Where Are They Buried? (63 page)

Clarence extended a charisma mixed with eccentricity offstage too. Wherever the band played, he made his dressing room into a shrine he called the Temple of Soul. By many accounts, including his own, he was a champion partier and he enjoyed telling a story of once playing pool with Fidel Castro. He could be a womanizer too, married five times and divorced four. He also released several solo albums, most notably 1985’s well-received
Hero
. He occasionally sat in with the Grateful Dead, owned a rowdy New Jersey nightclub called Big Man’s West, and, surprisingly, even shot a music video with Lady Gaga. In 2009 Clarence published his memoir,
Big Man: Real Life & Tall Tales,
which President Bill Clinton himself called “a unique personal narrative that’s bound in both history and folklore.”

After suffering a stroke at age 69, Clarence died soon after from complications. He was cremated and his ashes remain with his family.

OCTOBER 3, 1938 – APRIL 17, 1960

FEBRUARY 11, 1935 – OCTOBER 12, 1971

No one person “invented” rock and roll. Rather, over the years it worked its way out of the blues, and in the 1950s its development accelerated due to the imagination and innovation of about fifteen pioneers. Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent were two such pioneers; they recognized rock’s potential and, for a while, anyway, helped develop the foundations of a new cultural phenomenon. Though Eddie only had a couple of hits, most notably “Summertime Blues” in 1958, his influence was considerable in terms of musical arrangements, the role of the drums, and, indeed, the very deliberate and wild sound and attitude that he lent to rock music. Gene’s sole hit was “Be-Bop-a-Lula,” but it added fuel to the fiery excitement of the time, and his frenzied and energetic performing style was copied by his contemporaries.

For the first few months of 1960, Eddie teamed with Gene for a tour of England, where Gene had been living since 1958, successfully pacing the rock and roll mania that gripped the country’s youth. After their last show at the Hippodrome Theatre in Bristol, Eddie, now a budding star, his girlfriend Sharon Steely, and headliner Gene caught a taxi back to London from where Eddie and Sharon planned to catch a plane. Zooming through the night along winding country roads, the taxi driver lost control at Rowden Hill in the village of Chittenham, and the Ford MKII was destroyed as it slammed into a lamp pole. Gene suffered a few broken bones and Sharon’s pelvis was shattered, but Eddie went through the windshield and died of massive head injuries ten hours later.

At 21, Eddie was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Cypress, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Highway 91, take Carmenita Road south, turn west onto Lincoln Avenue, and the park is a mile ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Drive past the gates and stop after about a hundred yards. Eddie’s big, flat stone is on the left, fifteen rows back.

By promoting his rebel image, Gene had become one of Britain’s biggest draws by the time of his tour with Eddie. But by 1964 he’d lost favor with English audiences who were instead flocking to their homegrown bands, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He returned to the States but failed to stage a comeback. In 1971 Gene’s alcoholism spurred a bleeding ulcer, and he died in his mother’s arms at 36.

Gene was buried at Eternal Valley Memorial Park in Santa Clarita, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Follow Highway 14 north from I-5 and exit at San Fernando Road, which is also Route 126. Proceed west, turn left at the traffic light onto Sierra Highway, and the park is a short distance ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and make an immediate left up the hill. Stop on the left after about 50 yards, perhaps 30 feet past the yellow water spigot. In the grass along the curb, find Lilard Rainbolt’s marker and Gene’s grave is just two rows further into the lawn.

JANUARY 10, 1943 – SEPTEMBER 20, 1973

You know his songs—everybody does. You sing along with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” in your car and hum along to the Muzak recording of “Time in a Bottle” in elevators. But few actually remember Jim Croce, a mustachioed and cigar-smoking, working-class folk artist who struggled for years to break into the mainstream.

In 1969, with his wife, Ingrid, he cut an album titled
Ingrid and Jim Croce
and they remained on the New York City coffeehouse circuit for a couple of years before eventually tiring of city life. Moving a little west to Pennsylvania, Ingrid learned to bake bread and can vegetables while Jim worked low-paying odd jobs, pursuing music more as a hobby than a profession. But by 1972 Jim had penned a number of catchier pop ballads and that year he put out a solo album,
You Don’t Mess Around With Jim
, which was an
instant success. As his songs played on radios and turntables across America, Jim became a club and concert headliner.

After an appearance at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, Jim and the four members of his band boarded a small, chartered airplane. On takeoff, the plane clipped a pecan tree at the end of the runway and went down, killing all on board. After Jim’s death, sales of his music tripled and his signature songs became mainstays of classic-rock stations. The lesser tragedy is that Jim never lived to enjoy this broad popularity, and we can only hope that he’s somehow basking in it now.

At 30, Jim was buried at Haym Salomon Memorial Park in Frazer, Pennsylvania.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From Route 30, turn north onto Planebrook Road and the park is one mile ahead on the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Jim rests about 50 yards to the right, almost in front of the office. His is a flat stone shaded by a pine tree.

In San Diego’s historic Gaslamp Quarter, Ingrid now operates Croce’s, an award-winning restaurant featuring live local and national R&B acts nightly.

SEPTEMBER 7, 1936 – FEBRUARY 3, 1959

MAY 13, 1941 – FEBRUARY 3, 1959

OCTOBER 24, 1930 – FEBRUARY 3, 1959

Buddy Holley played violin and piano as a child, and was a teenager before he adopted his signature guitar. By the time
he teamed up with the Crickets at just 20, he’d already released a few records with Decca (the label accidentally dropped the “e” in his last name), and had introduced a unique songwriting style characterized by a blues-heavy lyricism.

In these very early days of rock and roll, Buddy Holly and the Crickets began recording at a New Mexico studio, and by May 1957 had nailed “That’ll Be The Day,” its title lifted from a line uttered by John Wayne in
The Searchers
. The song raced up the charts and they went on tour in its support, and by November “Peggy Sue” and “Not Fade Away” had joined the first hit. With the Crickets, Buddy appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
twice in those few short months and the limelight inspired a decidedly cosmopolitan shift in Buddy’s appearance and manners; he began to wear stylish New York suits and donned the thick, black eyeglasses that he became known for.

In autumn of 1958, because of managerial and royalty disagreements, Buddy parted from the Crickets and their manager. He shortly assembled a new backing band, including future country-star Waylon Jennings on bass, and joined the Winter Dance Party tour, an assemblage of acts that would tour the upper Midwest.

The acts included Ritchie Valens, a hot, young artist known for his rock and roll version of the old Mexican standard “La Bamba,” and Jiles P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, a Texas deejay-turned-rocker who found success with the song “Chantilly Lace.” Buddy would headline, and Dion and the Belmonts rounded out the list of performers.

The 24-stop tour hit its eleventh stop at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, and the performers arrived cold, tired, and disgusted. Since they’d set out ten days earlier they had been traveling between venues in the bitter cold of a Midwest winter on a bus with a spotty heater. Dreading the 400-mile trip to Fargo, North Dakota, Buddy asked Carroll Anderson, manager of the Surf Ballroom, to arrange a charter flight instead. Carroll
found a plane, a three-passenger Beechcraft from Dwyer Flying Service, and Buddy informed band mates Waylon Jennings and Tommy Allsup that they wouldn’t have to ride on the bus to Fargo after all.

However, during the concert at the Surf, Waylon Jennings gave his seat on the plane to the Big Bopper, whose stocky frame was a poor fit in the bus’s narrow and uncomfortable seats, and who was suffering from the flu, to boot. After the switch, Ritchie Valens began begging Tommy Allsup to give up his plane seat, too. Tommy finally agreed to let a coin toss settle it; Ritchie called “heads,” winning the toss and a seat on the plane. After the concert, Carroll drove Buddy, J.P., and Ritchie to the airport in nearby Mason City and bid them goodbye. With his wife and son, Carroll watched the plane take off and circle around as it took up its course. Nothing appeared out of the ordinary, and Carroll and his family went home.

By the next morning though, it was clear to Jerry Dwyer, the plane’s owner, that something was wrong. He hadn’t yet heard from the pilot, Roger Peterson. After checking for Peterson by telephone at airports along the way to Fargo, Dwyer sent out on an aerial search and soon spotted the plane’s wreckage in a stubbled cornfield 5½ miles from the Mason City airport. Except for a solitary wing that was relatively undamaged, the plane was hardly distinguishable. Its three passengers were scattered around the field and the pilot was still trapped inside the wreckage; all four were dead.

Authorities could never find a reason for the crash; the pilot was experienced and competent, the navigational equipment was functioning properly and set for a course to Fargo, the aircraft was properly maintained and in good condition, and, contrary to some reports, the weather was favorable for flying; the night had been clear with just trace amounts of snow in the air. All appearances are that, for some unexplained reason, perhaps disorientation or inattention, the pilot flew the plane into the ground.

For teenagers of the period the crash was certainly devastating, but for the general public the news was not terribly significant. Buddy’s clean-cut image and scandal-free life, coupled with the young ages of the three rockers, made the story all the more poignant. But rock and roll was new and not taken very seriously in those days, and Buddy Holly became a largely forgotten figure.

Then in 1971 a little-known singer-songwriter named Don McLean released a seven-plus minute song called “American Pie.” Its narrative is a rhyming allegorical history of rock and roll structured around the hook “the day the music died,” a direct reference
to Buddy’s first hit “That’ll Be The Day.” Since then, Buddy has gotten his deserved credit and recognition, and in 1986 he was inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame.

Buddy was 22 at his death and was buried at the City of Lubbock Cemetery in Lubbock, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-27, take Exit 3 and follow Route 62 east for 1½ mile to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Turn right (south) on MLK, and after a mile turn left onto 31st Street, which will bring you into the cemetery.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn right. After about 100 yards there are two silver posts on the left side of the road. Another 30 feet beyond these posts, alongside the curb, is Buddy’s grave.

Ritchie Valens was just 17 when he died in the plane crash, and he was buried at San Fernando Mission Cemetery in Mission Hills, California.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
From I-405, exit at Rinaldi Street, follow Sepulveda Boulevard south for a half-mile, then turn left onto Stranwood Avenue. The cemetery is immediately to the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and park in front of the flower shop. Ritchie is buried across from the flower shop between curb numbers 235 and 247 in the third row from the drive.

At his death, Jiles P. “Big Bopper” Richardson was 28. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Beaumont, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 855A off of I-10, follow Pine Street north for 1½ miles, turn left onto East Lucas Drive and the cemetery entrance is immediately to the right.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
After entering the cemetery, the Lilypool Garden lawn is immediately to the left. Near the curb in Lot 31 the grave of J.P., “the Big Bopper.”

Waylon Jennings, who gave his plane seat to J.P., enjoyed a very successful career in country music. He died in 2002 and is profiled within these pages, as well. Years after losing the coin toss for his plane seat to Ritchie Valens, Tommy Allsup opened Tommy’s “Head’s Up” Saloon in Dallas, Texas.