From the Boston Herald: Thursday, November 9, 2000

Three rock 'n' roll ghosts will hover over the North Shore Music Theatre Monday night.

In the most imaginative bit of oldies packaging in recent memory, local promoter Harvey Robbins will evoke the legendary last concert of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper at his annual Royalty of Doo-Wopp show.

Holly, Valens and the Bopper died in a 1959 plane crash in a Iowa cornfield, a stunning event later immortalized as ``the day the music died'' in Don McLean's song ``American Pie.''

Monday's concert, billed as ``The Show That Never Died,'' will feature Buddy Holly's original Crickets, the Big Bopper's son (J.P. Richardson Jr.), Valens' nephew Ernie Valens and the Belmonts, who with then-leader Dion also performed at that fateful show.

In fact, the Belmonts' Fred Milano is the only performer on Monday's bill who was actually there the night before the day the music died: The two other original Belmonts have since left the group and the original Crickets - Jerry Allison, Sonny Curtis and Joe B. Mauldin - had split with Holly when he left his native Texas to advance his career in New York City.

Even though Holly had agreed to let the Crickets keep their name, he nevertheless was touring with a group of new Crickets, which included a young bass player named Waylon Jennings.

``We were playing these ballrooms they had all over the Midwest,'' Milano recalls, ``and it was the dead of winter. What happened was that one night this dilapidated bus we were riding around in broke down. It was about 35 degrees below zero. I kid you not. Buddy Holly's drummer (Carl Bunch) got frostbite. So he couldn't do the show anymore.

``Carlo (Mastrangelo) in our group was a drummer originally, so he filled in on the rest of the shows. Except when we went on, Buddy Holly played drums for us. So Dion says, `Can you imagine that he'd be playing drums behind us?' So I went over to Buddy and said, `Did you ever think you'd back up Dion and the Belmonts on drums?' And he said, `No, what a great thing.' He felt the same way we did.''

The grueling conditions of what was called the Winter Dance Party tour fostered a camaraderie among the acts, which included the soon-forgotten Frankie Sardo as opener.

``We had done a tour before with Buddy Holly but never got close to him,'' Milano says. ``We thought he was cocky. But living on a bus together we all got really close. We found out that Buddy was really shy. His cockiness was like a defense.

``Ritchie Valens would call his mother every night and he'd put us on the phone. She could hardly talk English, but we'd tell her Ritchie was doing good. I remember in the movie about him (`La Bamba'), they said he didn't speak Spanish. But he talked Spanish to his mother.''

The oversized Big Bopper, then riding high on the charts with ``Chantilly Lace,'' was ``hysterical,'' Milano says, ``a real clown. He originally was a disc jockey and he held the record at the time for staying awake the most hours. So we'd kid him. `What do you mean you're tired?' ''

On Feb. 2, 1959, the tour pulled into Clear Lake, Iowa, to play the Surf Ballroom. To avoid a long, cold bus ride to the next day's show in Moorhead, Minn., Holly had chartered a small plane to fly him and his band to nearby Fargo, N.D. But the Big Bopper and Valens prevailed on the Crickets to let them go with Holly instead.

When Holly found out, he joked to bassman Jennings, ``Well, I hope your old bus freezes over.'' Jennings cracked back, ``I hope your plane crashes.''

Shortly after takeoff, it did.

``We were on the bus,'' says Milano, who was 19 at the time. ``We didn't know what happened until 2 o'clock the next afternoon when we got to Minnesota. It was a shock. A heartbreaker. Then when we called home, everyone thought we were dead, because that's what had been reported on the radio.

``We had to make a decision whether or not to play that night. Frankie Sardo, us, Waylon Jennings and Buddy's guitar player Tommy (Allsup) got together. Everybody agreed that Buddy and the others would want us to play. It was the old thing, the show must go on.

"To fill out the bill they got a local kid from North Dakota, Bobby Vee, who was an unknown at the time. The next night, they had added Frankie Avalon and Jimmy Clanton to the tour. We just continued and finished the whole tour.''

One last question: Whatever happened to Frankie Sardo?

``He was from New York like us,'' Milano says, ``so I thought we'd see him after the tour. But you know something? We never did.''

``Royalty of Doo-Wopp: The Show That Never Died,'' Monday at 7:30 p.m. at the North Shore Music Theatre, Beverly. Tickets: $42. Call (978) 232-7200

By Steve Morse, Globe Staff

Boston Globe, 15 Nov 2000

Music of Holly, Friends Lives On:

Clear Lake Revival With The Crickets, Ernie Valens Jr., Big Bopper Jr., the Belmonts, and the Royalty of Rock ‘n’ Roll All-Stars At: the North Shore Music Theatre in Beverly.

BEVERLY – Any thought of this being a macabre night vanished quickly. The show was called the Clear Lake Revival – referring to the Iowa town where Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Ritchie Valens played the night they died in a plane crash 41 years ago – but the show turned into a celebration of their lives, rather than a wake.

"This is as close as we can get to that fateful day of Feb. 3, 1959," said Harvey Robbins, the local promoter who assembled this first-ever bill of Buddy Holly’s Crickets, Ernie Valens Jr. (cousin of Ritchie), Big Bopper Jr. (the Bopper’s son, who was born just months after his dad died), and the Belmonts (known then as Dion & the Belmonts).

Belmonts singer Fred Milano was the only artist on the bill who was in Clear Lake that night (Holly had left his original Crickets and was playing with other band members). So it was heart-warming to see Milano set an affirmative tone for Monday’s near-sellout crowd at the North Shore Music Theatre.

In a one-on-one stage chat with Robbins, Milano warmly told stories of the Big Bopper’s sense of humor of Valens’s youth (he was only 17) and how his mother would talk by phone with the other acts to see if her son was OK, and of how Holly was playfully engaged in a nonstop card game with other musicians on the tour.

Milano also reminded the crowd of how tough that tour was – recalling bus rides in freezing weather that reached minus 35, hence the reason that Holly, Valens, and the Bopper wanted to take a private plane that night (to avoid another 12-hour bus ride). But he agreed with Robbins that, contrary to Don McLean’s "American Pie" song that called it "the day the music died," the music did not die that night.

"It’s wonderful, wonderful music – and it’s still with us," said Milano, to great applause.

Indeed, the audience also heeded Robbins’s earlier words of "Let’s take you back…to being in high school and just being care-free." The crowd went willingly – and was aided by exuberant performances that turned back the clock for a nearly four-hour show of classic oldies.

The Belmonts – a vocal trio of the black leather-jacketed Milano, Warren Gradus, and Dan Rubado – bounced and jounced around stage, hitting mostly a series of highs on "The Wanderer," "Runaround Sue," and other street corner pop nuggets.

The were followed by a bonus appearance by Robbins’s Royalty of Rock‘n’Roll All-Stars, featuring Lee Mitchell’s great, Wilson Pickett-style shouts, Billy Davis’s vintage guitar riffs (he originally played on Jackie Wilson’s "Higher and Higher"), the sleek vocal harmonies of Judy Teo and Thea, and Robbins’s tireless dance moves and showmanship.

And this is not to overlook the local backing band anchored by two Berklee College of Music faculty members, Mike Ihde (guitar) and Randy Phelts (saxophone).

After an intermission, Ernie Valens was a congenial addition with his cousin’s songs "La Bamba," "Let’s Go," and "Donna." Big Bopper Jr. had light-hearted fun with his dad’s "Chantilly Lace" and "White Lightning" (often associated with George Jones, but the Bopper wrote it).

Then came a sparkling set by the Crickets, consisting of Sonny Curtis, Joe Mauldin, and Jerry Allison, augmented by longtime Elvis Presley keyboardist Glen D. Hardin. Curtis did some songs he wrote (namely "I Fought the Law," a hit for Bobby Fuller), but much of the set was Holly tunes from "It’s So Easy" and "Everyday," to "Peggy Sue" and "Rave On." The Crickets were the class of the night, delivering a more cohesive performance than when they opened for, then joined, Nanci Griffith at Harborlights three years ago.

With their simple, direct style, they still personify rock ‘n’ roll.