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A long, long time ago, I can’t remember shit because I wasn’t born yet. All music didn’t die that day, but it was still a tragedy that took the lives of three rock and roll greats: Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and “The Big Bopper” J.P. Richardson.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 3, 1959--
I don’t know about music saving mortal souls, but I can’t imagine living without it. 2020 sucked for me with the loss of Neil Peart and Eddie Van Halen, but at least they’d both had a good run. When that plane went down on February 3, 1959, Holly was only 22, Richardson was 28, and Valens was a mere 17 years old.
Their tour was called the Winter Dance Party, and it sucked. The transport—shitty old reconditioned school buses that kept breaking down—was cold and uncomfortable. People were getting sick and even got cases of frostbite as they traveled through the wintery Midwest. The tour began on January 23 in Milwaukee and was scheduled to play 24 cities in as many days. What made it suck even more was that the dipshits at General Artists Corporation who organized the tour never looked at a fucking map. Rather than logical hopping from venue to nearest venue to minimize travel, the musicians meandered across the countryside back and forth and froze their asses off for several hours each day, then had to play at night, then do it all again. Holly called it “The Tour from Hell” and said, “It was like they threw darts at a map.”
On February 2 they played Clear Lake, Iowa and Holly said fuck this I’m hiring a plane to take us to Moorhead, Minnesota. Two of his band members, Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup, were going to join him, but Waylon was saved via altruism, and Tommy by a coin toss.
Richardson was called The Big Bopper because he was big, and the school buses were designed for kids. Not only that, he had the flu. Jennings, being a good guy, gave up his seat on the small Beechcraft Bonanza aircraft. Allsup flipped a coin against Valens and lost, but also won a long life.
The flight departed at 12:55 a.m. and lasted only minutes. Unbeknownst to the 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson, the weather was going to shit, and he was not yet rated to fly solely by instruments when visibility was nonexistent. He suffered spatial disorientation and the plane crashed, killing him and his three passengers.
Holly’s pregnant wife learned of his death via a news broadcast, and suffered a miscarriage shortly afterward, reportedly from the trauma. The events were immortalized in the 1971 Don McLean song “American Pie,” and since that time the crash has been referred to as “the day the music died.”
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