a studied intensity magnified by the frenetic speed of his strumming. His fingers are a blur, but he doesn’t make mistakes, and as I watch the clip, I’m startled by the distinctly handsy look in his eye. This is not what I expected.
The whole song’s a revelation, from the rapid-fire drumming, to the stuttering Pretty pretty pretty pretty Peggy Sue, to the way his falsetto warps the words of the last verse. With a love so rare and true—you know he doesn’t mean a word of it. He’s just telling you what you want to hear, and that tamped-down sex—how had I missed it?—burns in his eyes. And there’s something about the way he stares at the camera that sets him apart from his contemporaries. Elvis, the Big Bopper, Johnny Cash all play to the audiences they have at the time, mugging for the camera and making the kids squeal. Jerry Allison, the drummer for the Crickets, said later that playing on TV made him nervous: “That was something different,” he said, “an audience that wasn’t there.” But watching Buddy, you’d never know it. He’s playing to the fans of the future—to the camera, to now.
First floor, living room. First floor, dining room.
Children at play, unaware of approaching disaster.
—“Declassified US Nuclear Test Film #33”
(Apple-2/“Cue”), 1955
Ever since I watched La Bamba as a kid, I’ve known about the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. It happened before my time; it was a foregone conclusion, verifiably historical. Knowing that, I couldn’t see Buddy Holly as anything other than a dead man walking, doomed to die young, tragic. But of course there’s more to him than that.
He was a writer, for one thing. The year before that TV appearance, he’d gone to the movies with his friends and seen a John Wayne picture. That’ll be the day, Wayne kept saying. Well, that was a nice line, and he wrote it down, to see if he could put it to use.
Not long ago, I watched The Searchers myself, trying to figure out what about that line had compelled Buddy Holly. The movie follows Ethan Edwards, played by John Wayne, over the course of five years spent tracking a band of Comanche across the desert Southwest. He’s trying to find his niece Debbie, kidnapped as a child during a raid on her family’s ranch. Along the way, other riders join Ethan, but you wouldn’t call them his partners. He’s the one calling the shots, and he’s vengeful, cruel, and all the more dangerous because he has enough cultural know-how to really hurt his enemy. This image stays with me: when the group finds a Comanche warrior buried under a stone, Ethan opens the grave and shoots out the corpse’s eyes. “Now he’ll have to wander forever between the Spirit Lands,” he says, leaving the twice-blinded body behind.
For me, the movie’s most compelling moments are the early ones leading up to the raid on the ranch. In a low-ceilinged adobe room, Debbie’s mother scolds her older daughter for lighting a lamp and revealing their presence. “Let’s just enjoy the dusk,” she shrills, trying to hide how frightened she is. Outside the half-timbered window, the desert glows white-orange, sunlight pouring in like fear made visible. Her voice cracking, she orders Debbie to run away to the family’s burial plot and hide there: “Don’t come back,” she says, “no matter what you hear.”
That light, brilliant and threatening, stays with me. No matter what Mother tries to pretend, this is no ordinary sunset. We don’t see the war party attacking the ranch; it’s enough to see the helpless family anticipating disaster, and the aftermath, in which nobody’s left standing. When Ethan and the rest of the men return to the ranch, they find it a smoking ruin, the death inside so grisly they can only allude to it. “Don’t let him look in there,” Ethan commands one of the men. “It won’t do him any good to see it.” The people killed had been Ethan’s brother and his family, but he doesn’t show signs of sorrow or surprise when he finds them. You can’t catch him off guard. He’s an icon, not a real man, and he says “That’ll be the day” four times.
ALERT TODAY
ALIVE TOMORROW.
—Poster, Mr. Civil Defense, 1956
Seems like nothing goes according to plan. The date for Apple-2 had been set well in advance, but after weather conditions force several delays, some of the would-be watchers pack up and head home; surely some of them regret missing the chance to see the bomb up close. Finally, conditions are right, and the countdown begins. Just past 5:00 a.m., full dark over the desert, photographers brace on boulders overlooking Frenchman Flat, and soldiers hunch in trenches. The speakers crackle, and the announcement goes out for observers to put on their dark goggles; those without goggles must face away from the blast. A transmitter broadcasts canned music that pours from the radios in the houses of Doom Town. It plays in the dark rooms as of a house asleep, but only one resident is in her bed. In the dim living room still smelling of sawdust and damp cement, Sister reclines on the floor beside her record player, and Father leans toward the dark television, pipe clamped in his mouth.
Not far away, a reporter embedded with a group of soldiers takes notes from inside a fifty-ton Patton tank. “‘Sugar [shot] minus fifteen minutes,’” he writes. “Then it was ‘sugar minus ten’ and ‘sugar minus five.’ Someone tossed me a helmet and I huddled on the floor.”
We just hoped somebody would buy our records so we could go on the road and play.
—Niki Sullivan, rhythm guitarist for The Crickets
Sometimes it must seem he’s never known anything but life on this bus, its engine groaning up the grade of every back road in the Upper Midwest, his clothes wrinkled and ripe in the bags overhead, his hands tucked under his armpits for warmth. When the bus breaks down again and the heater conks out, they burn newspapers in the gritty aisle between the seats to try and stay warm. Carl, the drummer, gets frostbite and has to go to the hospital. He’s a fill-in; Joe B. and Jerry are back in Lubbock. But Buddy needs the money. On cloudy days after snow falls, you can’t tell where the fields end and the sky begins, and the fences down the section lines must be a comfort to him. Iowa’s a long way from Texas, but at least the barbed wire tells you what’s solid and what’s not.
They all play the show in Clear Lake and gear up for Moorhead, nearly four hundred miles away, a full night’s ride in that freezing bus, and probably another breakdown on the side of the road. Why not charter a plane instead? Then he’ll get to the next gig in plenty of time, have a hot shower, do everyone’s laundry. The Beechcraft seats three plus the pilot. He’s in for sure, and J.P., sick with a cold. Ritchie and the guitar player flip for the last seat, and Ritchie wins. See you when we see you.
And I’m not married yet and I haven’t got sense enough to realize the magnitude. You see it visually but it’s beautiful. It’s beautiful. Just gorgeous, the colors that are emitted out of this ball of mass, and the higher it goes into the air, it becomes an ice cap on top of it because it’s getting so high, and it’s just a beautiful ice cap.
—Robert Martin Campbell Jr., describing test George, the thermonuclear detonation he witnessed in the Marshall Islands on May 9, 1951
The plane’s thin door clicks shut. Past midnight, and Buddy’s beat. The pilot turns the knobs and checks the instruments, and the engine roars its deafening burr. When he looks out the windshield, there’s nothing to see but snow, swirling in the lit cone thrown by the hangar lights. Slowly at first, then faster, the plane rolls down the runway and lifts off. Up, and bouncing in the air pockets, the roar of the engines, no way to talk and be heard but he’s too tired to talk anyway. Three miles out, then four, then five.
When
