The Last Days of Buddy Holly

The musicians had kicked off their scheduled three-week tour on January 23rd at the Million Dollar Ballroom in Milwaukee. Playing grueling one-night stands and crisscrossing Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa in a series of ramshackle, continually breaking-down buses, they were now, in the early hours of Sunday, February 1st, heading down Highway 51 on a 300-mile journey to Appleton, Wisconsin, from Duluth, Minnesota, where they had that previous evening performed for an audience that included the then-17-year-old Hibbing, Minnesota, senior-year high school student Bobby Zimmerman. It was a concert that never escaped his mind. (Bob Dylan would later remark that it seemed "as if there was a halo around Buddy's head.") Down on Highway 51, near the town of Hurley, Wisconsin, in the early hours of the morning, a piston on the tour bus had gone through the engine block. In the pitch darkness and with no heat, the musicians, stranded for several hours until rescued by passing motorists, burned newspapers in the aisle of the bus to keep warm.

Dion, whose exhilarating versions of songs by Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens are featured on his new album, Heroes, recalls his memories of that night: "We were in the middle of a blizzard, trees were snapping in the wind, it was 30 below, and the snow was coming down so hard we couldn't see out the windows.

"Buddy and I huddled together under a blanket, and just to pass the time, I'd tell him stories of the Bronx — about Ralphie Mooch, Frankie Yunk Yunk and Joe BB-Eyes — and he'd tell me stories about Baptists in Lubbock, Texas. One of the Belmonts had a bottle of scotch, so we'd all take a shot. We were laughin', and to me it seemed like a field trip! I didn't know 30 below zero.

"You know, Buddy, Ritchie and I used to sit in the back and jam together. It was a little bit of heaven.

"When I'm inside a song, I know exactly who I am. And when we were playing in the back of the bus, I knew it. When we hit those chords and were stompin' on the floor of the bus and we were rockin' and taking solos and taking verses . . . man, that was home, that was family, that was the connection, that was a bit of salvation, that was touching the very center of my heart."

The Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa — a town of about 8,000 once known as "Iowa's Fun Capital" — was opened in 1934. A one-story, hangarlike structure, it looks as if it had materialized out of one of Stephen Shore's photographs of the American vernacular roadside attractions he wittily calls "Uncommon Places." Inside, clouds are projected on the ballroom's blue-painted domed ceiling and faux palm trees flank the stage, intended to simulate the atmosphere of a South Sea Island beach club.

It was 19 below zero the morning when the Winter Dance Party musicians boarded another bus in Green Bay, Wisconsin, for the 340-mile journey to Clear Lake, but near Prairie du Chien, the heaters, as if on schedule, failed once again and had to be repaired. They arrived at the Ballroom just in time to perform their 8 p.m. show for the more than 1,200 teens who had paid $1.25 to attend the concert. Alan Mitchell, a former Chicago radio disc jockey who was there that night with his girlfriend, recalls, "I was 15 and was wearing my Thompson High School letter jacket. And I have to chuckle when I remember my ducktail and lots of Brylcreem — 'A little dab will do ya.' We looked very cool then . . . and the girls did too with their poodle skirts, capris, froufrous and rabbit-fur collars."

And the musicians were dressed to kill. Throughout the tour, the Big Bopper sported a Stetson and a three-quarter leopard-skin coat that he called Melvin. Valens dressed in a blue satin shirt, black bolero and vaquero pants. And Buddy and the Crickets were clothed in black jackets, gray slacks and ascots. At the ballroom that night, they performed their hits, and for the finale they all came onstage for a jam that included "Brown Eyed Handsome Man," "La Bamba" and "Great Balls of Fire."