumed that what they’d recorded so far was just going to be a demo, but Thiele said that no, he thought what they had was fine as it was, and put this out: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “That’ll Be The Day”] But the Crickets had still not properly finalised their lineup. The core of Holly and Allison was there — the two of them had been playing together for years — and Niki Sullivan would be OK on rhythm guitar, but they needed a permanent bass player. They eventually settled on Joe B. Mauldin, who had played with a group called The Four Teens that had also featured Larry Welborn. Joe B. had sat in on a gig with the other three, and they’d been impressed with his bass playing.  Before “That’ll Be the Day” was released, they were already in the studio cutting more songs. One was a song that had originally been written by Holly’s mother, though she refused to take credit for it — she was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and rock and roll was the Devil’s music. She was just about okay with her son playing it, but she wasn’t going to get herself involved in that. So Buddy took his mother’s song and turned it into this: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Maybe Baby”] And at the same time, they also made an agreement that Holly could record solo material for Coral. That would actually be recorded by the same people who were making the Crickets’ records, but since he was coming up with so many new songs, they might as well use them to get twice as much material out — there was no prohibition, after all, on him recording new songs under his own name, just the ones he’d recorded in 1956. And they were recording a ludicrous amount of material. “That’ll Be The Day” still hadn’t been released, and they already had their next single in the bag, and were recording Buddy’s first solo single. That song was based on “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, a favourite of Holly’s: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Holly took that basic musical concept and turned it into “Words of Love”: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Words of Love”] That wasn’t a hit for Holly, but even before his version was released, the Diamonds, who usually made a habit of recording tracks originally recorded by black artists, released a cover version, which went to number thirteen: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Words of Love”] The Crickets were essentially spending every second they could in Petty’s studio. They were also doing session work, playing on records by Jim Robinson, Jack Huddle, Hal Goodson, Fred Crawford, and more. In the early months of 1957, they recorded dozens upon dozens of songs, which would continue being released for years afterwards. For example, just two days after “That’ll Be the Day” was finally released, at the end of May, they went into the studio and cut another song they had patterned after Bo Diddley, who had co-written “Love is Strange”,  as a Crickets side: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Not Fade Away”] and, on the same day, a Holly solo side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Every Day”] All these songs were written by Holly and Allison, sometimes with Mauldin helping, but the songwriting credits didn’t really match that. Sometimes one or other name would get missed off the credits, sometimes Holly would be credited by his middle name, Hardin, instead of his surname, and almost always Norman Petty would end up with his name on the songwriting credits. They weren’t that bothered about credit, for the moment — there was always another song where the last one came from, and they were piling up songs far faster than they could release them. Indeed, only a month after the “Not Fade Away” and “Every Day” session, they were back in the studio yet again, recording another song, which Buddy had originally intended to name after his niece, Cindy Lou. Jerry, on the other hand, thought the song would be better if it was about his girlfriend. And you’ll be able to find out what happened after they decided between Cindy Lou and Peggy Sue in a few weeks’ time…

  Episode sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “That’ll Be the Day” by The Crickets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” by Gene Autry —-more—- Before I get to the resources and transcript, a quick apology. This one is up many hours later than normal, almost a full day. I’ve been dealing with a combination of health issues, technical problems, and family commitments, any two of which would still have allowed me to get this up on time, but which in combination made it impossible. Errata I say in here that Larry Welborn lent Holly a thousand dollars. That money was actually lent Holly by his brother, also called Larry. I also at one point say “That’ll Be the Day” was co-written by Joe Allison. I meant Jerry Allison, of course — Joe Allison was also a Texan songwriter, but had no involvement in that song.   Resources   I’ve used two biographies for the bulk of the information here — Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman.  There are many collections of Buddy Holly’s work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection, which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. A lot of the early recordings with Bob, Larry, and/or Sonny that I reference in this episode are included in Down The Line: Rarities, a companion set to the Memorial Collection. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so, far later in the story than many people might have been expecting, we finally come to Buddy Holly, the last of the great fifties rockers to appear in our story. Nowadays, Holly gets counted as a pioneer of rock and roll, but in fact he didn’t turn up until the genre had become fairly well established in the charts. Which is not to say that he wasn’t important or innovative, just that he was one of the greats of the second wave — from a twenty-first-century perspective, Buddy Holly looks like one of the people who were there when rock and roll was invented, but by the time he had his first hit, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent had all had all their major chart hits, and were on their way down and out. Little Richard was still touring, but he’d already recorded his last rock and roll record of the fifties, and while Fats Domino was still making hit records, most of the ones he’s remembered by, the ones that changed music, had already been released. But Holly was arguably the most important figure of this second wave, someone who, more than any other figure of the mid-fifties, seems at least in retrospect to point the way forward to what rock music would become in the decade after. So today we’re going to look at the story of how the first really successful rock group started. Because while these days, “That’ll Be The Day” is generally just credited to “Buddy Holly”, at the time the record came out, it didn’t have any artist name on it other than that of the band that made it, The Crickets: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “That’ll Be the Day”] Charles Hardin Holley grew up in Lubbock, Texas, a town in the middle of nowhere that has produced more than its fair share of famous musicians. Other than Buddy Holly, the two most famous people from Lubbock are probably Waylon Jennings, who briefly played in Holly’s band in 1959 before going on to his own major successes, and Mac Davis, who wrote several hits for Elvis before going on to become a country singer of some note himself. Holly grew up with music. His elder brothers performed as a country duo in much the same style as the Louvin Brothers, and there’s a recording of Holly singing the old country song, “Two Timin’ Woman”, in 1949, when he was twelve, before his voice had even broken: [Excerpt: Charles Holley, “Two Timin’ Woman”] By his mid-teens, he was performing as “Buddy and Bob” with a friend, Bob Montgomery, playing pure country and western music, with Buddy on the mandolin while Bob played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, “Footprints in the Snow”] He would also appear on the radio with another friend, Jack Neal, as “Buddy and Jack”. Some early recordings of that duo survive as well, with Jack singing while Buddy played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Jack, “I Saw the Moon Crying Last Night”] When Jack Neal, who was a few years older than Buddy, got married and decided he didn’t have time for the radio any more, the Buddy and Jack Show became the Buddy and Bob Show. Around this time, Buddy met another person who would become important both to him and the Crickets, Sonny Curtis. Curtis was only a teenager, like him, but he had already made an impression in the music world. When he was only sixteen, he had written a song, “Someday”, that was recorded by the country star Webb Pierce: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, “Someday”] Buddy, too, was an aspiring songwriter. A typical early example of his songwriting was one he wrote in collaboration with his friend Scotty Turner, “My Baby’s Coming Home”. The song wasn’t recorded at the time, but a few years later a demo version of it was cut by a young singer called Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, “My Baby’s Coming Home”] But it wasn’t until he saw Elvis live in 1955 that Buddy Holly knew he didn’t want to do anything other than become a rock and roll star. When Elvis came to town, the promoter of Elvis’ show was a friend of Buddy and Bob, and so he added them to the bill. They became friendly enough that every time Elvis passed through town — which he did often in those early years of his career — they would all hang out together. Bob Montgomery used to reminisce about going to the cinema with Elvis to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Elvis getting bored with the film half an hour in, and leaving with the rest of the group. After seeing Elvis, Buddy almost immediately stepped up his musical plans. He had already been recording demos with Bob and Sonny Curtis, usually with Bob on vocals: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, “I Gambled My Heart”] The bass player on that song, Larry Welborn, believed in Buddy’s talents, and lent him a thousand dollars — a *massive* amount of money in 1955 — so he could buy himself a Fender Stratocaster, an amp, and a stage suit. Holly’s friend Joe B. Mauldin said of the Strat that it was the first instrument he’d ever seen with a gear shift. He was referring there to the tremelo arm on the guitar — a recent innovation that had only been brought in that year. Buddy kept playing guitar with various combinations of his friends. For example Sonny Curtis cut six songs in 1955, backed by Buddy on guitar, Larry Wellborn on bass, and Jerry Allison on drums: [Excerpt: Sonny Curtis, “Because You Love Me”] Curtis would later talk about how as soon as Elvis came along, he and Buddy immediately switched their musical style. While it was Buddy who owned the electric guitar, he would borrow Curtis’ Martin acoustic and try to play and sing like Elvis, while Curtis in turn would borrow Buddy’s Strat and play Scotty Moore’s guitar licks. Buddy was slowly becoming the most popular rock and roll singer in that part of Texas — though he had an ongoing rivalry with Roy Orbison, who was from a hundred miles away in Wink but was the only serious competition around for the best local rock and roller.  But while Buddy was slowly building up a reputation in the local area, he couldn’t yet find a way to break out and have success on a wider stage. Elvis had told him that the Louisiana Hayride would definitely have him on at Elvis’ recommendation, but when he and Sonny Curtis drove to Shreveport, the radio station told them that it wasn’t up to Elvis who got on their show and who didn’t, and they had to drive back to Texas from Louisiana without getting on the radio. This kind of thing just kept happening. Buddy and Bob and Sonny and Larry and Jerry were recording constantly, in various combinations, and were making more friends in the local music community, like Waylon Jennings, but nothing was happening with the recordings. You can hear on some of them, though, exactly what Sonny Curtis meant when he said that they were trying to sound like Elvis and Scotty Moore: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Don’t Come Back Knockin'”] These songs were  the recordings that got Buddy a contract with Decca Records in Nashville, which was, at the time, one of the biggest record labels in the country. And not only did he get signed to Decca, but Buddy also got a songwriting contract with Cedarwood Music, the publishing company that was jointly owned by Jim Denny, the man in charge of the bookings for the Grand Ole Opry, and Webb Pierce, one of the biggest country music stars of the period. So it must have seemed in January 1956 as if Buddy Holly was about to become a massive rock and roll star. That first Decca recording session took place in Owen Bradley’s studio, and featured Sonny Curtis on guitar, and a friend called Don Guess on bass. The session was rounded out by two of the regular musicians that Bradley used on his sessions — Grady Martin on rhythm guitar, so Buddy didn’t have to sing and play at the same time, and Doug Kirkham on drums. The songs they cut at that initial session consisted of two of the songs they’d already demoed, “Don’t Come Back Knockin'” and “Love Me”, plus “Blue Days, Black Nights”, a song written by Ben Hall, a friend of Buddy’s from Lubbock. But it was the fourth song that was clearly intended to be the hit. We’ve talked before about the Annie songs, but that was back in March, so I’ll give you a brief refresher here, and if you want more detail, go and listen to episode twenty-two, on “The Wallflower”, which I’ll link in the show notes. Back in 1954, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had recorded a song called “Work With Me Annie”, a song which had been, for the time, relatively sexually explicit, though it sounds like nothing now: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Work With Me Annie”] That song had started up a whole series of answer records. The Midnighters recorded a couple themselves, like “Annie Had a Baby”: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, “Annie Had a Baby”] Most famously there was Etta James’ “The Wallflower”: [Excerpt: Etta James, “The Wallflower”] But there were dozens more songs about Annie — there was “Annie Met Henry”, “Annie Pulled a Hum-Bug”, even “Annie Kicked the Bucket”: [excerpt: the Nu Tones, “Annie Kicked the Bucket”] And the fourth song that Buddy recorded at this first Decca session, “Midnight Shift”, was intended to be another in the Annie series. It was written by Luke McDaniel, a country singer who had gone rockabilly, and who recorded some unissued sides for Sun, like “My Baby Don’t Rock”: [Excerpt: Luke McDaniel, “My Baby Don’t Rock”] Jim Denny had suggested “Midnight Shift” for Buddy — though it seems a strange choice for commercial success, as it’s rather obviously about a sex worker: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Midnight Shift”] Perhaps the label had second thoughts, as “Blue Days, Black Nights” was eventually chosen as the single, rather than “Midnight Shift”. When the paperwork for it came through for Buddy to sign, he discovered that they’d misspelled his name. He was born Charles Holley — h-o-l-l-e-y — but the paperwork spelled it h-o-l-l-y. As he was told they needed it back in a hurry, he signed it, and from then on he was Buddy Holly without the e. For the rest of 1956 Buddy continued recording with Owen Bradley for Decca, and kept having little success. Bradley became ever more disillusioned with Holly, while Paul Cohen, the executive at Decca who had signed Holly, at one point was telling his friends “Buddy Holly is the biggest no talent I have ever worked with.” One of the songs that he recorded during that time, but which wasn’t released, was one that Owen Bradley described as “the worst song I’ve ever heard”. It had been written by Holly and Joe Allison after they’d been to see the John Wayne film The Searchers — a film which later gave the name to a band from Liverpool who would become hugely influential. Holly and Allison had seen the film several times, and they kept finding themselves making fun of the way that Wayne said one particular line: [Excerpt: The Searchers, John Wayne saying “That’ll Be The Day”] They took that phrase and turned it into the title of a song. Unfortunately, the first recording of it wasn’t all that great — Buddy had been told by Webb Pierce that the way to have a hit single was to sing in a high voice, and so he sang the song far out of his normal range: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “That’ll Be The Day”] Around this time, Sonny Curtis stopped working with Holly. Owen Bradley didn’t like his guitar playing and wanted Holly to record with the session musicians he used with everyone else, while Curtis got an offer to play guitar for Slim Whitman, who at the time was about the biggest star in country music. So as 1956 drew to a close, Buddy Holly was without his longtime guitarist, signed to a record company that didn’t know what to do with him, and failing to realise his musical ambitions. This is when Norman Petty entered the story. Petty was a former musician, who had performed crude experiments in overdubbing in the late forties, copying Les Paul and Mary Ford, though in a much less sophisticated manner. One of his singles, a version of Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo”, had actually been a minor hit: [Excerpt: The Norman Petty Trio, “Mood Indigo”] He’d gone into the recording studio business, and charged bands sixty dollars to record two songs in his studio — or, if he thought the songs had commercial potential, he’d waive the charge if they gave him the publishing and a co-writing credit. Petty had become interested in rockabilly after having recorded Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings’ first single — the version of “Ooby Dooby” that was quickly deleted: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, “Ooby Dooby”, Je_Wel Records version] When he heard Sam Phillips’ remake of the song, he became intrigued by the possibilities that echo offered, and started to build his own echo chamber — something that would eventually be completed with the help of Buddy Holly and Buddy’s father and brother. Petty recorded another rockabilly group, Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, on a song, “Party Doll”, that went to number one: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, “Party Doll”] When the Rhythm Orchids passed through Lubbock, they told Buddy about Norman Petty’s studio, and Buddy went there to cut some demos. Petty was impressed by Holly — though he was more impressed by Sonny Curtis, who was still with Buddy for those demo sessions — and when his contract with Decca expired, Petty and Holly agreed to work together. But they had a problem. Buddy’s contract with Decca said that even though they’d only released two singles by him, and hadn’t bothered to release any of the other songs he’d recorded during the year he was signed to them, he couldn’t rerecord anything he’d recorded for them for another five years. Buddy tried to get Paul Cohen to waive that clause in the contract, and Cohen said no. Holly asked if he could speak to Milt Gabler instead — he was sure that Gabler would agree. But Cohen explained to him that Gabler was only a vice president, and that he worked for Cohen. There was no way that Buddy Holly could put out a record of any of the songs he had recorded in 1956. So Norman Petty, who had been secretly recording the conversation, suggested a way round the problem. They could take those songs, and still have Holly sing them, but put them out as by a group, rather than a solo singer. It wouldn’t be Buddy Holly releasing the records, it would be the group. But what should they call the group? Buddy and Jerry Allison both really liked New Orleans R&B — they loved Fats Domino, and the other people that Dave Bartholomew worked with — and they particularly liked a song that Bartholomew had co-written for a group called the Spiders: [Excerpt: The Spiders, “Witchcraft”] So they decided that they wanted a name that was something like the Spiders. At first they considered “the Beetles”, but decided that that was too creepy — people would want to squish them. So they settled on The Crickets. And so the version of “That’ll Be The Day” that Buddy, Larry, Jerry, and Niki Sullivan had recorded with Norman Petty producing was going to be released as by the Crickets, and Buddy Holly’s name was going to be left off anything that the heads at Decca might see. Amusingly, the record ended up released by Decca anyway — or at least by a subsidiary of Decca. Norman Petty shopped the demos they’d made around different labels, and eventually he took them to Bob Thiele. Thiele had had a similar career to Milt Gabler — he’d started out as a musician, then he’d formed his own speciality jazz label, Signature, and had produced records like Coleman Hawkins’ “The Man I Love”: [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, “The Man I Love”] Like Gabler, he had been taken on by Decca, which of all the major labels was the only one that really understood the way that the music business was changing. He’d been put in charge of two labels owned by Decca — Coral, which was being used mostly for insipid white cover versions of black acts, and Brunswick, which was where he released rockabilly tracks by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio. The Crickets were clearly a Brunswick group, and so “That’ll Be the Day” was going to be released on Brunswick — and the contract was sent to Jerry Allison, not Buddy Holly. Holly’s name wasn’t mentioned at first, in case Thiele decided to mention it to his bosses and the whole thing was blown. Norman Petty had assumed that what they’d recorded so far was just going to be a demo, but Thiele said that no, he thought what they had was fine as it was, and put this out: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “That’ll Be The Day”] But the Crickets had still not properly finalised their lineup. The core of Holly and Allison was there — the two of them had been playing together for years — and Niki Sullivan would be OK on rhythm guitar, but they needed a permanent bass player. They eventually settled on Joe B. Mauldin, who had played with a group called The Four Teens that had also featured Larry Welborn. Joe B. had sat in on a gig with the other three, and they’d been impressed with his bass playing.  Before “That’ll Be the Day” was released, they were already in the studio cutting more songs. One was a song that had originally been written by Holly’s mother, though she refused to take credit for it — she was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and rock and roll was the Devil’s music. She was just about okay with her son playing it, but she wasn’t going to get herself involved in that. So Buddy took his mother’s song and turned it into this: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Maybe Baby”] And at the same time, they also made an agreement that Holly could record solo material for Coral. That would actually be recorded by the same people who were making the Crickets’ records, but since he was coming up with so many new songs, they might as well use them to get twice as much material out — there was no prohibition, after all, on him recording new songs under his own name, just the ones he’d recorded in 1956. And they were recording a ludicrous amount of material. “That’ll Be The Day” still hadn’t been released, and they already had their next single in the bag, and were recording Buddy’s first solo single. That song was based on “Love is Strange” by Mickey and Sylvia, a favourite of Holly’s: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, “Love is Strange”] Holly took that basic musical concept and turned it into “Words of Love”: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Words of Love”] That wasn’t a hit for Holly, but even before his version was released, the Diamonds, who usually made a habit of recording tracks originally recorded by black artists, released a cover version, which went to number thirteen: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, “Words of Love”] The Crickets were essentially spending every second they could in Petty’s studio. They were also doing session work, playing on records by Jim Robinson, Jack Huddle, Hal Goodson, Fred Crawford, and more. In the early months of 1957, they recorded dozens upon dozens of songs, which would continue being released for years afterwards. For example, just two days after “That’ll Be the Day” was finally released, at the end of May, they went into the studio and cut another song they had patterned after Bo Diddley, who had co-written “Love is Strange”,  as a Crickets side: [Excerpt: The Crickets, “Not Fade Away”] and, on the same day, a Holly solo side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, “Every Day”] All these songs were written by Holly and Allison, sometimes with Mauldin helping, but the songwriting credits didn’t really match that. Sometimes one or other name would get missed off the credits, sometimes Holly would be credited by his middle name, Hardin, instead of his surname, and almost always Norman Petty would end up with his name on the songwriting credits. They weren’t that bothered about credit, for the moment — there was always another song where the last one came from, and they were piling up songs far faster than they could release them. Indeed, only a month after the “Not Fade Away” and “Every Day” session, they were back in the studio yet again, recording another song, which Buddy had originally intended to name after his niece, Cindy Lou. Jerry, on the other hand, thought the song would be better if it was about his girlfriend. And you’ll be able to find out what happened after they decided between Cindy Lou and Peggy Sue in a few weeks’ time…

  Episode sixty-one of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "That'll Be the Day" by The Crickets. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" by Gene Autry ----more---- Before I get to the resources and transcript, a quick apology. This one is up many hours later than normal, almost a full day. I've been dealing with a combination of health issues, technical problems, and family commitments, any two of which would still have allowed me to get this up on time, but which in combination made it impossible. Errata I say in here that Larry Welborn lent Holly a thousand dollars. That money was actually lent Holly by his brother, also called Larry. I also at one point say "That'll Be the Day" was co-written by Joe Allison. I meant Jerry Allison, of course -- Joe Allison was also a Texan songwriter, but had no involvement in that song.   Resources   I've used two biographies for the bulk of the information here -- Buddy Holly: Learning the Game, by Spencer Leigh, and Rave On: The Biography of Buddy Holly by Philip Norman.  There are many collections of Buddy Holly's work available, but many of them are very shoddy, with instrumental overdubs recorded over demos after his death. The best compilation I am aware of is The Memorial Collection, which contains almost everything he issued in his life, as he issued it (for some reason two cover versions are missing) along with the undubbed acoustic recordings that were messed with and released after his death. A lot of the early recordings with Bob, Larry, and/or Sonny that I reference in this episode are included in Down The Line: Rarities, a companion set to the Memorial Collection. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript And so, far later in the story than many people might have been expecting, we finally come to Buddy Holly, the last of the great fifties rockers to appear in our story. Nowadays, Holly gets counted as a pioneer of rock and roll, but in fact he didn't turn up until the genre had become fairly well established in the charts. Which is not to say that he wasn't important or innovative, just that he was one of the greats of the second wave -- from a twenty-first-century perspective, Buddy Holly looks like one of the people who were there when rock and roll was invented, but by the time he had his first hit, Bill Haley, Carl Perkins, and Gene Vincent had all had all their major chart hits, and were on their way down and out. Little Richard was still touring, but he'd already recorded his last rock and roll record of the fifties, and while Fats Domino was still making hit records, most of the ones he's remembered by, the ones that changed music, had already been released. But Holly was arguably the most important figure of this second wave, someone who, more than any other figure of the mid-fifties, seems at least in retrospect to point the way forward to what rock music would become in the decade after. So today we're going to look at the story of how the first really successful rock group started. Because while these days, "That'll Be The Day" is generally just credited to "Buddy Holly", at the time the record came out, it didn't have any artist name on it other than that of the band that made it, The Crickets: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "That'll Be the Day"] Charles Hardin Holley grew up in Lubbock, Texas, a town in the middle of nowhere that has produced more than its fair share of famous musicians. Other than Buddy Holly, the two most famous people from Lubbock are probably Waylon Jennings, who briefly played in Holly's band in 1959 before going on to his own major successes, and Mac Davis, who wrote several hits for Elvis before going on to become a country singer of some note himself. Holly grew up with music. His elder brothers performed as a country duo in much the same style as the Louvin Brothers, and there's a recording of Holly singing the old country song, "Two Timin' Woman", in 1949, when he was twelve, before his voice had even broken: [Excerpt: Charles Holley, "Two Timin' Woman"] By his mid-teens, he was performing as "Buddy and Bob" with a friend, Bob Montgomery, playing pure country and western music, with Buddy on the mandolin while Bob played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, "Footprints in the Snow"] He would also appear on the radio with another friend, Jack Neal, as "Buddy and Jack". Some early recordings of that duo survive as well, with Jack singing while Buddy played guitar: [Excerpt: Buddy and Jack, "I Saw the Moon Crying Last Night"] When Jack Neal, who was a few years older than Buddy, got married and decided he didn't have time for the radio any more, the Buddy and Jack Show became the Buddy and Bob Show. Around this time, Buddy met another person who would become important both to him and the Crickets, Sonny Curtis. Curtis was only a teenager, like him, but he had already made an impression in the music world. When he was only sixteen, he had written a song, "Someday", that was recorded by the country star Webb Pierce: [Excerpt: Webb Pierce, "Someday"] Buddy, too, was an aspiring songwriter. A typical early example of his songwriting was one he wrote in collaboration with his friend Scotty Turner, "My Baby's Coming Home". The song wasn't recorded at the time, but a few years later a demo version of it was cut by a young singer called Harry Nilsson: [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "My Baby's Coming Home"] But it wasn't until he saw Elvis live in 1955 that Buddy Holly knew he didn't want to do anything other than become a rock and roll star. When Elvis came to town, the promoter of Elvis' show was a friend of Buddy and Bob, and so he added them to the bill. They became friendly enough that every time Elvis passed through town -- which he did often in those early years of his career -- they would all hang out together. Bob Montgomery used to reminisce about going to the cinema with Elvis to watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and Elvis getting bored with the film half an hour in, and leaving with the rest of the group. After seeing Elvis, Buddy almost immediately stepped up his musical plans. He had already been recording demos with Bob and Sonny Curtis, usually with Bob on vocals: [Excerpt: Buddy and Bob, "I Gambled My Heart"] The bass player on that song, Larry Welborn, believed in Buddy's talents, and lent him a thousand dollars -- a *massive* amount of money in 1955 -- so he could buy himself a Fender Stratocaster, an amp, and a stage suit. Holly's friend Joe B. Mauldin said of the Strat that it was the first instrument he'd ever seen with a gear shift. He was referring there to the tremelo arm on the guitar -- a recent innovation that had only been brought in that year. Buddy kept playing guitar with various combinations of his friends. For example Sonny Curtis cut six songs in 1955, backed by Buddy on guitar, Larry Wellborn on bass, and Jerry Allison on drums: [Excerpt: Sonny Curtis, "Because You Love Me"] Curtis would later talk about how as soon as Elvis came along, he and Buddy immediately switched their musical style. While it was Buddy who owned the electric guitar, he would borrow Curtis' Martin acoustic and try to play and sing like Elvis, while Curtis in turn would borrow Buddy's Strat and play Scotty Moore's guitar licks. Buddy was slowly becoming the most popular rock and roll singer in that part of Texas -- though he had an ongoing rivalry with Roy Orbison, who was from a hundred miles away in Wink but was the only serious competition around for the best local rock and roller.  But while Buddy was slowly building up a reputation in the local area, he couldn't yet find a way to break out and have success on a wider stage. Elvis had told him that the Louisiana Hayride would definitely have him on at Elvis' recommendation, but when he and Sonny Curtis drove to Shreveport, the radio station told them that it wasn't up to Elvis who got on their show and who didn't, and they had to drive back to Texas from Louisiana without getting on the radio. This kind of thing just kept happening. Buddy and Bob and Sonny and Larry and Jerry were recording constantly, in various combinations, and were making more friends in the local music community, like Waylon Jennings, but nothing was happening with the recordings. You can hear on some of them, though, exactly what Sonny Curtis meant when he said that they were trying to sound like Elvis and Scotty Moore: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Don't Come Back Knockin'"] These songs were  the recordings that got Buddy a contract with Decca Records in Nashville, which was, at the time, one of the biggest record labels in the country. And not only did he get signed to Decca, but Buddy also got a songwriting contract with Cedarwood Music, the publishing company that was jointly owned by Jim Denny, the man in charge of the bookings for the Grand Ole Opry, and Webb Pierce, one of the biggest country music stars of the period. So it must have seemed in January 1956 as if Buddy Holly was about to become a massive rock and roll star. That first Decca recording session took place in Owen Bradley's studio, and featured Sonny Curtis on guitar, and a friend called Don Guess on bass. The session was rounded out by two of the regular musicians that Bradley used on his sessions -- Grady Martin on rhythm guitar, so Buddy didn't have to sing and play at the same time, and Doug Kirkham on drums. The songs they cut at that initial session consisted of two of the songs they'd already demoed, "Don't Come Back Knockin'" and "Love Me", plus "Blue Days, Black Nights", a song written by Ben Hall, a friend of Buddy's from Lubbock. But it was the fourth song that was clearly intended to be the hit. We've talked before about the Annie songs, but that was back in March, so I'll give you a brief refresher here, and if you want more detail, go and listen to episode twenty-two, on "The Wallflower", which I'll link in the show notes. Back in 1954, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters had recorded a song called "Work With Me Annie", a song which had been, for the time, relatively sexually explicit, though it sounds like nothing now: [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Work With Me Annie"] That song had started up a whole series of answer records. The Midnighters recorded a couple themselves, like "Annie Had a Baby": [Excerpt: Hank Ballard and the Midnighters, "Annie Had a Baby"] Most famously there was Etta James' "The Wallflower": [Excerpt: Etta James, "The Wallflower"] But there were dozens more songs about Annie -- there was "Annie Met Henry", "Annie Pulled a Hum-Bug", even "Annie Kicked the Bucket": [excerpt: the Nu Tones, "Annie Kicked the Bucket"] And the fourth song that Buddy recorded at this first Decca session, "Midnight Shift", was intended to be another in the Annie series. It was written by Luke McDaniel, a country singer who had gone rockabilly, and who recorded some unissued sides for Sun, like "My Baby Don't Rock": [Excerpt: Luke McDaniel, "My Baby Don't Rock"] Jim Denny had suggested "Midnight Shift" for Buddy -- though it seems a strange choice for commercial success, as it's rather obviously about a sex worker: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Midnight Shift"] Perhaps the label had second thoughts, as "Blue Days, Black Nights" was eventually chosen as the single, rather than "Midnight Shift". When the paperwork for it came through for Buddy to sign, he discovered that they'd misspelled his name. He was born Charles Holley -- h-o-l-l-e-y -- but the paperwork spelled it h-o-l-l-y. As he was told they needed it back in a hurry, he signed it, and from then on he was Buddy Holly without the e. For the rest of 1956 Buddy continued recording with Owen Bradley for Decca, and kept having little success. Bradley became ever more disillusioned with Holly, while Paul Cohen, the executive at Decca who had signed Holly, at one point was telling his friends "Buddy Holly is the biggest no talent I have ever worked with." One of the songs that he recorded during that time, but which wasn't released, was one that Owen Bradley described as "the worst song I've ever heard". It had been written by Holly and Joe Allison after they'd been to see the John Wayne film The Searchers -- a film which later gave the name to a band from Liverpool who would become hugely influential. Holly and Allison had seen the film several times, and they kept finding themselves making fun of the way that Wayne said one particular line: [Excerpt: The Searchers, John Wayne saying "That'll Be The Day"] They took that phrase and turned it into the title of a song. Unfortunately, the first recording of it wasn't all that great -- Buddy had been told by Webb Pierce that the way to have a hit single was to sing in a high voice, and so he sang the song far out of his normal range: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "That'll Be The Day"] Around this time, Sonny Curtis stopped working with Holly. Owen Bradley didn't like his guitar playing and wanted Holly to record with the session musicians he used with everyone else, while Curtis got an offer to play guitar for Slim Whitman, who at the time was about the biggest star in country music. So as 1956 drew to a close, Buddy Holly was without his longtime guitarist, signed to a record company that didn't know what to do with him, and failing to realise his musical ambitions. This is when Norman Petty entered the story. Petty was a former musician, who had performed crude experiments in overdubbing in the late forties, copying Les Paul and Mary Ford, though in a much less sophisticated manner. One of his singles, a version of Duke Ellington's "Mood Indigo", had actually been a minor hit: [Excerpt: The Norman Petty Trio, "Mood Indigo"] He'd gone into the recording studio business, and charged bands sixty dollars to record two songs in his studio -- or, if he thought the songs had commercial potential, he'd waive the charge if they gave him the publishing and a co-writing credit. Petty had become interested in rockabilly after having recorded Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings' first single -- the version of "Ooby Dooby" that was quickly deleted: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison and the Teen Kings, "Ooby Dooby", Je_Wel Records version] When he heard Sam Phillips' remake of the song, he became intrigued by the possibilities that echo offered, and started to build his own echo chamber -- something that would eventually be completed with the help of Buddy Holly and Buddy's father and brother. Petty recorded another rockabilly group, Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, on a song, "Party Doll", that went to number one: [Excerpt: Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids, "Party Doll"] When the Rhythm Orchids passed through Lubbock, they told Buddy about Norman Petty's studio, and Buddy went there to cut some demos. Petty was impressed by Holly -- though he was more impressed by Sonny Curtis, who was still with Buddy for those demo sessions -- and when his contract with Decca expired, Petty and Holly agreed to work together. But they had a problem. Buddy's contract with Decca said that even though they'd only released two singles by him, and hadn't bothered to release any of the other songs he'd recorded during the year he was signed to them, he couldn't rerecord anything he'd recorded for them for another five years. Buddy tried to get Paul Cohen to waive that clause in the contract, and Cohen said no. Holly asked if he could speak to Milt Gabler instead -- he was sure that Gabler would agree. But Cohen explained to him that Gabler was only a vice president, and that he worked for Cohen. There was no way that Buddy Holly could put out a record of any of the songs he had recorded in 1956. So Norman Petty, who had been secretly recording the conversation, suggested a way round the problem. They could take those songs, and still have Holly sing them, but put them out as by a group, rather than a solo singer. It wouldn't be Buddy Holly releasing the records, it would be the group. But what should they call the group? Buddy and Jerry Allison both really liked New Orleans R&B -- they loved Fats Domino, and the other people that Dave Bartholomew worked with -- and they particularly liked a song that Bartholomew had co-written for a group called the Spiders: [Excerpt: The Spiders, "Witchcraft"] So they decided that they wanted a name that was something like the Spiders. At first they considered "the Beetles", but decided that that was too creepy -- people would want to squish them. So they settled on The Crickets. And so the version of "That'll Be The Day" that Buddy, Larry, Jerry, and Niki Sullivan had recorded with Norman Petty producing was going to be released as by the Crickets, and Buddy Holly's name was going to be left off anything that the heads at Decca might see. Amusingly, the record ended up released by Decca anyway -- or at least by a subsidiary of Decca. Norman Petty shopped the demos they'd made around different labels, and eventually he took them to Bob Thiele. Thiele had had a similar career to Milt Gabler -- he'd started out as a musician, then he'd formed his own speciality jazz label, Signature, and had produced records like Coleman Hawkins' "The Man I Love": [Excerpt: Coleman Hawkins, "The Man I Love"] Like Gabler, he had been taken on by Decca, which of all the major labels was the only one that really understood the way that the music business was changing. He'd been put in charge of two labels owned by Decca -- Coral, which was being used mostly for insipid white cover versions of black acts, and Brunswick, which was where he released rockabilly tracks by Johnny Burnette and the Rock and Roll Trio. The Crickets were clearly a Brunswick group, and so "That'll Be the Day" was going to be released on Brunswick -- and the contract was sent to Jerry Allison, not Buddy Holly. Holly's name wasn't mentioned at first, in case Thiele decided to mention it to his bosses and the whole thing was blown. Norman Petty had assumed that what they'd recorded so far was just going to be a demo, but Thiele said that no, he thought what they had was fine as it was, and put this out: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "That'll Be The Day"] But the Crickets had still not properly finalised their lineup. The core of Holly and Allison was there -- the two of them had been playing together for years -- and Niki Sullivan would be OK on rhythm guitar, but they needed a permanent bass player. They eventually settled on Joe B. Mauldin, who had played with a group called The Four Teens that had also featured Larry Welborn. Joe B. had sat in on a gig with the other three, and they'd been impressed with his bass playing.  Before "That'll Be the Day" was released, they were already in the studio cutting more songs. One was a song that had originally been written by Holly's mother, though she refused to take credit for it -- she was a fundamentalist Southern Baptist, and rock and roll was the Devil's music. She was just about okay with her son playing it, but she wasn't going to get herself involved in that. So Buddy took his mother's song and turned it into this: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Maybe Baby"] And at the same time, they also made an agreement that Holly could record solo material for Coral. That would actually be recorded by the same people who were making the Crickets' records, but since he was coming up with so many new songs, they might as well use them to get twice as much material out -- there was no prohibition, after all, on him recording new songs under his own name, just the ones he'd recorded in 1956. And they were recording a ludicrous amount of material. "That'll Be The Day" still hadn't been released, and they already had their next single in the bag, and were recording Buddy's first solo single. That song was based on "Love is Strange" by Mickey and Sylvia, a favourite of Holly's: [Excerpt: Mickey and Sylvia, "Love is Strange"] Holly took that basic musical concept and turned it into "Words of Love": [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Words of Love"] That wasn't a hit for Holly, but even before his version was released, the Diamonds, who usually made a habit of recording tracks originally recorded by black artists, released a cover version, which went to number thirteen: [Excerpt: The Diamonds, "Words of Love"] The Crickets were essentially spending every second they could in Petty's studio. They were also doing session work, playing on records by Jim Robinson, Jack Huddle, Hal Goodson, Fred Crawford, and more. In the early months of 1957, they recorded dozens upon dozens of songs, which would continue being released for years afterwards. For example, just two days after "That'll Be the Day" was finally released, at the end of May, they went into the studio and cut another song they had patterned after Bo Diddley, who had co-written "Love is Strange",  as a Crickets side: [Excerpt: The Crickets, "Not Fade Away"] and, on the same day, a Holly solo side: [Excerpt: Buddy Holly, "Every Day"] All these songs were written by Holly and Allison, sometimes with Mauldin helping, but the songwriting credits didn't really match that. Sometimes one or other name would get missed off the credits, sometimes Holly would be credited by his middle name, Hardin, instead of his surname, and almost always Norman Petty would end up with his name on the songwriting credits. They weren't that bothered about credit, for the moment -- there was always another song where the last one came from, and they were piling up songs far faster than they could release them. Indeed, only a month after the "Not Fade Away" and "Every Day" session, they were back in the studio yet again, recording another song, which Buddy had originally intended to name after his niece, Cindy Lou. Jerry, on the other hand, thought the song would be better if it was about his girlfriend. And you'll be able to find out what happened after they decided between Cindy Lou and Peggy Sue in a few weeks' time...

Bob Montgomery was the founder of The Bremerton Machine office company more than 70 years ago. Before Bob passed away at the age of 96, Paul Lundy bought the shop in downtown Bremerton and has been continuing the business. It's the last Puget Sound-area company that does a full-time business repairing typewriters. Paul does a blog and sells typewriters on the website: https://typespec.com

 Never heard of Bob? You've heard his music and musical friends: Buddy Holly, Charlie Rich, Bobby Goldsboro; its about time you know about Bob Montgomery.

Greetings and salutations, Brothers and Sisters....this weeks episode features a jukebox full of 45's! After our opening salvo The Chants tell a tale about a dick....Dick Tracy that is.The Chants lineup featured a cat named Mickey Lee Lane so he follows up with a 7" platter of wax on the Swan label - Hey Sah-Lo-Ney fresh off the presses in 1965!Heading over to the UK for The Contrast and a killer tune - Clue followed up by Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros with Sandpaper Blues....Strummer didn't record and clunkers, buddy!Our 2nd set features the 5 B's -Bonniwell, Blondie, Bob, Buddy and Billy...Sean Bonniwell's Music Machine knows what the f**k is goin' on via their Masculine Intuition [1967 / Original Sound / Stereo version]...Don't tell Sean girl but Debbie Harry wants to Rip Her To Shreds while Bob [Montgomery] & Buddy [Holly] hit the road with Down the Line / 1959 / Brunswick Records....Got Love if you Want it by Billy Gibbons and the BFG's finishes the set.Set 3....The Gibbons cover of Slim Harpo's Got Love, etc gets us hip shakin' with Hip Shakin' baby by Slim hisself….The Peacheroos with one of my favorite 45's of all time....Be Bop Baby checks in...what show would be complete without the Onion Radio News followed by Dusty Springfield's 1st 45 - I only want to be with you...and the Rolling Stones with their 2nd 45 written by McCartney / Lennon - I wanna be your manSet 4...NRBQ offa their incredible debut with Eddie Cochran's C'mon Everybody / The Flying Burrito Brothers offa their debut - Do you know how it feels.Heading up north to Canada where The Ugly Ducklings FYI with Just in case you wonder and from Canada to Peru for Traffic Sounds' Mescalina from 1970I'm signing off and I'll see everybody next week on the internet.....sayonara...

Starting the conversation around workplace safety in light of the recent changes made by the government. Does the economy tie into workplace safety? What do companies need to do to ensure workplace safety? Bob Montgomery, ex-RCMP turned safety professional, joins Angela Kokott on Calgary Today.

The Naked Vibes Show features conversations with musicians, artists & healers to ignite your creative genius & elevate you in your spiritual growth. This episode features Grammy-winning songwriter, Wood Newton, a veteran of the Nashville music scene, a performing artist & activist. This audio was taken from a Naked Vibes TV episode where Wood joined me to play live & to share conversation about the creative process, his insights on the importance of commitment in relationships, his activism on behalf of songwriters' constitutional rights, & more. Wood is well-known in music circles as a lyricist adept at turning a phrase. He has a great sense of humor, so we enjoyed some good laughs! Enjoy the show on NAKED VIBES TV: SHOW NOTES: 1:55 - SONG - LIVE PERFORMANCE: "Private Malone" performed live by Wood Newton at the Bluebird Cafe, Nashville. 6:31 - We're recording our conversation in the studio of painter, Gloria Newton. Wood respects this as her sacred space. We all need sacred space for our creativity to blossom. 7:04 - Wood has over 2000 songs in his catalog, recorded by Kenny Rogers, Alabama, Steve Wariner, Oak Ridge Boys, David Ball, B.J. Thomas, Anne Murray, George Jones, Restless Heart & many more. 7:42 - Everyone is creative. As a songwriter, Wood's antennae are always up for new phrases & ideas. Inspiration comes from everywhere. It's amazing what people say on Facebook. Watch out  - that could end up in a song! 9:00 - Wood respects the ideas that other songwriters share as part of their own creative work. Though inspiration is everywhere, ideas shared as titles or "works in progress" are not up for grabs. 9:35 - Tim & Miles Thompson had the idea for the song, "It's Time For Me To Go" & Wood helped them phrase it. One of his strong suits is creating phrases that work easily for the singer. Great video on YouTube. 10:33 - Wood has collaborated with so many other songwriters. He talks about the benefits of collaboration & the way that process continues to benefit him even when he's writing solo. 11:40 - When you're writing with another artist & the hair on your arms stands up, you've probably got something! The intuitive nature of creativity is where the power lies - & that comes into play in business, relationships, & every other endeavor. 12:26 - Wood relies on his intuition as his editor in writing & business. He's been published by Sony, Jerry Crutchfield at MCA, Kenny O'Dell & Bob Montgomery at House of Gold Music, Jim & David Malloy, Even Stevens & Eddie Rabbit. Wood counts on his intuition to alert him to what direction to take, even moreso now that he runs his own publishing business. 13:30 - Wood pays close attention to his emotions about an idea when writing. Joy, sadness, & fun are all guides. He loves the comedy of Roger Miller. What a laugh! 13:58 - Miller's song "Husbands & Wives" brings forth strong emotions. Wood talks about the premise of this song, pride, being the demise of many good relationships. Celebrating his 42nd wedding anniversary on the date of this video shoot, we discuss the richness of lasting relationships. 15:09 - There's freedom in commitment. Wood tells the story of meeting a couple celebrating their 50th anniversary & telling them, "That's a good start!" He also tells of marrying Gloria in Oklahoma because there was no waiting period. When he shared their story on Facebook, it got more "likes" & comments than anything he's ever posted - & he has over 5000 fans there. That says something about the fact that people ultimately want good, lasting relationships. Wood talks about never taking your relationships for granted. 16:57 - Many young men have come forward searching for answers to that these days. Wood is happy to share his wisdom with them in these personal areas & is also open to creative collaboration with writers getting their start. 17:53 - Wood is very real & open, not interested in shallow relationships. That kind of openness is what brings success - in eve...