Customer Reviews

The Real Buddy Holly Story

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Watching Buddy Holly perform such songs as Peggy Sue, That'll be the Day, and Oh Boy is worth the price of the video alone. It is also interesting to learn about his career from its roots in Lubbock, Texas, until its untimely end on February 3, 1959. A revealing interview with Tommy Allsup, a band member on the Winter Dance Party, is provided. Interviews with his Crickets' band members are also very interesting and informative.

... it really does. I had a chance to see this video when it was shown on my local educational public television station quite a few years back. For those who are true Buddy Holly fans, this is an absolute must to add to your collection of Holly memoralibia. The interviews are top-rate and are probably the most accurate I have seen as they are from the people most closely connected to Buddy Holly and give a closer look and insight into both his musical as well as his personal life. This is one video you will definitely want to keep and watch over and over again (I still do every February).

This mans music was pure genius.I dont care how old it is this man was the most tragic thing to happen to rock and roll when he died.I wasnt even born when he got on that plane,but you cant go through life and not hear his music.
The one thing that you enjoy seeing about musicians is their film clips.But with Buddy Holly there is not many available.
But here is some rare clips,and interviews with family members and friends.Well put together.I like to see the places where he lived and visited in his short career.Its all here.
While i am a Beatle fan i would have rathered they talked about Buddy Holly more than filling space with Paul McCartneys versions of the songs.Now im not saying i didnt enjoy them,i just felt there should be more Buddy Holly information instead.
But upon saying that this is a real informative video and almost everything you want to know about him is here.
Buddy is the true master of Rock and Roll.Often it makes me wonder what he would have done had he lived.But as it says in the DVD,The Beatles were inspired by him,would they have had the same success had Buddy Holly lived?And The Rolling Stones first hit was a Beatles song,seems to me he started a chain reaction.

Great music documentary. Paul McCartney produced this heartfelt tribute as an antidote to the more lurid Gary Busey docudrama that came out the year before. McCartney goes on the road to re-tell the story of the geeky kid from Lubbock, Texas who helped refine rockabilly into rock'n'roll, and who set the template for the singer-as-songwriter model later taken up by the Beatles. Holly's story is both astounding and underwhelming -- extensive footage of his shabby hometown helps underscore how humble his background was and how tenuous his success, and -- as Keith Richards points out -- how amazing it was that Holly organized a band capable of elevating themselves out of the C&W world they came from. It turns out there's very little footage of Holly performing live -- this short film apparently includes all of it -- but it's fascinating to see his transformation from a nervous kid into a savvy showman, just prior to his untimely death. In a series of charming, low-key interviews with Holly's old bandmates and contemporaries such as the Everly Brothers, the early world of rock and roll is wonderfully evoked, and the tenuous passing of the torch from a soft pop-destined America to a rock-hungry Britain is convincingly portrayed. (Plus, check out that all-too-brief guitar break on "That'll Be The Day"... was Buddy Holly the founding member of the Buzzcocks?!? Who knew?)

I'm grateful to Paul McCartney for making this video for 2 reasons. First, with all due respect to Gary Busey who is a great actor in his own right, that movie wasn't Buddy. It's impossible to play a Legend who was and still is larger than life. Second, The Real Buddy Holly Story explains in part why he was as great as he was - he had the perfect setting for his genius to flourish, with a down-to-earth, supportive and loving family & good childhood friends of long duration who shared his interests & worked with him without (it seems) harboring any rivalry or animosity over his growing fame. He seems to have had an innate belief in his own ability to be a great musician, and the dogged determination to let nothing deter him. Most of all, this video helped me to appreciate the simple, basic honesty of Buddy Holly's music and the circumstances under which it was produced. It has a timeless quality that is a far cry from what passes for R&R nowadays! I was 16 years old when The Music came to a crashing halt in a frozen Iowa cornfield. Now, 43 years later, I will watch this movie over and over, each time finding something in it I hadn't noticed before.

Excellent documentary from Paul McCartney setting the record straight on the true Holly legend and legacy with pertinent interviews from the people who knew him first and best, his brothers Larry and Travis Holley (yes..that is the correct spelling of the family name!), original Crickets Jerry ("J.I.") Allison and Joe ("Joe B.") Mauldin, plus current Cricket member Sonny Curtis (writer of "Rock Around With Ollie Vee, "I Fought The Law", and later on The Mary Tyler Moore theme song "Love Is All Around"). Probably the best video archival record of Buddy Holly out there and more than worth the price for any "true" Buddy afficianado. If all you have ever seen or heard about Buddy Holly comes from the movie, what I euphemistically call "The Gary Busey Story", and please see my review of the VHS version of that one, do yourself a huge favor and get yourself a copy of this documentary before you "Rave On" to the rest of us about the wonderfulness of the movie and Gary Busey's performance of a film that, by the producer's own admission, was never designed to be a factual account of Buddy Holly's life anyway. Jerry Allison himself said it should be called "The Buddy Hollywood Story". I heartily concur! McCartney, who owns the rights to Holly's music, does him the true justice that the movie sadly denied him. As Sonny Curtis so eloquently stated in his song "The Real Buddy Holly Story", written by him shortly after the movie came out, "The levy isn't dry, and the music didn't die, 'cause Buddy Holly lives every time we play rock and roll."
Amen Sonny!

If you want to hear Buddy Holly's music, watch Gary Bucy in his Hollywood bio-pic about Buddy. If you want the facts and insight, watch "The Real Buddy Holly Story." I teach pop music history at the college level and am always looking for source material, and I found it with this project. I watched this movie and then a few months later had a chance to go to Lubbock and Clovis. This documentary was a great primer before my trip (there are also many good books about Buddy). Music buffs and Buddy fans will especially like this project, as will the casually curious. Now if someone would only produce a definitive documentary about Bill Haley and the Comets . . .

The movie all and all was good, and soon going to watch it again, and hope that you people buy that good movie that i bought at Amazon.com, I do think that Buddy holly band members did a good job talking about Holly, and to see Holly's brothers was cool i thought and all so to see who Holly was with before his got marryied.

Had this on vhs years ago .. now got it on DVD . great stuff .. I was 11 yrs old when Buddy died .. I have been a lifelong fan of his music .I met/tracked down the late Norman Petty , in 1981 when I went down to do a gig in that area of Clovis .. Portales N.M actually .I went inside the original studio , and also Normans new 'mortgage mountain' as he put it ;on main street in Clovis .. a state of the art recording studio in a converted movie theater . amazing .he took some time and listened to some of my original stuff(tunes)!a wonderful memory of 2 hours with him . This DVD is well presented by Mcartney ;who as we know, is also a life long fan! This DVD is very educational .. as soon as my kids are old enough , this is required viewing ! a 5 star production .

As Paul McCartney expresses it at the beginning of this fine documentary, he was dissatisfied with the version of the Buddy Holly story as told in the movie by that name, and hoped in this film to tell THE REAL BUDDY HOLLY STORY. He therefore set out to interview as many of the people who were either friends or family or fellow musicians and who are still alive. If you have read John Goldrosen's highly regarded biography THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY there will be little here that is unfamiliar, but it is always great to see film footage, some of it very raw, that can, of course, never be contained inside a book. The documentary manages a pretty balanced view of Buddy's life, though it politely skips over some of the more controversial aspects of his life, such as the somewhat acrimonious breakup of the Crickets near the end of Buddy's life and the complexities created by Buddy marrying a Hispanic female at a time when such a thing was pretty unusual. The film also ignores or minimizes other aspects of Buddy's life. For instance, there is some mention of his religious convictions, but no indication of how deep those were. In fact, Buddy remained a devout Baptist throughout his short life and even tithed to the church (giving 10% of your income to your local church). At the end of his life he was forming plans to record a collection of religious songs. Items like this are usually left out of accounts of Buddy's bio.

Still, this film has a lot of great footage and some wonderful interviews with a lot of great people, not just people who knew and performed with Buddy, but some who were deeply influenced by him, like Keith Richards. McCartney is a solid if not terribly penetrating interviewer (his position in the rock world would prevent his asking any uncomfortable questions, such as probing for details about the reputed fight between Buddy and a bandmate before appearing on Ed Sullivan).

The one thing that I've always regretted was just how little quality film footage there is of Buddy Holly performing. We've a lot a photographs and a satisfying number of studio recordings, but few recordings of Buddy performing live. Even one of the sequences found in this film shows Buddy lip synching rather than performing live. The film does include a great deal of rather raw footage, where we get visuals of Holly performing with either inadequate or no audio.

There may someday be a better documentary film about Buddy Holly, but it is unlikely that we will ever see one with as much first-rate original interview footage. And no film is likely to do a better job of documenting just how central Buddy Holly was to the development of rock music in the early sixties, when bands like the Beatles, following the example of Holly, started writing their own songs instead of doing covers of those written by others. It has often been stated that of all the deaths of performers in the history of music in the rock era, it was Holly's that most impoverished our culture. Only 22 at the time of his death, Holly could well have taken our music in completely new directions. We'll never know what he might have done, but what he actually accomplished was extraordinary.