MASON CITY, IA (AP) – Three of the nation’s top rock ‘n’ roll stars and a pilot were killed during a light snow when their chartered plane crashed shortly after taking off from the airport here early Tuesday.
64 years ago this February 3, 2023, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and pilot Roger Peterson were killed in a plane crash. This was the “day the music died.”
Buddy Holly has gone down in rock and roll history for his tragedy more than his music, but while most of the world has long buried these names, Clear Lake, Iowa remembers them fondly each year as the anniversary comes to pass.
The rockstars had just wrapped a concert at the Surf Ballroom that still stands to this day and has featured many prominent names before and after it hosted that fateful stop on the Winter Dance Party Tour.
Performers like the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Ricky Nelson, Little Richard, Jan and Dean and Conway Twitty, who were prominent in the 1950s, all performed at the Surf before the three names that would become synonymous with it.
According to the Des Moines Register, Clear Lake residents joke today that if everyone who said they were at the Surf Ballroom that night was really there, the crowd would have reached 50,000. The ballroom itself only holds about 2,000 people. It’s estimated the actual count was close to 1,500 at the concert.
Santana, REO Speedwagon, Kansas, Alice Cooper, Martina McBride, Lynryd Skynyrd, Robert Plant and countless others continued to play the venue long after the music died. And every year around the anniversary, the Surf holds an event honoring the fallen stars.
Named fittingly, the Winter Dance Party is a three-day event that is “a celebration of the lives and legacies of three rock ‘n roll legends lost too soon,” according to their website. Full of live music and dancing, the event allows people to step back in time and remember what it may have been like on that night.
Unlike the Surf Ballroom, the memorial at the crash site is more unofficial. In fact, the site didn’t even have a memorial until 1988, when music fan Ken Paquette made a stainless-steel monument of a guitar and three records with the names of the three rockers. In 2009 he made a memorial for the pilot as well.
The access point on an old farm road is marked by a big pair of Holly’s trademark eyeglasses. It’s a long walk from there to the crash site, but many fans continue to make the trek, even if the road is paved in snow.
Kyle Munson, a former writer for the Des Moines Register visited the site in the dead of winter on the 50th anniversary of the crash.
“I’ve never been colder in my life than in the first hour of Feb. 3, 2009, when I stood in the middle of a frozen field,” Munson wrote in a 2017 article about the visit.
The site itself is just the same as it was in 1959, a simple Iowa field where no one could have predicted something so tragic to have taken place.
Holly produced seven top 40 hits in his few years in the spotlight and he has influenced a generation of rock and roll stars before his untimely death at 22.
The Beatles decided to name themselves after an insect partly because that’s what Holly’s band, the Crickets, did (funnily enough Holly considered calling his band the Beetles but thought it was too silly). Two days before Holly’s death, Bob Dylan saw him in concert in Duluth, Minnesota and a young Mick Jagger caught a show in London. From Springsteen to The Clash, Holly’s influence has spread to many of the musicians we know and love today.
And it all ended in an Iowa field with a crash that is still shrouded in mystery and speculation even 64 years later.
Stereo Gaga 