The Night the Music Died: Searching for the ghost of Buddy Holly in Clear Lake, Iowa. (Michael Hall, February 2009, Texas Monthly)
The other acts on the Winter Dance Party lineup were Ritchie Valens, a 17-year-old kid from the San Fernando Valley who had had a breakout hit with “Come On, Let’s Go”; the Big Bopper, a 28-year-old deejay from Beaumont who had made a splash that year with a novelty hit, “Chantilly Lace”; Dion and the Belmonts, a quartet of teen singers from New York with a few minor hits (“I Wonder Why” may be the most notable); and Frankie Sardo, an Italian kid from New York with another minor hit, “Fake Out.” Holly would be the top draw. At Christmas he returned to Lubbock to put a new band together. Earlier Holly had befriended and recorded a young deejay and singer named Waylon Jennings. Now he told him to learn how to play the bass; Tommy Allsup would play guitar and Carl Bunch drums.
The tour had no frills. Jennings, Allsup, and Bunch backed up all the stars, who sang through one microphone and whatever primitive public-address system the local promoter had found for the show. Sardo—whom Jennings later called “the worst singer you ever heard in your life”—was on first, then the Bopper, Valens, the Belmonts, and Holly (sometimes the Belmonts played second). There were no set changes; the show was a dance, and the stars played one after the other, the earlier acts doing a handful of songs and the later ones getting more time. Holly played 45 minutes to an hour. He began every performance with the old folk song “Gotta Travel On,” then moved through his hits, as well as “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” which had just been released, and a few covers, such as “Lucille,” “Great Balls of Fire,” and “Salty Dog Blues.” The whole concert was about two hours long.
That winter was brutally cold, and the musicians traveled in a series of cramped, drafty old charter buses that kept breaking down. The first performance was a January 23 show in front of six thousand kids in Milwaukee, where the temperature was 17 below zero. From there the tour crisscrossed between Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa. The bands played every night, sometimes driving three or four hundred miles to make shows in tiny towns like Kenosha, Mankato, and Montevideo. After about a week, they were miserable. Valens was sick, and the Bopper was coming down with the flu. There was never any time to do laundry, so besides being cold, the buses began to stink. “We smelled like goats,” Jennings later recalled. On January 30 Holly asked the Fort Dodge, Iowa, promoter about chartering a plane.
