Singing from his soul

In rock ’n’ roll’s received history, what’s usually considered Buddy Holly’s last recording session is the string-drenched October 1958 date that produced the immediately posthumous hit “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” as well as the much-revered “True Love Ways.” The four-song session — Holly’s first in stereo, backed by the Dick Jacobs Orchestra with nary an electric guitar in the room — is usually read as a turning-away from rock ’n’ roll, an embrace of more mainstream pop that shows where his ambitions were headed.

There were, however, sessions after this, beginning that December, that sound like anything but an abandonment of rock. Done in the living room of Holly’s New York apartment, with the singer’s own acoustic or electric guitar the only instrumentation, the recordings made that winter were no doubt intended as demos. Buddy gave them all the care of a legitimate session, however, starting with the machine they were made on: the recently purchased pro-model tapedeck that Norman Petty had used to record the Crickets’ hits.

The songs were doled out over the next few years as singles, but overdubbed with painfully unsympathetic accompaniment. Six of the original undubbed versions showed up in the late ’70s on bootlegs, as well as on the Complete Buddy Holly box, but they’ve been out of print for years. (Tied up in legal battles, their glaring omission from MCA’s 1993 The Buddy Holly Collection kept it from being the definitive Holly anthology.)

In 1995, the complete session, 16 tracks, was finally made available on an unauthorized box set of unreleased Holly material called What You Been A- Missing (on the since-busted Vigatone label). This album has been showing up again recently without any label — a bootleg of a bootleg. Heard in their entirety (and in much better sound than the ’70s box), the living-room recordings come across as perhaps the strongest (certainly the most personal) music of Buddy Holly’s career — an extension, not of the pop orchestra sessions, but of two records he made around the same time: the penetrating “Well All Right” and the wistful “Wishing,” performances so private Holly seems to be singing only to himself.

The recordings he made that winter contain music of unnerving intimacy. His singing — plain, direct, unflinching — locates unexpected pockets in the material, places to whisper secrets, to speak of disappointment and desire, of the dreams and wishes you wish in the night, when lights are low. It’s a side of Holly that would have a particular effect on the Beatles. “Things We Said Today” or “Every Little Thing” would sound right at home on the apartment tapes; “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” could almost be a Beatles song.

Chockfull of masterpieces, the solo sessions predate MTV’s “unplugged” phase by 30 years. These are hardly “sensitive folksinger” renditions, however. Holly’s self-accompaniment becomes its own bass and drums. His playing conjures a tough little combo as surely as does Ted Hawkins’ or Charlie Patton’s. The fast strumming of “Peggy Sue Got Married” or “Crying, Waiting, Hoping” is full of subtle accents that propel the songs with a cool pulse. Holly’s trademark technique of “soloing” by playing rhythmic variations on full chords (which first turned up on “Peggy Sue” and was revived years later by Lou Reed) is everywhere on this set.

“Peggy Sue Got Married,” one of Holly’s most perfect songs, is also one of his most mysterious, thanks to a left-field chord change in the bridge and the tune’s richly enigmatic lyrics. Much has been made of Holly’s penchant for lyrical economy, his gift for communicating a great deal using a kind of telegraphic shorthand (“Words of Love,” “Not Fade Away”). Here, the technique is almost the reverse, the lyrics taking forever to say next to nothing (a strategy the Beatles would later employ on “I Want to Hold Your Hand”).

“Please don’t tell / No no no / Don’t say that I told you so,” the song begins. But the specific reason for the singer’s anxiety — or exactly why Peggy Sue’s nuptials needs to be kept such a secret — is never revealed. That the rumor concerns not the possibility of Peggy’s getting married, but a wedding that’s apparently already taken place — or that the song’s language remains so steadfastly everyday, conversational — only deepens the mystery. It isn’t clear that the rumor is even true, as the singer wriggles to give himself every out: “This is what I heard / Of course the story could be wrong.” The song becomes a Chinese puzzle box, a deliberately circular argument, and an untouchable piece of rock ’n’ roll.

Included on What You Been A-Missing are two takes of Holly’s weird reworking of Little Richard’s “Slippin’ and Slidin’” (one of which, even overdubbed, had never seen the light of day). Buddy slows the song down to half its original tempo, stretching out words until they melt into pure sound, then submerges it in a swamp of electric guitar. It’s an impossibly rich performance — languid, hypnotic — foreshadowing both druggy psychedelia (“Crimson and Clover,” “Hurdy Gurdy Man”) and the Feelies‚ trance-inducing post-punk (“Forces at Work”).

By halfway through, even Buddy succumbs to the tune’s spell: His singing loses its grasp on language, resorts to moans and whispers, intense humming, dislocated vowel sounds, reminding one of the similarly wordless midsection of Van Morrison’s “Listen to the Lion” (a song, as Greil Marcus writes, that Morrison doesn’t sing, so much as it sings him). There’s also a good fast version of “Slippin’ and Slidin’‚” one of the few successful transformations of New Orleans R&B into rockabilly — something even Elvis had trouble with.

There are other eccentric covers (“Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” “Wait ’til the Sun Shines Nellie”) nestled among topnotch originals like the abandoned “What to Do” and the luminous “Crying, Waiting, Hoping.” Perhaps best of all, there’s “You’re the One,” recorded at a Lubbock radio station while Buddy was home for Christmas. The recording lacks the pristine sound of the living-room tapes, but matches their emotional tone perfectly. It’s the only track recorded that winter with any kind of percussion, but it’s the most delirious percussion imaginable: Holly’s then-bandmates Waylon Jennings and Slim Corbin provide handclaps that are incantatory. They enter at the second verse, initially supplying a backbeat, but by the bridge their clapping has come unhinged, like a sprung music box. They syncopate the beat: against the guitar, the singing, against each other. The effect is magical, dizzying. The song itself finds Holly at his most tunefully efficient and includes one of his best bridges: “Sometimes you make me feel so bad / You make me cry deep in my heart / I feel like an actor in a play / Who doesn’t fit the part.”

Bo Diddley is a major touchstone throughout these sessions: in the frequent use of tremolo on the guitar, as well as startlingly personal interpretations of two songs Bo wrote anonymously for Mickey and Sylvia. In its original incarnation, “Love is Strange” was a buoyant rock ’n’ roll joyride. Buddy heard something very different in the song, something like a hymn. His performance here is still, reverential. He makes himself a vessel for whatever revelations the song might offer up. It would be the perfect title track for the virtual album this material suggests.

“Dearest” (originally the sequel to “Love is Strange”), in Holly’s hands, becomes one of those songs (like “Oh Boy” or “Rave On”) that you can’t believe he didn’t write, the tone is so gentle, and lines like the “Umm yeah” of the refrain or “You scold and you are so bold / Yes together our love will grow old” so Buddy-like.

It is hard to imagine a performance of more delicacy or tenderness — perhaps only Lefty Frizzell’s hits of the same time, “I Want to Be With You Always” and “I Love You a Thousand Ways.” On these songs especially, but throughout the recordings he made that winter, Holly seems to have found a way to harness the existential power of the great doowop ballads (“Little Star,” “Earth Angel,” “Over the Mountain Across the Sea”), a way of replicating their sense of distance and desire. “You may be a million miles away,” he sings and it’s impossible to think the song was taped any hour other than the middle of the night.

“Love is Strange” was also surely the inspiration for “Learning the Game,” one of the last songs Holly wrote and one of the very best. If Holly sings the Mickey and Sylvia material with reverence, on “Learning the Game” he sounds practically ascetic. His guitar playing is as plainspoken as the song’s lyrics — which are as formally taut and balanced as its perfect circle of a melody. “When you love her and she doesn’t love you, you’re only learning the game,” he sings, but the performance evokes a wisdom far beyond the words. It’s as if the singer has taken everything he knows about love’s complexity, its sadness, and — not simplified it — but boiled it down to something simple enough — hard enough — to resonate and endure.

Once, more than 20 years ago, I tried to impress a girl by playing her these rare recordings. It worked. As we sat in my car, in the dark at night, listening to Buddy sing of hearts that are broken and love that’s untrue, singing as though he were sitting there with us, she was brought nearly to tears. The songs that followed on the cassette I’d made were by Bob Dylan, from his similarly homemade Minnesota Hotel tape.

“It’s not as good,” my friend complained.

“Wait,” I said, fast-forwarding to the famous ’65 outtake of “I’ll Keep It With Mine.”

“That’s as good,” she said quietly, when it was done.

That’s how good — how powerful and intimate — these recordings are.