…they caught the last plane for the coast
The day Happy Days…died*
* Sept 24, 1984
Just to point out, that last video is not Ritchie Valens. It’s Lou Diamond Phillips playing Ritchie Valens in the biopic La Bamba.
My wife can’t stand it, but her reason for this is solely because she heard it so often as a young person, and she grew sick of it.
Sorry. Can anyone find of video of Ritchie singing La Bamba (the videos I am finding simply show one or more pictures of him while the song is playing.)
I did a quick search and could not. There doesn’t seem to be much film of him actually performing.
Holy crap! When I first glanced at that I thought it was talking about rights to the lyrics and going “Damn, did he get fucked.”
For me, Buddy Holly is the only one I can actually picture in my head when I hear his songs. Lou Diamond Phillips is Richie Valens. And until this thread, I thought the Big Bopper was a black guy. 
In my defense, I think the only time I’ve ever heard his music is when they used to sell greatest hits of the decade LPs on television.
Best mondegreen ever! 
I wish I had heard that!
This is me a little bit. If it comes up on the car radio twice a year I won’t change the channel. But I’ve never owned it or had it on a playlist of any kind. I think it’s a good song, it’s just a bit out of my musical tastes and a little goes a long way.
Though I love the song in general, I can think of one particular instance I hated it…one night my sister dragged me to a Karaoke night at a bar. One guy, either clueless, shameless, or sadistic, kept going up and singing in a mumbly, off-key voice that was like nails on a chalkboard. After a few shorter songs, he chose to sing American Pie. I’ve never been more acutely aware of how long the song is.
That’s one of my favorite Weird Al parodies.
Fun fact about that: Weird Al wrote the song before he ever saw the movie, basing his info on online leaks. when he was invited to a prescreening, he was surprised how accurate he was, and only had to make a few changes.
Not “Lennon read a book on Marx”? A possible reference to his 1970 “Working Class Hero”?
Don’t know. I got the lyrics from google so all bets are off.
I always figured that the “Lennon/Lenin” was a play on words, and could be interpreted either way.
I have no idea if there is an official lyric sheet, or which spelling it might feature, but for what it’s worth, the song’s listing on Genius.com says “Lennon,” and I find their lyrics to usually be fairly accurate.
My brother in law hates this song. He chaperoned a scouting trip when this hit #1 and it’s all he heard for 3 days.
That’s only five repetitions. Big deal.
Just for the hell of it, I once decided to reinterpret the entire song to make it all about politics. I can’t remember every metaphor I tortured, but the jester was Abbie Hoffman, the sergeants playing a marching tune who wouldn’t yield the field were the National Guard troops at Kent State, The Chevy on the levee of course belonged to Ted Kennedy.
Yeah, some of the allusions were forced, but they didn’t seem much more forced that what Casey Kasem came up with.
I heard he stopped performing it, thinking it would pigeonhole him or something, but I haven’t found that on line.
His current girlfriend was negative twenty (plus) years old at the time…a man with money to burn meets his ‘match,’ as they say?
She’s pretty.
And he’s pretty… old.
About the Surf Ballroom, it has a pay phone in it. It’s the same phone Buddy Holly used to call his wife that night. It was the last time they would talk.
Years later she visited, and she autographed the wall nearby.
Seeing that sent chills up my spine.
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
Chills? I’ve probably posted it in here elsewhere, but are we all familiar with the story of the Big Bopper and his coffin?
IIRC they buried him in a part of the cemetery where people weren’t finding him. At some point they decided to relocate him so the could stop explaining how to find him. So they contacted his son (who was still in the womb when his dad died) and basically asked if he’d like to “meet” his father for the first time. And he did. 
I’m too lazy to go back and find sources but IIRC, Texas law says you can’t rebury in the same coffin, so…here’s a piece of RNR memorabilia?! The son mentioned possibly selling it on ebay, but people squealed and he was like “No, not really.” It ended up in a museum. I wonder what it smelled like and I’m glad I don’t know.
Dig (ahem) into that story…something to the effect that the son thought maybe Buddy Holly was carrying a gun and his dad had been shot, so they x-rayed the corpse.
Bizarre stuff.
Imagine only knowing it from the Madonna version. Don’t … just don’t.
Oh I’d forgotten she’d done one. Memorable? Not.
I am this way about Freebird … growing up, it was on hard cycle the summer of 75 and my brother and I picked up money working for a local farmer doing various crop related stuff and the foreman had a boom box on the tractor and blasted it … so I associate the song with being hot, sweaty and tired. The whole middle where the guy on guitar goes off twiddling around for about 10 minutes could safely be cut out as far as I am concerned.
I do like American Pie, it wasn’t as overplayed - and doesn’t have the selfwanking guitar part in the middle. I did like Valens, Holley and Big Bopper, grew up listening to the music [my mom liked them and owned records that she would play. I love Chantilly Lace =) ]