Buddy Holly once rocked the Lewiston Armory? Oh, boy! That’ll be the day. But it really happened May 5, 1958, nine short months before the seminal rocker died in an Iowa plane crash.
Feb. 3 marks 50 years since the storied tragedy that also claimed the lives of touring pop stars Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, along with Roger Peterson, the 21-year-old pilot who was flying the trio from Mason City, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., in a chartered 1947 Beechcraft Bonanza.
Peter Dow Bachelder, an Ellsworth author, won’t ever forget seeing Holly and his band, The Crickets, in Lewiston on a Monday night while a University of Maine freshman. He has kept the program he purchased at the show, featuring photos and thumbnail sketches of Holly, along with promoter Alan Freed’s lineup of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers, Danny and The Juniors, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and others.
“I gladly paid the $5 admission and trooped into the main hall,” recalled Bachelder in Will Anderson’s book “When Rock ’n Roll Rocked Maine.” “Evidently this would be a combination show and dance. But that was OK. Maybe I could find an even better vantage point than I’d first imagined.”
Lewiston police, alert to a stabbing at a Freed show in Boston two nights before, sent eight officers for crowd control, but as Bachelder recalled, “Their toughest assignment proved to be keeping one or two over-exuberant fans from storming the stage.”
After an intermission, the crowd of 4,000 got their money’s worth when Holly and The Crickets tore through a hard-driving set, highlighted by their biggest hit, “That’ll Be the Day.” Lewis performed next and Berry closed the show.
“Just like at the Lewiston performance, it was Holly who always stood out as the friendliest guy on the show, a real sweetheart who often stayed around afterward to sign autographs,” said Bath author Will Anderson. Anderson saw Holly and The Crickets at the Brooklyn Paramount around 1957 while he was living in the Westchester County village of Ardsley, N.Y.
“This performer with glasses came on stage, and I thought, who is this finky guy?” recalled Anderson, who was accustomed to seeing black Freed-produced singers such as Bobby Freeman, who belted out his hit song, “Do You Wanna Dance?”
“Then I heard Holly sing and play his guitar and I changed my mind,” said Anderson, who recalled the Texan’s magnetic stage presence and hiccup-like voice.
The news of the 22-year-old Holly’s untimely death came like a lightning bolt to young fans such as Bachelder and Anderson. Readers of the Bangor Daily News, which went to press before the tragic news broke, woke up to this one-column headline Feb. 4, 1959: “Teen Idols Killed In Plane Crash.”
The top of the front page was reserved for the crash of an American Airlines turbo-jet that plunged into the East River after taking off from LaGuardia Airport in New York, killing 65 people.
In the days and weeks that came after the Iowa tragedy, Holly’s name was seldom mentioned in the BDN as readers turned their attentions to other topics such as the historical accuracy of the city’s new Paul Bunyan statue, which had been built to honor the city’s 125th anniversary.
Not until Don McLean’s 1972 hit record, “American Pie,” which recounted “the day the music died” and the sadness of Holly’s “widowed bride,” did the gentle, bespectacled, innovative rocker really make his long-deserved comeback, capped by the 1978 fictionalized biopic, “The Buddy Holly Story.”
When the three surviving Crickets performed last July at WERU’s Full Circle Fair in Blue Hill, baby boomers such as me danced by the stage. All the hits were there — “Peggy Sue,” “Maybe Baby,” “Everyday,” “Rave On,” “Oh Boy!” “Not Fade Away,” “It’s So Easy,” “Raining In My Heart,” and of course, “That’ll Be the Day.”
Buddy’s spirit was in the air, a half century after his body died in a frozen Iowa cornfield.