This coming Sunday is the sixtieth anniversary of the plane crash in an Iowa snow storm that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. February 3, 1959, is sometimes called “The Day the Music Died.” Don McLean wrote a song about it. I don’t much like that song.
The four bands in that tour were headed to Moorhead, Minnesota (my home town) for a gig at the Armory. In my youth, I went to some dances at the Armory before the building was torn down. It was a fairly small venue; I doubt it could have held more than 200-300 people.
Here are a few bits of trivia:
The only band that arrived intact at the Moorhead gig was Dion and the Belmonts. They and the various other musicians took a bus from Iowa to Minnesota through the snowstorm.
Buddy Holly wasn't touring with The Crickets; he had hired some musicians to back him up, including a guy named Waylon Jennings. He gave up his seat on the plane to another musician who was under the weather and Waylon Jennings didn’t die because he wasn’t on the airplane. He went on to have a long career.
After the plane went down, a radio station in Fargo (across the river from Moorhead) asked local musicians to fill in at the concert. A 15-year-old kid named Robert Velline quickly gathered together a band and got some stage time. Robert later became famous and had numerous hits under the stage name of Bobby Vee. Interesting aside: a little later, before he moved from Minnesota to New York, Bob Dylan played in Bobby Vee's band for a brief period and they kept in touch for years afterwards.
I read a book about ten years ago called "Killing Yourself to Live" by Chuck Klosterman. He’s a pretty good writer. He traveled around the country visiting the sites of rock and roll disasters. I don't remember all the places he went, but he went to the cornfield where Buddy Holly's plane went down, the swamp where two members of Lynyrd Skynyrd died in a plane crash, the Rhode Island club where Great White was playing when everything caught fire, and the house in Seattle where Kurt Cobain overdosed. Along the way he meets some quirky people and writes about rock music. He also dwells on what went wrong with his ex-girlfriends, sometimes a little too much.
McCartney and Lennon were both big fans of Buddy Holly and the Crickets. They chose to call their band “The Beatles” because they wanted a name like “The Crickets.” A bug name. Incidentally, a couple days ago was the fiftieth anniversary of the last live performance by the Beatles. On January 30, 1969, the Beatles played several songs on a rooftop. At the end John Lennon says, “I would like to say thank you on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we’ve passed the audition.”
I suppose you could call the final Beatles concert another day that the music died.
Here’s Buddy Holly’s song “Not Fade Away.” The Rolling Stones cover of this song was their first single released in the U.S. The Grateful Dead also covered it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyTtFNGzFsE