Chapter 2: The Buddy Holly Curse? "Every Day's a Holly Day"
The snow was snowing, the wind was blowing when the world said, "Good-bye, Buddy." -- Mike Berry, "Tribute to Buddy Holly"
February 3, 1959, will forever be known as "The Day the Music Died." Shortly after 1:00 A.M. Eastern time, during what was considered to be a routine flight, three of the brightest stars in the rock and roll heavens came plunging back to the earth in a comet of fire and distorted, twisted metal. When the solemn news quickly spread across AM radio airwaves, the victims were identified as Buddy Holly, twenty-two; J. P. Richardson, "The Big Bopper," twenty-eight; and Ritchie Valens, seventeen. These three young musicians were not the first to be sacrificed upon the altar of musical stardom, but such a cataclysmic loss of life at such an early age foreshadowed countless others who would follow in their tragic path.
Today, more than forty years since the crash, the events of that terrible night and the strange sequence of coincidences that have followed have become the very substance of urban legend. Many rumors, as well as conspiracy theories, have continued to swirl about the events that have now defined rock and roll's first great catastrophe, in some ways painting a mental image much like the squall that encased the downed Beechcraft Bonanza in a light shroud of freshly fallen snow as the splintered aircraft lay broken and embedded in the frozen earth just nine miles outside Clear Lake, Iowa.
Several documented accounts have stated that all three performers had some sort of premonition of the calamity that would befall them. The Big Bopper had served as a DJ for radio station KTRM in Beaumont, Texas, as he continued to develop his rock and roll career both as a songwriter and performer. As a DJ, the Bopper's zany radio antics included a sleepless Disc-A-Thon in 1957. The Disc-A-Thon was a popular gimmick that required the station DJ to stay awake and on the air for as many days as possible playing record after record until he collapsed from the terrible weariness. Curious onlookers would rush to the studio to watch the radio personality and silently wonder how long he could possibly last until he succumbed to exhaustion.
Jerry Boynton, who served as radio announcer for KTRM, remembered the Disc-A-Thon and a near-exhausted Richardson who had been awake for slightly more than three straight days. Richardson asked, "Jer, you think I'm going to die?" And Boynton replied, "J. P., I think you are. [Laughs]." During the course of the day several breaks were arranged to help refresh the DJ and keep him going just a little longer. Cold towels, hot coffee mixed with adrenaline, and an iron will kept the Big Bopper continuing his spectacular sleepless production. Finally, after setting a new record of 122 hours and eight minutes (just over five days) without sleep and constantly being on the air, the Big Bopper was carried out of the station by an ambulance. During the sleepless marathon he had begun to hallucinate. In one hallucination he told of foreseeing his own death, later reporting that "the other side wasn't that bad."
For Ritchie Valens, the very thought of flying was terrifying. Donna Fox, subject of Ritchie Valens's hit song "Donna," recalled, "He would have nightmares about that [flying]. He just had a horrible fear of small planes, and planes in general. He indicated that he would never fly. He just would never fly."
That horrible fear began on January 31, 1957. This day was the funeral of Ritchie's grandfather. Ritchie had missed school that day to attend the funeral service. Shortly after the family returned to the Valenzuela home, a deafening explosion shook the earth. When Ritchie and his older brother Bob Morales looked into the heavens, they saw a plane plummeting from the sky totally engulfed in flames.
Quickly, the family members jumped into a car and followed in the general direction of the now crimson sky. Almost like children searching for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the Valenzuela family found the wreckage of the doomed aircraft. Ironically, the crash site was the playground of Ritchie's school, Paicoma Junior High School. The school ground resembled a battlefield, with pieces of contorted, burning metal intermixed with playground equipment. The scene created a ghastly paradox of childhood innocence and untimely death. Horribly, three students were killed and ninety others injured. One of the students killed was Ritchie's best friend. Every day Ritchie would sit on these same playgrounds playing his guitar while his fellow students would gather around him. He was convinced that if he had not attended his grandfather's funeral he would have been one of the victims lying on that pockmarked school ground. But malevolent fate had other plans; two years and three days later he would be at the scene of another plane crash, as one of three rock and roll stars lying sprawled upon the snow-covered grounds of Albert Juhl's farm just outside Clear Lake, Iowa.
When Ritchie's career took off like a shooting star he realized that he would have to overcome his fear and dread of flying. With the release of "Come On, Let's Go," "Donna," and "La Bamba," Ritchie Valens was very much in demand. He had a cameo role in the film Go, Johnny, Go! with fellow rocker Eddie Cochran and was asked to join Buddy Holly on the Winter Dance Party. Just before Valens was to catch his flight to join the tour he attended church services with a friend: "On his final night in Los Angeles, he'd gone to the Guardian Angels church on Laurel Canyon Boulevard with his friend Gail Smith and prayed for a safe journey. He was afraid of airplanes, he told Gail,...but he was getting used to them and might even take one at some point during the Winter Dance Party. Gail warned that it was snowy and storming in the North and asked, 'What'd you do if you crash?' 'I'll land on my guitar,' Ritchie said." Strangely, Ritchie Valens's mother was also said to have had a premonition concerning the death of her son on that fateful tour. She had refused to say anything to him because she didn't want to interfere in his career.
The center of the rock and roll universe was Buddy Holly. The other stars would orbit around his presence during the Winter Dance Party tour. Though Holly had the reputation based on his many past hits, the hottest star in this galaxy tour was Ritchie Valens, who was shooting straight up the charts with "Donna" and "La Bamba." Holly's last two compositions, "Heartbeat" and "It's So Easy," had failed to make a splash on the charts. He was determined to get back to the top as a solo artist since his split with the Crickets. In a deal worked out with his producer and cowriter Norman Petty, the Crickets -- Jerry "J. I." Allison and Joe B. Mauldin -- would retain the rights to the band's name and would continue to perform without Buddy. In another sense of irony, both Jerry and Joe had tried to contact Buddy the night of the plane crash in hopes of reuniting the band. Sadly, this was not to be.
For the Winter Dance Party tour, Holly had hired longtime friend and protégé Waylon Jennings to be the bassist. According to Jennings, Buddy purchased a new electric Fender bass guitar and told Jennings he had two weeks to learn to play the instrument. For backup guitar, Holly chose Tommy Allsup. With the addition of these two fellow Texans, the band was complete.
The chief reason for Holly's agreement to do the Winter Dance Party was to generate enough income to support his new wife, Maria Elena, who was also pregnant with the couple's first child. The income would also help support Buddy's new publishing company. Though he hated to go in the dead of winter -- the midwestern winters could be brutal and unbearable in early February -- he had no choice. In recalling their first date, Maria mentioned that Buddy proposed to her then and there. When she asked that just maybe Buddy should get to know her a little better, he smiled and replied, "I haven't got the time." Perhaps this was a premonition that Holly had, that he would have a short life, and so he had decided that he should find all the happiness to fill his tragically numbered days.
Shortly before leaving for the Winter Dance Party tour, both Maria Elena and Buddy were shaken by disturbing but strangely prophetic dreams. Maria was awakened suddenly from a nightmare in which she was standing in a vast open area, much like a farm: "I didn't know where I was or how I got there. And then all of a sudden I could hear noises, like shouting, and it got closer and closer in the distance. I could see all these people running, running, running and shouting, 'They're coming! Hide!'" Maria was convinced that she would be trampled by the onrushing mob. As the crowd parted around her, she heard a terrible noise and then she saw a descending ball of fire falling from the heavens. She was convinced that this flaming cometlike object would crush her but it passed by her. She heard a terrible crash and in the distance witnessed a huge explosion, much like that of a plane crash. As she approached the site, all she could see was a great burning hole in the ground. At this point she awakened Buddy.
As Buddy tried to comfort her, he related to Maria a dream he had just moments before in which he was flying in a small plane with his brother Larry and her. For some reason Larry convinced Buddy to leave Maria on the top of a building but reassured him that they would soon return to pick her up. The dream created so much guilt within Buddy that he broke into tears saying that he just couldn't understand why he left her and she wasn't with him. In a few short weeks both these dreams would come back to haunt Maria Elena: "We were both dreaming the same dream at the same time. And there was so much that came true if you put two and two together. Buddy leaving me [the day he left for the Dance Party Maria had her bags packed to go with him but he convinced her to stay due to her morning sickness]...an airplane crash...on a ...
