“A surprise makes life worthwhile.”
The great playwright and director Arthur Laurents said that to me when I interviewed him a couple of years ago. I realize again and again how true it is.
A surprise last week led me down a few country roads that I never expected to travel, but what a worthwhile journey.
On October 21st, I found myself in Clear Lake, Iowa, a town plopped between expansive farm fields along the aptly named Clear Lake. The area is home to some of the most fertile ground in America and to one of the great legends of Rock And Roll: Clear Lake was the last place Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson performed before the plane crash that took each of their lives.
The Surf Ballroom where the “Winter Dance Party Tour” stopped that February night in 1959 is still in Clear Lake. In fact, it’s a thriving venue (ZZ Top will play to a sold out crowd of 2,100 tomorrow night). And it looks much as it did when the brightest stars in the rebellious new genre of Rock And Roll pulled into town more than 50 years ago. It’s unlikely beach club motif (this is north Iowa, not Miami) with ocean murals along the sides of the ballroom still welcomes dancers.
But the ballroom isn’t just for concert goers. Anyone who wants to relive “The Day The Music Died” is welcome to walk through at any time and as I did, sit down in a booth and imagine watching Buddy Holly performing “Peggy Sue,” or sit for a moment on the very stage where those pioneers of rock sang their hearts out for the last time.
I would never have made this trip if not for something that happened one week earlier in New York. I saw the reading of a promising new musical by Charles Messina, “The Wanderer,” based on the life of Dion DiMucci. He was the only headliner of the “Winter Dance Party Tour” not on the chartered plane leaving Clear Lake, and so the only one who survived. Messina digs deep into the tensions, dreams, hurt, self destruction, soaring triumphs and unbearable losses that only a Rock And Roll life can provide.
And after seeing it, I had to get closer to the moment that crystalized all those feelings for Rock And Roll’s first generation.
A trip to Clear Lake and to the crash site memorial in a field just five miles north of town gave me the education I was seeking. And, a personal connection to an event that happened long before I was born yet is the most enduring and heartbreaking tale of “what might have been.”
As I drove down the gravel road leaving the crash memorial and thinking about what I had seen and learned that day, I started clicking through the radio. At the fourth station, my heart skipped a beat. It was another little surprise to make the moment incredible. “Peggy Sue” was on.
You couldn’t script a better ending.