Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper played
their last concert at Clear Lake Surf Ballroom, Iowa,
on 2nd February 1959.
At 00.55 early the next morning they took off from
Mason City, Iowa, and their plane crashed in a snow-storm
several minutes later. The day the music died.
A young rocker who was Somethin' Else dies in England
On Saturday, April 16, 1960 having performed at Bristol's Hippodrome theatre at about 11.50 p.m., while on tour in the United Kingdom, 21-year-old Cochran died as a result of a traffic accident in a taxi traveling through Chippenham, Wiltshire, on route to London Heathrow airport. The speeding taxi crashed into a lamp post on Rowden Hill. He died in St. Martin's Hospital, Bath 4:10 p.m. the following day of severe head injuries.
John Bonham died aged 32 on the 25th September 1980 in Windsor, England, as Led Zeppelin prepare for their up-coming American tour.
On the previous day Bonham had attended rehearsals at Bray Studios for the tour which was the band's first US tour since 1977.
On the journey to the rehersals, Bonham stopped for breakfast, where he drank four quadruple vodkas and then continued to drink heavily at the rehearsals.
The band rehearsed until late in the evening and then retired to Jimmy Page's house in Windsor. After midnight Bonham fell asleep and he was put to bed. Led Zeppelin's tour manager and John Paul Jones found him dead the next afternoon.
He is widely considered to be one of the greatest drummers in the history of rock music. The readers of Rolling Stone magazine named Bonham as the "best drummer of all time" in 2011.
Lennon had disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to raise his infant son Sean, but re-emerged in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.
