Not Fade Away:
Fifty Years after Clear Lake, Buddy Holly Lives
Fifty Years after Clear Lake, Buddy Holly Lives
I watch my step walking home from work, avoiding treacherous patches of black ice on the sidewalk. At the corner of Pine Street and 23rd, I turn south, wishing myself five thousand miles away in the direction I'm heading. A warm house awaits me, a kind-hearted woman and a bowl of hot soup; life is good. Apart from the weather, why should I complain, let alone despair? Really, I tell myself, what is it? And then I remember.
It happened at this time of year, with this same weather. Around one o'clock in the morning, on February 3, 1959, a small chartered airplane fell from the sky near Clear Lake, Iowa, smashing into a cornfield shortly after takeoff. Grainy photographs of the aftermath flash into my consciousness in black and white: the cockpit crumpled around the silent, steel engine, the reporters, police, and aviation authorities milling about, and three broken bodies strewn across the snowy field. The dead pilot remains out of sight, trapped inside the wreckage. "Oh god," I say to no one, alone on the street except for a man shoveling out his car and a crow passing overhead. Having once made the mistake of reading a detailed account of the accident, I struggle to dispel the images from my mind's eye. He died. They all died. I'll feel this way for at least a week. I am in the throes of an inconsolable Buddy Holly funk.
It may seem strange to mourn a man I never met, a singer who died more than five years before I was born, who lived only half as long as I have, to date. But then I'm a pop music obsessive. I've read James Brown's autobiography three times. Thousands of songs on mp3, CD, cassette, and vinyl crowd my shelves—especially vinyl, since I'm old-school, lo-fi, only grudgingly digital. Then there are my guitars, keyboards, and odd items of percussion, which listening to all this music makes me want to pick up and play. No shortage of noisemakers in my house. So why is Buddy Holly so special, when I have bossa nova, obscure British psychedelia, Atlantic, Stax, and Motown waiting to be placed on the turntable?
Of all the stars in the first generation of rock and roll, Buddy seemed the most accessible. No kid in the fifties could dream of being Elvis, impossibly cool and handsome with his curling lips and swiveling hips. Jerry Lee Lewis figured as a force of nature, pounding the piano not only with his fingers but with his fists and feet. Chuck Berry was a poet, a duck-walking hillbilly cat from Missouri and the true father of rock and roll. Little Richard, well, he was Little Richard. Now Buddy . . . you could imagine Buddy Holly as a kid in your neighborhood, as a guy in English class junior year. You wouldn't mind Buddy dating your sister, or so you might suppose. And his music! Buddy wrote beautiful songs, tender ballads and exultant rockers, all delivered in that distinctive voice with the patented hiccup at just the right moment. If you're a novice guitar player, some of Buddy's simpler songs offer a perfect introduction to the instrument: three chords and a story to tell. Like "Words of Love," the first song I learned on guitar at fifteen, and have practiced ever since. Strum these major chords—A, D, and E—and you're on your way.
Band plays "Words of Love"
A young person could carry that song like a prayer; I know I did, for years. A key theme in Buddy's songs is the promise of love, the certain knowledge that with patience and faith, what Buddy called "True Love Ways," one will find love in this mortal life, transcendent, incarnate, and real. Listen again to songs like "Take Your Time" or "Wishing." In the classic "Everyday," Buddy conveys the sentiment musically as well as verbally, having chosen the celesta, or keyboard xylophone, as the lead instrument. The childlike sound of the celesta moves the song through sophisticated chord changes, while giving the lyrics sonic expression: "Every day it's getting closer / Going faster than a rollercoaster / Love like yours will surely come my way."
Band plays "Everyday"
Buddy was born and raised in Lubbock, Texas, a city of fundamentalist churches and honky tonk bars. His family struggled during the Great Depression but after Buddy's older brothers returned from service in World War II, their fortunes improved. Buddy started on guitar at age eight and learned fast. As much as he liked fishing, hunting, and hiking in the west Texas plains, Buddy loved to sing and strum, or else listen to country and western, black gospel, or rhythm and blues on the radio. As a teenager, he got into trouble like a lot of boys—alcohol, cigarettes, and sex being his transgressions of choice, as with his friends, for whom James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift set the image for adolescent rebellion. But music increasingly occupied his thoughts and his time. He played in a bluegrass duo, playing shows around Lubbock and sharpening his technique.
Then in 1955, Elvis came to town, and rock and roll loomed as Buddy's destiny. He opened for Elvis at one show, and observing the style and musicianship of Elvis and his band, redoubled his efforts as a songwriter and performer. 1956 began with Buddy recording in Nashville, in a series of sessions that didn't work out because the producers tried to force him into a country mold. He struggled that year, not only with finding the right people to work with, but with life in Lubbock. His girlfriend Echo (how perfect is that?) left him, making it clear that she wanted an ordinary life of home and church, not rock and roll and the road. Buddy loved Echo, and took her departure hard. At the same time, he was becoming uncomfortable in the South under Jim Crow. I don't want to claim too much for rock and roll as an agent of social change, but it changed Buddy. "Despite the white-supremacist, homophobic society he grew up in," biographer Ellis Amburn writes, Buddy Holly "cleansed himself of racial prejudice and macho snobberies and began to embrace people who were different from him, notably blacks, Hispanics, and gays." His friendship with Little Richard alone stands as a statement against bigotry and dogma. The Baptist church to which Buddy belonged would have had several reasons to condemn Richard, whom Buddy brought to his parents' house one night, threatening never to return if they didn't welcome his friend. They let him in.
Success came in 1957. That February, he recorded a couple tracks in Clovis, New Mexico, working with a producer who insisted on sharing unearned co-writing credit, publishing rights, even Buddy's power-of-attorney. In a hurry for success, Buddy put his name on the paper, signing away a fortune. Released in May, the fruit of that session became a number one hit and Buddy's signature number: "That'll Be the Day."
Band plays "That'll Be the Day"
In his last twenty months, Buddy founded The Crickets, wrote and recorded prolifically, toured the United States, England, and Australia, and made television appearances to promote a string of hits. He started spending more time in New York, to escape provincial Lubbock and immerse himself in the music business. There his songs about the promise of love turned out to be true. In March 1958, back in town after the British tour, he met María Elena Santiago, who worked for Buddy's publisher. He proposed marriage on their first date, she accepted, and they married in August. They moved into a fashionable high rise on Fifth Avenue, where they hosted musician friends like The Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, and Waylon Jennings.
Buddy's creativity flowered in his last months, as he and María Elena reveled in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, taking in poetry readings, jazz, and folk singers. He experimented with arrangements, worked with saxophone great King Curtis, and became the first rocker to record with a full orchestra, on numbers like "Raining in my Heart," "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," and "True Love Ways," his love poem to María Elena and one of the great wedding songs of all time. Writers and English professors may notice the lyrics' perfect iambic meter, and musicians spot the diminished seventh chord shimmering in the chorus. The rest of us just feel it, the glow of that golden autumn, 1958 in New York.
Band plays "True Love Ways"
Another of Buddy's late interests was a plan to open his own recording studios, where musicians would find a supportive atmosphere and fair financial dealings. He especially wanted to produce Latino artists like his friend Ritchie Valens. Although Native American writer Sherman Alexie includes Buddy Holly in a list of people he wishes had been Indian, Buddy was closer to Latino culture. Being from west Texas, which was once and in many ways still is part of Mexico, Buddy has a distinctive accent, what jazz players call a "Latin tinge," in his guitar playing. Then there was his marriage to María Elena, born in Puerto Rico, who introduced him to flamenco guitar, inspiring him to take classical guitar lessons and to start learning Spanish. All of this gives context to his friendship with Ritchie, who pretty much invented rock en español with his adaptation of the Mexican folk tune "La Bamba."
Band plays "La Bamba"
While Buddy had tired of the almost constant touring—the lousy buses, the bad hotels, and worse food—financial necessity forced his hand. His former manager would not relinquish his earnings; his latest records, as good as they were, did not sell as well as he had hoped; and he had bills to pay. After first rejecting the offer, Buddy agreed to headline the Winter Dance Party, a tour of the upper Midwest featuring up-and-coming acts like Ritchie, Dion, and J.P. Richardson, The Big Bopper, with his big hit "Chantilly Lace." Since he had parted ways with the original Crickets, Buddy put together a touring band, with Waylon on bass and the nimble-fingered Tommy Allsup on lead guitar.
The tour was a disaster from start to finish. It involved twenty-four straight days of travel and performance, starting on January 23 in Milwaukee and then proceeding with a completely illogical order of destinations that magnified the distances involved. On top of that, the winter of 1958 to 1959 was one of the worst on record, with regular subzero temperatures and snowstorms. The promoters had accepted the lowest bid on coach service, resulting in a bus with a worn-out engine, broken heater, and windows that wouldn't stay shut. En route from Duluth to Appleton, near Pine Lake, Wisconsin, the bus broke down and the musicians waited two hours in the freezing cold, burning newspapers for heat. The drummer suffered frostbite and stayed behind in a hospital.
But the concerts were another matter. Buddy and the others may have been tired, cold, and homesick, but they put on fantastic shows for the teens in Kenosha, Eau Claire, Mankato, and all the other towns they visited. Rock and roll might have been struggling nationally, with the radio payola scandal and record companies moving toward tamer talent, but real rock and roll, the big beat, was just sinking into the consciousness of young people in the Midwest. Crowds in both the cities and small towns responded ecstatically, dancing, singing along, or simply staring at their heroes, absorbing every note. A kid named Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota attended the Winter Dance Party on January 31, and saw his own destiny reveal itself on the stage. We know him as Bob Dylan, who along with The Beatles, led the second wave of rock in the 1960s. In accepting his Grammy Award for Best Album in 1998, Dylan said, "I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him . . . and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way."
Band plays "It's So Easy"
The matinee in Appleton was canceled, but they played an evening show in Green Bay on February 1, then set off on the 350 mile trip to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, a last-minute engagement booked on what was supposed to have been their one day off.
I've been to the Surf, which holds a Fifties in February weekend every year on the anniversary of the Winter Dance Party of 1959. The year I went, Tommy Allsup played, backed by a couple Buddy Holly look-alikes who sounded amazing. The crowd mostly consisted of people who had been teenagers in the fifties. Some may have attended the Clear Lake show in 1959. Women in their sixties danced in poodle skirts and saddle shoes, screaming when one of the young but distinctly retro performers did the duckwalk or played a solo with his guitar behind his head. Members of The British Buddy Holly Appreciation Society stood solemnly in the wings; you knew them by their scarves, which had the name of their organization knitted into the fabric.
The whole brilliant scene made the original show assume even more mythic grandeur. Imagine The Big Bopper on stage, telephone in hand, singing the choruses and talking the verses to "Chantilly Lace," spoken to the unseen girlfriend who must be saying something pretty tempting and vivid to him over the line, as he agrees to pick her up at eight sharp, even though he's broke.
Band plays "Chantilly Lace"
After the show, Buddy called María Elena from a pay phone inside the Surf Ballroom. He had decided to charter a plane to Fargo, North Dakota, to arrive early for the next show, across the state line in Moorhead, Minnesota. He couldn't face another cold bus trip, five hundred miles this time, and besides, the musicians needed clean laundry. He could take care of that and have a good rest. The passenger list changed more than once. Buddy's sidemen, Waylon and Tommy, had first dibs, but J.P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens had taken ill and decided they wanted to fly. Tommy and Ritchie flipped a coin; Tommy called tails and lost. Waylon gave up his seat to the Bopper; when he told Buddy of the switch, Buddy quipped, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up!" Waylon replied, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes!" Years later he almost forgave himself for that joke.
They headed to the Mason City airport in a snowstorm. J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper), age 28, Ritchie Valens age 17, and Buddy Holly age 22, left the ground at one a.m. February 3 in a single-engine Cessna piloted by 21-year-old Roger Peterson, who had been working for seventeen hours straight and who lacked night flight certification.
Band plays "Learning the Game"
If there were a book on Midwestern gothic, a compendium of pioneers losing their minds in the dead of winter and shooting the cows, burning down the barn; Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip; shipwrecks on the Great Lakes; tornadoes, floods, and blizzards; and psychopathic killers with names like Starkweather, it ought to include this crash. All manner of random acts of natural and human violence taking place on the northern interior plains of this continent would appear in one chapter or another. Why did Buddy die? Is there any coming to terms with something, anything, so unacceptable?
Bear with me for a moment as I speculate on this theme. The Algonquian peoples of this region and further north spoke of a figure called the windigo, described as an emaciated, filthy, deranged cannibal creature of the snowy wastes of winter. Driven by an insatiable hunger for human flesh, the windigo wandered the woods and fields in search of prey. It's kind of like The Night of the Living Dead: those eaten by windigos might become windigos. Also, anyone forced by circumstance to resort to cannibalism to survive would become a windigo. Better to die than to let that happen.
All right, where am I going with this? Well, the windigo is an archetype for our time as well as that of the pre-contact indigenous peoples. Wisconsin has produced its share of infamous murderers, a couple of them were cannibals. I need not mention their names. They were windigos. Remember the scene in the movie Fargo, when one killer is feeding the body of the other killer into the wood chipper? Both of them are windigos, as is the man who hired them to kidnap his wife. But so too is that man's father-in-law, a wealthy businessman who refused him a loan he easily could have afforded. "I'm not talking about your damn word, Jerry," the old man says. That's a windigo talking. The windigo not only personifies the deathly cold of winter and the primal taboo of cannibalism, but also greed, which lies at the heart of most human suffering—rotten, ravenous, selfish, destructive greed, which most of all hungers for young flesh. So Buddy's former manager, who told him in their last meeting that he would see Buddy dead before giving him a cent of his earnings, he too was a windigo. And the promoters who sent those teenage and twenty-something performers out into the cold in a shabby bus, adding a show on their day off and continuing the tour even after the tragedy at Clear Lake, they were windigos, as well. The windigos got Buddy. Yes, he was young and reckless, but the chain of events leading up to his death might have been broken at any number of moments by any number of people, most of them older than him but not apparently wiser. He should have been back in New York with María Elena.
But anger burns itself out, leaving us with the tragic loss of young life, four grieving families, four wives or girlfriends, and fans around the world in shock. Then there was the promise of Buddy's talent, all the music he didn't live to create, all his unfulfilled plans. He considered acting. He hoped to record with Ray Charles, and to act on his admiration of Mahalia Jackson by making a gospel album. People speculate on where else he might have taken the music. Would he have simply gone country, perhaps becoming by now an elder statesman of American roots music, like fellow Texan Willie Nelson, joining Willie and Waylon in the rebel country supergroup The Highwaymen? Perhaps, but Buddy was a rocker. He would have responded to the British Invasion that he inspired—The Beatles named themselves partly in honor of The Crickets, and used Buddy's songwriting and original four-piece band arrangement as a template for their own history-changing career. Given the quality of his work at age twenty-two, what might he have done at twenty-seven? Or today, when he would have been seventy-two?
Speculation doesn't make me feel any better, though.Shuffling home in the snow, I remember that literary dictionaries define the elegy as a work of literature written in memorial of someone who has died or something that has passed, or more broadly, about the sobering fact of our inescapable mortality. "Only in the realm of praise should lament walk," Rilke said, and for that reason an elegy must do more than express mere sorrow and loss. It must evoke the best qualities of those who have gone on, and give us courage and consolation. So where is the solace in this story?
The only remedy—there is no cure—for a Buddy Holly funk is to play the music. So on that long cold sidewalk of my discontent, I finally arrive home, kiss my wife, turn on the stereo, open my guitar case, and come back to life.
What most appeals to me, finally, about Buddy Holly, about rock and roll at its best, is the sheer romanticism of the music: its joy, its defiance and humor, its simultaneous idealism and physicality. Like all Romantic art, rock and roll insists that youth has its own wisdom, to be heeded as well as that which only comes with age. Certain articles of faith follow from this premise, which I believed long before I could phrase them as follows:
I believe in love at first sight.
I believe that love is stronger than death.
I count among the impoverished those unwilling to risk sentimentality. To quote Neruda, "moonlight, the swan at dusk, "my beloved,' are, beyond question, the elemental and essential matter of poetry."
I agree with Duke Ellington, who said that there are only two kinds of music: "good music and the other kind."
And yes, Don McLean, I believe in rock and roll, and that music can save my mortal soul, and . . .
I believe that Buddy Holly lives.
Band plays "Not Fade Away" and "Well All Right"
It happened at this time of year, with this same weather. Around one o'clock in the morning, on February 3, 1959, a small chartered airplane fell from the sky near Clear Lake, Iowa, smashing into a cornfield shortly after takeoff. Grainy photographs of the aftermath flash into my consciousness in black and white: the cockpit crumpled around the silent, steel engine, the reporters, police, and aviation authorities milling about, and three broken bodies strewn across the snowy field. The dead pilot remains out of sight, trapped inside the wreckage. "Oh god," I say to no one, alone on the street except for a man shoveling out his car and a crow passing overhead. Having once made the mistake of reading a detailed account of the accident, I struggle to dispel the images from my mind's eye. He died. They all died. I'll feel this way for at least a week. I am in the throes of an inconsolable Buddy Holly funk.
It may seem strange to mourn a man I never met, a singer who died more than five years before I was born, who lived only half as long as I have, to date. But then I'm a pop music obsessive. I've read James Brown's autobiography three times. Thousands of songs on mp3, CD, cassette, and vinyl crowd my shelves—especially vinyl, since I'm old-school, lo-fi, only grudgingly digital. Then there are my guitars, keyboards, and odd items of percussion, which listening to all this music makes me want to pick up and play. No shortage of noisemakers in my house. So why is Buddy Holly so special, when I have bossa nova, obscure British psychedelia, Atlantic, Stax, and Motown waiting to be placed on the turntable?
Of all the stars in the first generation of rock and roll, Buddy seemed the most accessible. No kid in the fifties could dream of being Elvis, impossibly cool and handsome with his curling lips and swiveling hips. Jerry Lee Lewis figured as a force of nature, pounding the piano not only with his fingers but with his fists and feet. Chuck Berry was a poet, a duck-walking hillbilly cat from Missouri and the true father of rock and roll. Little Richard, well, he was Little Richard. Now Buddy . . . you could imagine Buddy Holly as a kid in your neighborhood, as a guy in English class junior year. You wouldn't mind Buddy dating your sister, or so you might suppose. And his music! Buddy wrote beautiful songs, tender ballads and exultant rockers, all delivered in that distinctive voice with the patented hiccup at just the right moment. If you're a novice guitar player, some of Buddy's simpler songs offer a perfect introduction to the instrument: three chords and a story to tell. Like "Words of Love," the first song I learned on guitar at fifteen, and have practiced ever since. Strum these major chords—A, D, and E—and you're on your way.
Band plays "Words of Love"
A young person could carry that song like a prayer; I know I did, for years. A key theme in Buddy's songs is the promise of love, the certain knowledge that with patience and faith, what Buddy called "True Love Ways," one will find love in this mortal life, transcendent, incarnate, and real. Listen again to songs like "Take Your Time" or "Wishing." In the classic "Everyday," Buddy conveys the sentiment musically as well as verbally, having chosen the celesta, or keyboard xylophone, as the lead instrument. The childlike sound of the celesta moves the song through sophisticated chord changes, while giving the lyrics sonic expression: "Every day it's getting closer / Going faster than a rollercoaster / Love like yours will surely come my way."
Band plays "Everyday"
Buddy was born and raised in Lubbock, Texas, a city of fundamentalist churches and honky tonk bars. His family struggled during the Great Depression but after Buddy's older brothers returned from service in World War II, their fortunes improved. Buddy started on guitar at age eight and learned fast. As much as he liked fishing, hunting, and hiking in the west Texas plains, Buddy loved to sing and strum, or else listen to country and western, black gospel, or rhythm and blues on the radio. As a teenager, he got into trouble like a lot of boys—alcohol, cigarettes, and sex being his transgressions of choice, as with his friends, for whom James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Montgomery Clift set the image for adolescent rebellion. But music increasingly occupied his thoughts and his time. He played in a bluegrass duo, playing shows around Lubbock and sharpening his technique.
Then in 1955, Elvis came to town, and rock and roll loomed as Buddy's destiny. He opened for Elvis at one show, and observing the style and musicianship of Elvis and his band, redoubled his efforts as a songwriter and performer. 1956 began with Buddy recording in Nashville, in a series of sessions that didn't work out because the producers tried to force him into a country mold. He struggled that year, not only with finding the right people to work with, but with life in Lubbock. His girlfriend Echo (how perfect is that?) left him, making it clear that she wanted an ordinary life of home and church, not rock and roll and the road. Buddy loved Echo, and took her departure hard. At the same time, he was becoming uncomfortable in the South under Jim Crow. I don't want to claim too much for rock and roll as an agent of social change, but it changed Buddy. "Despite the white-supremacist, homophobic society he grew up in," biographer Ellis Amburn writes, Buddy Holly "cleansed himself of racial prejudice and macho snobberies and began to embrace people who were different from him, notably blacks, Hispanics, and gays." His friendship with Little Richard alone stands as a statement against bigotry and dogma. The Baptist church to which Buddy belonged would have had several reasons to condemn Richard, whom Buddy brought to his parents' house one night, threatening never to return if they didn't welcome his friend. They let him in.
Success came in 1957. That February, he recorded a couple tracks in Clovis, New Mexico, working with a producer who insisted on sharing unearned co-writing credit, publishing rights, even Buddy's power-of-attorney. In a hurry for success, Buddy put his name on the paper, signing away a fortune. Released in May, the fruit of that session became a number one hit and Buddy's signature number: "That'll Be the Day."
Band plays "That'll Be the Day"
In his last twenty months, Buddy founded The Crickets, wrote and recorded prolifically, toured the United States, England, and Australia, and made television appearances to promote a string of hits. He started spending more time in New York, to escape provincial Lubbock and immerse himself in the music business. There his songs about the promise of love turned out to be true. In March 1958, back in town after the British tour, he met María Elena Santiago, who worked for Buddy's publisher. He proposed marriage on their first date, she accepted, and they married in August. They moved into a fashionable high rise on Fifth Avenue, where they hosted musician friends like The Everly Brothers, Eddie Cochran, and Waylon Jennings.
Buddy's creativity flowered in his last months, as he and María Elena reveled in the bohemian life of Greenwich Village, taking in poetry readings, jazz, and folk singers. He experimented with arrangements, worked with saxophone great King Curtis, and became the first rocker to record with a full orchestra, on numbers like "Raining in my Heart," "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," and "True Love Ways," his love poem to María Elena and one of the great wedding songs of all time. Writers and English professors may notice the lyrics' perfect iambic meter, and musicians spot the diminished seventh chord shimmering in the chorus. The rest of us just feel it, the glow of that golden autumn, 1958 in New York.
Band plays "True Love Ways"
Another of Buddy's late interests was a plan to open his own recording studios, where musicians would find a supportive atmosphere and fair financial dealings. He especially wanted to produce Latino artists like his friend Ritchie Valens. Although Native American writer Sherman Alexie includes Buddy Holly in a list of people he wishes had been Indian, Buddy was closer to Latino culture. Being from west Texas, which was once and in many ways still is part of Mexico, Buddy has a distinctive accent, what jazz players call a "Latin tinge," in his guitar playing. Then there was his marriage to María Elena, born in Puerto Rico, who introduced him to flamenco guitar, inspiring him to take classical guitar lessons and to start learning Spanish. All of this gives context to his friendship with Ritchie, who pretty much invented rock en español with his adaptation of the Mexican folk tune "La Bamba."
Band plays "La Bamba"
While Buddy had tired of the almost constant touring—the lousy buses, the bad hotels, and worse food—financial necessity forced his hand. His former manager would not relinquish his earnings; his latest records, as good as they were, did not sell as well as he had hoped; and he had bills to pay. After first rejecting the offer, Buddy agreed to headline the Winter Dance Party, a tour of the upper Midwest featuring up-and-coming acts like Ritchie, Dion, and J.P. Richardson, The Big Bopper, with his big hit "Chantilly Lace." Since he had parted ways with the original Crickets, Buddy put together a touring band, with Waylon on bass and the nimble-fingered Tommy Allsup on lead guitar.
The tour was a disaster from start to finish. It involved twenty-four straight days of travel and performance, starting on January 23 in Milwaukee and then proceeding with a completely illogical order of destinations that magnified the distances involved. On top of that, the winter of 1958 to 1959 was one of the worst on record, with regular subzero temperatures and snowstorms. The promoters had accepted the lowest bid on coach service, resulting in a bus with a worn-out engine, broken heater, and windows that wouldn't stay shut. En route from Duluth to Appleton, near Pine Lake, Wisconsin, the bus broke down and the musicians waited two hours in the freezing cold, burning newspapers for heat. The drummer suffered frostbite and stayed behind in a hospital.
But the concerts were another matter. Buddy and the others may have been tired, cold, and homesick, but they put on fantastic shows for the teens in Kenosha, Eau Claire, Mankato, and all the other towns they visited. Rock and roll might have been struggling nationally, with the radio payola scandal and record companies moving toward tamer talent, but real rock and roll, the big beat, was just sinking into the consciousness of young people in the Midwest. Crowds in both the cities and small towns responded ecstatically, dancing, singing along, or simply staring at their heroes, absorbing every note. A kid named Robert Zimmerman from Hibbing, Minnesota attended the Winter Dance Party on January 31, and saw his own destiny reveal itself on the stage. We know him as Bob Dylan, who along with The Beatles, led the second wave of rock in the 1960s. In accepting his Grammy Award for Best Album in 1998, Dylan said, "I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him . . . and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way."
Band plays "It's So Easy"
The matinee in Appleton was canceled, but they played an evening show in Green Bay on February 1, then set off on the 350 mile trip to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, a last-minute engagement booked on what was supposed to have been their one day off.
I've been to the Surf, which holds a Fifties in February weekend every year on the anniversary of the Winter Dance Party of 1959. The year I went, Tommy Allsup played, backed by a couple Buddy Holly look-alikes who sounded amazing. The crowd mostly consisted of people who had been teenagers in the fifties. Some may have attended the Clear Lake show in 1959. Women in their sixties danced in poodle skirts and saddle shoes, screaming when one of the young but distinctly retro performers did the duckwalk or played a solo with his guitar behind his head. Members of The British Buddy Holly Appreciation Society stood solemnly in the wings; you knew them by their scarves, which had the name of their organization knitted into the fabric.
The whole brilliant scene made the original show assume even more mythic grandeur. Imagine The Big Bopper on stage, telephone in hand, singing the choruses and talking the verses to "Chantilly Lace," spoken to the unseen girlfriend who must be saying something pretty tempting and vivid to him over the line, as he agrees to pick her up at eight sharp, even though he's broke.
Band plays "Chantilly Lace"
After the show, Buddy called María Elena from a pay phone inside the Surf Ballroom. He had decided to charter a plane to Fargo, North Dakota, to arrive early for the next show, across the state line in Moorhead, Minnesota. He couldn't face another cold bus trip, five hundred miles this time, and besides, the musicians needed clean laundry. He could take care of that and have a good rest. The passenger list changed more than once. Buddy's sidemen, Waylon and Tommy, had first dibs, but J.P. Richardson, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens had taken ill and decided they wanted to fly. Tommy and Ritchie flipped a coin; Tommy called tails and lost. Waylon gave up his seat to the Bopper; when he told Buddy of the switch, Buddy quipped, "Well, I hope your ol' bus freezes up!" Waylon replied, "Well, I hope your ol' plane crashes!" Years later he almost forgave himself for that joke.
They headed to the Mason City airport in a snowstorm. J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper), age 28, Ritchie Valens age 17, and Buddy Holly age 22, left the ground at one a.m. February 3 in a single-engine Cessna piloted by 21-year-old Roger Peterson, who had been working for seventeen hours straight and who lacked night flight certification.
Band plays "Learning the Game"
If there were a book on Midwestern gothic, a compendium of pioneers losing their minds in the dead of winter and shooting the cows, burning down the barn; Michael Lesy's Wisconsin Death Trip; shipwrecks on the Great Lakes; tornadoes, floods, and blizzards; and psychopathic killers with names like Starkweather, it ought to include this crash. All manner of random acts of natural and human violence taking place on the northern interior plains of this continent would appear in one chapter or another. Why did Buddy die? Is there any coming to terms with something, anything, so unacceptable?
Bear with me for a moment as I speculate on this theme. The Algonquian peoples of this region and further north spoke of a figure called the windigo, described as an emaciated, filthy, deranged cannibal creature of the snowy wastes of winter. Driven by an insatiable hunger for human flesh, the windigo wandered the woods and fields in search of prey. It's kind of like The Night of the Living Dead: those eaten by windigos might become windigos. Also, anyone forced by circumstance to resort to cannibalism to survive would become a windigo. Better to die than to let that happen.
All right, where am I going with this? Well, the windigo is an archetype for our time as well as that of the pre-contact indigenous peoples. Wisconsin has produced its share of infamous murderers, a couple of them were cannibals. I need not mention their names. They were windigos. Remember the scene in the movie Fargo, when one killer is feeding the body of the other killer into the wood chipper? Both of them are windigos, as is the man who hired them to kidnap his wife. But so too is that man's father-in-law, a wealthy businessman who refused him a loan he easily could have afforded. "I'm not talking about your damn word, Jerry," the old man says. That's a windigo talking. The windigo not only personifies the deathly cold of winter and the primal taboo of cannibalism, but also greed, which lies at the heart of most human suffering—rotten, ravenous, selfish, destructive greed, which most of all hungers for young flesh. So Buddy's former manager, who told him in their last meeting that he would see Buddy dead before giving him a cent of his earnings, he too was a windigo. And the promoters who sent those teenage and twenty-something performers out into the cold in a shabby bus, adding a show on their day off and continuing the tour even after the tragedy at Clear Lake, they were windigos, as well. The windigos got Buddy. Yes, he was young and reckless, but the chain of events leading up to his death might have been broken at any number of moments by any number of people, most of them older than him but not apparently wiser. He should have been back in New York with María Elena.
But anger burns itself out, leaving us with the tragic loss of young life, four grieving families, four wives or girlfriends, and fans around the world in shock. Then there was the promise of Buddy's talent, all the music he didn't live to create, all his unfulfilled plans. He considered acting. He hoped to record with Ray Charles, and to act on his admiration of Mahalia Jackson by making a gospel album. People speculate on where else he might have taken the music. Would he have simply gone country, perhaps becoming by now an elder statesman of American roots music, like fellow Texan Willie Nelson, joining Willie and Waylon in the rebel country supergroup The Highwaymen? Perhaps, but Buddy was a rocker. He would have responded to the British Invasion that he inspired—The Beatles named themselves partly in honor of The Crickets, and used Buddy's songwriting and original four-piece band arrangement as a template for their own history-changing career. Given the quality of his work at age twenty-two, what might he have done at twenty-seven? Or today, when he would have been seventy-two?
Speculation doesn't make me feel any better, though.Shuffling home in the snow, I remember that literary dictionaries define the elegy as a work of literature written in memorial of someone who has died or something that has passed, or more broadly, about the sobering fact of our inescapable mortality. "Only in the realm of praise should lament walk," Rilke said, and for that reason an elegy must do more than express mere sorrow and loss. It must evoke the best qualities of those who have gone on, and give us courage and consolation. So where is the solace in this story?
The only remedy—there is no cure—for a Buddy Holly funk is to play the music. So on that long cold sidewalk of my discontent, I finally arrive home, kiss my wife, turn on the stereo, open my guitar case, and come back to life.
What most appeals to me, finally, about Buddy Holly, about rock and roll at its best, is the sheer romanticism of the music: its joy, its defiance and humor, its simultaneous idealism and physicality. Like all Romantic art, rock and roll insists that youth has its own wisdom, to be heeded as well as that which only comes with age. Certain articles of faith follow from this premise, which I believed long before I could phrase them as follows:
I believe in love at first sight.
I believe that love is stronger than death.
I count among the impoverished those unwilling to risk sentimentality. To quote Neruda, "moonlight, the swan at dusk, "my beloved,' are, beyond question, the elemental and essential matter of poetry."
I agree with Duke Ellington, who said that there are only two kinds of music: "good music and the other kind."
And yes, Don McLean, I believe in rock and roll, and that music can save my mortal soul, and . . .
I believe that Buddy Holly lives.
Band plays "Not Fade Away" and "Well All Right"
by William Barillas
Sometimes in late January or early February, a darkness wells up within me, shading my thoughts and weighting my steps. Especially if an arctic front has swooped down over Wisconsin, plunging the temperature below zero toward that blueblack cold that recalls the last and future age of glaciers. It feels as though the days will never lengthen and thaw, that winter's lease has permanently extended over this part of the world. The frozen rivers and bare gothic trees, the inscrutable blank of snowy fields, the salt-rimed roads and snow-packed side streets all figure in a waking dream, as real in my troubled imagination as out there, in the northern wind, under an overcast sky already fading into night at five o'clock.
Dr. William Barillas giving this presentation February 6, 2009