Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Ritchie Valens 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster (AOR-1.18)....

Description

FIVE DAYS AFTER THE PLANE CRASH, "THE SHOW MUST GO ON".
THIS WAS THE END OF THE 1950's, and THE STONES ALTAMONT POSTER THIS AUCTION WAS THE END OF THE 1960's.

Buddy Holly & the Crickets, Ritchie Valens 1959 Historic "Winter Dance Party" Concert Poster (AOR-1.18). An original cardboard window card, printed before the tour to sell tickets, for Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Frankie Sardo playing at the Les Buzz Ballroom in Spring Valley, Illinois on Saturday night, February 7, 1959. Five days earlier, on Monday night February 2, the three top headliners had perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa in what is usually referred to as "rock and roll's first tragedy." But regardless... this show in Spring Valley still took place. (More on that below.)

So this is nothing less than a fully original, authentic concert poster advertising the 16th stop out of 24 dates on the ill-fated Winter Dance Party tour of January-February 1959. After the 11th concert took place in Clear Lake on February 2, Buddy Holly chartered a four-seat airplane to jump ahead quickly to the next stop in the next state - Moorhead, Minnesota. Skipping past all the intricacies of the story, Valens and the Big Bopper (real name: J.P. Richardson) joined him. The weather was bad, sometime after midnight the plane went down in farmland, and all lives were lost.

Just like with the other four cities, this is the only concert poster from the Spring Valley show to ever surface. That's no surprise, given the complete rarity of any Winter Dance Party poster. Heritage has been lucky enough to sell four WDP posters in our history. The first one, from Mankato, Minnesota a week before the crash, went for $125,000 at Heritage in 2020. Then the one from Moorhead, Minnesota - the show the plane was en route to - went for $447,000 in November 2022. That amount still stands as the world's record for any concert poster ever sold, period - by a margin of $172,000. Now that's the definition of being in a class by itself.

The third one, from Green Bay, Wisconsin, was auctioned off by us in 2023 for $250,000. And then the Ft. Dodge, Iowa poster fetched $187,500 at Heritage in December 2024. That track record easily beats out any other concert poster... Beatles Shea's, Grateful Dead Skeleton & Roses, Elvis Presley 1955's, Hendrix flying eyeballs, Hank Williams death concert, you name it.

As background, this advertising poster was originally created as a "tour blank" by the Murray Poster Printing Co. in New York (their credit is down in the bottom margin). Poster collectors are familiar with tour blanks; the color portion is printed weeks ahead of time, and then each local promoter would fill in the blank with their own personalized info.

The ones we sold from Mankato, Ft. Dodge and Green Bay had that information printed up above; the Moorhead info was handwritten in by what looks like a red grease pencil, a common tool of the day. Who needed the year on any of these? Remember, this advertising placard was designed to have a shelf life of just a few weeks at best. Everyone certainly knew what year it was... just tell us the date and show times, please.

This Spring Valley venue box from February 7 is, in some ways, the most intriguing of them all. The owner of the ballroom was Les Buzz, short for either Leslie or Lester. So it's not a French pronunciation; "Les" rhymes with "guess." A nice feature is that rather than using just plain block print, they presented the ballroom name in really cool design lettering. It reminds us of the style found on the Ft. Dodge Laramar Ballroom poster.

And then what they decided to do was show a map up in the venue box, with the ballroom clearly marked. Is that a first, or what? So very charming & cute. The internet was still a third of a century away, so real maps were needed. With all the room that map took up, the other pertinent info had to be simply typeset into that small strip above the date... "Door Open 8 P.M., Dancing 9 Til 1 A.M., Advance - $2.25, Door - $2.50."

A blank, never-filled-in version of this poster has never been found, by the way. Bootlegs yes, but zero genuine blanks that were printed in December 1958 or January 1959 by Murray. This is such a popular and historic image that naturally, the graphic art has been reproduced and poster-bootlegged endlessly over the last few decades. But this poster was created for one purpose only: to get teenagers into that ballroom on a cold winter's night to have a little fun.

How many did they make back then? Well, as mentioned, first the attractive yellow & black portion was printed up in quantity weeks before the tour started, leaving that blank white box at the top. Then the local promoter for each stop on the tour, if they even wanted them (many local promoters opted for only newspaper ads or radio spots), would have their own information printed in up top. Sometimes with tour blanks, the home office does the venue printing for individual promoters; in the case of the Winter Dance Party tour, it was up to each individual promoter to enter the information themselves. We can deduce that simply by witnessing the wildly different appearance of the Mankato, Green Bay, Fort Dodge and this Spring Valley venue boxes. Each one with a personality all its own, all clearly local jobs.

So how many were filled in for Spring Valley, a town of only about 5,000 people at the time? A few dozen? Hard to say, but 50-100 spread around the area does seem logical. And then many were surely ruined on the spot by the snow, ice and horrible weather conditions in the dead of a harsh winter.

Moving on to the entertainment itself, we don't need to tell you how incredibly special the music was behind this poster. It is so fortuitous that the national tour promoter, General Artists Corporation/Super Productions, and the poster's graphic designer and printer, Murray (both located in New York), chose to list a big hit single for each artist on the poster. Quite often with old posters, the tour promoter would instead list each musician's current single, which might or might not turn out to be a hit. Now, we don't mean to disparage the legacy of J.P. Richardson or anything, but how less cool would this poster be if, below his name it said, "Big Bopper's Wedding"? Yep, that was the Bopper's current single in January 1959. Instead, wonderfully, we get the timeless classic "Chantilly Lace." Hel-lohhh, baby!!

Likewise for Buddy Holly and the Crickets - how fantastic that it says "Peggy Sue" instead of the very respectable but much less dramatic "Heartbeat," his current single (Billboard magazine peak: #82). "Peggy Sue" is just such an iconic song, it practically carries the poster all by itself. I'll go as far as to say that the hypothetical six-inch square containing Holly's picture, name and "Peggy Sue" might be the most important and compelling half-foot square of cardboard real estate in the entire 100-year history of concert posters.

On the other hand, Ritchie Valens wasn't old enough to have a recording history to draw from. Richard Valenzuela was a crushingly sad 17 years old at the time of the accident, and yet he was the hottest pistol on this poster. "Come On, Let's Go" had been a minor hit the previous fall - and a much bigger hit for Los Lobos decades later - and thankfully gets a mention here. But is there any more compelling single from the 1950's than Ritchie's current disc at the time, "Donna" b/w "La Bamba"? The A-side is a remarkably moving, plaintive ballad about love lost (and the #3 record in the country this week), and the B-side a timeless Spanish-language rock 'n' roll evergreen that we'll continue to hear several times a year for the rest of our lives. I'll take that 45 to a desert island any day over you-know-who's "Don't Be Cruel"/"All Shook Up."

Dion DiMucci was a rocket ship on the launching pad with his backing singers the Belmonts, and is a tremendously strong fourth talent in the rookie position on this poster. "I Wonder Why," given above a snowflake, had been his charting debut the previous summer, peaking at #22. Before you could blink, however, "A Teenager in Love" would come along that spring and catapult Dion into a career that landed him in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame... just like Buddy and Ritchie. Sadly, only Dion lived to enjoy it.

Singer Frankie Sardo is truly the low man on the totem pole, squeezed into a little strip scarcely over an inch tall. Adding to the ignominy was the listing of his recent single, "Fake Out"... which was butchered into "Take-Out" on the poster. Perhaps they thought he was just the caterer? (I actually tracked down the song, put it on my iPod and grew to like it, obviously as a novelty tied to this poster. But nobody in 1959 noticed it.)

As for this tour soldiering on after the tragic plane crash, it's absolutely flabbergasting when you consider that in today's big-money rock world, if a key bandmember catches the flu, stadium dates are postponed and schedules moved around. If Bono were to get a bad sore throat, a whole U2 tour could be canceled. But with the Winter Dance Party in 1959, you had the top three headliners killed in the middle of the tour, and the show still went on. Through substitute talents such as Bobby Vee and Frankie Avalon, the mortally wounded Winter Dance caravan chugged its way through its remaining obligations, with all post-accident attendees watching a shell of a show through moist, mournful eyes. In retrospect, it defies belief. This all happened because the shows, and the whole tour, were aimed entirely at teenagers. Nobody else cared.

Another point to consider about the rarity of a Winter Dance Party poster. Once Heritage started getting great money for the Beatles 1966 Shea Stadium poster, the high-graded Skeleton & Roses and Flying Eyeballs, the early Elvis Presley's and so forth, other people came out of the dark with their own specimens. Wishing, smartly, to cash in. Well... Heritage has run four WDP posters in the last six years, and not one new specimen has come out of the woodwork. This Spring Valley poster came into collectors' hands decades ago. So in modern times, there's been nary a murmur, a whisper or a hint of a new one being found by the hobby.

Given that it's now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, you'd think that almost anybody with one of these posters surely would've contacted Heritage by now. If only just to talk to us. But we've heard nothing but crickets - so to speak (I know, groan). Is it really possible that the three we know of before the plane crash - Mankato, Green Bay and Fort Dodge - are the only pre-crash ones still surviving on the planet? And that this poster and the world-record-holding Moorhead, Minnesota one ("the day the music died") are the only two from afterwards? After years of doing this now, I would absolutely not bet against it.

The tragic and untimely death of Buddy Holly on this tour was immortalized forever in Don McLean's famous song, "American Pie." McLean's poignant lyrics included the line, "Something touched me deep inside / The day the music died." So touched were music fans around the world that the original manuscript of Don McLean's handwritten lyrics to "American Pie" sold at auction 11 years ago for $1.2 million.

Personally, I'd rather have one of the posters.

Pete Howard
Director, Concert Posters
Heritage Auctions

This first-ever Heritage offering measures a shade under 14" x 22" and grades to restored Very Good condition. From the David Swartz Concert Poster Collection. COA from Heritage Auctions.

Literature: See Grushkin, Paul, The Art of Rock: Posters from Presley to Punk, Abbeville Press, New York, 1987, p.30 (illus.).

More Information: Chameleon Restoration addressed a few edge and corner issues, touching up any printing or color where necessary, mending tears or pinholes, eradicating surface blemishes and greatly reducing any creasing the poster might have had. The result is a wonderfully satisfying piece with little or no evidence of past damage.


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