Fifty years ago, Graham Nash stood on a street corner in his hometown of Salford, England, with his best friend, Alan Clarke, and wept.
The source of their sadness was news from 4,000 miles away and across the Atlantic Ocean - a frozen field north of Clear Lake, where the airplane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson crashed on Feb. 3, 1959, killing the three rock stars from the Winter Dance Party tour as well as their local pilot, Roger Peterson.
“It was very traumatic for me,” said Nash, who was only 17 years old that day. He went on to form the Hollies with Clarke in 1962. They found themselves among a rising tide of ’60s rock musicians on both sides of the pond who owed a huge musical debt to the innovations of the Winter Dance Party artists.
Today it might be tempting to sum up the musical legacies of Holly, Valens and the Bopper in terms of Don McLean’s landmark 1971 tune “American Pie” (that forever dubbed the tragedy the Day the Music Died), the biopics (1978’s “The Buddy Holly Story” and 1987’s “La Bamba”) and the annual “oldies” rock tribute concerts at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, site of the trio’s final performance on Feb. 2, 1959.
But today’s musicians still continually claim Holly as a primary songwriting influence; celebrated indie singer-songwriter M. Ward, for instance, releases a new album Feb. 17 that includes a cover of Holly’s “Not Fade Away.” And younger music fans are discovering classic rock in greater numbers as the songs flow freely from iTunes and other online, digital sources.
Valens is revered for his guitar technique and as the prototypical Latino rocker who anticipated the careers of everybody from Santana to Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys.
The Bopper wrote country music hits for other artists and is credited with creating the first distinct music video.
“They are all different but of the same era - pioneers, artists that really did catch the ear of the world, not just America,” said Terry Stewart, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Bopper has yet to join Holly and Valens as an official Rock Hall inductee, but the museum is co-producing a series of events Wednesday, Feb. 2 at the Surf to commemorate the enduring influence of all three artists.
Back in 1959 the Winter Dance Party served first and foremost as a teen dance that left the adult world unmoved - much in the same way that today’s Disney heartthrob chart-toppers, the Jonas Brothers, while not poised for artistic impact on par with Holly, play to a predominantly teen fanbase.
Now that the teens of 1950s rock have long since grown up and are retiring, the likes of Buddy and the Beatles have in a way become canonized as classics. And it’s no great stretch to imagine that Bruce Springsteen might even cover a Holly song during his halftime performance next weekend at the Super Bowl.
Musicians young and old now trace the musical thread of rock history back to the Day the Music Died.
“Buddy Holly totally was the model for the Beatles and everything that came after,” said Dion DiMucci, the Bronx-born rock troubadour with blues roots and a doo-wop streak who remains the sole surviving headliner from the 1959 tour. “He was self-contained, he wrote, he had two guitars, bass and drums. He was the whole model of that.”
“(Holly) was the essence of the first real rock ‘n’ roll band,” agreed John Mueller, who today performs as Holly on his own Winter Dance Party tribute tour. “And when that went away with this tragic event, I think it left a huge hole. It didn’t really start comin’ back until … the Beatles basically were doing Buddy Holly songs … but in a little more aggressive, little more ’60s kind of way.”
The fledgling Beatles, as the Quarry Men, recorded Holly’s “That’ll Be the Day” as their first official tune before renaming themselves with a nod to Holly’s band, the Crickets.
The Rolling Stones introduced themselves to America in 1964 with a cover of Holly’s “Not Fade Away.”
A decade after the death of his hero, Graham Nash found wider fame and became an emblem of the Woodstock generation with Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. On Feb. 2 he will finally make his first pilgrimage to the Surf and Clear Lake when he headlines the capstone concert of the commemorative “50 Winters Later” events there. The star-studded musical lineup includes the Crickets, Los Lobos and a house band featuring key Rolling Stones sidemen (Chuck Leavell, Bobby Keys).
“To be invited to go and play on the 50anniversary - that’s kind of scary to me,” Nash said. “I love it.”
Tracing their roots: The Beatles and beyond
“One of the main things about the Beatles is that we started out writing our own material. People these days take it for granted that you do, but nobody used to then. John and I started to write because of Buddy Holly. It was like, ‘Wow! He writes and is a musician.’ … In our imaginations back then, John was Buddy and I was Little Richard or Elvis.”
- Paul McCartney of the Beatles, “The Beatles Anthology,” 2000
“To guys of my age at the time, if you were the least bit interested in music, Buddy was the one, because he sang and was very self-contained. Elvis was fantastic, but because Buddy had glasses and looked a bit like a bank clerk, you could say to yourself, ‘Well, it’s not just for guys who look like Elvis,’ because otherwise it was sort of unattainable.”
- Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, “According to the Rolling Stones,” 2003
“When I was 16 or 17 years old I went to see Buddy Holly play in Duluth, National Guard Armory. And I was three feet away from him, and he looked at me. And I just have some kind of feeling that he was - I don’t know how or why - I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.”
- Bob Dylan, Album of the Year acceptance speech at the Grammys for “Time Out of Mind,” February 1998
“When I think of Buddy Holly I think of the … purest form of rock ‘n’ roll. … And if we want to change things, if anybody wants to change anything in this business … let’s get back to that.”
- Shawn Crahan of Slipknot, interview with Des Moines Register reporter Joe Lawler, 2009
“Bo (Diddley)’s rhythm was first borrowed by Buddy Holly, later by me for ‘Magic Bus.’”
- Pete Townshend of the Who, Entertainment Weekly, June 2008
“As a musician and singer (Holly) had a style of singing that we all try to at some point emulate. If you don’t do it exactly the way he did it, at least it’s a thing always in the back of your head.”
- Billy Bob Thornton, interview with Des Moines Register reporter Joe Lawler, 2008
“The great thing about Buddy Holly is his songs had a rhythm and bluesey kind of feel, super catchy with really strong vocal melodies. That’s what I really liked. Later on I really appreciated that he played a Strat while other guys played hollow body. Part of his sound was the way he played that Fender, and I really appreciated it.”
- Kirk Hammett of Metallica, interview with Des Moines Register reporter Joe Lawler,
