Review:

on 2011-06-04 CharlesMartel Said:

Masterful is the only word to describe this. It is scarce indeed to find, these days, a compilation of genuine appeal, providing both an apt introduction to the new listener; a touching reminder to those with greater familiarity; and a comprehensive selection of the best of the best to those with a more in-depth knowledge of the artist. It does come close to representing all things to all men and is a credit to those who made the track selections.

Buddy Holly was influential for the future of popular music in ways in which we can scarcely imagine today. More than anyone else of his generation he took rock and roll away from the preserve of the solo performer and into a group setting. His Crickets were as much an integral part of his sound as he himself, and not merely a backing band whose members could be hired and fired as and when necessary. This presaged the rise of the group as a popular music format in the following decade, a format which has pretty much become dominant over solo performers.

His early death robbed the world of what may well have been a style of rock music which would have been a counterbalance to the Beatles' invasion of the States a few years later. Like his contemporary, Eddie Cochran, Holly was poised on the edge of career of glittering greatness when it was all taken away from him. Why oh why did so many of the early rockers perish in aeroplane crashes?! I guess flight was not as safe back then as it is now. More probably as it was also more expensive. It was only rich people who could afford to fly, and as rock and rollers in the late fifties were both rich and rushed in terms of their lifestyles and touring schedules, proportionately more got killed in air crashes as a result. Still, they probably did not have to worry about lunatics blowing them out of the sky.

One particularly odd thing about this album is that there are several albums with the same name. Check which one it is before you shell out your hard earned cash as some are not as good or comprehensive as this one. Odd. I have an awful suspicion that it is another one of those albums which have to be marketed differently to North Americans and Europeans for some obscure reason. This is a practice which really pisses me off.

And so the music! Well it is what you would have come to expect. All the great songs of Buddy's all too brief career are here. For one thing it shows just how influential to bands like the early Beatles he was. This was music which came from the heart. This was all about the good times and girls who were all virgins and guys who all had the purest of intentions. This was rock and roll before rock got hold of it and brought some of the harsh realities of life into music. In contrast to Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly represented the cleaner side of rock and roll. Together with Eddie Cochran he could have been the Beatles to Cochran's Stones of a later era which, strange as it may seem, was less than half a decade away from most of these songs.

When Buddy Holly died, the credibility of that clean-cut pony-tailed, flouncy skirt type of music type of music died with him. His pioneering use of a group format may have outlived him, and have become his most potent of legacies, but the naivety and simplicity of the lifestyle his songs depicted (with a few exceptions) is something which has never been recaptured since on any meaningful scale.
Rating: 7/10