260: Buddy Holly // Greatest Hits
Greatest Hits
Buddy Holly
1967, Coral
As with following any artist who died young, being a Buddy Holly fan is like doing one of those connect-the-dots drawings where they give you part of the image and you fill in the rest as a wireframe. There isn’t a shortage of material exactly—he’d released 50 or so songs by the time he died in February of 1959, and recorded enough that “new” Buddy Holly records ensured he was a regular presence on store shelves well into the late ‘60s. But his literal absence gives all these assorted cash-in repackagings a fanfictional quality, exercises in instant nostalgia. As a fan, you can choose between seemingly half-a-dozen sensationally overdubbed versions of a song like “What to Do,” each based on a hushed demo he’d recorded on an acoustic guitar in his apartment; you can even decide that that set of demos, which are admittedly exquisite, represent the “true” Buddy, even though the singles he signed off on in his lifetime often had plenty of bells and whistles.
The fact is, we can never know where Holly might’ve gone as an artist, no matter how assiduously we sift through the pile of variously-incompleted sketches he left behind. Grim, unromantic precedent suggests we lost out on perhaps three to four years of his prime. Among the early prodigies of rock ‘n’ roll, none had a run of greatness much longer than six or seven: not trailblazers Berry or Little Richard, not the King, not even a singular songwriting genius like Orbison. Most of them rarely even managed a memorable single once they’d moved past their primes, let alone albums (with all due respect to the Everlys’ Roots and Bo Diddley’s The Black Gladiator). Perhaps something in the effort of instantiating a brand-new genre burns an artist out more than the work of refining one with an established foundation. Regardless, the shapes of these primordial figures in rock and roll are detectable again and again throughout the music’s history; for a rock fan, discovering the recordings of a Buddy Holly is one of those Rosetta stones that helps translate and connect so many of the currents you’ve followed in your own listening journey. He’s dissolved into the body and blood of rock like some bespectacled divine sacrifice.
But before he was dissolute, he was his body of songs. I don’t own either The “Chirping” Crickets or Buddy Holly, though both are great records and contain a good number of his classic songs. I also don’t own any of the more comprehensive retrospectives (of which 1979’s six-LP The Complete Buddy Holly is probably still definitive) either. I’ve just got this basic as mish Greatest Hits from 1967 and… that’s absolutely fine! It’s well-sequenced, has no bad songs, hits a lot of the absolute peaks, and even includes my preferred overdub of “What to Do.” It necessarily lacks many of his essentials, but in terms of single LPs you can find for like $1 in the year of our lord 2024, the list of records with more bang for your buck is short indeed. If Holly’s yet to hit for you, the hoopla can admittedly be a little perplexing, but take it from me: if you’re wired for rock music, you’ll get it one day.
