Page 300: That'll Be The, Uh, Yesterday

That'll Be The, Uh, Yesterday

Note: I've been super busy lately being all in love and shit (it's a fact... new relationships are the enemy of music blogs). Luckily my friend Tyge at The Neon Lounge has hooked me up with another of his guest blogger posts. Of course, this is going up a day late... the day the music died was yesterday. But since he didn't email me this until 11 last night, it's totally not my fault. And if you're in the mood for more day old Buddy Holly remembrances, I highly recommend the WFMU post that Steve at Nashville Cream turned me on to. I'd like to say that the music business has gotten less sleazy since the 1950s... sadly it has not.

Fifty years ago today Buddy Holly, J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson and Ritchie Valens died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Thanks to Don McLean's song "American Pie," the event became known as "the day the music died."

That got me thinking about an article I read in a "Best of Rolling Stone" issue back in 1988. The issue had reprints of articles and letters that appeared in the magazine over the years and this particular letter originally ran in an early 1970's issue. A professor from some big university, perhaps M.I.T., wrote the magazine to report of "dire news." He stated he had been entering data into the latest, state-of-the-art IBM computer and had calculated the day music really would die. Music, he said, was made up of a finite number of notes, tempos and melodies, and at some point all combinations of these would be exhausted. He even went so far as to state we would reach this fateful date somewhere around the summer of 1982. Funny stuff in retrospect. Or is it?

I couldn't find a copy of this article online but I did happen across a forum arguing this theory. It's kind of interesting in a nerdy, mathematical aspect: The Day The Music Will Die

No one knows for sure what happened in that airplane on that fateful night, but you can be sure The Kids In The Hall have their own theory: