Whipped Cream Difficulties

Jerry Allison, drummer with the Crickets.

Mr. Allison was still a teenager in Lubbock, Texas, when he began playing with Mr. Holly, who was three years older and had already made a tentative start on a music career, releasing a few records in Nashville that did not do well. Back in Lubbock, he, Mr. Allison, Niki Sullivan on guitar (soon replaced by Sonny Curtis, Tommy Allsup and others) and Joe B. Mauldin on bass began honing a sound that drew on Elvis Presley and on country and, especially, Black music.

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Then, in May 1956, he and Mr. Holly went to see a new John Wayne movie, “The Searchers,” in which one of Mr. Wayne’s most memorable lines was “That’ll be the day.”
Days later, according to an account written for the Library of Congress, Mr. Holly suggested that he and Mr. Allison write a song together, and Mr. Allison, imitating the Wayne line, said, “That’ll be the day.”
“Right away, Buddy starts fiddling around with it,” Mr. Allison told the Lansing newspaper. “In about a half-hour, we had it.”
Mr. Holly cut a country version of the song in Nashville that was unloved (a producer there is said to have called it “the worst song I’ve ever heard”), but in 1957 he and the Crickets, as his Lubbock group was called, recorded a rock ’n’ roll version that became a national hit and remained in Billboard’s Top 30 for three months. Mr. Holly, Mr. Allison and the producer who recorded that version, Norman Petty, got the songwriting credit, and in 2005 the record was selected for the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry.

Gerald Potterton. He directed the 1981 “Heavy Metal”. Other credits include some work on “Yellow Submarine” and “The Railrodder“. (I have previously covered that Buster Keaton film in this space, but the videos are no longer available on the ‘Tube. There is a version that’s not from the Canadian NFB, but I can’t vouch for it.)