Waylon Jennings' work in Buddy Holly's band is well-known, as is the story of Jennings giving up his seat on the ill-fated flight that took the lives of Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on February 3, 1959. But the brutal crash has left scars that still haunt Waylon even now on the 40th anniversary of that fateful evening, a date commonly known as "The Day The Music Died"--the symbolic end of 1950s rock 'n' roll.
Taken from the recent interview at J.I. Allison's place, supported by Waylon: An Autobiography (written in 1996 with Lenny Kaye of The Patti Smith Group), the following is Jennings' account of his friendship with Buddy Holly in his own distinctive words:
"I was working as a disc jockey at KLLL in Lubbock, Texas. Buddy would come up and hang out with me when he was in town. I had known him for a long time from talent shows we'd do around Lubbock.
"Buddy's success gave us all hope. He traveled the world with his music, appeared at the New York Paramount with Alan Freed and a 'Caravan' of teen idols, and was one of the first rock and rollers to write his own songs.
"Buddy was an upper, just a happy person. He would laugh and cut up all the time. We'd lay back in the studio and play guitars, and Buddy would tell us stories. Our eyes would bug out of our heads because he'd been all over the world. He would talk about people like the Everly Brothers and Jerry Lee and Elvis.
"Buddy was talking about starting a label of his own ... The new company was to be called Taupe, after the reddish-brown color of the Cadillac that Buddy drove. Its first artist was going to be Waylon Jennings.
“He could see how much music meant to me, and maybe he related my yearning desire to himself, growing up in a sun-baked West Texas town with music as an only outlet. "Buddy produced my first record, 'Jole Blon.' He tried to teach me how to sing Cajun French ... We didn't know the lyrics, so I tried to learn them off the Harry Choates original. By the time we finished, you couldn't understand a word. I just sang gibberish, really. Buddy strummed rhythm guitar, and King Curtis called-and-responsed around my fractured French.
"Buddy was the first guy who had confidence in me. Hell, I had as much star quality as an old shoe. But he really liked me and believed in me. He said, 'There's no doubt you're going to be a star. I know. The way you sing, there's no limit. You can sing pop, you can sing rock and you can sing country.'
"One day Buddy brought this bass guitar in and pitched it in my lap and said, 'You've got two weeks to learn to play it.' I never took the time to figure it out. I just memorized every song Buddy ever recorded. I was terrible. I played too loud and broke the amplifier speakers. I was scared to death. In later years I got to where I could play a little bit, but at that time I was over my head. He'd have been better off with a monkey back there instead of me.
"We barely got to the shows on time and would go straight from the bus to the dressing room. We'd smell like billy goats because we didn't have time to take showers. I still remember going into the dressing room at Clear Lake, Iowa, that afternoon.
"Big Bopper weighed about 300 pounds, and he had trouble sitting on those bus seats, and he couldn't get any rest. He came to me and said, 'I have the flu, I'm very sick and tired and I haven't been able to sleep. Would you mind if I took your place on the plane? I said, 'No, I'm alright. Talk to Buddy and if it's OK with him, it's OK with me.' Then Tommy gave his place up for Ritchie Valens.
"I remember the last time I saw Buddy. He had me go get us some hot dogs. He was leaning back against the wall in a cane-bottom chair and he was laughing at me. He said, 'So you're not going with us tonight on the plane, huh? Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up. It's 40-below out there and you're gonna get awful cold.
"So I said, 'Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes.' I was so afraid for many years that somebody was going to find out I said that. Somehow I blamed myself. Compounding that was the guilty feeling that I was still alive. I hadn't contributed anything to the world at that time compared to Buddy. Why would he die and not me? It took a long time to figure that out and it brought about some big changes in my life--the way I thought about things.
"I woke up on the bus when we pulled into Moorhead, Minnesota. The tour manager said, 'Waylon, come here. I've got to talk to you.' Tommy Allsup was sitting across from me. I said, 'You go, Tommy.' I don't know why or how, but I knew something bad had happened. So Tommy went, and after a while he came back and said, 'The boys didn't make it. The plane crashed and killed them.”
"I didn't know what to do. I'd never had anything like that happen in my life before. I'd never had anybody that I cared about get killed and know I was never going to see them again. I was feeling a lot of guilt. I went into the hotel and just walked around, but I stayed away from the newsstand.
"I walked around for a half-a-day and then thought, 'Maybe I ought to call home.' Sure enough, when I called home everybody back in Lubbock, my mother and brothers, thought I had died on the plane.
"Never a week or two goes by that I don't think of Buddy. I know he didn't know he was going to die, but it seems like he knew something. He'd talk nonstop to me about things to watch out for.
"He'd say, 'When you know it's wrong it is wrong, so don't accept anything less. Nobody knows your music like you do.' He'd tell me about not getting locked in and developing a style. I learned so damned much from him, about rhythms, and not overstaying your welcome, and not compromising. He had a dose of Nashville where they wouldn't let him sing it the way he heard it and wouldn't let him play his own guitar parts. Can't do this, can't do that. 'Don't ever let people tell you you can't do something,' he'd say, 'and never put limits on yourself. Don't back up.' It was all in the singer and the song. That was it.
"Buddy would talk about getting a groove and keeping it going. If the music was right, the song would take care of itself. The whole thing is getting the rhythm to where you can feel it. That was the difference between rock 'n' roll, country and pop. Years later, I'd be in the studio, and the track would really get in the pocket and feel good, and I'd hear those Nashville producers saying scornfully, 'Man, that sounds like a pop hit.' And I'd remember Buddy talking to me, telling me they thought he was crazy, as that freezing bus moved down the highway from Green Bay, Wisconsin, to Clear Lake, Iowa.
"Buddy was the first person to have faith in my music. He encouraged me in my music and my writing. He was my friend. If anything I've ever done is remembered, part of it is because of Buddy Holly."
After Buddy’s death, it took Jennings years to regain some career equilibrium. He first went back to radio in West Texas, then he began performing again.
Waylon, who named a son after Buddy, says the main thing he learned from Holly was attitude, about not compromising his music. As a result, Waylon stayed true to his musical instincts and recorded a gallery of landmark recordings that helped shape the course of country music. Jennings was dubbed an "Outlaw" in Nashville for demanding artistic freedom and eventually getting the right to record what material he wanted, in what studio he wanted, and with what musicians he wanted to use. Modern country owes much of its broad-based appeal to Waylon (Wanted: The Outlaws was the first country album to be certified platinum), while roots-rock owes part of its rugged individualism to Waylon ... and, in turn, to Buddy.
Waylon had his left foot amputated in December of 2001 due to complications from diabetes, and passed away on February 13th, 2002 with further problems with the disease.