The Bus: Eddie Cochran and the Feld Package Tours, 1957-1958

Eddie Cochran spent two spells of his working life inside somebody else's travelling company: the back end of a continental tour in the autumn of 1957, and a seventeen-day run the following January. Both were built and sold out of the same office.

Both campaigns left a paper trail: Billboard followed the tours, later scholarship mapped them, and advertising survives from Portland and Rochester. Cochran's own touring life, from the Cochran Brothers to the A4, is in Eddie Cochran on the Road.

The Feld machine

The tour was three days old when the trade press laid out the whole campaign. On 9 September 1957, in his "On the Beat" column on the rhythm and blues and rock and roll page, Ren Grevatt wrote that "Irving Feld's Washington booking combine, Super Attractions, kicked off its '80 Days' fall edition of its 'Biggest Show of Stars for 1957,' Friday (6) at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh with one of the strongest pop and rock and roll talent line-ups in recent memory."

Read the quotation marks. "80 Days" is the edition's own name, and two weeks later the same paper spelled it out: the package was "now on the second week of its 80-day, cross-country tour". It is a length of time. It is not a count of performances and not a count of towns.

The company is a family firm — elsewhere in the same issue Billboard calls it "the Feld brothers' Super Attractions". The bill for the first six weeks was Fats Domino, Clyde McPhatter, LaVern Baker, Frankie Lymon, Chuck Berry, the Crickets, Paul Anka, the Everly Brothers, the Spaniels, the Bobbettes, Johnnie and Joe, the Drifters, "(Crying) Tommy Brown" and Paul Williams and his band, with Harold Cromer as emcee.

How far it reached has two answers. Billboard gives the eighty days and adds that "the package has been booked for at least five Canadian appearances as well". The geographer Kevin D. Romig, writing in the peer-reviewed Journal of Texas Music History in 2011, puts it at "a tour of 70 cities in 80 days" — the days agree; the seventy cities are Romig's figure alone.

Romig also describes how the company moved: "As the tour crisscrossed the continent, all the artists were packed into a single bus, in which Holly often would shoot craps with Chuck Berry. This ended when Berry became successful enough to purchase his own Cadillac and drive himself to the shows."

That is the bus of the title. The sentence describes the autumn of 1957 and records the arrangement breaking down; it says nothing about which vehicle Cochran travelled in.

Billboard reported it as a success. On 23 September the paper wrote that in Montreal "the package broke all existing records at the Forum, with 30,000 packed in for two performances. Police turned away thousands."

Before Cochran joined: the southern leg

Eddie Cochran was not yet on the tour. What follows happened in September, weeks before his name appeared on a Super Attractions bill. It happened to the company he would later join.

Romig, citing Ellis Amburn's 1995 biography of Buddy Holly at pages 98 and 99, records that police stopped the tour on the road between Atlanta and New Orleans and notified the musicians that their buses "would have to be racially segregated". The performers also learned that white artists would not be allowed to perform with black artists in three cities: Columbus, Georgia; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Birmingham, Alabama. By the time the package reached Tulsa on 28 September, Romig writes, the buses "had again been desegregated, and black and white musicians were able to ride and perform together once more."

Romig's account records an instruction given by police on a road, and what the performers were told they would not be allowed to do in three named cities. It cites no ordinance, and names no statute behind the three refusals.

15 October: Cochran joins

His arrival was not a late repair to the bill. It was printed more than a month in advance, in the same 9 September column that announced the tour: "When the crew reach the Coast on October 15, Eddie Cochrane, Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen and the Rhythm Orchids will be added, while the Bobbettes, the Spaniels and Johnny and Joe will leave the cast. On October 31, the Diamonds join the show."

So the change was scheduled, it was tied to the tour reaching the West Coast, and Billboard gives no reason for it beyond that geography. Romig describes the outgoing acts as having been "replaced by newer, more popular acts, such as Eddie Cochran and West Texans Buddy Knox and the Rhythm Orchids" — but that reading of the motive is Romig's. Billboard offers none.

One part of that plan is confirmed afterwards. In its issue of 4 November Billboard noted in passing that "Knox has joined the Feld 'Biggest Show of Stars' troupe on the coast." It says nothing about the rest of the exchange.

Cochran's autumn run

One night in his autumn run is fixed by a surviving object, and it is worth keeping apart from the rest.

22 October — Paramount Theatre, Portland, OR. A Super Attractions handbill for this date survives, and is described below.

The day he joined is better attested than the place. Billboard printed 15 October in advance as the date the changes would take effect when the crew reached the Coast, but it named neither a city nor a hall; the Los Angeles venue comes from the compiled listings. Writing afterwards, on 4 November, the paper mentioned "their Los Angeles date turning out to be slightly disappointing from the attendance standpoint" without saying which day that was.

Romig also names Moscow, Idaho among the small towns the package played, without giving a date for it.

Later compiled listings carry the route on from there. One figure is worth setting against them: the same Billboard paragraph that reported the Los Angeles attendance also said the troupe had "a total of 54 engagements yet to play on their tour". Written at the end of October, that does not sit easily with the finish those listings give it, in the third week of November.

Portland: a handbill

The surviving Portland artefact is a handbill — a small paper throwaway, 6.5 by 9 inches, meant to be handed out or left on a counter rather than hung in a window. It carries the Super Attractions billing for The Biggest Show of Stars for '57 and the Portland date of Tuesday 22 October 1957, and it sells the show the way the package sold itself all autumn: by pairing many of the performers with a picture and a song.

Cochran is on it, and his name carries no song title. He had "Sittin' in the Balcony" behind him and not much else; "Summertime Blues" was nine months away.

A souvenir programme for the same tour also survives: twenty-four pages, the fall edition, with Buddy Holly and the Crickets on page nine.

January 1958: Feld again

In January he was working for the same office again. Romig describes the January package as "another, shorter (17-day) Irving Feld Tour called 'America's Greatest Teenage Recording Stars,' playing several venues east of the Mississippi River".

Romig describes a seventeen-day Feld tour east of the Mississippi. The compiled listings place it from 8 to 24 January; the Rochester window card independently fixes Sunday 19 January.

Danny and the Juniors were on the bill with "At the Hop", which sat at the top of the American charts in the weeks the tour was on the road. Around them, the Rays, the Mello-Kings, the Tuneweavers, the Hollywood Flames, the Royal Teens and Jimmy Edwards, with Sam Donahue and his orchestra behind the show.

Rochester: the window card

For 19 January there is a window card, and it is the fullest of the three surviving artefacts: heavy board, 17 by 22¾ inches, printed in six colours by Globe Posters of Baltimore.

It reads America's Greatest Teen-Age Recording Stars, at the Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, on Sunday 19 January, two shows — a matinee and an evening — with tickets from $2.00 to $3.50, and the line "Auditorium Box Office Opens Jan. 10." Nine days of advance sale for one Sunday.

Cochran is at the foot of the card, and there is no song title under his name. That is the second surviving piece of advertising in a row on which the acts around him carry a hit and he does not. It is a fact about two objects, printed in two cities three months apart; what the printer or the promoter intended by it is not recorded on either.

Where that leaves the two campaigns

Two Feld tours, run out of the same Washington office, one advertised as eighty days across the continent and the other as seventeen east of one river. A trade paper that named the incoming cast more than a month before it changed. And two pieces of surviving advertising, a small one from Portland and a heavy one from Rochester, on both of which Eddie Cochran's name sits near the bottom with no record title beside it.

A note on sources

Contemporary trade press, consulted as page scans of the original issues in the World Radio History archive:

Ren Grevatt, "On the Beat — Rhythm & Blues / Rock & Roll", Billboard, 9 September 1957, page 64 — the promoter, the company, the opening at the Syria Mosque, the "80 Days" framing, the opening cast, the 15 October change and the Diamonds.
Billboard, 23 September 1957 — "the second week of its 80-day, cross-country tour", the Montreal Forum attendance, and "the Feld brothers' Super Attractions".
Billboard, 4 November 1957 — the Los Angeles attendance, the "54 engagements yet to play", and Buddy Knox joining on the coast.
Billboard, 20 January 1958 — Feld's and Alan Freed's separate 1958 touring plans, which is what establishes that the 1957 package was not a Freed production.

Scholarship:

Kevin D. Romig, "'Not Fade Away': The Geographic Dimensions of Buddy Holly's Meteoric Career", Journal of Texas Music History 11 (2011) — peer-reviewed, with notes. Source for "70 cities in 80 days", for the single bus, for the description of the incoming acts, for the January tour's length and range, and for the southern leg.
Ellis Amburn, Buddy Holly: A Biography (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), pages 98-99, which is Romig's note 27 for the southern leg. Cited here through Romig; the book itself has not been consulted.

Artefacts, as catalogued by Heritage Auctions:

The Portland handbill — Super Attractions, The Biggest Show of Stars for '57, Tuesday 22 October 1957, 6.5 × 9 inches. Heritage lot #89058.
The Rochester window card — America's Greatest Teen-Age Recording Stars, Auditorium Theatre, Rochester, Sunday 19 January 1958, Globe Posters, six colours, 17 × 22¾ inches. Heritage lot #11173.
The 1957 fall souvenir programme — 24 pages, with Buddy Holly and the Crickets on page 9. Heritage lot #49123. Listed as evidence that the programme survives; its contents are not described.

Compiled tour listings were used only to show where a claim is unsupported, and are not cited here as evidence for any date.