Buddy Holly Lives On

Details

Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Tuesday, 26 July 2011 05:00

Written by Lloyd Carroll

Buddy Holly
Icon (UME)

Various Artists
Rave On (Concord Music)

Rock & roll is chock full of "what if" questions. Certainly on the top ten list of most rock aficionados’ lists would be "Could you imagine how much richer American pop culture would have been had Buddy Holly not died at age 22" in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and JP "Big Bopper" Richardson in Clear Lake, Iowa on February 3, 1959?

Twelve years later, Don McLean further immortalized Holly to Baby Boomers with his iconic "American Pie" that referred to that fateful frigid night as "the day the music died." Holly also inspired a Broadway show and a 1978 biopic that starred a still sane Gary Busey.

Buddy Holly would have been celebrating his 75th birthday next month if he were alive. Concord Records commissioned a number of artists to record their favorite tunes associated with Holly, while Universal Music Enterprises, which holds the rights to Holly’s original recordings, has compiled a dozen of his best in a new recording titled Icon.

Paul McCartney owns the publishing rights to Holly’s catalog, so he clearly had the pick of the litter here. On "It’s So Easy," which was a big hit for Linda Ronstadt in 1977, he tries so hard to give a different interpretation that the song is unrecognizable and quite awful to boot. He bizarrely attempts to emulate Dave Edmunds' 1971 hit cover of Smiley Lewis’s "I Hear You Knocking" by singing through a fuzz box.

Sir Paul is happily the only weak link here. Fiona Apple duets with Jon Brion on a touching version of "Everyday" while Graham Nash -- of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young -- delivers a faithful, heartfelt version of "Raining In My Heart" to close the album.

Other veterans who deliver are Kid Rock on the lively Motown-style "Well All Right"; Lou Reed on a very moody take on "Peggy Sue"; and Patti Smith, who shows a rare romantic side for her with "Words of Love".

The biggest surprise is Cee Lo Green, of Forget You and Crazy fame and one of the hosts of NBC’s The Voice. He wonderfully captures the sound of Holly and his backup band, the Crickets, on the rather obscure "(You’re So Square) Baby, I Don’t Care" that was written for Holly by the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame composing/production team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

As fine as the aforementioned Holly tribute album is, as the old cliche goes, there’s nothing like the real thing. Icon captures a dozen of Holly’s most memorable recordings, from such catchy seminal rockers as "Oh Boy!" and "Maybe Baby" to the full orchestral ballad, "True Love Ways", which was recorded in New York City mere weeks before his untimely passing.

Also included here are tunes that were written by fellow up-and-coming pop stars at the time, Paul Anka and Bobby Darin, "It Doesn’t Matter Anymore" and "Early in the Morning", respectively.

Stevie Nicks
In Your Dreams (Reprise)

Judging from both the album cover and her voice on her new album, In Your Dreams, Stevie Nicks has found a way to cheat time. She looks and sounds just the way we all remember her when she was cranking out hits with Fleetwood Mac in the mid to late 1970s.

As has long been the case in her music, Nicks is full of contradictions. In the opening cut, "Secret Love", she is content with a no-strings-attached relationship, while on the very next track, "For What It’s Worth" (not the Buffalo Springfield classic), she yearns for a grand romance.

It has been six years since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, so Stevie’s concern for the city in New Orleans may be a bit late. But it serves as a reminder that the Crescent City is still not what it once was.

Nicks has been singing about spooky characters way before Twilight, HBO’s True Blood and the CW’s Vampire Diaries, so we have to indulge her slow ballad, "Moonlight (A Vampire’s Dream)".

The title track, "In Your Dreams", is the kind of snappy, up-tempo, hummable tune that we haven’t heard from Nicks since Stand Back, Edge of Seventeen and Stop Dragging My Heart Around back in the early ‘80s.

In Your Dreams shows that Stevie Nicks can still carefully craft fine pop music.

• < Prev
• Next >