(Credits: Far Out / Bent Rej / Alamy)
Sun 28 September 2025 17:30, UK
On a frosty night in January 1959, George Harrison’s idol, Bob Dylan, was watching his other idol, Buddy Holly, perform live.
The Beatles guitarist never got the chance to enjoy the same experience, because by the time Harrison landed in America, greeted by untold pandemonium, it was, to some extent, Holly’s tragically departed shoes that they were stepping into. In fact, Dylan happened to be at one of his final shows.
“I saw Buddy Holly two or three nights before he died. I saw him in Duluth, at The Armory. He played there with Link Wray. I don’t remember the Big Bopper. Maybe he’d gone off by the time I came in. But I saw Ritchie Valens,” he recalled in a Rolling Stone interview in 1984.
“And Buddy Holly, yeah. He was great,“ he added. “He was incredible. I mean, I’ll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand. And he died –it must have been a week after that. It was unbelievable.”
It was, in fact, three days later, on February 3rd, when he perished. But although his stint at the pinnacle of pop culture was inauspiciously fleeting, his impact was everlasting. As Dylan put it himself some 58 years later, when he became the first musician to collect a Nobel Prize, “Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype, everything I wasn’t and wanted to be,” he said.
Fatefully adding, “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.” Perhaps that’s more literal than we could ever know.
George Harrison performing with The Beatles. (Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
The impact he had on Harrison was much the same. In the same manner that he had struck Dylan, his future hero, Holly had been the first to make Harrison realise that it was possible for an ordinary kid, a kid in glasses no less, to take the world by the scruff of the neck and have them singing ‘That’ll Be the Day’.
“One of the greatest people for me, was Buddy Holly. He sang, wrote his own tunes and was a guitar player,” Harrison said. You could argue that more than anybody, Holly cast the mould that Harrison saw himself in. He was a sensitive, everyday sort of rockstar who could do everything himself.
So, it’s no surprise that when Harrison was curating the compilation CD titled, George Harrison’s Jukebox, which contained his 25 favourite songs, he opted for ‘That’ll Be the Day’ to be chief among them.
In a strange twist, the fate of the song was very uncertain. It might have had one of the greatest impacts on pop culture imaginable, inspiring Dylan, The Beatles, and plenty of others, but the first producer to work on it described it as “the worst song [he’d] ever heard.”
Holly and his Crickets had, in fairness, just filtered out of the John Wayne movie The Searchers, before turning his character’s catchphrase into a song in a flash. But even after the criticism, they knew they were onto something. Maybe there’s some of that tenacity codified into the song, too, and that’s why it resonated so much with Harrison. Because lord knows, by rights, his nickname should’ve been The Defiant One.
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