davethegrinch.net

Dave Says:

If I were a twenty year old rock’n'roll star who was about to die in a tragic airplane crash somewhere in the middle of a corn field, I think I would choose Iowa in which to do it. Clear Lake, Iowa is famous more for a tragic day in February 1959 than it is anything else including the lake regardless of how clear it happens to be. I’m a bit of a Buddy Holly nut. I’m not sure why, I’m not sure it even matters why. I just am. You can ask two of my friends: Amber and Amy. Amber was born in Iowa and not too far from Clear Lake and Amy comes from Lubbock, Texas, the birthplace of the great bespectacled one. Within seconds of befriending them both nearly (and separately) eleven years ago I pounced on them with questions and trivia about their prodigal son. And so, with great enthusiasm, we met with our good pals Amber and Chadwick in Minneapolis with the idea to head south, to Iowa, to Amber’s family farm and, most importantly, via Clear Lake and the Surf Ballroom.

This isn’t really a post about Buddy Holly; you don’t know that yet but you do need a little background info so I’ll keep pretending it is. Buddy Holly, Richie Vallens and The Big Bopper played their last show ever at the Surf Ballroom on February 2nd 1959. The heating on the tour bus was broken and several musicians were reporting frost-bitten fingers. Holly decided to charter a plane to fly him and a couple of band members to the next show in Fargo. The guitar player lost a coin toss to Richie Vallens and Buddy’s bass player (Waylon Jennings) gave up his seat to an already sick Big Bopper. The plane left Clear Lake in the early hours of the 3rd but quickly crashed in white-out conditions in a corn field a few miles out of town. That was, I believe, “the day the music died” (now try getting that song out of your head).

But, as I said, this isn’t about Buddy - he is just the catalyst that led me to discover heritage, hospitality and the heartland.

Heritage is something the Americans try to preserve only after they’ve already destroyed it. Unlike the Europeans, although it could be fairly said they understand it more by accident than design, however it’s the design that helps them out. i.e. every great European leader believes their empire will last forever so designs and builds structures that can quite literally last forever. This is not how the Americans build empires. Forever squarely stands in the way of progress and progress is the engine behind the economy and the economy is what is supposed to make the poor rich but only seems to make the rich richer. Nothing in the US is built to last because nobody wants it to. And so, this brings me on to the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa whose saviour, its patron saint, is this 20 year old nerd of a musician who happened to meet his untimely end a few hours after playing one of thousands of shows the venue had already seen. During the 1920’s to the 1950’s the US was full of these provincial entertainment venues. The list of people who played the Surf is as famous as those who played Carnegie Hall, The Apollo and The Grand Old Opry combined. But then, so was the artist list for every other ballroom in the country, it was a matter of geography. Before the age of air travel, musicians toured by slow bus and if a chance to earn money en-route between big cities was there, then they would take it. Almost all of those ballrooms were pulled down to make way for progress when the airplanes began to fly over the Clear Lakes, Fargos and Rapid Cities of the mid-west. Had Buddy not died that night, the Surf Ballroom would just be a footnote of a footnote, pulled down long ago. But, people love Buddy and the people of Clear Lake love people who love Buddy. Never before have I seen hugs and handshakes from a venue manager to his visitors. A genuinely warm greeting filled with honesty and integrity. We were given the tour, shown the movie and when I expressed admiration of a piece of art on the wall, our host ran to his office to look up the telephone number of the local artist who drew it. All for free, bar the voluntary contribution we gave them to help keep the doors open. If it wasn’t for this unremarkable building with a remarkable past then Clear Lake itself would have had no reason to pull up its socks and open its arms to curio-tourists like ourselves. We went to their locals’ only bowling lanes for a Bud, the locals’ only Half Moon restaurant for dinner and the next morning to their little coffee shop with horse saddles for seats - everywhere people were warm, polite and genuine. Heritage only comes alive with hospitality otherwise you’re just looking at a cold, old building.

The next morning we got in the car and drove the five miles out of town and walked the half mile or so through a corn field to find the precise point that Buddy bit the dust (or snow in this case). The spot may only be marked by a simple memorial but it’s been lovingly adorned by the fans. I love the way pop music moves people to write on the walls of Abbey Road studios or leave mementos at Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris, or, in this case, cover Buddy’s marker with plastic toy cars and other 50’s memorabilia. Buddy lost his trademark glasses in the crash but he can still see thanks to the thoughtfulness of one fan who brought an extra pair, just like the originals, and placed them on the marker. As an aside, the original glasses were re-discovered just last year, they’d been lost in storage at the coroner’s office since 1959 and are now back with his widow.

Speaking of corn and cornfields, our next stop was Amber’s family’s farm(s). But first, we had to stop by Grandma D’s (Amber’s favorite grandparent) for dinner. Grandma D is nearly 80, she has a working vintage pinball table in her basement, can tell you the price of an acre of farmland or a bushel of corn and will whoop your ass at cards given half the chance. (Actually, I won the game we played but I think she let me win, those Iowan manners wouldn’t let her do otherwise). Home cooking country style - lots of fresh farm produce and butter. All of Amber’s family farm for a living including her Uncle Ron who gave us a ride on the biggest tractor I have seen in my life. It has four wheels in the front and four even larger ones at the back all driven by 18 gears and controlled by a computer. He’s pretty proud of it. I might get one when we return to Seattle - it’s certainly a head turner and a snap to park but only when you own three thousand acres. Iowa farms produce mostly corn and soybeans. I was curious to debunk the myths us city folk have of modern farming so I peppered Ron(ster) with questions. Here’s some interesting factoids to ponder over when you next pour a bowl of cereal. The tree-hugging hippies would like you to believe that most corn/soy production in the US is going to bio-fuels which are under fire for not being as efficient as we think. According to Ron, most actually goes to livestock feed. That feed makes our pigs, cattle and chicken plump, juicy and ready for the BBQ. A acre of crop grow-able farmland is now priced at a record $6700. That doesn’t sound a lot but an acre of land to a farmer is equivalent to a window-box to us urban-dwellers. You can’t graze more than two cows per acre out here. A bag of corn seed is now $300, another record high. A farmer can sell a bushel of corn for about $5. It weighs about 56lbs. Your box of cornflakes weighs about a pound and costs about $3 from the supermarket - that means that somewhere between Kelloggs buying a bushel from Uncle Ron and me spooning it into my mouth that corn has gone from 8.9 cents to $3 per pound. Oh - and one more fact: pigs really really smell bad!

Iowa has to thank Buddy Holly somewhat and so do I. Without him, Iowa would have been just another flat state on the way back west. Now I have a bunch of great memories from the most unlikeliest of places.

(If you like Buddy Holly or are just simply bemused as to why a young English lad like myself does, stay tuned for the report of our trip that was hours out of our way to see the little recording studio where the magic was made)

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 7th, 2008 at 5:18 am and is filed under Global Travels, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.