The Last Days of Buddy Holly

"I first found out about the plane crash," Don McLean has said, "because I was a 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy in New Rochelle, New York, and I was carrying the bundle of the local Standard-Star papers that were bound in twine, and when I cut it open with a knife, there it was on the front page." Paul McCartney, who idolized Buddy Holly as a teenager and bought the publishing rights to Buddy's songs in 1976, also found out about the plane crash from a newspaper: "I remember reading the news on the front page of the Daily Mirror. Me and my friends were in the playground of the Liverpool Institute High School for Boys — it was the school George and I went to — in a little back corner that was called the Smokers' Corner. It was where all the would-be rebels and music freaks would congregate. It was before school opened, someone had the paper, and we were all huddled around reading it and were shocked and saddened by the news.

"Buddy was a major influence on the Beatles. And in John's case, he had to wear heavy horn-rimmed glasses, just like Buddy, which he would always whip off when any girls came near. But post-Buddy he didn't have to, and that was an added bonus for him. Buddy to us was your neighbor. He looked like some of the kids you saw around in school.

"Listening to and singing Buddy's songs puts you in a good place. It hits that era, and you're a teenager again. It takes you right back with a slam. For me it evokes beautiful memories because that's when I was just getting into music. John and I would sing 'Words of Love' together just sitting at home: He'd sing it and I'd fall in behind him on the harmony. And this became the backbone of a lot of Beatles works — John singing lead and me singing harmony. And we spent hours trying to work out how to play the opening guitar riff of 'That'll Be the Day,' and were truly blessed by the heavens the day we figured it out. That was one of the first songs we ever learned to play, and it was in fact the very first song John, George and I ever recorded."

It would go down in history as rock & roll's Tour From Hell: the Winter Dance Party of 1959 that took place exactly 50 winters ago in February. As their heat-deprived yellow converted Baptist-school tour bus went slipping and sliding in subarctic temperatures along the ice-laced highways of the Upper Midwest, a dozen shivering young musicians inside whiled away the hours huddling under blankets, catnapping, cardplaying, storytelling and making music together on acoustic guitars.

Among the riders were the 22-year-old Buddy Holly, one of the radiant lights of 1950s rock & roll, from Lubbock, Texas; the 17-year-old Ritchie Valens, a forefather of the Chicano rock movement, from California's San Fernando Valley; the 19-year-old Dion DiMucci (better known as Dion) and the Belmonts — soon to rise to the top of the charts with "A Teenager in Love" — from the Bronx; and the 28-year-old group elder, J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson, a radio DJ from Beaumont, Texas, who, in 1957, had broken the record for continuous on-the-air broadcasting (five days, two hours and eight minutes, during which time he played 1,821 discs, taking showers during five-minute newscasts) and whose signature song, "Chantilly Lace" ("Hel-lo, bay-bee. . . . You know what I like!"), was a recent Top 10 hit.