Feb 3, 1959:The day the music died

History ^ | Feb 3 | History

[Baynative]

I've seen the movie more than once and I thoroughly enjoy it every time. I think Gary Bussey's performance was stellar. It reportedly brought Buddy's mother to tears during the screening.

Speaking of the Hayride: It was the time when rock and roll was just starting to cross over from what was called R&B and the term bop or bopping started out as a bit derogatory, then became more acceptable.

At the beginning of the movie, Buddy is playing the acceptable country style music of the time and then introduces his own song saying "This is for the boppers ...those who bop". All the kids head for the stage and show their appreciation. I think I was in the 4th or 5th grade and we used to go to the soda bar at the 5 and 10 cent store and play the juke box and I remember getting scowls from older patrons.

[Iron Munro]

The legend goes that the heater on the tour bus had failed and some of the performers were spreading a cold. The plane trip was to try to avoid a long ride in a freezing bus.

More Info Here: http://www.classicwisconsin.com/features/buddyholly.html

The group started the 340-mile trip from Duluth to Appleton on U.S. Highway 2, a concrete thread winding through the heart of the remote Chequamegon National Forest, an area on the razor’s edge of the Artic front slashing down across Lake Superior. Wind chills were estimated at minus 40 or worse.

Turning south on U.S. 51 shortly after midnight, Feb. 1, the bus approached a hill fifteen miles south of Hurley when disaster struck. The bus died.

“We didn’t know enough to be afraid, or what a mid-winter night by the side of the road meant,” Dion said in his autobiography.

Unprepared and sickly, members of the tour party were trapped in the worst possible predicament. The temperature inside the bus was roughly the same as outdoors, with pounding winds sending drafts through the windows. Frozen tree limbs were snapping like twigs in the wind, crashing to the ground in the forest surrounding the group.

The group began burning newspapers in the aisle for heat, which provided only a few fleeting moments of relief. Carl Bunch was unable to move his legs at all.

One backup musician began to panic. “We can’t stay in this bus,” he begged the others. “They’ll read about us in the paper tomorrow.”

Some of the musicians stepped outside hoping to flag down a vehicle. At that time of night in remote Iron County with conditions being what they were -- not a soul was traveling.

“I’m looking for traffic,” road manager recounted in an interview. “Nothing. I’m worried about it. The kids in the back were freezing.”

The group was in serious danger. With no other option, the men grabbed their instruments and began a jam session in the bus to stay active. Carl Bunch prayed for deliverance.

After an hour, the group saw the headlights of a semi-truck approaching through the darkness. They hurried off the bus and into the middle of the road. The trucker slowed enough to maneuver around the men but never stopped. Dejected, the musicians filed back on the bus.

“We just sat there and froze,” Tommy Allsup said. Holly and Dion told their life stories to one another under a blanket, passing time “through the dark hours while we waited for something to happen,” according to Dion.

After two hours on the roadside, the Iron County sheriff arrived. The trucker had notified the police when he reached town. The group was shuttled, a few people at a time, back to Hurley’s Club Carnival Café, a strip joint on notorious Silver Street, where they were fed breakfast – except for the group’s black bus driver, who had to eat in the county garage.

[painter]

The plane they where riding in when it crashed was a Beach Bonanza. A 4 passenger plane that’s including the pilot.

[Verginius Rufus]

Did you have 16 candles on your birthday cake in 2012?

[Iron Munro]

The Winter Dance Party Tour

"Holly spent 1958 touring non-stop at home and abroad, yet by the end of the year he was virtually penniless thanks to bad management. He was also expecting a baby with his new wife and had begun plans to create his own record company and recording studio.

Holly reluctantly agreed to headline the Winter Dance Party of 1959, a tour that was beneath his stature but offered quick cash.

“The only reason Buddy went on that tour was because he was broke - flat broke,” Waylon Jennings, Holly’s bass player on the ill-fated tour, would say years later. “He didn’t want to go but he had to make some money.”

The tour of the upper Midwest was organized by General Artists Corporation (GAC), a shoestring outfit headed by a druggist who sold records from his pharmacies and cared little about rock-n-roll.

The schedule for the Winter Dance Party was absurd. The group had to endure daily bus travels back and forth across Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. GAC accepted any offer that came along and filled the dates regardless of the distance involved. Holly was appalled when he received the schedule. He told GAC he wanted out, but it was too late, the deal was done.

Expectant dad Holly reluctantly said goodbye to his wife – both had experienced premonitions in the days leading up to the tour – and headed to Milwaukee where the Winter Dance Party was set to debut January 23, 1959.

More Here: http://www.classicwisconsin.com/features/buddyholly.html

[Sicvee]

Oh, Boy was great. How about That’ll Be the Day, Not Fade Away, Maybe Baby, Think It Over, Lookin’ For Someone to Love. My favorite rockers. Then there was the tear jerker written by Paul Anka—It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.

[knarf]

heh heh heh ... I wonder how many GET that

[Iron Munro]

heh heh heh ... I wonder how many GET that

Back in the day we called those songs "Belly Rubbers".

We still had a lot to learn.

[The Duke]

Rap killed it.

I'm not sure that disco did it much good!

[knarf]

I was born Feb 29, 1948 .. Leap Year baby .. a birthday every four years ... in 2012 ... I was

16

[Chainmail]

I thank you for your service to your country - you and I both spent time in uniform during that time. I had a different take when I got back - it seemed the whole country was part of a giant psychosis. While I was in Vietnam, we heard some of the songs that were popular during that time and we were sure that everybody had lost their minds: Winchester Cathedral - Mellow Yellow - Tiptoe through the Tulips.

Once I got back I knew I was right. I'm happy you had a good time - you deserved it - but the country I knew and loved was long gone.

[JoeFromSidney]

Never heard that one before. Thanks for posting the link. I enjoyed it.

[JoeFromSidney]

Never heard that one before. Thanks for posting the link. I enjoyed it.

[Baynative]

This week is the 50th of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan. I was 17 and watched all the girls go crazy. I liked them to, but at heart I was a big R&B fan.

By the time I was in high school we were living in the SF bay area. Music was everywhere in my life. About 62 or 63 the Beatles and Beach Boys were competing for stardom with R&B influenced British pop battling the west coast lifestyle influenced surf music. I had an AM radio in my room and used to tune into a black owned radio station from Oakland so I could listen to the blues influenced music the big stations didn't play. Names like Solomon Burke, Elmore James, Garnett Mimms, Clyde McPhatter, Bobby Bland, Muddy Waters were familiar to me, but not my friends.

I was drafted in 66 and when I came home the country had changed. I went back to the Bay Area at the top of the hippie era and saw all the popular bands of the time that gave birth to the FM radio domination of music broadcasting that was a bit out of the mainstream. While you could hear "Like a Rolling Stone" or "Hurdy Gurdy Man" on the big stations, you could also go down the dial and find cuts that weren't making it into mainstream.

What is interesting to me now is that I meet so many seniors that have no idea what I'm talking about when I remissness about the music of that era (all the way up to the early 80s).

Somewhere in their subconscious they may have heard "Dream Weaver" or "Whiter Shade of Pale", but mention Spooky Tooth (Gary Wright's original band) or Robin Trower (guitar master from Procol Harem) and their eyes glaze over.

Maybe I'll have to start a new "old school FM show". ;-)

[Verginius Rufus]

At least you weren't apprenticed until your 21st birthday, like the poor fellow with a February 29th birthday in The Pirates of Penzance.

[Scoutmaster]

RIP, Charles Hardin Holley.

One of the most influential rock and roll artists in history.

"Listen to any new release. Buddy will be in it somewhere. His stuff just works." - Keith Richards.

"I play Buddy Holly every night before going onstage. It keeps me honest." - Bruce Springsteen

[Fresh Wind]

No question that Holly was a game changer. But that was in ‘57. By ‘59, the game was almost over (and that’s not intended as a reference to his death).

Of course he was influential. But it was his rock songs that people noticed, not the pop ballads like “Peggy Sue Got Married” or his atrocious “True Love Ways”.

Pure rockabilly largely died when it was packaged for a mainstream audience. That’s what happened to Elvis, and that’s what was happening to Holly.

Some say he was an innovator for embracing lavish studio productions. That presupposes that overproduction is desirable. I disagree.

One can only speculate what might have been had he lived.

But I believe his career as a performer was close to its end and he would have become involved with the production and management end of the business, only to return to his roots at a later time, but then only as part of the oldies scene.

[knarf]

Bakat'cha', bro

I think the beginning of my socio/political consciousness was being in conversation with a black GI telling me he had no quarrel with those yellow guys ... he still had trouble with the white ones.

I met an Australian guy that had joined to become a citizen and we became friends. He'd already done a tour in country and I never met a soldier that pretty much dared the cadre to give him a hard time ... and they DID give him leeway ... probably because he was a few months from discharge and he WAS a badass.

HIS comments made sense

Some other guy had an album that had the song Universal Soldier and I had NEVER heard such thinking before

Somewhere around that time Sgt Pepper's showed up ....

I couldn't HELP but be a hippy when I got out

I lived in Boston and I heard Eldridge Cleaver and Abbie Hoffman speak on the Boston Common and the girls were friggin' EVERYwhere for the pickin'

Any and every thing anyone had ever tried to teach me faded too rapidly for hedonism, sex, drugs and rock and roll.

I met Jesus in '81 and I have been steady workin' on myself tryin' to correct a whole BUNCH'A shit.

[blu]

The very first time I heard about this was in the 80’s. On the way to church on a Saturday night, I was looking for something to listen to on the radio. Of course, my first choice (and my boys’ “OK, we’ll listen but we don’t have to like it” ).

Our classical music station was playing some show with a guy just talking. He was talking about this day, and how he and some friends drove for miles, just to see if it was true. They couldn’t believe that these big stars were dead. So they drove to the crash site and were devastated.

It was magical. We were driving thru a snowstorm, church is 10 miles away, so we had awhile to listen.

That guy was Garrison Keillor, and the show was “Prairie Home Companion”. (I know, he’s a lib and his politics in no way line up with mine.) We didn’t know it, but the portion of the show we were listening to was The News From Lake Woebegone.

[knarf]

Y’also could’a checked out the Filmore