Rave on: The Biography of Buddy Holly

On September 23, 1957, 4 months after its release, That'll be the Day stood at No.1 on both pop and r & b charts. Before reading this book watch Paul McCartney's Buddy Holly DVD and Gary Busey's DVD. Then go to the musical "Buddy - The Buddy Holly Story" at the Duchess Theatre, London August 7 2007-June 28 2008. This play ran for 12 and a half years in its original production at the Victoria Palace Theatre and subsequently in many cities across the US. (Seattle last February). Next go to Lubbock and check out the statue and the Buddy Holly Center on Crickets Avenue. http://www.buddyhollycenter.org/. Then head over to Cleveland for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame display. And, finally go to Clear Lake on February 2. 2008 for the Fabulous Fifties show: The Crickets, Big Bopper, Jr., David Somerville of The Diamonds, The Chiffons, Sonny Burgess & The Pacers, The Belmonts. After all that you may then plop into your favorite ottoman and enjoy this book while watching the La Bamba DVD.

This book gives a thorough description of Buddy Holly's life and career. Buddy Holly is well known,but the story here is told in depth.Philip Norman,who has also done other biographies such as The Beatles,Elton John and The Rolling Stones .He has written a great story of Buddys short career,as well as his life.It tells how he constructed his songs and the recording methods he used.It also tells of all the people he worked with to make some of the best songs ever written.

I needed to read this book because all I knew about Buddy Holly, other than a dozen or so evergreen songs, was that movie, "The Buddy Holly Story," which is hardly accurate. Philip Norman gives you a much better sense of what Buddy's brief moment in the spotlight was all about.It was brief, just over a year and a half from the time he and his band, the Crickets, hit the U.S. charts with "That'll Be The Day" in the summer of 1957 to the fateful flight from Mason City, Iowa on February 3, 1959. It's hard to imagine making as much of the time as Buddy Holly did of his, starting a career, a business partnership, and a family, not to mention writing music that revolutionized rock n' roll.Norman gives you a good sense of how Holly did this, in a book that is a clear work of love, not ignoring negative elements of the story but striving to put them in less lurid context. One weakness of the book is that this sometimes gets in the way (Holly's alleged gambling problems, dwelt on in other books, is only mentioned once in passing, while a tale backup Cricket guitarist Niki Sullivan offers up about Holly getting a girl pregnant is thrown up only to be knocked down in backhanded fashion.) But the overwhelming sense one gets from reading "Rave On" is Norman's contention that Buddy had everything going for him except luck.I liked especially the English context of this book. Norman, a British author, pays close attention to Holly and the Crickets' impact on the British music scene, where he was a bigger sensation than his native land. Occasionally, as when the Crickets visit the U.K. and Norman itemizes hotel expenses and suchlike, it gets a bit precious, but Holly, the first rocker to write his own songs and perform them in a band context, obviously was laying some groundwork here that the British would emulate with great success in the coming decade.Norman also takes on Norman Petty, producer and manager of the Crickets who was either duplicitous by design or by accident. "To some, he was the person who made it possible for Buddy Holly to come alive; others feel he could hardly be more to blame for Buddy's death if he'd gone out into the Iowa snows with a machine gun and pointed it straight into the sky." Given Buddy's reason for joining the 1959 "Winter Dance Party" tour had to do with Petty's reluctance to part with money Holly earned under Petty's wing that Holly needed for himself and his pregnant wife, you can understand the bitterness.Norman was able to get a look at Petty's files, tape transcripts, and the like, which cast some new light on the fellow Norman dubs "Clovis Man," if not enough to figure out exactly who he was or what he was about. Petty makes an interesting character; Norman got more use out of Brian Epstein in his Beatles book, "Shout," but when the Holly story finds itself in the strange Clovis, New Mexico studio space where Petty, his wife, and their butch female companion lived, the story picks up a bit.Ultimately, the focus stays wit

I'm not such a fan of Buddy Holly that I think he was the father, or King, or founder of Rock n Roll, but his music and business practices were certainly innovative for the time. (I wonder how his life and career would have developed had he lived) That said, I definitely recommend this book. It was very descriptive and entertaining to read. This book should have been the source material for the bio-pic that was made several years back! It's hard to imagine how frantic his life must have been during the last two years of his life, and as I got closer and closer to the last page--knowing how it's going to turn out--I found myself reading faster and faster, wishing this story had a different ending.

A must read for Holly fans. Author Philip Norman exhibits both a great knowledge of the history or Rock and Roll and respect and even love for Buddy Holly the musician, and Buddy Holly the man. Strips away the hype surrounding Buddy's life and music in much the same way as "Last Train To Memphis" did with Elvis Presley, and transforms Holly from a nerdy-looking singer with a couple o modesf hits into a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood person. I didn't really realize how much we lost in February, 1959 until I finished the book. Answers many of the questions I've always had about Buddy, and gives a good insight into what the rock 'n roll scene was really like in it's infancy, both in the studio and on the road