Not Fade Away 
Fair Park Coliseum, Lubbock 
The Night the Music Died
Searching for the ghost of Buddy Holly in Clear Lake, Iowa.
Lesley Loper says: Thank you for writing such a great article. Lubbock’s impact on the music world has been significant and largely undersold. I appreciate this exposure in Texas Monthly. The world lost an amazing musical genius that day, along with 2 other very talented performers. We are slowing gaining back some of Buddy for ourselves, as Maria Santiago’s clutch on his legacy has been so tight that fans have never been able to get as close as we want. I have high hopes that his music will thrive on a new level soon...though the restrictions that Maria has maintained has hampered all efforts thus far. (February 5th, 2009 at 1:47pm)
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Holly finished the first set at 9:30, and the musicians took an intermission. The stars signed autographs and made phone calls from the ballroom’s backstage pay phone. Everyone knew about the plane—Holly was planning on taking Jennings and Allsup with him, and at some point that evening the ill Bopper approached Jennings. “We were really good friends,” Jennings told me in 2000, two years before his death. “He said, ‘Man, I’ve been sick. I have the flu. I can’t get any rest at all. Would you mind if I take your place on the plane?’ And I said, ‘Well, if it’s okay with Buddy, it’s okay with me.’ ” Holly okayed the deal. When Valens heard about the plane, he asked Allsup to give up his seat, but the guitarist refused. Valens persisted throughout the rest of the night, but Allsup kept turning him down.
After the intermission, the musicians returned and played a second set. When it came time for Holly’s last song, Sardo, the Bopper, Valens, and the Belmonts all joined him. Hale says Holly announced, “Hey, we’d love to do more, but we have a plane to catch. We’ll be back in the spring for the Spring Dance Party!” For their final tune the band launched into one of Chuck Berry’s songs, by some accounts “Brown Eyed Handsome Man” (an anagram of which—as a die-hard Holly fan once discovered—is “rhyme man be dead on snow”).
Backstage, Holly and Jennings ate hot dogs, and Holly mocked his friend for not going with him on the plane. “I hope your damned bus freezes up again,” Holly said, laughing. Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes.” It was two friends having fun with each other but, as Jennings wrote later, “That took me a lot of years to get over.”
The musicians signed autographs, and Holly, the Bopper, and Allsup got in Anderson’s station wagon for the trip to the airport. This was the first time the musicians had broken their usual load-out protocol, and Holly asked Allsup to go back in and check to make sure they hadn’t left anything. While he was looking, Allsup bumped into Valens, who was signing a final autograph at the backstage door. Allsup remembers, “He asked me, ‘You gonna let me fly?’ For some reason I pulled out a fifty-cent piece, flipped it, said, ‘Call it.’ He called heads.” Valens won.
Anderson drove him, Holly, and the Bopper to the local airport, where they arrived at about 12:40 and met Dwyer and Peterson. The three musicians each paid $36 and got in the Beechcraft Bonanza—Holly in front. The plane taxied, sat on the runway for a few minutes, and took off at about 12:55 a.m., heading north. Dwyer later told investigators that from his point of view, in the airport tower, he thought he’d detected the plane “going down at a very slow rate of descent as it went farther away from us. I would guess that it was approximately four miles north of us. I thought at the time that probably it was an optical illusion.”
Peterson hadn’t filed a flight plan but told the airport controller that he would as soon as he was aloft. He never did, and Dwyer spent the next several hours trying to contact the plane, then calling airports along the northern path—where nobody had seen or heard anything. The controller in Fargo, North Dakota, told him the airport was closed due to a blizzard. Frustrated and worried, Dwyer took another of his planes up a little after nine that morning and half an hour later spotted the wreckage five miles from the airport. He called Anderson, who notified Hale, who was on the air at KRIB. Hale interrupted the record he was playing and broke the news to the world that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper were dead. “Then I reached over for a Holly album and put it on and just dropped the needle,” he told me. He couldn’t remember the song.
Federal investigators from the Civil Aeronautics Board spent three days poring over the crash site, and since there was no evidence of fire or equipment failure, they turned to the pilot. Peterson, they were told by flight instructors, sometimes suffered in-flight vertigo and disorientation. One instructor noted that during a March 1958 training flight, Peterson had been “very susceptible to distractions.” The CAB report, released in September 1959, concluded: “It is believed that shortly after takeoff pilot Roger Peterson entered an area of complete darkness and one in which there was no definite horizon; that the snow conditions and the lack of horizon required him to rely solely on flight instruments . . . ” Peterson was licensed, but he was not certified to fly by instruments alone. In the pitch-dark northern plains, with an overcast sky hiding the stars above and no city lights below, he couldn’t tell which way was up.
Iowans didn’t take kindly to the idea that one of their own had caused the crash, and over the years other theories were advanced. The most controversial one came after Holly’s pistol, which he carried in the bottom of his shaving kit, was found by Albert Juhl in the cornfield two months after the crash. Holly had the gun because of the large amounts of cash he carried after the shows. One empty shell was in the pistol, meaning it had been fired, but Juhl told the sheriff that was because he had shot it himself to see if it still worked. Nonetheless, a story took shape that perhaps there had been a struggle. Perhaps drugs and alcohol were involved (these were, after all, rock stars). One rumor has it that during one of Holly’s last phone calls with his young wife, María Elena, the couple had argued; perhaps he was so distraught that he started shooting.
Examiners never found any signs of gunplay (shells in the wreckage, bullet holes in the fuselage, or gunshot wounds to the bodies), but many locals remain convinced that some kind of onboard violence contributed to the crash. The theory gained enough momentum that in 2007 Jay Richardson paid to have his father’s body exhumed and examined by a forensic anthropologist. (It wasn’t just because of the gun; the Bopper’s body had been found farther from the plane than the others, on the other side of the fence, leading some to wonder if he had survived the impact and crawled away.) The expert concluded that the Bopper had died on impact. “There was no foul play,” he stated. After Griggs, the Holly expert, had a chance to look over the Bopper’s X-rays, he reported on his Web site, “It seemed that every bone had been fractured at least once.”
Griggs has his own theory. “I think the wings iced,” he told me. “Dwyer kept calling Peterson on the radio, and he never responded. I think he was too busy trying to keep the plane in the air.”
One person who remains a skeptic is Jerry Dwyer. I called him a few months after my visit, hoping he would remember his tentative okay to sit for an interview. I was in luck. Dwyer still flies, still has a hangar at the Mason City airport, and confirmed that he still gets nasty calls in the middle of the night, though not as often as he used to. “Yeah, I’ve had death threats and everything else,” he said. “Nobody has shot at me as far as I know.” I’d heard he was writing a book about the crash and his experience. “I’m working on it,” he confirmed, adding that he hopes to have it out within a year. “I’m gonna stir things up, and some folks are not gonna like it. But you have to remember: I was the only guy there.” He wouldn’t elaborate, but he did acknowledge that he had kept some of the wreckage. “There’s a reason I still have it.”
“Because it backs up your theory of what caused the crash?” I asked.
“Well,” he replied darkly, “I would think so.”
The survivors of the Winter Dance Party tour went on to enjoy various careers in show business. Dion left the Belmonts and had a series of huge hits in the sixties, including “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer.” Jennings became one of the biggest country stars of the seventies. Allsup turned himself into one of the greatest session guitarists ever, backing up everyone from Bob Wills to Willie Nelson and playing on some 6,500 recording sessions with three hundred artists (in 1987 he opened a club in Dallas’s Deep Ellum called Tommy’s Heads-Up Club; he still has the coin that saved his life). Allsup’s rhythm section partner, Carl Bunch, became a minister, singing Holly’s songs but with new, Christian lyrics. Sardo moved into film, acting in and producing B movies, like The Human Factor.
Holly wasn’t the only one of the three teen idols to become larger-than-life in death. Valens, the first great Mexican American rock star, influenced several generations of bands, including Los Lobos and Los Lonely Boys, and his life was the basis of the popular 1987 film La Bamba. A biopic of the Bopper is under way now too. Its working title is “The Day the Music Died.”
Of course, the music didn’t really die. Before leaving Iowa, I went back out to the cornfield and stood alone at the crash site. It was sad and eerie yet also strangely unsatisfying. The world long ago moved on from this place. The corn grew again and died again and grew again. Kids thousands of miles away and dozens of years in the future heard the music made by the guys who died here, and it moved them so much that they started making music too. As I walked back through the corn to my car, a song played over and over in my head. It was “That’ll Be the Day,” and it made me glad to be alive.
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