Taking a moment to think about Messrs. Holly, Valens, and Bopper on the anniversary of their fated plane ride (which was yesterday, actually-- even in the blogosphere, I remain fashionably late)...
I've always felt that The Big Bopper got shafted after his death-- how come no one ever made a schmaltzy Hollywood biopic about him? It's the part Dan Ackroyd was BORN to play!
Anyhoo, "The Day the Music Died" holds an especially terrifying place in my fractured subconsciousness, and not just because it sucks the life out of any listener within a thousand yard radius. I first heard it at my grandparents' house during the summer between third and fourth grade. I was hanging out in the creepy spare bedroom with my cousin when it came on the radio. My cousin was describing a book with a funny title to me-- HELTER SKELTER, I think it was. He had just finished reading it, and being in his early teens/late adolescence at the time, was thoroughly freaked by the horrific violence described within.
"You could hear them screaming over a while away!" he said. My grandparents' house was in the country, at least twenty miles from the nearest town-- I realized with a shudder that NO ONE would be able to hear us screaming all the way out here.
"They cut out her baby and wrote HELTER SKELTER on the walls in blood!" The walls in the spare room were clean and white, and I could see in my mind how clearly any blood-messages would show up on them.
"The MANSON FAMILY," my cousin said. "It's a true story, and they never caught all of them-- they could still be killing people RIGHT NOW!"
Of course, I had to sleep by myself in the spare room that night. I never closed my eyes, not once, I just laid under the covers and cried and listened to that chorus repeat in my head: "This'll be the day that I die! This'll be the day that I die!"
I didn't even know what the lyrics were about until much, much later. I overlapped the song and the story for so long that they became inseparable to me-- it was always a song about the Manson murders, as far as I was concerned.
