Icons*

This morning, as I tried to get out of bed, I listened to the radio. The DJ mentioned this day, February 3rd, as a landmark day in the history of rock ‘n roll, the anniversary of the Iowa plane crash in 1959 that killed J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, Richie Valens and Buddy Holly.

The DJ went on to rhapsodize the legacy left by Holly, saying that, to this day, every day, somewhere on the globe, a radio station is playing a Buddy Holly song.

What is it about human nature that, in the event of a famous life cut short – especially a talented one – we extrapolate that life, had it been lived fully, achieving tremendous things? “Oh, the music that Buddy Holly would have written! The innovations that would have continued to shape the industry!”

(Not to mention the two other famous guys on that plane, marginalized by our mainstream, white-majority sensibilities as one whose choice of a stage name locked his legacy into the era of “’50s music,” and the other as simply a Mexican also-ran.)

But would he have? Was his music really all that great? Did we feel that way about his music before he died? Sure, he was a pioneer in the halcyon days of rock ‘n roll. Sure, his music was popular in the 1950s, but back then there just wasn’t a great deal of rock ‘n roll music to choose from, yet! Do we know for certain that Holly hadn’t hit a wall creatively, and had written his last song, plane crash notwithstanding? Are we certain that he wouldn’t have called it quits upon the impending birth of his child so that he could spend the time his family needed of him?

Did we assign a greater importance to his musical contributions only because of our sense of loss at his tragic death?

How is it that someone whose career was so short, whose body of work – though promising – is so small, is revered by us as an icon as the result of an untimely death?

There are many others who died young, who we elevated to iconic status after their deaths: Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Lee. Janis Joplin. Kurt Cobain.

James Dean made only three films, and was only 24 when he died, yet at the mention of his name his image still ripples through the psyche as the personification of “cool” and “rebel,” and a great sense of what could have been.

Why do we do it? I’m guilty of it myself, especially upon hearing of the death of John Belushi in 1982. “What a shame!” I thought. “What a waste! The laughs he could have given the world…” But would he have? It became obvious after the details of his death were made public that he had a serious drug problem. Had the drugs never killed him, it’s likely he would have spiraled out of the public mind, fizzled into obscurity like so many other “rising stars” who never rose. (Britney Spears, anyone? Though her fall has been so spectacularly documented and photographed, she’ll still be “famous” in twenty years, even if she records or performs not one more note of music in that time.)

A great example here is “The King of Rock ‘n Roll,” Elvis Presley. As a rock ‘n roll star, he reached his zenith by age 25, in 1960, but since he’s the guy who essentially started it all, the spotlight was never really off him. He shifted his focus to a career in films and, by the mid-1960s, had disappeared from the stage. He was never taken seriously as an actor and as the 1960s came to a close, so did his film career. After his 1968 “comeback” as a stage performer, he quickly became a caricature of his former self. He still sold millions of records during this time, but he was a living legend whose legacy easily fed on itself.

Had Presley died tragically 1959, the world would have been spared the ugly proof in 1977 that, indeed, Presley was human; that, indeed, what goes up must come down.

And what if he had instead rehabilitated, gotten off the drugs and gotten clean again? Would we be subjected to scenes today of a 73-year-old man in a bejeweled white jumpsuit onstage, lamely karate-chopping his way through an hour’s worth of Vegas-rock arrangements of his greatest hits?

People older than I still often ponder the further greatness that could have been achieved by John F. Kennedy had he not died so young. Our nation had been seduced by the notion of “Camelot” in the White House, and was in love with the President. Let’s rewrite history for a moment and believe that Lee Harvey Oswald and/or one to three “second gunmen” got the date wrong and never showed up at Dealey Plaza when the presidential motorcade zoomed through.

It’s plausible that – as alleged in Oliver Stone’s film JFK – Kennedy would have ordered a pullout of the handful of our military “advisers” in the tiny country of Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson wouldn’t have had any power to reverse Kennedy’s order – as Stone also alleges in the film – and the lives of 58,000 young American men and women (not to mention untold hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese) over the next 12 years would have been spared.

However, in November of 1963, Kennedy was heading into an election year in which his opponents – and voters – would be looking back at his first term. There were already rumors of his dalliances with Marilyn Monroe, another star whose death in 1962 came too soon, amid circumstances in which Kennedy might have been implicated in murder as a cover-up of their affair. Who knows? Had he lived to pursue re-election, and this kind of information came to light, Kennedy may have resigned or chosen not to run for re-election, or might have been defeated in a re-election bid, or even arrested and imprisoned. He may have lived his post-White House years in disgrace much like Richard Nixon did. So much for the Boy King of America.

Though he was 30 at the time of his death in 1953, Hank Williams had only been Big Time for four years. Would we still hold him and his music in such high regard had he lived through his addictions and stumbled and staggered in and out of rehab in the public eye?

How would we feel today about Michael Jackson had some medical condition taken him from us shortly after the release of Thriller? How do we feel about Bob Dylan or Keith Richards, two men who, by their own admission and in the opinions of some who have known them, “should be dead?”

We just don’t know what would have come to a life cut short; we only know what won’t. For some reason inexplicable to me, we give a level of respect to a notable young person who dies early in a seemingly promising career higher than what we may have given that person with a long career in the spotlight and a death in comparative obscurity.

A final example: on January 19 of this year the entertainment world lost stage, film and television actress Suzanne Pleshette, age 70; three days later news outlets around the globe shouted in a pathetic frenzy about the death of film actor Heath Ledger, age 28. Of the two, who had the longer, more noteworthy career? But whose death received more news coverage and worldwide shock and sympathy? Who might we more likely see as an “icon” 20 years from now?

So it seems sadly possible that, with the examples of the longer lives lived by some of his contemporaries, and the lives of those who came after, Buddy Holly’s death on this date 49 years ago could have been the best thing for his career.



*In memory, fleeting, of Heath Ledger.