Chart entered : 10 September 1964
Chart peak : 39
By this time the Buddy Holly posthumous release machine was slowing down and Coral turned to a song Buddy had recorded in New York without The Crickets but which they had recorded themselves with Curtis and Sinks and released as their first single after his death reaching number 26. Their version has erroneously appeared on one or two of the endless Holly compilation LPs.
It's a typical Holly song really , not too far from "Not Fade Away" musically with Buddy musing on the trials of love. It's interesting to compare the two versions since Sinks actually employs more of Buddy's vocal tics than the man himself. This version has the cleaner production but then they had five years to work on it; the electric guitar certainly sounds more 1964 than 1958.
There's not much more to say. Holly's is still the most famous rock death of all, pop's equivalent to the Munich air disaster the year ( almost to the day ) before. I should perhaps mention the macabre recent postscript whereby the Big Bopper's son Jay managed to get an exhumation of his father's remains and second autopsy in 2007 on the flimsiest of pretexts; that maybe Holly's gun had been fired and perhaps his father, flung furthest from the plane, had crawled a short distance for help. What this would achieve given all concerned had been indisputably dead for nearly 50 years is anybody's guess. I suspect he just wanted a peep at what remained of the father he never knew and if so he got his wish as all present reported the state of preservation was excellent though the smell was terrible. The autopsy found no bullet wound and given that virtually every bone in his body was fractured the answer to the second question was an emphatic no. Jay himself died last August aged 54.
The reissues continued for the next three decades though of course there was nothing new anymore. In 1978 the film The Buddy Holly Story revived interest in his music and garnered Gary Busey an Oscar nomination though it was heavily criticised by fans including a certain Paul McCartney for its inaccuracies ; the Crickets were particularly badly served. 1987's La Bamba had the same ending of course and Holly was played by a latterday imitator Marshall Crenshaw. The following year Macca part-funded Buddy the musical, generally thought of as the first "jukebox musical" and therefore the most dubious part of the man's legacy.
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