Buddy Holly: Biography (43 page)

The bus crept along at twenty-five miles an hour, sliding over the sheet ice covering the old roads. Forty miles out of Davenport, they reached the town of Tipton (population 2,800) and pulled into Mac’s Shell Station around noon for fuel and repairs. Punchy and stir-crazy, they made a dash for Al’s Meet and Eat Café. It was the lunch hour and Al Hendricks’s small hamburger shack was packed with workers on their break. Waitress Esther Wenck later told reporter Larry Lehmer that Ritchie went over to the jukebox and asked her if she’d like to hear him sing his “famous” recording.

She assumed he was joking but went along with the ruse and told him to go ahead and play it if he wanted to, though rock ’n’ roll “wasn’t my kind of music,” she added. Ritchie played “Donna” and sang along with it, giving the small-town folk a free concert. Esther still assumed he was “goofin’,” she recalled. Ritchie was in a euphoric mood during the tour, according to his California friend Gail Smith, who later told Mendheim that Ritchie said, “When I get back, I’m gonna get my T-Bird.” He’d already decided he wanted a blue one.

As they ate that day in Tipton, several members of the tour party began to talk about deserting the bus and chartering a plane. Describing the scene to interviewer Wayne Jones years later, Fred Milano said, “If you’re going to live in a bus for twenty-eight days it should at least be comfortable. Well, it wasn’t. So a couple of the guys said, ‘Let’s take a plane.’” The idea caught on among the musicians, though GAC disapproved of charter flights as too dangerous, according to Tim Gale, who originated the dance-party tours with Irving Feld at GAC.

The Bopper had recently flown in a small plane piloted by his friend Gordon Baxter in Texas. “I took J.P. up … and he asked me what causes airplanes to crash in bad weather,” Baxter later told interviewer Jim Thomas. Baxter gave the Bopper a frightening demonstration, telling him to close his eyes, Baxter sent the plane into a “graveyard spiral.” Though they were plunging earthward, the Bopper thought they were climbing. Baxter’s point was that a pilot can become so disoriented in heavy weather that he can easily crash the plane. Despite the risks of flying, the Bopper was willing to do anything to escape the agony of the GAC bus. He wanted to get back to Texas, buy a radio station with the money he’d made on the tour, and continue writing songs for C&W artists, according to reporter Carol Gales.

Buddy considered chartering a four-seater for himself and his band, but “Tommy Allsup wasn’t making enough money to pay his share,” Fred Milano later told Jones. “And Ritchie Valens was,” Milano added. But Ritchie was afraid of flying, his friend Gail Smith later revealed. He was also strangely drawn to it, even in hazardous weather. He’d never been in a small plane before and was eager to try it, Tommy Allsup later stated. Sadly, there were no responsible adults around for Ritchie to go to for advice. “Our managers were never around,” Bo Diddley, a veteran of many grueling tours, once said. “No one cared about the performers. You should’ve seen the old bus we had to travel in. It was sheer chaos. And that doesn’t happen if a manager is thoroughly involved, totally committed to his clients. The road trips were a nightmare of inefficiency and confusion.” Buddy was now without management, but even when Petty had represented him, Buddy had been subjected to exhausting conditions on previous GAC tours.

As they finished their meal in Al’s Meet and Eat Café, the bus driver came in and told them he was ready to go. No more was said about chartering a plane—at least not for the present. On the way to Fort Dodge, the bus was so cold that once again they were in danger of frostbite. Carl Bunch’s feet were no better; he could be facing amputation and a loathsome death from gangrene. An intensely religious youth to whom God and the devil were palpable entities, Carl was convinced that “Satan” was hounding the “Winter Dance Party.” In a 1981 interview with Griggs, he’d refer to Buddy as the musical point man of a “massive rebirth” of Christ consciousness throughout the world. Satan, fearing Buddy’s power over millions of fans, was determined to stop the tour, Carl was convinced; the devil was coming “to kill, to steal, and destroy,” he said.

The perilous 210-mile trek across the Iowa plains, from Davenport to Fort Dodge, was taken at a time of year known as “winterkill.” Snow falls on this oceanic expanse in November and crusts over with ice, often remaining until spring thaw. Winterkill destroys the bacteria in the soil so that Iowa’s rich crops of corn, wheat, and soybeans can flourish. Though good for the economy, winterkill makes the area difficult for humans.

Nebraskan Theodore C. Sorenson once called the Midwest “a place to come from or a place to die.” His comments were particularly apt for the “Winter Dance Party” tour. Nobel Prize–winner Sinclair Lewis, who was born in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, wrote novels about the Midwest’s isolation, stupefying provincialism, and smugness. Minnesota-born author F. Scott Fitzgerald dreaded the “icy breath of death rolling down low across the land.”

The “Winter Dance Party,” despite the deprivations that winter brought on, made it to Fort Dodge and played the cavernous Laramar Ballroom to an avalanche of applause. They were fatigued, unwashed, malnourished, and, except for Buddy, disheveled in their dirty, smelly suits. This was the first night Buddy sported the alternate gear he’d brought along. He had never looked better; he’d at last discovered a style that suited him. He introduced Edwardian fashions to rock ’n’ roll during this tour, years before they became popular in the sixties. He wore an ascot and a greatcoat with a fur collar, displaying a style that was radical, even unthinkable in an era of Brooks Brothers sack suits and button-down collars. The “peacock look” men would embrace in the following decade can be traced to the clothes Buddy wore in 1958–59, although he avoided the flash that would characterize sixties fashions. Tasteful and vaguely aristocratic, his new image was romantic and subtly effete, presaging the androgyny of Mick Jagger. Through tireless and shrewd experimentation with cosmetic surgery, dental reconstruction, permanent waves, and hair dyes, Buddy had repeatedly reinvented himself until finally achieving a sort of beauty. Duane Eddy, whose twangy guitar made him rock’s No. 1 instrumentalist, saw Buddy at this time and described him, in Griggs’s
Reminiscing
magazine, as an impressive sight—tall, powerful, and strikingly handsome.

The tour party blew off some steam after the Fort Dodge show. In his black Levi’s suit with silver studs, Ritchie was the favorite of the groupies. Dion took on all comers. “Dion had his groupies, only they had a less flattering name for the girls back then—TFFs, Top Forty Fuckers,” Sue Butterfield, Dion’s future wife, told ex-groupie and author Pamela Des Barres. As the “Winter Dance Party” tour would prove in 1959, the real Top Forty Fucker was GAC. Leaving Iowa on January 30, the group headed north, driving 350 miles to Duluth, Minnesota, the remotest inland port in America. Their next few gigs would take them through winter badlands, where even the place names—Thunder Bay, Copper Harbor, Beaver Bay, Iron County, Porcupine Mountain, Caribou Island, Brute River—seemed to suggest the severity of nature. The bus broke down just as they pulled into Duluth. While it was being repaired, they took a look at the city that novelist Gore Vidal once described as a place “where cars skid and pelvises and femurs snap on the ice-slick pavements.” In Duluth, North Woodsmen congregate at the Classy Lumberjack Bar. Another favorite haunt, Black Bear Lounge, got its name when a bear smashed through the window and romped inside. Locals, trying to be philosophical about the worst weather south of the polar ice cap, joke about Duluth’s “nine months of winter and three months of poor sledding.”

The city clings to the clifflike shores of ice-bound Lake Superior, the largest single body of fresh water in the world—350 miles long, 160 miles wide, and 1,333 feet deep. In
Moby Dick,
Herman Melville described Superior’s “dismasting waves as direful as any that lash the salted wave. They have drowned many a midnightship with all its shrieking crew.” In late 1958, shortly before the arrival of the “Winter Dance Party,” the 729-foot-long ore vessel
Edmund Fitzgerald,
later immortalized in Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” churned out of Duluth on her maiden voyage. Sixteen years later, in a November northeaster of unimaginable force, the ship ran into a “white blob,” a thirty-foot-high wall of water that slammed her onto a reef and broke her to pieces, wadding her up like tinfoil. Superior swallowed her dead without a trace. Such is the fury of the region into which this band of roving musicians wandered, with no more protection than secondhand school buses that were overdue for the junkyard.

“I saw Buddy Holly in Duluth, at the Armory,” Bob Dylan later told
Rolling Stone
’s Kurt Loder. In 1959 the future folk-rock idol was still known as Bobby Zimmerman, a middle-class Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, about fifty miles northwest of Duluth. He wore Hush Puppies, played in a high-school garage band, and had a girl named Echo Helstrom, who proved as elusive as Buddy’s Echo and whose memory, according to some observers, Dylan would one day enshrine in “Girl From the North Country.” Commenting years later on Buddy’s Duluth show in
Rolling Stone,
Dylan said, “Buddy was great. Buddy was incredible.” Tickets for the January 31 show at the National Guard Armory cost $2, and the MC was a man named Lew Latto. More than two thousand teenagers attended what the local paper would later describe as “one of the biggest dances in the history of Duluth.”

Jimmy Bowen, playing clubs in the Midwest after his stint with Buddy Knox in the Rhythm Orchids, also caught the Duluth show and visited with Holly, who told Bowen that he was happy with his bride and that his life had settled down considerably since his single days. They spent an hour together, having a “nice little rap,” Bowen later told Griggs.

The bus required extensive repairs. As they waited, Ritchie Valens reintroduced the subject of a charter flight. “Tell everybody I’m flying,” he said to a Duluth newspaper reporter. But a replacement bus arrived at the last minute. Ritchie called his manager Bob Keene, who was dining at Jack’s on the Pier Restaurant in Santa Monica, California. “It’s thirty-five degrees below back here. I’m freezing,” Ritchie said, Keene later told a
Modern Screen
interviewer. According to Mendheim, Keene advised Ritchie to “finish that evening and then come home if things were that bad.”

“No,” Ritchie said, “I just wanted to tell you. Tonight I got two curtain calls! How about that!” Keene said he was proud of Ritchie and intended to cut a new album as soon as he returned to the West Coast.

They began the 330-mile trip to Appleton, Wisconsin, rumbling along the shores of Lake Superior, where ice floes were colliding like battering rams. They were entering the North Woods, land of the fox and the fur trapper. The heater was no match for icy blasts from the lake, but it was all that stood between them and cruel exposure. They stayed on U.S. 2 for a hundred miles, crossing the Brute and Iron rivers before entering the Chequamegon National Forest, a mournful region of lakes, loons, and gloomy woods. Somewhere around Ashland, Wisconsin, a town on Chequamegon Bay, the heater heaved its last puny puffs and died. The loose, rattling windows let in the cold and frost. Though the engine was knocking and missing, the bus continued on U.S. 2, traversing the Bad River Indian Reservation and the Whitecap Mountain Ski Area.

At Hurley, a town of 2,015 on the Wisconsin-Michigan border, they left U.S. 2 and turned south onto U.S. 51. Appleton still lay two hundred miles to the south. It was past midnight, February 1; later the same day, they were expected to perform a matinee in Appleton and an evening performance in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Fifteen miles out of Hurley, disaster struck. They were going up a hill when the engine froze and stopped. “The bus finally broke down, out there in the middle of the wilderness,” Carl Bunch later told Griggs. They were stalled on the highway, in a bus with no heater. “It was cold,” Tommy recalled. “Really cold.”

As Iron County garage mechanic Gene Calvetti would later tell
Ironwood Daily Globe
reporter Ralph Ansami, the piston had gone completely through the engine block. The tour party was on U.S. 51, a mile north of Pine Lake, Wisconsin, in the rugged North Woods, not a place where anyone would want to be stranded at one-thirty
A.M.
on February 1, 1959, during the coldest weather in memory. In these northern highlands, tearing blizzards and wind-driven snow can plunge the temperature to 50 below with startling suddenness. The low in Hurley on February 1 was 25 below, but out on the road it was more like 40 below. At this time of year, birch and pine trees snap in the wind, their ice-laden limbs crashing onto the highway. Snow, slanting in the wind, often piles up six feet deep.

The bus driver was no stranger to the outdoors. Leaning toward the windshield, he peered into the woods beside the highway. He could “feel” bears out there around Pine Lake, he said, writer Mark Steuer later reported in
Voyageur: Northeast Wisconsin’s Historical Review.
At least the musicians had the protection of the bus, but even that would soon be denied them. According to Tommy, they burned “newspapers in the aisle to keep warm.” When they ran out of newspapers and began to freeze, they were forced to go outside, hoping to hail down a car. They stood in the middle of the highway, where the wind keening down from the north was as sharp as splintered glass. The surrounding forest and the Great Lake beyond the trees seemed full of menace. This was the area Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote about in
The Song of Hiawatha,
referring to Lake Superior by its Indian name:

On the shores of Gitche Gumee …

Dark behind it rose the forest, rose the

    
black and gloomy pine trees.

In the early morning hours, traffic in these North Woods was all but nonexistent. The tour party was far less prepared to survive this wilderness than the French explorers, wearing buckskin and moccasins, who’d discovered it in the 1600s. “We didn’t know enough to be afraid, or what a mid-winter night by the side of the road really meant,” Dion wrote in
The Wanderer.
It was an hour, Tommy later told Buddy’s fans at a 1979 convention, before a big semi truck came thundering through the snow. They all started waving frantically. Obviously the driver had no intention of stopping “and tried to get around us,” Tommy added. As the truck disappeared into the enveloping snow, they trudged back to the bus. “We just sat there and froze,” Tommy recalled.