“Hey Joe, listen to this song, man!” Barry Folkes yelled at me. The year was 1957, geez, fifty years ago! We were sitting at Heinie’s grocery store, across from Oak Street Junior High School. In the back room, us junior high school criminals could smoke and listen to the jukebox.
It had a “tingy” beginning, then Wham!...”That’ll be the day!”. I was stunned by the sound; everybody was. At the end, when Buddy sang “that’ll be the day, woo-hoo”, it became our monogram for a greeting to each other. I remember the Teachers looking at us, strangely, when we’d come up to each other and sing, “woo-hoo”. You know how those things go; a little ‘tick’ from a song becomes ‘ours’.
I could not get over the great music being created by this one man. One after another, “Rave on”, “Not fade away”, “Oh Boy!”, “Everyday” (The flip side of Peggy Sue), “Well, all right”, all were ideas about living young. We connected immediately. “Rave on, it’s a crazy feeling”. What is that ‘crazy feeling’? We knew what it was. It was that youthful itch to get going somewhere. All we wanted to do was drive fast, love our girls, and eat cheeseburgers. It was the feeling that, if you didn’t do something wild soon, you’d bust wide open! You’d go crazy! Damn, it was good.
Then:
February 3, 1959: Pilot Roger Peterson was in heaven. He would fly three of his idols to fargo North Dakota, for their next stop at Morehead Minnesota, on the “Winter Dance Party” tour. On that winter night, three young rockers took to the sky after playing at the Surf Ballroom, in Clear Lake, Iowa. The Beech Bonanza N3794N took off from Mason City, at 1:00 am, and flew five miles, then dipped, ending up in the corn field, back outside Clear Lake. Something happened on that plane that night. Was it an argument; did someone pull a gun; did the pilot suffer from severe Vertigo? Peterson was uncertified for instrument flying, in bad weather. Something happened! The bullet hole in the door panel was never explained. It was known that, being the head-liner, a Texan, and money holder for the group, Buddy carried a gun. Five minutes into the flight, Mason City airport lost the tail lights, and could not communicate with the aircraft. Not being able to right the plane when he could only see the dark; there was no up, and no down for Roger Peterson. The plane kept falling, just missing a farm house, and crashing in the corn field of that farm, against a barb wire fence. It made the 6 o’clock news the next night. I know exactly where I was, in the world, when I heard the news. I was getting ready to go to the “Spider Web” youth center, where we smoked and danced to the music of our day. I was at the living room/dining room doorway; I had my hand on the wood paneling, about to ask my Mom for money. Three pictures flashed up on the TV screen. One of them was Buddy. My God, he was dead! There was dead silence at the ‘Web’ that night. Everyone of us took it personal. A picture of the crash was in the papers the next day. It was so macabre to see Buddy laying in the snowy cornfield. It was so final, seeing it. He lay there dead. I wish I hadn’t seen that. Maybe I could have held on to his life better. That was the end. I never connected to another singer the way I did him.
That tour, in 1959, should be made into a movie itself. They went through eight different buses on the tour. Three froze up in the 1959 winter. They nearly all froze to death one night on a desolate highway, when their bus broke down outside Kenosha Wisconsin. This was a rock tour in hell!
There is still a memorial in that awful corner of the world. I first visited the memorial in 1999, the 40th anniversary of the crash, at the Buddy Holly Tribute Festival, in Clear Lake. A DJ from Boston interviewed us at the crash sight. I was talking about how I felt about his music, and the night they fell from the sky, when tears suddenly came to my eyes. I could hardly talk; I was so sure the memory was gone, but it had never died; neither did his music.
“It ain’t been the same since Buddy died,” we would say when something went wrong. That meant something. It was one of those ways we found, to express a sorrow. At 22, in two short years, this guy put out more music that anyone. Buddy plowed the records out as if he was going to die. I guess he was right, and...
“I ain’t been the same since Buddy died.”
I love you, Buddy.
Joe
