Rock & roll doesn't get the respect that classical music does. I mean, you don't learn rock & roll at a conservatory and you don't hear about little kids giving recitals playing Free Bird or Me & Bobby McGee. Classical music is so snobby. Everything is called an overture or a symphony and they all have numbers.

 

If they lives 200 years ago, maybe Buddy Holly or Steve Howe or Geddy Lee or Paul McCartney would have been like Mozart. All these classical music snobs love Mozart but the truth is, in his personal life, Mozart was a lot more of a freak than any of those guys I just mentioned. Mozart was actually a lot more like Ozzy Osbourne, biting the heads off snakes and stuff like that. He was just a total maniac. But since he lived so long ago that now we can listen to his music while drinking tea with our pinkys extended. I wonder of 200 years from now, little girls in pinafores will give piano recitals playing Rave On and Not Fade Away.

 

It sucks that Buddy Holly died so young but what really sucks is that everyone goes so crazy over Elvis, but Buddy Holly had more talent in his little pinky finger than ten Elvises. Or Elvii.

 

Elvis was a pretty boy who sang and danced and little girls squealed over him. But he didn't write or produce his own songs. When you think of Elvis and who he was and what he did, what you're really thinking about is a hundred guys and Colonel Parker and a big promotion team all selling this image; when you think of Buddy Holly, it's all just Buddy Holly. He wasn't real pretty, but he could rock & roll.

 

I think there should be Buddy Holly impersonators and annual pilgrimages to Lubbock, Texas. On the other hand, maybe it's a good thing he never became a sick joke like some of those other guys.

 

You know, speaking of that, every so often I see someone on TV or something and it's someone I would have sworn was already dead, and I freak out just a little bit each time and I feel like that kid in the I See Dead People movie. I don't know why but I keep thinking Ricardo Montalban is dead, and Jerry Lewis, and especially Milton Berle.

 

I knew a guy whose grandfather lived to be like 175 years old. He had something like 19 heart attacks and 7 strokes and it seemed like every few months his parents would get a call like "Come to the hospital, it's time." And then by the time they got there, the old guy would be walking in the park and cussing at kids for walking on his grass. I mean this guy had an IV in his arm so long that every year someone would embroider a new cozy for the bag, and he took so many pills that every morning it was like a King Size bag of M&M's, but he just kept on going. It almost got to be kind of scary, and you might even have begun to get the sense that if there ever was a nuclear war, the only things left alive would be him and a billion cockroaches.

 

Rock stars don't age that way, mostly. I mean, you might look at Keith Richards or Mick Jagger and think that they do, but they only look 175. They may actualy live to be that old, but I just think that over the years they drugs they've used have caused them to prematurely mummify. The point is, you never see rock stars age gracefully; they all look like scarecrows and mummies and withered hairless monkeys, or like bloated mannequins. It's creepy.

 

It may not seem fair that they all get to be legends and billionaires, until you realize that they all age so badly. On the other hand, they also get to marry supermodels even when they look like Ric Ocasek and Billy Joel. I'm just glad I never had to choose between 1) being dirt poor and looking like Paul McCartney did in 1963, or 2) being a billionaire and looking like Paul McCartney does now.

 

I don't know how I feel about cloning, but I think if someone wanted to clone Buddy Holly I would be all in favor of it. I would start a petition or a movement or whatever. Or, o no, wait: If someone else started a movement, I would join. No sense going overboard, I mean, by the time the kid is old enough to record I'll be 100 years old myself. But I could circulate a petition and hand out Clone Buddy bumper stickers.

 

This is a cause I could get behind, a way to define what I stand for...what we can all stand for! What our society can become!

 

Clone Buddy!

 

 

Of course, Lubbock may be horrible, and I've no reason to doubt you, but that's how things are. I am speaking  to how things should be, where Lubbock is a shining metropolis with a golden shrine to Buddy Holly that's visible for miles across the Gulf of Mexico. Or maybe I'm thinking of Galveston. Whatever.

 

Also: Just for fun I searched on "Clone" and then cross-searched "Buddy Holly" to see if anyone is really trying to clone him....and I got some strange results, like a link to Linda Rondstadt singing "Heart Like A Wheel" and a group called the Del-Airs. So as far as I can tell, no one is seriously trying to clone him.

 

This is my bored day.