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Liner Note Author: Dave Penny. Among record collectors and rock & rollers, The Complete Buddy Holly is a holy grail of dream CD reissues. It only hurts worse that there was a Complete Buddy Holly box issued on LP in 1979, just three years before the debut of the CD format and roughly ten years before the great CD reissue boom (it was released in the U.S. in 1981). Ten years later, complete box sets of rock & roll were a rule, not an exception as they were in 1979, but Holly's work didn't make the jump to digital -- nor did it arrive in the next two decades as box sets proliferated promiscuously, since Holly's catalog was caught in some kind of murky legal limbo. Such legal niceties evaporated in Europe once the deadlines for copyrights passed 50 years after the original recording, paving the way for legal but not endorsed complete collections such as Not Fade Away: Buddy Holly 1957 - The Complete Recordings, a triple-disc set containing all known surviving Holly recordings from that seminal year. It has to be said that this is not the first time that there has been unauthorized yet loving assembly of Holly's complete recordings. Toward the end of the '90s, the bootleg company The Purple Chick assembled a mammoth ten-disc set of Buddy, collecting all the demos and masters, outtakes, live cuts, interviews, sessions, and songs given away, creating their own stereos mixes and even compiling a "Buddy's Record Collection" CD. This drifted into obsessive territory, but such compulsive collecting is not only the nature of this kind of project, it also comes hand in hand when an artist so major has such a small body of work: it lends itself to combing over minute details, as that's all that's left. Not Fade Away: Buddy Holly 1957 - The Complete Recordings, like its preceding Hollybilly: Buddy Holly 1956 - The Complete Recordings, mimics the approach of the bootleg The Complete Buddy Holly, rounding up all known existing tapes from that pivotal year of 1957, including master takes, alternates, demos, undubbed tapes, live shows, interviews, and promo tapes, plus studio sessions featuring Buddy supporting other singers. Needless to say, there is some amazing music here -- this is the year of "I'm Lookin' for Someone to Love," "That'll Be the Day," "Maybe Baby," "Words of Love," "Not Fade Away," "Peggy Sue," and "Oh Boy!," after all -- but this isn't the place to hear these songs and not even the place to appreciate Holly's astonishing artistic growth because it's too cluttered with ephemera, the kind that is only interesting to fanatics or scholars. By that standard, there are many interesting things here, but it's often plagued by uneven fidelity, and the sequencing that piles up as many as four takes of one song in a row is not user-friendly. But this isn't meant for casual listening; it's a clearinghouse of Holly, and for those who want to dig deep, it's nice to have it in wide circulation instead of bootleg. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
