At 1 a.m. Feb. 3, 1959, a four-seat Beechcraft Bonanza took off from Iowa's Mason City airport in a light snow. It was headed to Moorhead, Minn. Minutes later it crashed in a cornfield, instantly killing its young pilot and his three famous passengers, Buddy Holly, 22; Richie Valens, 17, and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, 28.
"The crash first scraped the ground at a spot in the middle of the field, breaking off one wing and other parts of the plane," Clear Lake [Iowa] Mirror Reporter reported. "It then bounced and skidded about 200 yards further to the northwest, scattering wreckage and debris along the way until it piled into a wire fence along the north end of the pasture. The plane was completely demolished in the crash, but did not burn."
Hours earlier, the three stars had performed at Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake before a sellout crowd as part of a multi-state Winter Dance Party tour of the Midwest.
It had been a miserable tour plagued by bad weather. Holly chartered the plane, feeling he needed a respite from the cold, bone-jarring bus. Originally he planned to take his band mates--guitarist Tommy Allsup and bassist Waylon Jennings--with him on the plane. But Jennings gave up his seat to Richardson, who had a cold, and Allsup ended up losing a coin flip with Valens.
That plane crash, rock 'n' roll's first tragedy (if we don't count Johnny Ace's Christmas Day suicide in 1954 or Carl Perkins' career-deflecting car crash in 1956), shocked a naive generation into the realization they were not immortal. As songwriter Don McLean put it in his windy ballad "American Pie," it was "the day the music died."
Although it didn't.
Innocence is a renewable resource. Americans have lost it dozens of times over the last 60 years. There was JFK and Vietnam and RFK and MLK and Watergate and the Challenger disaster and 9/11. Every one of those signal events wounded us and made us believe the world could never be the same. But eventually it all swings back. Something like equilibrium returns. We can't go on. But we do, and five or 10 years later we look back on all those moments that supposedly changed us forever, and they feel like a dream.
Still, most cliches have something that feels true. We might be instructed by the death of idols and the indifference of heaven. It might teach us, if nothing else, humility. As the meaning-seeking animal, the beast that needs stories, we are compelled to find lessons in catastrophe. We have to reckon that we've earned something. Innocence lost, something gained. Maturity? Wisdom?
Buddy Holly's crash was a harbinger, a signal of the end of that first generation of rock 'n' roll. Elvis would soon be in the Army, Little Richard already had religion, Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry were being hounded by scandal. The generation of teen-idol performers who began to emerge after the founding fathers faltered threatened to swing rock 'n' roll back in the finger-poppin' direction of Pat Boone.
A 16-year-old kid named Robert Thomas Velline--who used the stage name Bobby Vee--filled in for Holly the night after the plane crash (amazingly, the promoters refused to cancel the tour). Holly's crash turned out to be Vee's big break; the death of the genuine fertilized the growth of the imitative.
I never paid too much attention to Buddy Holly until I was almost 20, and Gary Busey starred in a movie about him.
Busey was great in that film, but the Stratocasters were all wrong; Holly's fingerboards were maple, not rosewood, and the bigger headstock didn't come along until CBS bought Fender, six years after Holly died. You'd think they'd have gotten that right considering how important Holly was to the popularity of the world's most popular guitar, but movie people care about some things and let other things go. They made sure the cars were period correct, but I suppose they figured that people didn't care that much about guitars.
Anyway, Buddy Holly was vogue in the late '70s; he's had a least a couple of revivals since. Compared with a lot of them he didn't leave all that much behind; you can pretty much swallow his entire catalog whole. I've got 130 tracks in my collection, and there are probably a couple of duplicate songs in there as well as some song fragments and alternate versions; you could burn the gist of his career to a single CD.
In a way, it was the perfect pop career. From the Panglossian perspective, Holly's martyrdom was for the best--it sealed his myth for as long as there are people nostalgic for pre-Beatles rock 'n' roll. Buddy Holly died before he got old.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
MovieStyle on 02/03/2019