Saturday morning tunes: A pre-invasion three-fer

This week starts the fiftieth anniversary celebration of the Beatles' arrival in America, their appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show, and everything that was to follow for the next six (or fifty) years or so.

I'm going to go light on that here in the weeks to come, in part because it will be covered in longer form and greater detail by my old pal (and executive producer of one of my early video credits, "King Kong Versus the Tyrannosaurus Rex from the 1964 World's Fair," but that's a story for another day) Keith Semmel on his weekly radio/streaming show Strictly the Sixties – a role he was almost literally born to play.

Instead, I'm going to do a triple play to mark the fifty-fifth anniversary this week – Monday – of the pre-invasion event famously called The Day the Music Died:

There's a real shortage of live film/video of Richie Valens, alas. I chose this one because the dancing was just great. Meanwhile, here's one of my favorite Buddy Holly live performances. It's what the young people were going for.