This is tasteless beyond words. Within the next few weeks, the Big Bopper's casket will be auctioned off on eBay by his son.

Jay Richardson was born three months after his father died. J.P. "Big Bopper" Richardson died Feb. 9, 1959, when the small plane in which he was riding crashed near Clear Lake, Iowa. Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens also were on board. Their deaths were immortalized in a 1972 song by Don Mclean — "The Day the Music Died."

Fifty years later, taste follows music to the grave.

“I have no personal use for the casket,” Jay Richardson told the Beaumont (Tx.) Enterprise. “When you get down to it, it is just a metal box. More important is what this particular metal box represents."

Would it be cynical to suggest that what it represents to Richardson is money?

The casket has been empty since March of 2007 when the body was dug up from its Beaumont cemetery for reburial in a more visible location, complete with a life-size statue and historical marker. The funeral home that supplied the original coffin donated a new one for the reburial. Since the disinterment, the old casket has been on display at the Texas Musicians Museum in Hillsboro, Tx.

Selling the casket, Richardson says, will give people "a unique opportunity to learn more about the early years of rock ‘n’ roll."

I would think leaving the casket in a museum, or perhaps giving it to the more visible Rock and Roll Museum in Cleveland would serve that purpose better than selling it to the highest bidder on eBay for whatever macabre purpose.

Richardson, who saw his father for the first time when the body was exhumed, was interviewed via telephone from Canada, where he was touring with an act in tribute to his father, Holly and Valens.

Yep, he's been mining his father's memory for some time. He calls himself Big Bopper Jr.

Richardson, who lives near Houston in Katy, Tx., says money from the casket sale will be used to finance a musical show about his father to help keep his memory alive.

No word on whether the "tribute" act he's touring with will play a role in that musical or how much of the profits will end up in Richardson's pocket.

Or is that a cynical thing to say?