As I’m getting out I laugh to myself

‘Cause this is the only place

Where as you’re gettin on the plane

You see Buddy Holly’s face

I hear they hate me now

Just like they hated you

Maybe when I’m dead and gone

I’m gonna get a statue too

Ingrid Kaiter

Did Lubbock hate Buddy Holly?

At the very least, his hometown has been criticized over the years for not understanding his genius when he was alive, not honoring him until long after his death, and, more recently, not having an annual event to honor his legacy … something that happens annually in Clear Lake, Iowa, the town where Holly played his last concert on Feb. 2, 1959.

At a Feb. 3 panel discussion at the Buddy Holly Center this year, former Lubbock radio station owner Larry Corbin criticized the town for not supporting the funding drive to create the Buddy Holly statue that now sits just west of the Memorial Civic Center.

“Holly was playing devil’s music” to some people, said Don Caldwell, musician, producer and owner of Lubbock’s Cactus Theater. “It’s the conservative nature of the people. When Buddy was here what he was doing was seen as fluff and fun and not a legitimate way to make a living.”

“There were also other groups of people in music community who didn’t respect rock ‘n’ roll,” he said.

Paul Beane, longtime local radio personality and now on Lubbock’s city council, thinks Lubbock was and continues to be supportive of Holly.

He’s concerned visitors from other countries who heard Corbin’s criticism will return to places like England, Australia, Germany and Norway with copies of the Feb. 4 Avalanche-Journal and it will “perpetuate the myth that Lubbock didn’t care about the memory of Buddy.”

Beane said Holly appeared on local radio and opened for Elvis Presley at Fairpark.

“He was popular among school friends … if it had been as bad as everyone said it was he wouldn’t have gained acceptance he did,” Beane said.

Beane came to work in the radio business in Lubbock a few years after Holly’s death.

“I talked to people who worked with and knew Buddy and heard about how Lubbock hated Buddy. I never heard evidence of that,” he said.

Brooke Allison, who oversees Lubbock’s Buddy Holly Center, says she hears very little negative comments about Lubbock and its most famous son.

“People do think people here loved him and reached out to him. Fans love the center and what Lubbock’s done for him,” she said.

Lawrence

Not embracing the legacy?

Caldwell agreed Lubbock didn’t embrace Holly’s legacy until others did … about the same time “The Buddy Holly Story” motion picture was released in the late 1970s.

He said support for Holly grew in the ’80s and into the ’90s with a short-lived Buddy Holly festival and continues to grow … whether it’s just love of his music, or for other reasons … developing tourism and economic development.

Beane said there are other reasons it took people a while to understand Holly’s influence.

“Musical tastes change every two or three years. We got into the early ’60s and got into artists like Bob Dylan and the growing protest movement in music. The genre changed. It wasn’t until the Beatles became famous and had the ear of music writers around the world and explained how Buddy’s music influenced them,” he said.

“It took 10, 12 or 15 years to wake up to what Buddy had contributed,” he said.

“I think it’s also natural for any community that has produced great talent to take somebody for granted,” he said.

Festival

Allison said visitors to the center tell her they’d like to see a big festival honoring Holly … and so would Holly’s niece, Ingrid Holly Kaiter.

“I would like to see … as a Holley family celebration or music festival to show appreciation for West Texas music and Buddy,” she said.

If legal concerns with Holly’s widow Maria Elena are a concern, she said, why not use the family’s name, which is spelled with the “e.”

“Who’s going to carry on his legacy? Austin has festivals and Lubbock artists are moving there and doing better in Austin than in Lubbock,” said Kaiter, who also fronts the Ingrid Kaiter Band. Her brother Eddy Weir is lead guitarist.

“I’ve gotten disappointed and disgusted with powers that be that keep this from going on,” she said. So she says she’s looking into what she can do.

“Well, all right,” she said, dropping one of her uncle’s famous song titles, “maybe we can do it anyway. Hopefully I’ve got a little bit of his blood in me to do it.”

The Lubbock native agrees with Caldwell that Lubbock could have been more supportive.

“When you have someone innovative like Buddy way beyond his years his music was kind of scary to Lubbock … maybe it’s tied to the Bible Belt. I don’t know why city took so long to promote his music. The city cares more about sports than arts and entertainment … I don’t know why the city doesn’t see the potential of arts and entertainment. I think Lubbock could be another Austin,” she said.

When Gary Lawrence started running the Lubbock Economic Development Alliance five years ago, which oversees Visit Lubbock, he thought promoting Holly’s legacy for tourism was an untapped resource.

Under a new agreement recently announced between the city and Maria Elena Holly, Lawrence said he hopes it creates new opportunities for Visit Lubbock.

“We expect to find out what we can and can’t do. Once we know that we’ll take an aggressive approach to promoting Buddy Holly,” he said.

Lawrence said if the agreement had been in place a year ago, “we would have had a tremendous celebration here similar to the one they had in Clear Lake, Iowa.”

In addition, Lawrence has been a fan for a long time.

“I know every song and could sing you every word of it. I was an absolute, dedicated, loyal fan … I liked him better than Beatles or Elvis,” he said.

But Lawrence didn’t realize Holly’s influence on the Beatles and others until he moved back to Lubbock.

“That story needs to be told,” he said.

Try this multiple-choice quiz:

Why was I hiking through a bean field in north-central Iowa a week ago today?

1. I like beans.

2. I was tired of driving south on I-35 from summer vacation in Wisconsin with the in-laws and needed to feel something different under my right foot than the accelerator.

3. I’m just weird.

4. My daughter Lucy and I were searching for a memorial marking the crash site where Buddy Holly’s plane went down almost 50 years ago just north of Clear Lake, Iowa.

The answer is number 4 … but 3 is always appropriate.

Before moving to Lubbock, I knew who Buddy Holly was … but since coming here I’ve learned a lot more.

I didn’t realize how much he influenced rock ‘n’ roll, for example, creating the basic lineup of the modern rock band.

I knew some of the songs, but not all the songs.

Joe Ely’s powerful live version of “Not Fade Away” has become one of my favorite songs and pulls me through workouts on my iPod.

I’ve even met Peggy Sue.

The movie “The Buddy Holly Story” came out a year after I graduated from college. I’d never seen it until moving here and literally came across it flipping channels a few months back.

There’s a scene where actor Gary Busey, playing Holly, is saying goodbye to his girlfriend at what is supposed to be a Lubbock bus station.

There are mountains in the background.

In fact, they looked like the mountains behind my college campus.

I checked imdb.com (Internet movie database) for filming locations … the whole thing was shot in and around L.A.

Now I understand it costs a lot more to shoot on location … but they couldn’t move the camera so the mountains were not so obvious? And from what I’ve heard, there were many other concerns about accuracy in that movie.

But, to quote my friend on the page to the right, I’m digressing.

As I’ve written before, the music coming out of this town and region is amazing.

I’ve enjoyed learning more about Buddy Holly.

I hope you went to the Fourth of July celebration in Mackenzie Park last month.

The Maines Brothers Band, Richie McDonald and Mac Davis were wonderful.

And folks around here have been able to follow their careers.

But what would have happened if that plane had not crashed?

Would we have also heard 71-year-old Buddy Holly singing to his hometown at the Centennial Fourth of July celebration?

What other influence would he have had on popular music?

The more I learn about Charles Hardin Holley, the more fascinated I become.

So there we were, hiking through the bean field about a half-mile off a gravel road.

Lucy and I found the metal “memorial” in the shape of a guitar with three records … on the border between the bean field and some corn fields.

The guitar has the names of the three stars who died in the famous crash … Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper.

Also interesting was the stuff people left around the monument, a driver’s license, beads, coins, “Wailin’ Waylon” buttons in recognition of Littlefield’s Waylon Jennings, who as most people know, gave his seat on the plane to the Big Bopper.

There were also some Holly-style glasses. I stuck my business card near them … wishing I had a laminated one. There was a fierce-looking storm coming out of the west and a week later, I wonder if that business card is now paper pulp.

But I thought it appropriate for something to be there that said Lubbock. There may have been other things from our area, but the pile in front of the memorial was thick in some places and partly covered by dirt. Plus, I felt uncomfortable moving things at a “memorial.”

After shooting some video and photos you can see on our Web site, we headed into Clear Lake to see the Surf Ballroom, where Holly played his last show … we drove down Buddy Holly Place to find it.

Then we hit the road, trying to dodge the bad weather, heading back to Holly’s hometown.