The 1957 Buddy Holly riff Paul McCartney always wanted to figure out
Some 70 years on from his rock ‘n’ roll heyday, Buddy Holly is still as ubiquitous a figure as they come in the rock realm, worshipped by everybody from Elvis Costello to Keith Richards. One of the biggest appreciators of that thick-rimmed, bespectacled revolution, however, has always been Sir Paul McCartney.
The Beatles were endlessly indebted to the first wave of American rock and rollers that drifted across the Atlantic Ocean, but Holly was a bigger pillar of influence than most. As opposed to figures like Elvis Presley or Little Richard, who might as well have arrived from a different planet, Buddy Holly was a relatable figure for budding young musicians like Macca, spurring them onto their own songwriting success. Aside from anything else, The Beatles were only named as such as a tribute to Holly’s own band, The Crickets.
Tragically, Holly himself didn’t live long enough to witness the generation of rock musicians he was directly responsible for. Perishing in a plane crash in 1959, at the age of just 22, his discography was cut short before its time, but songs like ‘Peggy Sue’ and ‘That’ll Be The Day’ continued to thrive in the years following his passing. The Beatles, for instance, regularly covered the rock pioneer’s efforts, paying homage to arguably their greatest influence.
Given the colossal, unparalleled success afforded to McCartney’s outfit soon thereafter, the songwriter quickly ascended to such a stature that he managed to rub shoulders with the vast majority of his influences, whether they were Motown stars or rock and roll contemporaries. Buddy Holly, on the other hand, was a hero that Macca could only meet in his fantasies.
Speaking to GQ back in 2020, the songwriter was asked what question he would pose to Buddy Holly, given the chance. “It would have been, ‘How do you do the riff from ‘That’ll Be The Day’?’” he said, before caveating, “But we [The Beatles] worked that one out. I’d probably ask him why he took that plane flight.”
Inevitably, the answer to that second question would be ‘Because I didn’t know it would crash’. Despite the poor flying conditions and the questionable credentials of the pilot were questionable, Holly was not an expert in air travel and could not have accurately predicted the plane crash that would be his demise. How to do the riff from ‘That’ll Be The Day’, therefore, is a much better question.
By the standards of modern rock guitarists, the riff is pretty simple, but the way in which Holly was able to play it has never truly been recaptured, despite the best efforts of groups like The Beatles. It was, after all, his defining anthem, and the single that best encapsulated the distinctive, groundbreaking sound of Buddy Holly as a songwriter.
As a result of that, the track has been covered hundreds of times throughout rock and roll history, and it was a staple for The Beatles during their early days, but nobody ever came close to eclipsing the sound of the original. It was, after all, the song that changed rock and roll forever, armed only with a timeless guitar riff and a line borrowed from a John Wayne film.
While Paul McCartney might have worked out how to play that riff eventually, there is no doubt that, if Buddy Holly was resurrected if only for a few short moments, he would still field a question from the former Beatle about the construction and impact of that riff.
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