HOLLY, BUDDY

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 stereo 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.

This is an import product, and as such may take longer to source stock, we estimate that despatch will take 14-20 days after ordering, click here for more information regarding import products.