The Bus: Eddie Cochran on America's Package Tours, 1957-1958

On Saturday 12 October 1957, Eddie Cochran played three shows at Sydney Stadium. Three days later he walked onto the stage of the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles as a new member of the largest travelling rock'n'roll show in the United States.

That is the whole logic of his 1957. He had one hit, a film credit and no band of his own, and the way a singer in that position earned a living was to get onto somebody else's bus.

This is the story of the two American package tours he rode: Irvin Feld's Biggest Show of Stars for '57 in the autumn, and America's Greatest Teenage Recording Stars the following January. Fifty-six dates in ten weeks of touring, almost all of them one-nighters, and both itineraries are below.

This article picks up a thread from Eddie Cochran on the Road, which covers Australia in 1957 and Britain in 1960.

The machine

The Biggest Show of Stars was an industrial operation. Promoter Irvin Feld, trading as Super Attractions, booked the autumn 1957 edition across 28 states and five Canadian provinces for around 80 performances, opening at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh on 6 September. Feld later bought Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey; you can see the circus logic in the routing.

The cast was extraordinary and the billing was blunt. Fats Domino and his orchestra on top, then Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Everly Brothers, LaVern Baker, Clyde McPhatter, the Drifters, Frankie Lymon and Paul Anka, with Harold Cromer as master of ceremonies and Paul Williams and his orchestra playing behind everybody.

Cochran was not on the opening bill. He joined on 15 October, at the Shrine.

The swap that put him on the bill

How he got the job is a matter of record, and the mechanism is ugly.

On 15 October 1957 Feld dropped three Black acts from the tour — the Bobbettes, the Spaniels and Johnnie and Joe — and added three white ones: Eddie Cochran, Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen. Fats Domino was moved to close the first half.

That was not the tour's first collision with American segregation. In late September, before Cochran was anywhere near it, the package had to drop Buddy Holly and the Crickets, the Everly Brothers and Paul Anka from five southern dates — Chattanooga, Birmingham, New Orleans and Memphis among them — because Black and white performers could not legally appear together in those cities.

A package-tour itinerary looks like a logistics document. Read the cast changes against the map and it is also a civil-rights document.

The autumn 1957 itinerary: Cochran's six weeks

15 October — Shrine Auditorium, Los Angeles, CA. His first night on the tour.
17 October — Civic Auditorium, San Jose, CA.
18 October — Memorial Auditorium, Sacramento, CA.
19 October — Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, CA.
20 October — Civic Auditorium, Stockton, CA, matinee, and the same evening at the Oakland Auditorium.
22 October — Paramount Theater, Portland, OR. 7.00 and 9.30.
23 October — Georgia Auditorium, Vancouver, BC.
24 October — Temple Theater, Tacoma, WA.
25-26 October — Orpheum Theater, Seattle, WA.
27 October — Spokane Coliseum, Spokane, WA.
28 October — University of Idaho, Moscow, ID.
29 October — Stampede Corral, Calgary, AB.
30 October — Edmonton Gardens, Edmonton, AB.
31 October — Exhibition Auditorium, Regina, SK.
1 November — Auditorium Arena, Denver, CO. The Diamonds join the bill.
2 November — The Forum, Wichita, KS. 7.00 and 9.30.
3 November — Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City, MO.
4 November — Music Hall, Omaha, NE.
5 November — Municipal Auditorium, Topeka, KS.
6 November — Kiel Auditorium, St. Louis, MO. 8.30.
7 November — Indiana Theater, Indianapolis, IN. 7.30 and 9.45.
8 November — War Memorial Coliseum, Fort Wayne, IN.
9 November — Fairgrounds Coliseum, Louisville, KY.
10 November — Fox Theater, Detroit, MI. 2.30 and 8.30.
11 November — Sports Arena, Toledo, OH.
12 November — Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, PA.
13 November — Warner Theatre, Erie, PA. 7.00 and 9.15.
14 November — RPI Field House, Troy, NY.
15 November — Boston Garden, Boston, MA.
16 November — State Theater, Hartford, CT.
17 November — Forum, Montreal, QC.
18 November — Ottawa Auditorium, Ottawa, ON.
19 November — Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY.
20 November — Arena, Philadelphia, PA.
21 November — Paramount Theater, Brooklyn, NY.
22 November — Municipal Auditorium, Norfolk, VA.
23 November — Coliseum, Charlotte, NC.
24 November — The Mosque, Richmond, VA. Last night of the tour.

Forty days, thirty-nine engagements, one bus. Look at 20 October, when they played an afternoon in Stockton and an evening in Oakland, or at the run from Spokane to Moscow to Calgary to Edmonton to Regina on five consecutive nights, and you have the measure of the job.

Two nights of that stretch are worth flagging. At Boston Garden on 15 November, police arrested dozens of young people for dancing during the show — the kind of policing that shadowed these tours through New England. And 18 November is the one date nobody can place: some reconstructions put the package at the Ottawa Auditorium, others at the Auditorium Arena in Toronto.

The window card

The Biggest Show of Stars advertised itself with window cards — heavy board, 17 by 22 inches or 22 by 28, hung in shop windows along the route. The surviving card for the Portland date is the single best document of this leg, and it is worth reading closely, because it explains how the whole industry advertised itself.

The ground is black. The names sit in flat yellow ovals and red and blue flashes tipped at angles, hand-lettered, each with its hit title set beneath in a smaller face and in quotation marks — because in 1957 the song sold the ticket more reliably than the face did:

Fats Domino and his Orchestra, top left, in the largest oval.
LaVern "Jim Dandy" Baker, with a full-length photograph in an evening gown.
Frankie Lymon — "Goody Goody".
Chuck Berry — "Schooldays".
Clyde McPhatter — "Long, Lonely Nights".
The Crickets — "That'll Be The Day".
Everly Bros. — "Bye, Bye, Love", on a blue banner across the middle.
Eddie Cochran — no song title, in plain white caps.
Buddy Knox — "Party Doll".
The Drifters, Jimmy Bowen and the Rhythm Orchids, Harold Cromer M.C.
Paul Anka — "Diana".
And along the bottom of the artwork, on a blue strip: Plus PAUL WILLIAMS and his BIG ORCHESTRA.

Then the part that matters commercially. The bottom third of the card is blank cream stock, and that is where the local printer stamped the booking:

PARAMOUNT THEATRE · PORTLAND · TUESDAY, OCTOBER 22nd · TWO SHOWS — 7:00 P.M. & 9:30 P.M. · TICKETS NOW AT J. K. GILL · PRICES: $2.00 - $2.75 - $3.50 · BUY TICKETS EARLY.

One artwork, printed once for the tour, overprinted eighty times for eighty towns. That is why surviving cards from this tour are near-identical apart from a block of black type at the foot, and why a card is worth far more to a historian than a poster with no date on it: the overprint is the only part that tells you when.

Note where Cochran sits on it — lower third, smaller type, no hit title beside his name. He had "Sittin' in the Balcony" and not much else. "Summertime Blues" was still nine months away.

January 1958: America's Greatest Teenage Recording Stars

Six weeks after Richmond he was back on a bus, on a package built around the Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly and the Crickets. The cast was younger and whiter than the autumn tour, and the billing reflected the charts of that exact fortnight: Danny and the Juniors were on the bill with "At the Hop", which went to number one in the United States while the tour was on the road.

Alongside them: Paul Anka, the Rays with "Silhouettes", the Mello-Kings, the Tuneweavers, the Hollywood Flames, the Royal Teens, Jimmy Edwards with "Love Bug Crawl", plus Jimmie Rodgers, Margie Rayburn, the Shepherd Sisters, Al Jones and Billy Brown, with Sam Donahue and his orchestra backing the show.

8 January — Coliseum, Charlotte, NC. Opening night.
9 January — Raleigh, NC. Venue not documented.
10 January — Winston-Salem, NC. Venue not documented.
11 January — Municipal Auditorium, Norfolk, VA.
12 January — The Mosque, Richmond, VA.
13 January — Coliseum, Baltimore, MD.
14 January — St. Joseph's Auditorium, Hazleton, PA. 7.00 and 9.30.
15 January — Stambaugh Auditorium, Youngstown, OH. 7.00 and 9.30.
16 January — Veterans Memorial, Columbus, OH. 7.00 and 10.00.
17 January — Sports Arena, Hershey, PA.
18 January — Buffalo, NY. Venue not documented.
19 January — Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, NY. 3.30 and 8.30.
20 January — Toronto, ON. Venue not documented.
21 January — Syria Mosque, Pittsburgh, PA. 7.30 and 10.30.
22 January — Erie, PA. Venue not documented.
23 January — Cincinnati Gardens, Cincinnati, OH.
24 January — Jefferson County Armory, Louisville, KY. Closing night.

The Rochester poster survives and carries the same anatomy as the Portland card, with the local detail this time printed at the top in heavy blue: AUDITORIUM THEATRE, 875 E. MAIN ST. — ROCHESTER — SUNDAY JANUARY 19 — 2 SHOWS 3:30 and 8:30 P.M. — PRICES: $2.00 - $2.50 - $3.00 - $3.50 Incl. Tax — AUDITORIUM BOX OFFICE OPENS JAN. 10. Under it, on green and red, "ALL IN PERSON" and the Everly Brothers over everyone, with Don and Phil's heads cut out either side of the banner.

Cochran is at the bottom again, in red, between the Mello-Kings and Jimmy Edwards. Sam Donahue's orchestra gets the black strip along the foot, which is where the band that plays all night always goes.

Five dates nobody can place

Five nights of the January tour have a city and no venue. The dedicated Buddy Holly concert chronology, about as thorough as this period gets, records the hall as unknown for exactly the same five:

9 January 1958 — Raleigh, North Carolina.
10 January 1958 — Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
18 January 1958 — Buffalo, New York.
20 January 1958 — Toronto, Ontario.
22 January 1958 — Erie, Pennsylvania.

Guessing would be easy: the autumn tour had played the Memorial Auditorium in Buffalo and the Warner Theatre in Erie two months earlier, and Raleigh and Winston-Salem have obvious candidates too. Easy, and unverifiable.

If you have a ticket stub, a newspaper advertisement or a window card for any of those five nights, that is exactly what would close them.

What this leg was worth to him

Nothing on a chart. Cochran came off the autumn tour in November 1957 with no new hit, and came off the January tour the same way. What he got was ten weeks of playing to arenas beside Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Fats Domino, and a reputation among musicians that outlived every act on the card except the three or four everybody still names.

Eighteen months later he cut "Summertime Blues" and "C'mon Everybody", and when Britain finally sent for him in January 1960 the posters put his name in letters the size of Gene Vincent's. That story is in the other article, and it ends in a taxi on the A4.