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It's always cold and windy in February in Clear Lake, Iowa. Don't let the notion of the town's famous Surf Ballroom give you any delusions of sun and sea. Come winter, wide open spaces in Iowa are more numbing than even a hardy Minnesotan wants to experience.
Every February, we think of the Surf Ballroom because rock hero Buddy Holly played his last concert there in 1959. Shortly after exiting the stage, in the early morning hours of Feb. 3, the 22-year-old bespectacled Texan and fellow stars Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper boarded a small private plane to the next night's concert in Moorhead, Minn. It was a cold and windy night and -- well, you know the rest of the story from Don McLean's "American Pie" -- the chartered Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in an Iowa field, killing all on board.
It was "the day the music died," as McLean sang, but the Surf Ballroom has become immortalized. On Jan. 13, it was officially declared a National Historic Landmark by the U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
The Surf is historic for more than that fateful concert, which also featured Dion and the Belmonts, and Holly's then-unknown bassist, Waylon Jennings, who famously gave up his seat on the plane to the Big
Bopper, aka J.P. Richardson.
The Surf has presented a who's who of popular music since the 1930s, including Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Benny Goodman, Lawrence Welk, Little Richard, Roy Orbison, the Everly Brothers, the Righteous Brothers, Ricky Nelson, B.B. King, the Temptations, Merle Haggard, Alice Cooper, Kenny Rogers, Little River...