Buddy Holly Poster Fetches $447K; Duluth Dylan House Was Much More Affordable

I read the news today, oh boy. A poster for the Buddy Holly concert that never was went up for sale and this week fetched the tidy sum of $447,000. The story of the sale gained wide circulation for a variety of reasons. Foremost is probably the amount of value placed on the poster. That's a lot of clams. Second, because of its rarity. This may be the only one in existence for that specific show, which took place on the very day of the plane crash that took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valenz, J.P. Richardson (the "Big Bopper") and pilot Roger Peterson shortly after midnight. It's a  plane crash made legendary by Don McLean in his song "American Pie."

STOP THE PRESSES!

OK, so Artnet News published the figure of $447,000, but the headline on John Lamb's story on the front page of our Duluth News Tribune announced that the said poster sold for a record $477K. 

Yahoo News posted a CBS News story that also affirms the $447K auction transaction. That story, by Helen Ray, opens like this:

The rarest and only known Buddy Holly poster from "The Day the Music Died," when an airplane carrying Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper (real name J.P. Richardson) crashed and killed all three, sold at auction for a record-breaking $447,000.

Oops. On further inspection John Lamb got it right. Whoever wrote the headline got it wrong. According to advertising guru David Ogilvy, five times more people read the headline than the ad copy. This undoubtedly applies to news stories, I suspect, and some astute readers may notice the discrepancy.

BACK TO THE STORY

Poster for Buddy Holly's last concert at the Surf Club.

There are many layers to this story, though. Like many teens in the 50s and 60s, Bobby Veline had learned to play the guitar and formed a band with a group of friends, much like Bobby Zimmerman had with his Golden Chords. After the plane crash took the lives of three headliners, the Moorhead show promoters scrambled to find someone who could step into Buddy Holly's big shoes. Bobby Veline and The Shadows earned the opportunity to wear the mantle that night, a major kickstart for Bobby Vee's career.

It's well known that all these events have Dylan connections. On January 31, just days before the fateful crash, Bobby Zimmerman and his friend Louis Kemp worked their way to the front of the stage to watch Buddy Holly perform at the Historic Duluth Armory. The 17-year-old kid with big dreams of his own felt that an uncanny something passed between them that night when Holly looked at him. 

Young Dylan's amusing attempt to join Bobby Vee's Shadows has a become another bit of lore.

* * *
Though the Winter Dance Party posters were mass produced, they were left blank on top so that times and dates for the various venues could be filled in for each of the shows. How this particular poster came to be auctioned off as such a rarity can be found in the many stories published this past week. 

What I think is most interesting is how values get established. When Bill Pagel bought Bob Dylan's birth home here in Duluth a little over 20 year ago it was a steal. He got the whole house and property for less than $100K. I'm curious what the house might have fetched if it had been sold through a higher profile, better-connected auction house.  In 2019 Pagel went on to purchase the Zimmerman house in Hibbing as well. That one cost $320,000. In short, he got both houses for less than that singular poster. 

Here are couple other mementos from that week long ago, courtesy 

Floor board from Duluth Armory signed by Carl Bunch, 

drummer for who got frostbite when the bus broke down 

between Duluth and Green Bay.

Another Armory floorboard, this one signed by a number of

Buddy Holly contemporaries including Bobby Vee.

Here's a link to a half dozen stories I've published regarding 

Buddy Holly's final shows on that Winter Dance Party tour. 

Link to John Lamb's Duluth News Tribune story cited above.

.Floorboards courtesy Joe Mann. Photos by Ed Newman.

IF YOU OR SOMEONE YOU KNOW ATTENDED THAT MOORHEAD SHOW WITH BOBBY VEE I WOULD LIKE TO TALK WITH YOU.  ennyman3@gmail.com

Don't Believe Everything You Read About Dylan

Who's Harry Belefonte? It's Belafonte, with an a.

This week I was doing library research about Dylan in Duluth. Specifically, I was reading through all the Dylan-related articles that our Duluth Public Library has catalogued in its archives. 

There were a number of surprises. First, I was surprised at how many clippings were stories I myself had written or had one of my paintings in. The bigger surprise was how many mistakes there were in some of the clippings. That is, in several instances there were misspellings, and in one instance an incorrect caption.

I didn't initially set out to document errors, but I did make note of a few. The first was a very nice article about the host of the Dylan-themed KUMD radio program Highway 61 Revisited, John Bushey. Except, throughout the article the author spelled his name Jon Bushy. Note to writers: when it comes to names, always doublecheck your spelling.

Yes, names can be tricky. That is why writers (and editors as well) need to go the extra mile to confirm spelling. For example, when I Google "Harry Belafonte" I get Harry Belafonte. And guess what? If you Google "Harry Belefonte," Google will reply, "Showing you results for Harry Belafonte." In our internet age it is really not all that hard to get it right.  Ask and you shall receive. 

There's another kind of error that is less easy to recognize. One of the articles had a photo of the Central Hillside home young Bob Dylan nee Robert Zimmerman lived in for his first six years. Or that is what it purported to be. This is where the Duluth Dylan Fest celebrates Dylan's birthday each year on May 24. We all know it well, but evidently the editor on this story did not know it so well because the caption reads, "Bob Dylan's childhood home in Hibbing."

Well, it just goes to show ya that you can't believe everything you read. Here's what the house in Hibbing looks like, along with accurate captions for both.

Today, both houses are owned by Dylan collector/archivist Bill Pagel who is in the process of restoring the homes to how they were back when "Bobby" was growing up and living here. If you're in the neighborhood, don't be shy. Stop on by.

As for accuracy, Dylan himself has a reputation of having been a notorious obfuscator. And occasionally you will find details in books about Dylan that repeat errors from earlier Dylan biographers. You wouldn't really know it was false because the "fact" has appeared so many times in print that it seems true. (This happens in many other contexts, especially politics and sports.) 

As the saying goes, it is what it is. Que sera sera.

Related Links
John Bushey Legacy Leaves No One Untouched

The Zimmerman Effect

A couple weekends ago I learned that there’s a graveyard not far from here where the parents of Bob Dylan were laid to rest. I’d intended to shoot a photo to accompany my blog entry about the Zimmermann Telegram, the book by Barbara Tuchman that I wrote about based on her research regarding how the U.S. got into World War One. Unfortunately, as I was writing about the book I realized the spelling was not the same, as you can see. So, hmmm. I slept on it.

The other night as I lay awake on my pillow, I found myself pondering how it is that places where celebrities have been, like our Duluth Armory where a young Bob Dylan saw Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper do their nearly last concert, can become charged with such meaning. Places like the graveyard in Paris where Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are purportedly disposed, or Woodstock because of the festival it hosted, perhaps against its will, have become shrines.

I also thought about the concept of six degrees of separation and how a tomb, in a sense, puts us in close proximity with a segment of history that has meaning to us in one way or another. Likewise art museums and history museums which let us stand at arm’s length from the bi-products of another's elevated life. By this I mean a life elevated in importance to a certain segment of society.

Examples abound. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The Louvre. The museum at the Indianapolis Speedway where you can stand next to every winning car of the Indy 500. The countless art museums in major cities throughout the world housing paintings by Picasso, images by Warhol and other iconic ghosts of art history.

For those who find the objects of our interests fascinating, our proximity to these people and places in some way effects us much like a magnet transforms a pin, when stroked, into a compass when floated on a film of water. Maybe this already has another name but if not, today I call this magnetizing The Zimmerman Effect.

I've sometimes been critical of the celebrity worship in our culture, but maybe it is something innate in us, in our essence, in the way we're wired, that desires to place people, places and objects on pedestals. There is a sense in which maybe we are even wronging them to do so because they are really just people, places and objects, not gods. It is interesting how our hearts are restless in the pursuit of something higher than ourselves.