“Everything I wasn’t and wanted to be”: The Buddy Holly live show that changed Bob Dylan’s life
It was a frosty and frigid January in 1959. A 17-year-old Bob Dylan shuffled through the streets of Duluth, Minnesota, with his collar turned to the cold and damp. He didn’t know his place in the world just yet, and the world didn’t know Bob Dylan’s place in it either. So far, the youngster’s impact had been as faint as the figure he cut in the mist, creeping in ominously like mould from Lake Superior. But all the same, his stride was purposeful—quickened by a fact as yet unknown that the evening had something fateful in store for him.
By the time he reached The Armory, Big Bopper had already departed. Dylan was fashionably late. But the act he had come to see was yet to emerge. Buddy Holly was the first of his kind. A weedy kid with jamjar glasses – if the jamjar in question had been built to survive a nuclear blast – and a persona that was far from the polished showbiz norms. But he could play. That’s all he cared about, and that’s all his audience cared about, too—well, that and the fact he represented one of them up there. In a roundabout way, the whole thing was punk.
So, Buddy Holly played his songs, eclipsing everyone else on the lavish bill that night by quite some margin, and Dylan, who had wandered in not knowing where he was headed, wandered out knowing that wandering was his true calling and there was bound to a be an army of other wanderers out there, on the road, who could do with some guidance. That dawning lesson would become all the more apparent to him just a few days later when the fog of Buddy Holly’s influence lifted, and Dylan saw his destiny to carry that forward with tragic, bittersweet clarity.
“I saw Buddy Holly two or three nights before he died. I saw him in Duluth, at The Armory. He played there with Link Wray. I don’t remember the Big Bopper. Maybe he’d gone off by the time I came in. But I saw Ritchie Valens,” he recalled in a Rolling Stone interview in 1984. “And Buddy Holly, yeah. He was great. He was incredible. I mean, I’ll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand. And he died –it must have been a week after that. It was unbelievable.“
It was, in fact, three days later, on February 3rd, when he perished. And it was the same icy chill that Dylan had turned his collar to that took him. So the story goes, shortly after take-off, Roger Peterson, a young and inexperienced pilot, lost control of a light aircraft on a dark, cold, cloudy evening and crashed into an Iowan field at 170mph. The catastrophic impact took his life and those of his three passengers: Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and The Big Bopper. In one night, three of America’s biggest pop stars perished. This created a void that bands like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and The Animals flooded into, and so the British invasion began.
Or at least that’s the reductionist, sutured narrative. After all, wasn’t Dylan a fresh, new-fangled pop culture invader too? He had pretty much been there at the scene of the accident and was ready to step into Holly’s shoes. He was steadfast, driven to ensure that the liberating force of his new hero would ‘Not Fade Away’ and he would carry the ‘Rave On’, to lend the phrasing of tracks Dylan heard that night.
Mystery and myth abound in Bob Dylan’s backstory like slippery shadows pooling under a gaslight, conspiring to foreshadow a future both unknowable and inevitable, but the handing over of the baton of the people’s music from Lubbock’s Buddy to Duluth’s original vagabond is one that has long been lost in the mist (except to Don McLean, whose jester in James Dean’s coat is surely the fellow who swept up on the day the music died).
Even at 17, Dylan was bursting with things to say like a bus driver’s bladder as they approach the last stop, he just wasn’t sure of the route yet. The would-be folk star at the final juncture of his development just needed someone to show him how—to illuminate the path. Buddy Holly at The Armory was his lighthouse in the fog.
As he put it himself some 58 years later, when he became the first musician to collect a Nobel Prize, “Buddy wrote songs, songs that had beautiful melodies and imaginative verses. And he sang great, sang in more than a few voices. He was the archetype, everything I wasn’t and wanted to be,” he said.
Fatefully adding, “He looked me right straight dead in the eye, and he transmitted something. Something I didn’t know what. And it gave me the chills.” Perhaps that’s more literal than we could ever know.
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