GONN an airplane crash took the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, the Big Bopper and their young pilot on February 3, 1959, "the Day the Music Died". Spurred by "Project GONN" of The PSPOT (an internet-based resource dedicated to the '60s music underground), a grassroots campaign led to the nomination of GONN in The Iowa Music Association Hall Of Fame And Museum. The band was inducted in a ceremony in 2004 and, as with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, was celebrated with a live concert by the inductees. The IRRMA post on the induction of GONN describes the
American Pie (song) some of the better known references in the song's lyrics, including mentions of Elvis Presley ("the king") and Bob Dylan ("the jester"), and confirmed that the song culminates with a near-verbatim description of the death of Meredith Hunter at the Altamont Free Concert, ten years after the plane crash that killed Holly, Valens, and Richardson. Mike Mills of R.E.M. reflected: "American Pie just made perfect sense to me as a song and that's what impressed me the most. I could say to people this is how to write songs. When you've written at least three songs that can be considered