Buddy Holly - Memorial Collection (Dig) (Slip)
List Price:
Our Price: $12.76
You Save: $17.22 (57%)
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Buy Used: from $12.75 (click here)
Category: Music CD
See more new music releases
Buy this Music CD at online store in your country
Canadian Music Store
Canadian Music Store
Music CD Cover
Artist: Buddy HollyEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Unknown)
CD Release Date: 2009-02-10
Music Label: Geffen Records
Free Music Notes for Memorial Collection (Dig) (Slip)
Free Music Review: Hands down the greatest Buddy Holly album on CD
Hit: 5 Stars
If this isn't a five-star album I don't know what is. Downgrading this glorious music because the packaging isn't deluxe is so far beside the point that it isn't even in the same region where the point resides. The decision to put this out in inexpensive packaging was clearly an economic decision. Most music buyers these days download their music rather than purchasing it on CD. And many who do buy the CDs put them immediately on their iPod and never touch the discs again. To have put it in a deluxe packaging would have bumped the price up to around $45 and have limited its audience. His biggest fans already own John Goldrosen's great biography THE BUDDY HOLLY STORY and wouldn't benefit much from liner notes.
The caviling of previous reviewers over the packaging and liner notes overlooks the essential fact that this is hands down the finest Buddy Holly collection available on CD. It is not the finest Buddy Holly album ever. That would be the even more inclusive LP box set THE COMPLETE BUDDY HOLLY released in 1979. In the early 1990s I made the idiotic decision to sell all my LPs and that was included among my disquisitions. I have been kicking myself all the time since as several of the best albums I owned have never received a comparable release on CD. For instance, there still hasn't been a CD box set to rival the LP THE ABSOLUTE ANTHOLOGY by the Easybeats, another album I profoundly miss.
But this set -- regardless of the packaging -- contains at a very cheap price the heart of what makes Buddy Holly great. It contains nearly all of his important songs, mainly dispensing with the horrible orchestrated versions of the posthumous songs that were found on Buddy Holly's recently purchased reel-to-reel tape recorder some weeks after his death. I've have them on other albums but have never been able to listen to them much. The single most important reason for anyone to get this set is to get that group of brilliant songs sans the grating arrangements that were later foisted onto them.
Buddy Holly was by any standard one of the towering figures in the history of rock and roll. And this despite dying at age 22 and after a recording career that lasted a mere 18 months. His inclusion in the initial class of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees was a no brainer. He had a large number of hits in the brief time that he was a professional performer and several of his other songs became hits after his death and his influence is incalculable. His influence on the Beatles and the Stones was significant. Dozens of singers sound like him, including Marshall Crenshaw and Elvis Costello who not only copied his voice but his appearance (Crenshaw even got to portray him in a movie). I even fancy I heard some of Holly's vocal mannerisms in people like Corin Tucker, who doesn't have his hiccup but does punch her words much as Holly did.
Holly's talent is all encompassing and multidimensional. He was a brilliant pop singer, with impeccable phrasing and a host of wonderful idiosyncrasies. He was one of the great songwriters rock has seen and an absolutely brilliant arranger of his own work. Near the end of his life he was making marvelous innovations with his arrangements, adding strings and using other instruments that anticipated the experiments of George Martin and the Beatles. And he was a tremendously underrated guitarist.
But as great as what we got from Holly, one can't help but wonder what we might have gotten. Rock and roll has witnessed many premature deaths, but without question Holly's is the one that cut short what might have been the career that would have changed the entire history of rock. He was barely getting started when he died.
Buddy Holly is also remarkable for being one of the cleanest figures in the history of rock. I mean Pat Boone kind of squeaky-clean. He was a devout Baptist and even tithed (that is giving ten percent of your money to the church) and his songs are almost completely devoid of the double entendres that lace the songs of most rock performers. His protagonists smooch and kiss instead of having sex. Yet his music has as much as an edge as anyone's. Even songs like "Rave On," with the rather odd vocal backings, at its heart is still a great rocker. And although he was completely conversant with the kind of rock and roll laid down by Memphis, he added a pop quality to his songs that was uniquely his own. When he died he was making plans to record a gospel album.
But in the end as you listen to these discs what you get more than anything is Buddy Holly's enormous talent. You can hear the enormous progress his made in his short career, starting as imitator of what was coming out of Sun, but more and more emerging as his own performer. His song writing got stronger and stronger as he went along (though Norman Petty is often listed as a co-writer, his contributions as a writer were either minimal or nonexistent, and significantly after Holly's death his career as a writer ended, though his work as producer of Buddy Holly and/or the Crickets was of utmost importance). The early songs give away to a string of great classics like "That'll Be the Day" (inspired by an expression used repeatedly by John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards's in John Ford's great western THE SEARCHERS), "Peggy Sue," "It's So Easy," "True Love Ways," and great covers like "I Guess It Doesn't Matter Anymore."
But as I said, the main reason to get this set is the glorious posthumous songs, left undubbed and precisely as he left them instead of the rather pedestrian re-recordings of them done later by Jack Hansen. "Peggy Sue Got Married" is one of the greatest musical sequels ever penned and it is impossible to hear "Learning the Game" without instantly concluding it is a great song. I especially love his wonderful cover of the Stoller and Liebe'sr "Smokey Joe's Café." The latter features a very strange guitar run that you at first think may have been an error, except that he then plays it precisely the same way a second time through. These songs break my heart every time I hear them. His wife was unaware of their existence when he died so that when they were discovered they literally were as if Buddy were speaking to us from the grave. As great as Buddy Holly was when he died, it is obvious that he hadn't come even close to actualizing his potential. Don McLean famously memorialized his death as the day the music died. Without question his death robbed us of more great music than any other. While it is possible that Buddy Holly's greatest musical achievements might have laid before him, what he managed to achieve easily ranks him with the greatest of rock and roll's founding fathers.
If you don't own a Buddy Holly album, you need to get this. And if you own a Buddy Holly album you need to get this (unless you own THE COMPLETE BUDDY HOLLY on LP). This is hands down some of the greatest music ever released. And that packaging doesn't' affect that at all.
Memorial Collection (Dig) (Slip) Poster
February 3, 2009, marks the 50th Anniversary of "The Day The Music Died," the anniversary of the crash of the flight that took the lives of `50s rockers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. Finally, the vault of rare Buddy Holly tracks will be opened wide for this multi-disc set to be released on 02/10/09. Memorial Collection is the defining package for all Buddy fans new and old.Pop Music CDs
Music Genres
Top music charts in Pop Music CDs
Yvette Freeman - Dinah Was (L.A. Theatre Works Audio Theatre Collection)Release date: 2005-04-12; Music CD
Best price: $20.02
Price in other shops:
Twin Sisters Productions - Building Character Music CDTWIN SISTERS PRODUCTIONS; Release date: 2007-01-01; Music CD
Best price: $9.99
Price in other shops:
Bernadette Peters in ConcertDVD
Best price: $129.99
Everything Must Go/ Two Against Natureby Steely Dan
Published: 2003; Music CD
Scattered Ashesby Ihsahn / Emperor
Candlelight Records/Emi; Published: 2009-07-28; Audio CD; Book
Best price: $9.75
Price in other shops:
![Christmas at the Biltmore Estate [VHS] Image](/images/Christmas-at-the-Biltmore-Estate-VHS-076700437X-X.jpg){kind=small}
Christmas at the Biltmore Estate [VHS]A&E Home Video; Release date: 1998-09-04; VHS Tape; VHS Video
Best price: $17.36
Price in other shops:
The Shadow: Rare Radio Gems (Rare Radio Gems)Release date: 2002-09-01; Published: 2002-09-01; Music CD
Best price: $20.00
Price in other shops:
On the Shoulders of Giants, Vol. 1: An Audio & Musical Journey Through the Harlem Renaissanceby Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Release date: 2011-09-06; Published: 2008; Music CD
Best price: $1.98
Price in other shops:
Francis Durbridge, Paul Temple & The Gilbert Case - Radio ShowRelease date: 2003-05-12; Music CD
Best price: $21.49
Price in other shops:
The Serenaders - My One and Only YouRelease date: 2011-05-28; Music CD
Best price: $8.76
Price in other shops:
Top Rated Albums
Elvis Presley - Elvis Is Back! (Legacy Edition)Release date: 2011-03-08; Music CD
Best price: $12.76
Price in other shops:
Rolling Stones: Some Girls Live In Texas '78Release date: 2011-11-21; DVD
Best price: $8.99
Price in other shops:
Little Richard - Very Best Of Little RichardRelease date: 2008-07-29; Music CD
Best price: $6.00
Price in other shops:
Buddy Holly - The Best Of Buddy Holly: 20th Century Masters (Millennium Collection)Release date: 1999-04-20; Music CD
Best price: $3.89
Price in other shops:
The Buddy Holly StoryBUSEY,GARY; Release date: 1999-09-07; DVD
Best price: $3.71
Price in other shops:
The Real Buddy Holly StoryKultur; Release date: 2004-10-26; DVD
Best price: $7.87
Price in other shops:
Rave On Buddy HollyRelease date: 2011-06-28; Music CD
Best price: $7.95
Price in other shops:
Buddy Holly - Down the Line: The Rarities (Dig) (Slip)Release date: 2009-01-27; Music CD
Best price: $11.10
Price in other shops:
Buddy Holly - Buddy Holly CollectionBuddy; Release date: 1993-09-28; Music CD
Best price: $22.93
Price in other shops:
Listen To Me: Buddy HollyRelease date: 2011-09-06; Music CD
Best price: $9.91
Price in other shops: