Dylan's back pages - Seeing Buddy Holly in concert, January 31, 1959.

Buddy Holly was a poet. Way ahead of his time ...Read his story. I played with Buddy Holly in North Dakota, South Dakota, ballrooms, youth dances . . - Bob Dylan telling tall tales to Robert Shelton, March, 1966. From Shelton's No Direction Home.

On January 31, 1959, a 17 year-old Bobby Zimmerman saw Buddy Holly in concert from the front row. A few days later, Holly was dead.

I've already written about the influence Holly had on Bob Dylan, in honor of what would have been Buddy's 73rd birthday. Monday marks the 52st anniversary of the "Winter Dance Party” tour stop at the Duluth Armory.

The line-up was Buddy Holly and the Crickets (including new members Waylon Jennings and drummer Carl Bunch), Ritchie Valens, the "Big Bopper" (J.P. Richardson), Dion and the Belmonts, Frankie Sardo, and MC Lew Latto. The entire crew traveled 368 miles from Fort Dodge, Iowa, by bus, to get to Duluth.

Dylan has covered some of Holly's material throughout the years. Dylan and his teenage friends would often crash local parties, and reportedly sing Holly's songs. Holly opened the Duluth concert with a solo electric version of  "Gotta Travel On" on the tour. Dylan recorded it for 1970's Self Portrait, and revived it on the 1976 leg of the Rolling Thunder Revue. Dylan rehearsed "Oh Boy" with The Grateful Dead in 1987. In 1999, Dylan dueted with Paul Simon on their joint tour, often playing a medley of Holly's "That's Be The Day' and Dion's "The Wanderer". "Not Fade Away" was also a common show closer that year.

Soon after Dylan arrived in New York, he played on a Carolyn Hester session:

"Carolyn was eye catching, down-home and double barrel beautiful. That she had known and worked with Buddy Holly left no small impression on me and I liked being around her. Buddy was royalty, and I felt like she was my connection to it, to the rock-and-roll music that I'd played earlier, to that spirit." – Bob Dylan, Chronicles, Volume One

Hester told John Bauldie for The Telegraph in 1992:

Bob was really startingly different than most everyone. He hadn't started writing an awful lot, but just as a performer he was so outstanding and magnetic. And afterwards we started talking....We talked about Buddy Holly and I told him that Buddy had actually helped me get recorded originally and he enjoyed that. But of course, I had no idea that Bob would be a rock'n'roll musician eventually.

On Theme Time Radio Hour, Dylan had this to say after playing The Spaniels version of “Stormy Weather”:

The Spaniels, with their lead singer Pookie Hudson, were on that ill-fated tour with Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, Link Wray, and a bunch of others… which means "probably" I saw them. Winter Dance Party, February, 1959. The day the music supposedly died.

According to Robert Shelton in No Direction Home, Dylan visited Wray in 1975, and told him, "Link, I was sitting in the front row when you and Buddy Holly were at Duluth, and you're as great now as you were then." However, it appears that neither the Spaniels nor Link Wray performed on that tour.

Nine years later, Dylan again commented on Holly, "He was great. He was incredible. I mean, I'll never forget the image of seeing Buddy Holly up on the bandstand."

The most famous and direct acknowledgment of seeing Holly on stage occurred on February 25, 1998, when Dylan accepted his Grammy award for "Album Of The Year", Time Out Of Mind:

And I just want to say that when I was sixteen or seventeen years old, I went to see Buddy Holly play at Duluth National Guard Armory and I was three feet away from him...and he looked at me. And I just have some sort of feeling that he was — I don't know how or why — but I know he was with us all the time we were making this record in some kind of way.

In 1999, Dylan was quoted in Guitar World:

You know, I don't really recall exactly what I said about Buddy Holly, but while we were recording, every place I turned there was Buddy Holly. You know what I mean? It was one of those things. Every place you turned. You walked down a hallway and you heard Buddy Holly records like "That'll Be the Day." Then you'd get in the car to go over to the studio and "Rave On" would be playing. Then you'd walk into this studio and someone's playing a cassette of "It's So Easy." And this would happen day after day after day. Phrases of Buddy Holly songs would just come out of nowhere. It was spooky. [laughs] But after we recorded and left, you know, it stayed in our minds. Well, Buddy Holly's spirit must have been someplace, hastening this record.

Will Brennan had an interesting interpretation of this lyric from "Standing In the Doorway", saying it related to Holly and the plane crash:

When the last rays of daylight go down
Buddy, you'll roll no more
I can hear the church bells ringing in the yard
I wonder who they're ringing for

Copyright © 1997 by Special Rider Music

I was thinking of Dylan seeing Holly in concert while I was reading Andrew Muir's post on Michael Gray's Bob Dylan Encyclopedia blog. Muir reported that Dylan was no longer the most popular artist in the "rare" records market. Neil Young and The Rolling Stones were still selling, with Bruce Springsteen becoming the new number one artist (The "New Dylan", as it were).

The reader's comments veered toward Dylan's current tours, and while many felt Dylan is worth seeing live, a recording of the show no long has the appeal of his older, pre-2003 (keyboard) shows. While no one could quite explain why Dylan is down while Springsteen and Young remain popular, it is interesting that Dylan appears to have finally succeeded at killing his own bootleg market. Dylan not only to wants control over his own "rare" releases (note The Bootleg Series), but he tries to connect directly through his music - no video screens, no cameras, no recordings, etc. The music he plays on stage now - as others have noted - works in the moment.

When Dylan recalled seeing Buddy Holly on stage, he said he felt that the two made eye contact. The young Bobby Zimmerman wasn't waving an iPhone or checking his recording levels or watching a mega-screen . . . He was letting the music transport him, directly.  It appears that Dylan wants to make that same connection to his audience.

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Holly's ghost still appears to follow Dylan. At the end of his 2009 tour, he added a special support act - Dion DiMucci, who Bobby Zimmerman saw on stage at the Duluth Armory, on January 31, 1959.

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