FORTY FIVE YEARS GONE

The word went round Worthing High School for Boys that Buddy Holly was dead. Not to diminish them, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper had also been killed in the same crash. Sad, but they didn’t signify in the same way. Holly was the gangly geek-nerd straight out of Texas, with the first Stratocaster we’d ever seen in the hands of a white boy, and it would be a couple more years before the cheap Burns and Framus copies showed up in the windows of the oh-so square music shops and piano stores, and we could handle a knocked-off surrogate for ourselves. Holly was the one that gave us hope. If he could make it with his thick glasses and buck teeth then maybe so could we. We were too young and untutored in the ways of the rama-lama at the time to be fully aware that he was touched by near-genius, or that Peggy Sue and Rave On would be rock songs of the century, and Holly would provide the Rolling Stones with their first real hit. We simply saw him as, by proxy, one of us. He wasn’t as stunningly handsome or blessed with the vocal shaman-magic of Elvis, he couldn’t hit those notes like Roy Orbison, and he didn’t have the dark frustration-rage of Gene Vincent. He was the one who brought us the word that, in rock & roll, all things were infinitely possible.

But, back on that grey, English February day, he also brought the first death in our rock & roll experience and attached a shocking sense of mortality to the music. If Buddy Holly could make it, so could we. If Buddy Holly could die, so would we. The shock resonated deep, and, for the rest of the day, we English schoolboys went through the motions of education, surly and recalcitrant, with a potential prison-riot vibe hanging in the classroom air. A secondary rumor told of a kid in Manchester who had hung himself because he could take a world in which That’ll Be The Day was all Buddy wrote. I never did find out if the rumor was true. The teachers didn’t get it, but they knew enough not to push a potentially incendiary situation. One beery math-teaching oaf was overheard to mutter something about how he was unable to fathom why we should be making such a fuss over “some bloody crooner”, and suggested, by way of explanation, that form 2B had been infected some horrible and virulent form of communicable homosexuality. Little did the oaf know that, in just seven racing years, other “bloody crooners” would be pointing us to the barricades, and the culture would be in violent upheaval.


FROM THE EMAIL

From Larry Kirwan of the excellent band Black 47 (via HCB)
www.black47.com

Happy James Joyce's birthday. He would have been 122 yesterday. My, how the years have flown. And on a more poignant note, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died 45 years ago today. I was just thinking of the three of them on Sunday night during the hilarious Superbowl Half-time Show Is it just me or was there something intrinsically, mind-blowingly funny about that spectacle? Was it meant to be funny? I was in a noisy pub and couldn't hear the sound that well, so couldn't tell if the whole thing was camp or serious? I'm hoping it was the former. Then again, I'm not sure, maybe it was a bit of both - one is lost for words when trying to categorize it - perhaps, post-orange alert irony? At any rate, it's an interesting thread - sociological, if not musical - between Buddy's Stratocaster and Janet's nipple. Maybe, it's because it's five in the morning and "Macbeth had murdered sleep," but I'm also reminded of a framed picture of Che Guevara that I see from time to time. Of course, one is jaded by his commercial T-shirt likeness flaunted by everyone from Dick Cheney to my Aunt Fanny's third cousin's granddaughter. But in the wonderful picture I speak of, the man is captured in all his stormy idealistic handsomeness. I sometimes stop to look at him and wonder how he would have dealt with polls, opinion groups, town hall meetings, etc.? Would these modern artifices have given him pause, or caused him to change course? And if so would he still be alive today, an elder statesman baring opinions and revelations to Barbara Walters? Or is he better off glaring out from that lonely picture in all his moody magnificence? Oh dear, the thoughts that torment at five in the morning.

And a horror tale from Kaymo...

From this month's Scientific American we have news of – Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral – US Navy is experimenting with this system on board blimps Next time you see a blimp hovering over your zone, check it out carefully. It may be keeping you and yours under surveillance. LASH is a computerized color detection and matching system. Blimp borne cams scan the ground below seeking anomalies which are fed into the Dbase and crunched. Anything that seems out of place can then be zeroed and examined in greater detail. In Oct 2002 the feds planned to use LASH to search for muzzle flashes in the hunt for the DC sniper, but the case was solved before LASH could get into the air. While it may first be deployed to check for terrorists landing on US shores in small boats, further uses aren't difficult to imagine as the USA slides towards a police state future.

LINK

Now I suppose you could stretch a point and make the jump from LASH to erotica. Well, okay, I could. And, for those with a taste for the explicitly well written, today’s Belle de Jour is a gem.

http://belledejour-uk.blogspot.com/

CRYPTIQUE – Those who would follow you into hell all too frequently bring their own hell with them. Just to make sure there’s enough hell to go around.