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.” And when we were playing in the back of the bus, I knew it.
“When I’m inside a song, I know exactly who I am. “You know, Buddy, Ritchie and I used to sit in the back and jam together. We were laughin’, and to me it seemed like a field trip! I didn’t know 30 below zero. One of the Belmonts had a bottle of scotch, so we’d all take a shot. “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. 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.ĭion, 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. You know what I like!”), was a recent Top 10 hit.ĭown 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. “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…. 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.Īmong 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. 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.
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