1001 Albums: #8. The Crickets - The "Chriping" Crickets

The Crickets - The "Chirping" Crickets
Brunswick, 1957



As an indie rock devotee, The "Chirping" Crickets feels like patient zero of nerdy white dudes playing rock n' roll music. Buddy Holly has been an alluring figure to me since I was a kid. As previously mentioned (and something I will probably mention in every other post until we get out of the 1960s), the first music I came to love on my own was oldies. When I was 10 or 11 I vividly remember getting a couple of oldies compilations for my birthday. I remember the confused looks on the faces of some of the dads at the party. It was decidedly uncool, but KC's erstwhile Oldies 95 radio station was all I really listened to. This was the late 90s, and I'd soon crawl out of my cozy sock hop swamp into the actual swamp of rap rock, but those were halcyon days of establishing a musical bedrock. The clean, chiming electric guitars here are what really do it for me. There's just something undeniable about songs like "Oh Boy" and "That'll Be the Day." You can hear a whole branch of pop music history sprouting on those songs. You can practically see the artists that would take that sound further sitting by the radio hearing those songs for the first time.