Buddy Holly: Biography (46 page)

Ritchie had learned from Bob Keene that he would receive his gold record for “Donna” as soon as he came home. Ironically, he was having far more success with the recording than with the real Donna, a high-school classmate he’d met at an Igniters gang dance in LA, according to Mendheim. Though Donna Ludwig was going with another boy, Ritchie said “Hi, blondie!” every time they passed in the hallway at San Fernando High, Donna later recalled. They danced together at noontime school hops and, according to Donna, necked whenever they ran into each other at hangouts like the Big Boy in Mission Hills or the Rainbow Roller Rink in Van Nuys.

Donna later revealed to Mendheim that her father disapproved of his blond, blue-eyed daughter dating a Chicano. Though for a while Donna sneaked out to meet Ritchie at the roller rink, their relationship proved too much of a “hassle” for her and they broke up.
Sixteen
magazine would state in July 1959 that a sore point between them was Ritchie’s jealousy, which provoked many of their fights. “You flirt too much,” he growled at her before they split up. On the rebound, Ritchie dated Donna’s girlfriend (and later stepsister) Cathy Brown, but he still loved Donna and wrote the song to get her back, according to Donna herself as well as Doug Macchia, the twenty-year-old San Fernando High graduate who brought Ritchie to the attention of record producer Bob Keene.

In September 1958 Ritchie called Donna and began, “Donnie … Listen, I’m really sorry what happened.” Cool at first, Donna melted into tears when he told her he was writing a song about her, according to a 1959 article in
Modern Screen.
Suddenly he started singing, and the song told of how she’d left him and how devastated he was. “Well, he began to cry,” Donna later told
Photoplay.
In another interview, in August 1959, she added, “We’d broken up about a year ago—but not really.” As a beautiful sixteen-year-old, Donna never lacked for dates, but according to mutual friends who observed them at the time, whenever Ritchie came home to L.A. from one of his tours, he could usually be found “walking Donna Ludwig to her next period class, carrying her books, an arm thrown affectionately over her shoulders or around her waist.”

On February 2, 1959, after Ritchie completed his set at the Surf Ballroom, the Bopper came on next and titillated the crowd with “Chantilly Lace,” in which a lecherous lover enumerates the unmentionable acts his girlfriend is willing to perform on him. “I remember the Bopper,” says Jim Weddell, who was seventeen and had driven with two friends from Clarion, Iowa, forty-five miles southwest of Clear Lake. “The Bopper was the biggest thing to me,” Weddell adds. Karen Lein recalls in 1995, “The Bopper was really good.” Carroll Anderson added in 1980 that the Bopper had everyone “screaming.” But it was Buddy, Anderson said, who “almost blew the roof. They didn’t want to let him go.”

The break between the two shows that night fell at 10:30
P.M.
Anderson reminisced years later in
Rave On!
magazine about how he escorted Buddy from the stage “and we came right down on the little brick wall there and he signed autographs.” Ritchie and the Bopper “didn’t give near as many,” Anderson recalled, “because Buddy was the big star.” With only a few minutes remaining before the late show, Buddy joined the other musicians in the band room. Bob Hale arrived to interview them for his DJ show on KRIB. Though Hale had dined with Buddy at Witke’s, he failed to recognize Buddy as the drummer during Ritchie’s performance and asked who was the “guy with the glasses playing drums.”

“My name is Mr. Holly, Mr. Hale,” Buddy replied.

Amused, Ritchie began to extol Buddy’s latest record, “It Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” and told Hale that Buddy was the first rock star to record with a full violin section. Ritchie joked that Buddy should be performing in a cutaway with tails and predicted he’d be leading the philharmonic before the end of the year. They all sat around drinking Cokes and coffee and having an impromptu party. A reporter from the
Clear Lake Mirror-Reporter
came in and found the stars “full of pep, reacting joyously to the big crowd of young people.” The Bopper and Ritchie “playfully Indian-wrestled backstage between acts,” he added.

Anderson recalled in 1980 that while Sardo and Dion began the second show, sometime after 10:30, Buddy spoke to him about the charter flight. “Let’s confirm that,” Buddy said, Anderson related in
Rave On!
They rang Dwyer’s Flying Service again and were advised that the plane would be ready for them around midnight.

When Buddy began his set after the break, the Belmonts’ bass singer Carlo Mastrangelo sat in on drums; Carl Bunch was still in the hospital in Bessemer, recovering from frostbite. Buddy had planned to hire another drummer, “but something happened,” Tommy said in 1979, and they never got around to it. Buddy sang “Gotta Travel On,” a song that evokes the free but melancholy life of a rolling stone, one who bums around little towns and periodically decides it’s time to hit the road again, usually at the first sign of winter. Buddy could have been singing about himself and the “Winter Dance Party” troupe, who’d never spent more than one night in the same town and still had to play Moorhead, Sioux City, Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo, Dubuque, Spring Valley, Chicago, Peoria, Springfield, Louisville, Canton, and Youngstown before wrapping on February 15, less than a month after they’d started.

People in the audience began to call out the titles of Buddy’s hit records. Charging into “Peggy Sue” at full throttle, he ignited the ballroom in seconds. Even the boozers lurking in back were stirred. “We drank beer and gin,” says Jim Weddell. “We went to a bootlegger before the show. There was always somebody who’d buy your booze for you.” Weddell put aside his drink and started bopping to Buddy’s driving attack in “Peggy Sue.” For Weddell and many others that night, the “Winter Dance Party” prefigured latter-day rock festivals such as Monterey Pop and Woodstock and would live just as vividly in memory.

It also marked the end of an era. With its major stars in decline and the upcoming congressional auto-da-fé that would wipe out tour packagers and DJs, fifties rock was celebrating its final night. As
Rolling Stone
’s Robert Palmer would write from the perspective of 1990, “It is a measure of fifties rock’s genuine revolutionary potential (as opposed to the revolution-as-corporate-marketing-ploy so characteristic of the sixties) that while sixties rock eventually calmed down, was co-opted or snuffed itself out in heedless excess, fifties rock ’n’ roll was
stopped.
Cold.”

Dion, Ritchie, and the Big Bopper had warmed the Surf audience up, but Buddy took the show to a higher level of excitement, bombarding them with one relentless rocker after another, from “That’ll Be the Day” to “Rave On.” Then “Heartbeat” and “Everyday” bound the whole crowd together in blissful fellowship. Bob Hale later described it as “fantastic … just one big surge” around the bandstand. Dion, who was watching from the sidelines, later wrote that Buddy had founded rock’s avant-garde and that his absence from the charts in 1959 was no more than a temporary setback: “He’d made it this far because he knew exactly where he wanted to go. To the top.” Though Buddy was the veteran star on the bill, Dion reflected that Buddy “was only at the beginning of a career that had already changed music.”

Years later, when asked what he was thinking during Buddy’s Surf performance, Jim Weddell says, “I dunno—I was just out there a-boppin’.” Buddy Holly had ironically and unknowingly achieved his purpose: a generation was up and dancing, and the world would never be the same. The rest of the century would bear his stamp.

The evening was not an unqualified success. When Buddy, Ritchie, and the Bopper attempted to sing together, they weren’t exactly the platters. “Thank God they never went into a recording studio,” Hale later told Griggs. It was all offered in a spirit of fun, and they left their audience in ecstasy. “There would never again be a time when the land was rocking in harmony,”
Rolling Stone
’s Ed Ward observed, almost thirty years later. Russ Rippon of nearby Rock Falls, Iowa, later told
Rave On!
that the final number performed at the Surf that night was Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba.” The show ended at 11:55
P.M.

Following the performance, Anderson paid the road manager, who was still trying to reach GAC to cancel the next show. The troupe was paid its base rate of $850 plus an extra $250, thanks to the “60 percent privilege” clause they had in their contract. Anderson later explained that 60 percent of the box-office net that night “was greater than the guarantee,” hence the $250 bonus. As Anderson counted out the money to the road manager, Buddy came into the office and said, “I’m down to only $19 or $20,” Anderson recalled in 1980. Lucier handed Buddy approximately $300, which Buddy “just rolled … up and stuffed … in his pocket.”

Anderson offered Buddy and his musicians a ride to the Mason City airport in his station wagon. As they started to leave, the Bopper approached Waylon and said he was suffering from the flu. “He was a big man,” Waylon said, explaining that the Bopper couldn’t rest on the bus. According to Tommy, the Bopper wanted to reach Moorhead early in the morning so he could visit a doctor and get an injection. The Bopper offered to leave his new sleeping bag with Waylon if he could take Waylon’s place on the plane.

Waylon’s reply to the Bopper, Waylon later told Sky Corbin, was: “It’s all right with me, if it’s all right with Buddy. You go ask him.” Buddy raised no objections. Waylon was relieved to be off the flight, according to Tommy. For Waylon, the fun and camaraderie of the bus far outweighed its dangers. It was the beginning of an addiction to the road that would eventually be detrimental, driving Waylon “to drugs,” according to the video
Waylon.

Ritchie began to wonder if there was any way he could talk Tommy Allsup out of the last seat on the plane. He, too, was suffering from a cold but again hesitated to plead illness out of fear that the older stars might say he couldn’t “take” the hardships of touring. Instead, Ritchie said he needed to get to their next gig in time to have his hair cut, Alan Freed later told writer Jim Hoffman. Ritchie remained ambivalent about flying, according to his sister-in-law Ernestine Reyes. On his final night in Los Angeles, he’d gone to the Guardian Angels church on Laurel Canyon Boulevard with his friend Gail Smith and prayed for a safe journey. He was afraid of airplanes, he told Gail, according to Mendheim, but he was getting used to them and might even take one at some point during the “Winter Dance Party.” Gail warned that it was snowy and storming in the North and asked, “What’d you do if you crash?”

“I’ll land on my guitar,” Ritchie said.

His mother told him she’d had a premonition, writer George Shetlock later disclosed in
Teen
magazine. “She didn’t want him to go,” Shetlock wrote, “but she couldn’t bring herself to stand in the way of his career.” Ernestine Reyes drove from her home at 13812 Judd Street in Pacoima to give him a lift to the airport. Shortly thereafter, she told Concepcion that just before boarding the plane, Ritchie had said “he wished he didn’t have to fly,” Hoffman revealed in
Photoplay.

At the Surf, despite these qualms, Ritchie asked Tommy for his seat on the plane. Tommy said no, explaining that he “was starting to freeze every night, too.”

“I have never been on a small plane before,” Ritchie begged, according to Mendheim. “Please let me go instead.” Tommy shook his head and left the ballroom with Buddy, the Bopper, and Anderson. They went to the parking lot and dumped their belongings in the back of Anderson’s station wagon. Anderson’s wife Lucille and their eleven-year-old son Tom joined them for the ride to the airport. Suddenly, according to Tommy, Buddy asked him to “go back” and make sure they hadn’t left any amplifiers or other equipment behind. Returning to the ballroom, Tommy again encountered Ritchie, who was surrounded by fans clamoring for his autograph. One of them, Cindy Johnson, recalled in 1989 that she and her friends lacked pencil and paper so Ritchie accommodatingly signed their hands. Spotting Tommy, Ritchie decided to make one last play for the seat. “You going to let me fly, guy? Come on. Flip,” Ritchie said, according to Tommy. Reaching in his pocket, Ritchie produced a 50-cent piece, Tommy stated in a 1979 interview. “Let’s flip a coin,” Ritchie said.

Tommy told him to go ahead and flip it “if you want to go that bad.” But if Tommy lost, he later told Goldrosen, he wanted to use the Bopper’s sleeping bag on the bus. Evidently that wasn’t possible; in 1979 Tommy told a meeting of Holly fans that the Bopper promised the sleeping bag to Waylon “and no more was said about that.” If the coin came up heads, Ritchie would go on the plane; tails and it was Tommy. Ritchie flipped the coin. It danced in the dim light of the empty ballroom and landed in Ritchie’s palm with a soft splat. His big dimpled face broke into a wide smile as they peered down into his hand. “You won the toss,” said Tommy.

“What do you know? This is the first time I’ve ever won,” Ritchie said, Alan Freed would tell Hoffman a few months later.

Then Ritchie and Tommy went outside and spoke briefly with Buddy, explaining the latest change in the manifest. Tommy asked Buddy to pick up a registered letter from his mother, which she’d sent to the post office in Fargo. Some identification would be necessary, Buddy pointed out, and he asked Tommy for his driver’s license. “Here, take my wallet,” Tommy said. Buddy stuffed the wallet in his pocket and climbed into the station wagon with Ritchie and the Bopper.

Tommy left to join Waylon, Sardo, and Dion and the Belmonts, who were boarding the bus. At exactly midnight, Angelo D’Aleo of the Belmonts started celebrating his nineteenth birthday, inside the bus; it was February 3, 1959. All the members of the tour party were gathered in the parking lot, ready to leave for Moorhead, some by bus, others by plane. A light snow began to fall, and suddenly it was a scene as sad and star-crossed as the third act of
La Bohème.
Bob Hale and his wife stood in the darkness, saying good-bye to the three stars of the tour, who were sitting in Anderson’s station wagon, waiting to go to the airport. At 12:05
A.M.
Anderson started the car and they headed for Mason City.