Never mind the bollocks...

I’ve always thought of Buddy Holly as the perfect boy next door, a bit of a goody-goody, verging on wimpishness even. But then I’ve never been much of a judge.

Today is the 56th anniversary of Buddy Holly’s death. I wasn’t even two when, as Don McLean sings, the music died before I was really there to witness what it was all about. All I really know about Buddy is that he had a girl called Peggy Sue and that he wore big, black specs and a light blue jacket.

I didn’t know that on January 26, 1958, Holly and the Crickets made their second appearance on the legendary Ed Sullivan Show. They were planning to perform recent hit ‘Oh, Boy’, but ultra-conservative wasp Sullivan ordered the group to drop the up-beat rock number and replace it with a slow ballad. Buddy lost it, insisting on singing ‘Oh Boy', Sullivan cut Holly’s two song spot to one and then decided to mispronounce the group’s name as ‘Buddy Hollett and his Crickets.’ He also instructed sound engineers to mute the line feed for Holly’s electric guitar.

It seems that rather than being the boy next door Buddy was really a rebel and oh boy did he rebel. Singing rough and loud over Joe Mauldin and Jerry Allison’s raw bass and drums, Buddy repeatedly turned up the volume of his guitar and played faster and faster. Strutting a cocky sneer that was pure Sis Viscous he let out a brilliant primal howl and then went into a hard-rocking machine-gun solo.

The episode is one of the earliest and best examples of rock’n’roll rebellion in the face of the bland corporations that controlled the music business and still do to some extent. It’s also an example of how far Buddy was pushing the limits of his music and his guitar to give birth to a new kind of sound. I guess Buddy was the Johnny Rotten of his day in Middle America’s eyes; degenerate and dangerous and not the kind of girl that Peggy Sue should be hanging around with at all.

Ironically, the performance was so well received that Ed Sullivan was forced to invite the group back for a third time. Buddy responded by telling Sullivan that they couldn’t afford him.

Never mind the bollocks Buddy - Listen here Rock on Buddy!