The rarest and solely identified Buddy Holly poster from “The Day the Music Died,” when an airplane carrying Holly, Richie Valens and the Large Popper (actual identify J.P. Richardson) crashed and killed all three, bought at public sale for a record-breaking $447,000.
Holly, Valens and Richardson had simply performed a live performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, and have been headed to Moorehead, Minnesota, for his or her twelfth cease on the ill-fated Winter Dance Get together tour, when their single-engine Beechcraft Bonanza crashed in a cornfield throughout dangerous winter climate on Feb. 3, 1959, killing everybody on board.
The tragedy, which killed a few of rock and roll’s greatest names on the time, would later develop into immortalized as “The Day the Music Died,” in Don McLean’s 1971 hit “American Pie.”
Heritage Auctions
The poster is an unique commercial window card memorializing the present that by no means was, and one of many first tragedies in rock and roll historical past. It had initially been caught to a phone pole, however had fallen to the bottom a day or two after the present and was picked up by a upkeep man who took it residence and positioned it in a closet the place it was forgotten about for about 50 years, Howard mentioned in an on-line interview.
The poster has no pin or nail holes, lacking components or fading, however does present a white stain on either side from the sticky substance used to hold it up, which was left intact on the poster as a minor, however essential element to the story, based on the web site.
Heritage Auctions mentioned the profitable bid for the poster bought for $447,000 — breaking the earlier report for a rock poster, which was $275,000 for a print from the Beatles’ 1966 present at Shea Stadium.
“Heritage is thrilled to interrupt the earlier report for a live performance poster by greater than $170,000,” mentioned Pete Howard, director of live performance posters at Heritage Auctions, “however not in the slightest degree shocked, given the significance, the individuality and the gravitas of this wonderful window card, which marketed rock and roll’s first tragedy.”
The auctioneer has had only one different poster from the Winter Dance Get together tour — for a present in Mankato, Minnesota — that bought for $125,000 in April 2020.
