Buddy Holly and the Road Trip from Hell: The Days Before the Music Died

A portion of the memorial at crash site.

Someone who identified themselves as Anonymous left a Comment on my Sunday blog post and for technical reasons I am temporarily unable to "accept" comments. (Hopefully just a temporary glitch.)

This story is of such importance that I am posting it here as a blog post. I have in the past referenced this "Road Trip from Hell" but never in this much detail. I will also preface this by saying that the reason this tour was undertaken was because Buddy Holly and the Crickets had not yet received payment for their European Tour. This horror was the consequence of that unfortunate situation.

Thank you to whoever submitted these details. We in the Northland are familiar with all these places. Most people are less familiar with many of these additional details.

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After Buddy's Saturday night show at the Armory in Duluth, Minnesota on Jan. 31st, Buddy and his fellow performers packed up, loaded and boarded an unheated, uninsulated school bus for an all-night 340 mile ride to Appleton, Wisconsin for a Sun. matinee show at the Cinderella Ballroom and later on that day, an 8PM show in Green Bay at the Riverside Ballroom, 30 miles north. 

Duluth Armory, January 1959

The low-budget inadequate transportation was supplied by General Artists Corp., the same heartless agency responsible for the poorly planned 24 shows in 24 days, Winter Dance Party, referred to by most of those who were on it as: "The Tour From Hell!", with all its zig-zag routing in the middle of winter, at some of the country’s coldest cities in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Kentucky and Ohio, without allowing ample travel time for the long distance drives and not leaving any extra time for dangerous winter driving conditions, let alone time for the performers to take a hot shower, do laundry or get adequate rest. 

The bus traveled east out of Duluth on old coast-to-coast U.S. two-lane Hwy. 2, thru windy sub-zero conditions with ice and snow covered roads. The recorded low temperature in Duluth that night was -7° F with 11" of snow on the ground. The wind averaged 19mph, with gusts up to 28mph, making for a "feels like" temperature of -30°. At the small town of Hurley, WI the bus turned south onto Hwy. 51. The same Highway 51 Dylan wrote and sang about on his self-titled 1962 debut album. Although a basically a 12 bar Blues, Dylan's recording displays a definite Buddy Holly influence, both in his aggressive vocal delivery and in his percussive rhythm guitar playing on the track. 

After turning south onto Highway 51 in Hurley, at approx. 1:30 AM CST, on a barren stretch of road, approx. 15 miles south of Hurly and one mile north of Pine Lake, the bus threw a piston, leaving Buddy and the rest of the tour party stranded by the side of the road for about 2 hours in the frigid darkness, huddling together and even trying to light newspapers inside the bus for some kind of heat. A semi-truck drove by and the driver, after seeing the stranded crew trying to wave him down beside the stalled bus, alerted the Iron County Sheriff's Dept. back in Hurley, by CB radio, about their predicament. A posse was sent out to rescue them in Jeeps. They returned to Hurley in the pre-dawn darkness of Feb.1st and were deposited at the Club Carnival Café, a former strip club, on Silver Street, only to have the management refuse service to the black bus driver. 

The musicians ordered food for him and brought it to him at the Iron Co. Garage, where the bus had been towed. Buddy's drummer, Carl Bunch, suffered frostbite in both his feet, having to be rushed to Grand View Hospital, seven miles away. The Appleton show was cancelled and the group traveled by train to Green Bay. 2 hours later the Iron Co. Garage began installing a replacement engine in the bus, after which a driver delivered the bus to Green Bay. Shortly after arriving in Green Bay, J.P. Richardson stopped at nearby Bertrand's Sporting Goods and purchased a sleeping bag, vowing he wasn't going to freeze on that bus again. 

The tour party was scheduled to have the next day, Monday, Feb. 3rd, off to catch up on laundry and get a much needed break but GAC, greedy to make a buck and not considering any of the performer's needs and with J.P. and Ritchie both coming down with the flu, GAC accepted a last minute call offer from Carroll Anderson, 39 year old manager of the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa. GAC telephoned the troupe in Green Bay and told them they need to board the bus ASAP after their show and travel 350 miles southwest to Clear Lake, with an ETA of 4pm for an 8 o'clock show but the bus kept breaking down across Wisconsin, on into Iowa until the troupe ditched the bus, leaving it along the highway, renting another bus, for the last leg and arriving only a couple hours prior to showtime without any idea of the disaster yet to come.

Crash site, Clear Lake, Iowa

Buddy Holly Death Certificate

In Memoriam