The Buddy Holly Story 12/22/12, Best Adaptation Score, 1978
Buddy Holly never won a Grammy, but the movie about his life won an Academy Award for Best Adaptation Score, beating out The Wiz and Pretty Baby. I had to look this up because the music in the film was all by Buddy Holly and the Crickets, so it wasn’t original, but apparently the arranger, Joe Renzetti, arranged the music and taught the actors/musicians to play it and they played it live while being filmed, something totally new at that time. You may not care about those details, but I needed some context. And on some level, I don’t care either; I just really loved the music. Watching the movie and hearing all those songs, songs that over the years have been covered by so many other artists, was like hearing for the first time. Gary Busey did the singing, and whatever you think about him now, he did a great job as Holly and I almost forgot it was a movie (not really, but you know what I mean). The movie follows Buddy Holly and the Crickets from around a year or so before they hit it big to the last concert that Holly ever did, in Clear Lake, Iowa in 1959. Holly seemed to be way ahead of his time in terms of producing his own music, some of his arrangements and his desire to collaborate across the color barriers of his time; he performed at The Apollo Theater in New York and toured with black musicians before the country began integration, the late 1950s (there is a funny scene in the movie where the Crickets, touring with Same Cooke and others, try to check into the same hotel as the black musicians; Sam Cooke is told that the hotel is ‘restricted’ and Holly and company can’t stay there; Cooke introduces the band as his valets, and the clerk is so impressed that he has THREE white valets, he lets them stay). Buddy Holly influenced musicians like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton and others. The music is great and the movie is really good. I will be downloading some Buddy Holly songs this week. Rave on!
