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Buddy Holly - Down the Line: Rarities
| Bullz-eye |
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The beauty of a collection like Buddy Holly’s Down the Line: Rarities lies in the striking clarity not just of the recordings themselves – the music here is more than 50 years old, much of it recorded outside of professional studios – but in the way rock’s primary elements are all brought into sharp relief. As one of the original rock stars during the music’s first decade, Holly was there on the front lines, fusing country, bluegrass and blues with rockabilly into the original devil’s music. Divided into four sections, Down the Line opens with the double-CD set’s one recording that suffers from poor sound quality even by bootleg standards, but whose historical importance is trumps audio concerns. Holly’s very first home recording, a confident performance of Hank Snow’s country hit "My Two-Timin’ Woman," was recorded in 1949 when Buddy was just twelve years old. It gives little indication of where Buddy would go from there, though his duo recordings with his school pal Bob Montgomery (as "Buddy & Bob") spanning 1953 through mid ’55 continued in the country vein, with several Montgomery originals, co-writes with Buddy, and a faithful take on Bill Monroe’s bluegrass classic "Footprints in the Snow."...full text |
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| Popmatters |
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Outsiders best know Iowa musically for three things: the Broadway show The Music Man, those mask-wearing devils Slipknot, and as the place where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. Richards (the Big Bopper) died. Of these three, the last item is by far the most famous. Here it is five decades after the event, and reporters from around the world again descend to the Hawkeye State to question locals about what happened. The Surf Ballroom (where Holly last played) hosts another tribute concert, and the nearby cornfields are filled with tourists gawking in the snow at the barren fields where the fatal plane crash took place. What is it about Buddy Holly that inspires such devotion? He wasn’t the first rock ‘n’ roller. He didn’t have very many hits during his less than two-year recording career. He wasn’t particularly sexy or charismatic. Critics have long pondered Holly’s legend, and usually attribute his celebrity to a combination of Holly’s innocent charm, his commonplace appearance, the fact that he wrote his own songs, and his early, tragic death. He was the first rock and roller to die before this time....full text |
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| Prefixmag |
| As all fans of early rock know, even the late, great Mr. Holly’s table scraps are worth savoring. The Rolling Stones, Beatles and others weren’t no fools when it came to citing the Texas troubadour as a main influence, after all. For the 50th anniversary of the rock pioneer’s death at age 22 (yes, 22), Geffen Records has compiled a 59-song two-disc set of start-to-finish rarities and unreleased works. Some of the highlights that should have fans doing backflips include early tracks Holly cut with Bob Montgomery (as Buddy & Bob) as well as the undubbed final recordings Holly made at home before just before his death. The collection is said to have been compiled with the cooperation of Holly’s widow, Maria Elena, which is probably how Geffen got their hands on the cut titled “Buddy & Maria Elena Talking in an Apartment.”...full text |
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