Buddy Holly

By the time Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story ends its 6-week run at the Walnut Street Theatre next Sunday, about 50,000 people will have been told how a young, sexually frustrated musician was responsible for creating one of the most famous paeans to a girl in the history of rock and roll. In the play, Holly and his band, the Crickets, are in a studio in Clovis, N.M., to record a catchy song titled "Cindy Lou. " But drummer Jerry Allison balks; he wants the song named after his girlfriend.

Few stars have shone so briefly and so brightly as Buddy Holly. The career of the legendary rocker began in Lubbock, Texas, and ended 18 months later, on Feb. 3, 1959, in a fiery plane crash in a snow-covered Iowa cornfield when Holly was 22 years old. Since then his life and, even more, his music have become myth. Now Philadelphia-born Paul Hipp is resurrecting this "dead rock star from Texas who wears glasses," as he plainly puts it, in Buddy: The Buddy Holly Story, which opened last night on Broadway after a successful London run. The colorful show - a cross between straight biography and rousing oldies concert - gets the audience wildly clapping and dancing in their seats to such simple, compelling tunes of Holly's as "Peggy Sue," "That'll Be the Day" and "Rave On. " Backstage the other day in his tiny dressing room, an excited Hipp, 25, is smoking cigarettes, jiggling his long legs, bouncing around.

"Why do you want to play this rock-and-roll?" splutters an exasperated Hipockets Duncan, the No. 1 disc jockey and man-about-music in Lubbock, Texas, back in the mid-'50s. "You can make yourself into a big country star. " But Charles Hardin "Buddy" Holly didn't want to be a big country star, and a disastrous recording session in Nashville persuaded him he was right. Which is why he kept looking for a hospitable studio and eventually found one in Clovis, N.M., where he and his band, the Crickets, laid down a rock-and-roll song called "That'll Be the Day. " And the rest is you-know-what.

What you can see at the Hall of Fame: The shades Roy Orbison used to check out the next "Pretty Woman" The handwritten lyrics Jimi Hendrix penned for (and probably in a) "Purple Haze" The jacket John Lennon wore for "Sergeant Pepper" A high school diploma Buddy Holly probably chucked into his closet when he got big in music Grace Slick's dress from the original "Woodstock" (suspiciously without mudstains) George Clinton's "Atomic Dog" shoes The dress Tina Turner wore in the film "Tommy" Grandmaster Flash's Kangol cap (no, it's not red with lightning bolts)

Even if you blinked, you couldn't miss Gary Busey's appearance in "The Firm. " He's only on the screen for a few minutes, but his off-the-scale performance as cop-turned-felon-turned-private-investigator Eddie Lomax is impossible to miss. High-energy performances come naturally to Busey, who burst onto the scene in 1978 with a frenetic performance as rocker Buddy Holly in "The Buddy Holly Story. " "I'm extremely gifted in the energy department," Busey said of his skills as a performer.

In the nerd-rock tradition of Talking Heads, Devo and, yes,, Buddy Holly, Weezer pushes the boundary of geekiness. Thursday night at the Electric Factory, band leader Rivers Cuomo performed his relentlessly quirky, catchy pop with about as much confidence as a high school freshman on his first date. Musically the band was impressive - especially Cuomo, who played flawless leads and sang simultaneously. "Buddy Holly," "Say It Ain't So," "The Sweater Song" and "El Scorcho" proved that he has mastered the art of writing top-notch, addictive hooks and turned the set into a virtual time capsule of '90s radio.

Columbia Pictures might have a huge hit on its hands. "La Bamba," Columbia's $6.2-million film based on the life of the late Hispanic rocker Ritchie Valens, received a standing ovation last week at a screening for those attending the Fifth National Hispanic Media Conference and Expo. The group represents more than 1,200 American-Hispanic professional journalists. The screening, attended by the film's writer-director Luis Valdez, its star, Lou Diamond Phillips, and other cast members, was frequently interrupted by applause.

Is this the real Dan Quayle? While the spin patrol works overtime to convince us that Sen. Dan Quayle of Indiana reads more Important Books than his veep-debate opponent, now comes word that Quayle dug some heavy electric guitar tracks when he was a DePauw University frat pledge. We're talking black-light, tie-dyed, oh-wow-man kind of groovy. We're talking "WHAT'S THAT SPELL?" and what's that smell? It seems that when Quayle wasn't playing golf, toiling for the campus Republicans and attending to his National Guard duty, he was listening to . . . Jimi Hendrix.

One of Nashville's more intriguing "new country" acts, Radney Foster and Bill Lloyd mix traditional country with Beatles and Buddy Holly-esque pop- rock, aiming to draw from the best of both worlds. Friday's show had its moments. On the Byrds-like "I'll Always Be Here Loving You," Lloyd's sweeping guitar and Foster's twangy voice sounded at once comforting and assertive. Rave-ups such as "Faster and Louder" had plenty of snap, and Lloyd's biting guitar lines were consistently cushioned by Pete Finney's warm, swelling pedal-steel playing.

This week's big video news, the dual release of La Bamba (1987) and The Buddy Holly Story (1978), has been overshadowed by the long-delayed arrival, after much legal wrangling, of Oliver Stone's Platoon. PLATOON (1986) (HBO) $99.95. 111 minutes. Platoon grabs you by the scruff of the neck and drops you into the sludge of a foxhole in 1967 South Vietnam. The power - and the gory - of Oliver Stone's movie about the grunts of the 25th Infantry is that Stone rubs your nose in the stench of carnage and bets you can't outflank your enemy.