Whenever three or four kids get together with an electric guitar or two, a bass and a drum kit and decide to write their own songs, whether they decide to call themselves the Beatles, the Ramones, Nirvana or something that they’re still arguing about, they are essentially following a template laid down by Jerry Allison and his friends in the city of Lubbock, Texas. That was back in a distant time when Dwight D Eisenhower was just starting his second term as president of the US.
Allison, who has died aged 82, was the drummer with the Crickets, who became known around the world in 1957, when their song That’ll Be the Day became one of the defining hits of the first rock’n’roll era. He had co-written it with Buddy Holly, their bespectacled singer and lead guitarist. A year later Holly left the group to pursue a solo career, and in 1959 he was killed in a plane crash, but his name and that of the group remain inextricably linked through such hits as Peggy Sue, Well … All Right and Think It Over, all of which Allison co-wrote.
