Ritchie Valens, J.P. (The Big Bopper) Richardson and Buddy Holly

Clear Lake, Iowa, Feb. 3 (UPI)

Three of the nation's top rock 'n roll singing stars — Ritchie Valens, J. P. (The Big Bopper) Richardson, and Buddy Holly — died today with their pilot in the crash of a chartered plane.

The singers, members of a rock 'n roll troupe touring Midwest cities, died because they wanted to make a fast hop between dates so they could get their shirts laundered.

The tragedy that ended the careers of the three rising stars symbolized, in a way that was powerfully real, the decline of the strange new music that was carrying us into adolescence and adulthood. In rock and roll one has to be a fan as well as a listener, and the energy of the music depends on stars as much as it does on expertise and creativity. Send Jimi Hendrix to prison for a few years, bust John Lennon and Mick Jagger just one more time, and it won't matter much how good the next album by the Byrds sounds. Rock and roll is not composed in conservatories or judged in museums — this is one world where infinity does not go up on trial. 19 and 59 — the stars were gone.

The sound Buddy Holly had brought together was left to the second stringers, members of the bands who previously had been happy to back him up or copy his material. Then Bobby Vee appropriated the Crickets for an LP, and hired a young piano player, Bob Dylan, for his road band. That was where the momentum was. Rock and roll, as Dylan himself put it. became "a piece of cream."

Today, we can discover that the heritage of that flimsy, beautiful era comes to more than just the million-sellers everyone remembers. The spirit of the old music, brash, innocent, is a spirit our best craftsmen have never lost, and the memories are more than music—they jump out of an awareness of crucial, sometimes tragic events that exaggerate every note of "La Bamba" and "Peggy Sue" until there's just a lot more there to hear.

Following an appearance before 1000 fans at Clear Lake last night, they chartered a plane at the Mason City Airport, two miles east of here, and took off at 1:50 AM for Fargo, North Dakota. Their Bonanza four-seat single engine plane crashed minutes later.

If Buddy Holly were alive today I've no doubt that he, like Johnny Cash, would be recording with Bob Dylan. (The band, for their part, tried to get Gene Vincent to visit the sessions for their latest album, only to discover him living in a hospital in Los Angeles, crippled by an accident.) When young Bob Dylan brought an electric rock and roll band on stage at a junior high school music pageant back in Hibbing, Minnesota, to a reception similar to the one he received when he did the same thing at Newport years later, Buddy Holly tunes were most likely part of the program. Traces of Holly's vocal style, his phrasing rather than his insane changes from deep bass to something resembling soprano, pop up all through Dylan's career: on an obscure 1962 Columbia single, "Mixed-Up Confusion," on "Absolutely Sweet Marie," on "I Shall Be Free No. 10," anywhere you look. Dylan and Holly share a clipped, staccato delivery that communicates a sly sense of cool, almost teenage masculinity.

This spirit is captured at its best on one of Holly's finest albums, The Great Buddy Holly (Vocalion VL 3811), recently released as a budget item ($1.98). The LP contains ten cuts recorded in Nashville before Holly made it as a star (these are the songs discussed by Barret Hansen in "Tex-Mex," the article in Rolling Stone #23, but they are available). The accompanying musicians, lacking the flash and the excitement of Holly's later band, do all the right things and put the burden on Holly. He carries it with ease, on an early version of "That'll Be the Day," on love songs, on school-boy rockers. It's with the last two songs, "Don't Come Back Knockin'" and "Midnight Shift," that Holly gets into rock and roll like a young Carl Perkins singing about women who cheat on him, not people who step on his shoes. This isn't the blues — there is no self-pity, not even a tear. Buddy has the last laugh. "Annie's beein working on the midnight shift" — he's glad to let you know, and he's not referring to overtime pay at the all-night drugstore. The phrasing is simply what we know as pure Dylan —

If she tells you she wants to use the caahhhh!

Never explains what she want it faaahhh!

— what Phil Spector meant when he heard the Four Tops doing "Reach Out" and said, "yeah, that's a black man singing Dylan." In an odd way, it was the Four Tops doing Buddy Holly. If things had been different, Holly and Dylan might be surprising us all with a snappy duet on "I Don't Believe You."