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.
0 kommentar(er)
