Buddy Holly: The tour from hell
By PAMELA HUEY, Star Tribune
January 24, 2009
The rickety old bus pulled out of the Duluth Armory late on Saturday, Jan. 31, 1959, and headed across St. Louis Bay into the frigid Wisconsin night. On board were some exhausted, stinky rock 'n' rollers and their harried manager. The Winter Dance Party tour had just finished its ninth gig in as many days and was headed east for Appleton and Green Bay, for shows 10 and 11 on Sunday. But as the temperature plunged to around 30 below and the wind howled, fate intervened. The southbound bus creaked to a stop as it struggled up an incline on Hwy. 51 about 10 miles south of Hurley. Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Waylon Jennings, Dion and the others were stranded on a remote highway in the northern Wisconsin forest. They huddled under blankets and burned newspapers to try to stay warm. Buddy's drummer was nursing painful frostbitten feet.
As Holly fans from around the world converge on Iowa's Surf Ballroom to remember his death in a plane crash 50 years ago and celebrate his music, the little-known story of the Wisconsin bus breakdown and the rest of the grueling tour is worth telling to understand why Holly chartered the airplane at Mason City. One of the nation's most famous rock stars, Holly had reluctantly signed onto the midwinter Midwest tour because he needed the money. But after 11 days of touring, he was tired -- tired of the endless miles on frozen buses, tired of performing in dirty clothes, tired of bickering with his manager in Clovis, N.M., and tired of sleeping sitting up on hard seats. By all accounts, the rockers gave a rousing performance in Clear Lake on Feb. 2, 1959. But rather than get on that cold bus again to travel 365 miles to Moorhead, Holly, J.P. Richardson (the Big Bopper) and Valens got on a single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza that crashed into a cornfield in a snowstorm just after takeoff. All three and pilot Roger Peterson were killed.
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The midwinter tour was particularly difficult for Texans Holly and his reconstituted Crickets, and for Valens, a Southern California boy who hadn't packed a winter coat... General Artists Corp. had organized the tour with no thought to geographic sanity. "They didn't care," says Holly historian Bill Griggs. "It was like they threw darts at a map. . ... The tour from hell -- that's what they named it -- and it's not a bad name.".. The tour started in Milwaukee on Friday, Jan. 23, 1959. It then zig-zagged during the next 11 days from Wisconsin to Minnesota to Wisconsin to Minnesota to Iowa to Minnesota to Wisconsin to Iowa to Minnesota. There were no roadies to help set up and pack up, and only icy two-lane highways to get from town to town.
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On Saturday, Jan. 31, the tour made its second-longest haul -- 368 miles from Fort Dodge, Iowa, to Duluth. Bob Dylan, then a young high schooler from Hibbing named Robert Zimmerman, has told the story of making eye contact with Holly. "He was great. He was incredible. I mean, I'll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand," Dylan told the Rolling Stone in 1984. The Duluth show ran until about 11 p.m. The balky bus had been kept in the Armory basement to stay warm. Tour members packed up and headed into the brutally cold Wisconsin night.
Tommy Allsup, the Crickets' lead guitarist who will be in Clear Lake at the big 50th anniversary bash on Feb. 2, has vivid memories of that next unscheduled stop on Hwy. 51. "We had started up this incline, it was snowing real bad, and the bus just started going slower and slower, and the lights got dimmer and dimmer, and all of a sudden the bus stopped," Allsup recalls. "The driver said, 'The bus is frozen,' ... It was so cold, and we were just sitting there right in the middle of the road. Everybody started thinking we were about to freeze to death." Dion's Belmonts started lighting newspapers to generate warmth. Holly's drummer Carl Bunch was in pain and having difficulty moving his legs. Allsup looked at his feet; they had turned brown. At that moment, they saw headlights in the distance. "It seemed like it took forever to get to us." A sheriff's deputy, who had been alerted by a passing trucker, sized up the dire situation and got four cars to take the musicians to Hurley. He also got Bunch to the hospital in nearby Ironwood, Mich., where the drummer would learn two days later about the plane crash.
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Monday, Feb. 2 was supposed to be an off-day. But at the last minute, tour organizers booked Clear Lake. So it was back on the bus for the 355-mile trip. "We tried to hang our wrinkled suits in the aisle, and after a while, it got kind of ripe in there. We smelled like goats," Jennings wrote. Allsup puts it another way: "We were running out of white shirts and underwear."
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