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\nIt’s his birthday today. <\/p>\n
Eddie Cochran’s songs still get play everywhere, all the time, on the radio no less! 1950s hits still in rotation. Elvis’ 1950s hits aren’t still in rotation. The only ones you hear on the radio for the most part are “Suspicious Minds” and maybe – MAYBE – “In the Ghetto”. But Cochran is still everywhere. (I just reviewed a movie in August<\/a> which had Cochran’s “Summertime Blues” on the soundtrack. Obligatory, perhaps, but that song is a stone-cold classic.) <\/p>\n The deaths of Ritchie Valens, The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly in 1959 was, in retrospect, just the horrible jump-start to the exodus. When Cochran died the following year – just as suddenly only this time in a car crash – it had to have felt like a cruel joke to the kids. The only comparison I can think of for my generation was the one-two punch of Kurt Cobain and River Phoenix, their deaths six months apart. Cochran was only 21 years old when he died. Hard to believe. Eerily, after Buddy Holly’s plane went down, Cochran recorded a song about the Big Three (all of whom he knew personally) called “Three Stars” (three new stars in the sky. Sob.) Cochran’s performance is earnest and sorrowful, prayerful, solemn. He had just months left to live.<\/p>\n \n