Remember that awful song about dead rock stars, Rock-N-Roll Heaven? You know the tune: If you believe in forever, then our gig’s just a one night stand, if there’s a rock-n-roll heaven, well you know they have a hell of a band…band…BAND. (Repeat twice, fade out.)

The song was a big hit for the Righteous Brothers in 1974, about ten years after their own recording career went to the great unknown, but the truth is, if there is a rock-n-roll heaven, Wisconsin just might be purgatory.

No less than the great Buddy Holly set the stage for troubadours to come. His doomed Winter Dance Party of 1959 debuted Jan. 23 in Milwaukee.

“It was crazy, daddy – the goings-on Friday at George Devine’s Million Dollar Ballroom,” reported the Milwaukee Sentinel. “Nearly 6,000 young people turned out to hear such rock ‘n’ roll starts as Buddy Holly and the Crickets, Big Bopper, Dion and the Belmonts and Richie Valens. If you haven’t heard them, you haven’t lived, man…

“Electric guitars boomed through two loudspeakers with the force of two symphony orchestras in full sway, and the twitching rock ‘n’ rollers invoked screams that surely melted the snow on the roof of the ballroom.”

If only the hottest act in the land had been able to melt the snow. Holly crisscrossed Wisconsin in a bus plagued by mechanical problems in the freezing weather, including a broken heater – the reason the native Texan chartered a plane upon reaching Iowa. The thought of another day on the clammy bus was too much.

Following Holly’s opening night in Milwaukee, the tour hit Kenosha’s Eagles Ballroom and Eau Claire’s Fournier Ballroom, then north to the Duluth armory where the show mesmerized a young Robert Zimmerman, later known as Bob Dylan.

The Winter Dance Party headed for Appleton’s Cinderella Ballroom. The bus broke down and the group resorted to burning newspapers in the aisle to keep warm. The entourage grew increasingly rundown. One person needed hospitalization. The Appleton matinee show was cancelled.

On Feb. 1, Holly played an evening show at Green Bay’s Riverside Ballroom. It would be his second-to-last performance.

After the Green Bay show the group headed to Clear Lake, Iowa, where Holly, literally sick and tired from the cold, chartered the airplane that took his life and that of Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson the next evening.

The Dock of Monona Bay
It was another plane crash, this one occurring in Wisconsin eight years after Holly’s death, which took the life of a popular R&B performer on the cusp of superstardom.

On the afternoon of December 10, 1967, the twin engine airplane carrying singer Otis Redding and his band developed engine problems on its approach to Madison, where the group was set to perform that evening. Redding and four band members died when the plane slammed into Lake Monona. The exact cause was never determined.

The wreckage was removed from the lake – pieces of the Beechcraft with the singer’s name painted on the side are displayed in the Rock-N-Roll Hall of Fame – but controversy exists over what was not found, specifically a large sum of cash carried by Redding from the previous gigs. A briefcase recovered from the plane was noted in the initial police report, but the case mysteriously disappeared by the time Redding’s widow arrived in Madison a day later. And federal crash experts were unhappy to find that somebody had rifled through the band’s luggage. Others believe the cash remains at the bottom of Lake Monona, covered by decades of silt.

Sadly, Redding never lived to see his song (Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay become a #1 hit. He had recorded the song three days before his death.

Yet another fatal air crash occurred in the foggy morning of August 27, 1990, and took the life of renowned guitarist Stevie Ray Vaughn. A helicopter carrying Vaughn crashed into a hillside moments after leaving Alpine Valley Music Theater near East Troy, where he had just headlined with Eric Clapton and Robert Cray.

It’s a wonder Clapton still tours in Wisconsin at all. Nine years before the tragic Alpine Valley crash, Clapton cut short a Madison concert due to severe stomach pain. Moments later he collapsed from a bleeding ulcer and nearly died here.

Wendy Oh!
But not all sensational rock and roll incidents in Wisconsin involve air crashes. A case could be made that Wendy O’Williams 1981 appearance in Milwaukee was more like a train wreck.

O’Williams was a punk, er, singer and adult film, ahem, actress best known for detonating equipment and wielding chain saws during her live performances.

Occasionally O’Williams would wear clothes, but her usual attire consisted of two pieces of duct tape on her breasts, a dollop of strategically placed whipped cream, and a motorcycle helmet.

So we can assume that Milwaukee police had a heads-up on O’Williams Jan. 17 appearance at the Palms nightclub, 2616 W. State St.

Ms. O’Williams did not disappoint.

She performed some of her best ditties…Got a problem in my heart, got a fire in my pants…The day of the humans is gone, we’ll laugh and sing while we chew on your bones…We are the brain dead, we march with no head.

Then O’Williams performed her latest show stopping moves. She got intimate with a sledgehammer.

Waiting backstage were Milwaukee’s finest who placed the singer under arrest for “conduct prohibited in a licensed premises.”

An altercation occurred outside the club and O’Williams wound up face down on the ice-covered parking lot. Additional charges were filed for resisting arrest.

O’Williams fought the law and the law lost. A trial was held. The sledgehammer was paraded before a jury of O’Williams peers. (If not exactly her peers, at least they were twelve people not offended by a punker porn star sporting a Mohawk.)

Photos of the handcuffed O’Williams being bloodied and bruised by police generated enough sympathy for her acquittal.

Flush with success against The Man, O’Williams appeared on the Tomorrow Show to perform her latest song -- A Pig is a Pig -- and blow up a Milwaukee police car. The sledgehammer did not make and appearance.

And Now, the End is Near…
One of the weirdest Wisconsin events involving a rock star featured none other than The King himself.

Elvis Presley came to Madison on June 24, 1977. Like Buddy Holly decades before, Elvis was performing what would be his final string of shows before climbing the king’s throne one last time later that summer.

A limo met Presley’s touring jet, the Lisa Marie, at the Dane County airport about 1 a.m. after a show in De Moines.

Riding shotgun in the limo were Elvis, his girlfriend Ginger Alden, Elvis’ father Vernon, Vernon’s girlfriend, a bodyguard, and Madison police detective Thomas McCarthy, who had been hired for local security.

The limo stopped for a light at Stoughton Road and E. Washington Avenue. A Standard gas station was located on the southwest corner.

“Elvis was sitting by the window in back,” McCarthy told the Capital Times in 2005. “He saw a kid with a clipboard reading gas meters and said something like, ‘Isn’t that nice? There’s a kid out there working late to help his family.’”

As the group looked out the window, two men approached the pumps and began harassing the teenage employee.

“I can’t let that happen,” Elvis said. “That isn’t right.”

Alden, Vernon Presley and McCarthy told the singer to him to stay put, but by the time they finished urging the iconic singer not to get involved, Elvis had left the limo.

“If you get into a fight, you’re on your own,” McCarthy told him.

The bodyguard assured the group, “He’s been studying karate. He can take care of himself.”

Elvis was decked out in his sequined powder blue jumpsuit and patented sunglasses – the kind with the erector set frames. He approached the three men at the pumps and sure enough, struck a karate pose.

“They were dumbfounded,” McCarthy said. “His presence broke the thing up.”

Fortunately, the bloated Elvis did not split his pants, which must have helped his credibility somewhat.

“Presley did not leave until tempers were cool,” according to one wire-service account. Elvis reportedly told the group, “I found you as enemies, I leave you as brothers.”

Elvis got back in the limo and laughed.

“Did you see the look on their faces?” he asked.

Priceless, no doubt.