Buddy Holly is one of the biggest victims of being influential. What do I mean by that? It's simple: virtually everyone who brings him up nowadays focuses solely on how much of an impact he made with little thought towards what he actually accomplished. The Beatles owed a great deal to him: their name was inspired by his backing group The Crickets and he was the one who inspired John Lennon and Paul McCartney to write their own songs. (I have no idea why Chuck Berry and Little Richard didn't seem to play a significant role in their creativity since they, too, wrote their own songs) Every glasses-wearing pop star from Elvis Costello to Ed Sheeran owes him a debt of gratitude for dawning the specs when it would have been frowned upon. (In spite of his example, the myopic Lennon still refused to use eyewear in public until 1967)
But what of his actual work? Being a towering figure in rock 'n' roll is all well and good but what do I care who he influenced? Listening to him ought to be the concern. But this is where the critics and podcasters and YouTubers who only want to talk about how "influential" people are may be on to something because, well, a fair chunk of Buddy Holly's material isn't all that special. Quite how much is hard to say. The songs he wrote or co-wrote — "Not Fade Away", "Maybe Baby", "That'll Be the Day", "True Love Ways" — are some of his strongest but the outsourced compositions are much more inconsistent. Much as it pains me to say, the Paul Anka-penned "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" is in fact superior to the lackluster songs a young Roy Orbison gave him.
Had Holly lived to the age of, say, seventy-two, it's reasonable to think that this break-up song from the spring of '59 would be little more than a footnote, a forgettable, if brave, stab at something that plainly didn't suit him. His singing is a little all-over-the-place with hints of Broadway, some country and a subtle Elvis impersonation; while I sometimes tire of those trademark hiccups and stutters, I find I miss them in a song in which he was seemingly trying to sound like anyone else but himself. I'm not sure I would have even guessed this was by Buddy Holly had I not already known. (And yet, I prefer his reading to the one Anka gave in his 1963 recording: sounding resigned to a relationship that has fallen apart is far preferable to laying the self pity on thick as Ottawa's favourite son chose to do; Linda Ronstadt's sensitive version from her Heart Like a Wheel album is the one to go with)
The arrangement also leaves a me shaking my head. Do we need an orchestra when Holly and the Crickets were a crack band who were more than up to the task? Again, much of this is down to this being his final single and I wouldn't be complaining otherwise — especially since there's no way it would have gone to number one under happier circumstances. Sure, "True Love Ways" (recorded at the same session as "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" with also happened to be Holly's final studio date) worked with a lush backing but the more uptempo number would have been better off as a rock 'n' roll tune.
I previously expressed the belief that Buddy Holly never got the chance to record or even write his greatest song which makes his death at the age of twenty-one all the more heartbreaking. But what if I'm wrong? What if he had ended up going the country crooner route instead? What if his best days were already behind him? Peaking at such a young age is out of the ordinary so it's likely he had plenty left in the tank but you never know. As I recently wrote about Ritchie Valens, Holly deserved to have a lengthy career full of ups and downs — and just imagine how influential he would have been had he lived another fifty years.
Score: 5
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