From Songs to Stories : Carl Bunch, who has performed with some of music’s biggest names, may have a future spinning tales.

He was once Buddy Holly’s drummer, but today Carl Bunch is a 53-year-old half-blind diabetic who was recently singing songs for gas money near the entrance of a local supermarket.

“I don’t have a problem with pride,” explained Bunch, a Lancaster resident who has needed extra cash for his weekly visits to a San Fernando Valley doctor.

Fortunately, Ron Lancaster, owner of the Storyteller Bookstore & Cafe, discovered Bunch at the Alpha Beta on Topanga Canyon Boulevard two months ago and is giving him a chance at another career--storytelling. Bunch will practice his new art Wednesday.

“That’s the new thing for me,” Bunch said. “I’ve been so many places, and I have so many stories.”

They start with the day the music died. Bunch was bedridden with frostbite in a Michigan hospital when Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens were killed in a plane crash. Just two days earlier, the band’s bus had broken down. Holly had hitchhiked to the nearest town for help, while Bunch stayed on board, putting on six pairs of socks to keep his feet warm. Instead, he cut off the circulation.

Bunch will never forget the phone call from his mother.

“I couldn’t believe it,” said Bunch, who had just joined Holly after Christmas and viewed the tour as an unofficial audition that could lead to a permanent gig. “I couldn’t see Ritchie dead. We had become close.”

Still shaken from the tragedy, Bunch, only 19, rejoined the tour in North Dakota. Over the years, he hit the road with some of music’s biggest names, including Roy Orbison and Hank Williams Jr. Williams, however, was trying to emulate the wild lifestyle of his father, and Bunch joined in, for two long years of alcohol and drug abuse. By the early 1970s, his music career was finished, and he was lucky to be alive.

He took on various jobs, including as a security officer for Jim Bakker and the Praise the Lord ministry.

“I didn’t see things, but we knew there were things were going on there,” Bunch said. (Bakker was convicted in 1989 of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy.)

Later, in the mid-1980s, Bunch earned degrees in theology, biblical counseling and pyschotheology at Friends International Christian University in Merced, Calif. He became a mental health therapist at Buena Park Community Hospital, and his most recent job was supervising teen-agers at a group home in Reseda. But his health began to fail, and he’s now on disability.

After two decades, he wants to be a performer again.

“I don’t care if it’s 25,000 people or 25 people,” Bunch said. “I’m comfortable on stage.”

But he is no fool, and understands how difficult it would be for a 53-year-old musician to form a band and make it in a profession that caters to youth.

“His future is storytelling,” Lancaster said. “Like many who don’t know the technique, he rambles on a bit, but that will improve with time.”

Bunch also refuses to play bars and clubs, the normal required stops to gain a following. “It’s tough for me, as a Christian, to be around that kind of drunkenness,” he said. “I don’t play rock ‘n’ roll anymore. It got too raunchy.”

Instead, he sings country-Western music and some gospel.

On a recent night at the Storyteller, playing guitar, he sang two original tunes--”Twenty Years Younger & Single” and “Mighty Oaks Have Roots.” The crowd of about two dozen offered polite applause, seemingly not interested in his past, and Bunch was off the stage in less than 20 minutes.

Yet, he has no regrets.

The plane crash, ironically enough, might have saved him. “I don’t think I would have handled the fame well,” he said. “I might have killed myself.”

WHERE AND WHEN

What: Stories by Carl Bunch.

Location: The Storyteller Bookstore & Cafe, 22047 Sherman Way, Canoga Park.

Hours: 8 to 10 p.m. Wednesday.

Price: $3 cover charge.

Call: (818) 713-2518.