FEATURE:
Groovelines
Don McLean – American Pie
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I am probably not going to…
IN THIS PHOTO: ‘The day the music died’ … the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly is thought to be one of American Pie’s references – but Don McLean hints it could be about his father’s death/PHOTO CREDIT: Hulton Archive/Getty Images (via The Guardian)
teach you too much about a song that is considered to be one of the defining moments of twentieth-century music. American Pie was written and recorded by Don McLean. Recorded at Record Plant in New York, it was included on the 1971 American Pie album. The single was a number-one U.S. hit for four weeks in 1972. The reason I am focusing on this song now is because Don McLean turns eighty on 2nd October. Many might remember Madonna’s cover of American Pie that was released in 2000. Simply, yes, American Pie is in part about the day Buddy Holly died (3rd February, 1959) and, with it, music dying. It is, as the song goes, “The day/the music died”. Don McLean is, and I say this with all the respect I can muster, an artist like Van Morrison. Part of a different time, they probably view this woke and more progressive age as something cynical, wrong or bullsh*t. Perhaps sharing the same emotional palette as Van Morrison, you cannot argue against the fact both are masterful songwriters. Also, this is a case of perhaps separating the art from the artist. Saluting his contributions and amazing career, and this incredible and world-class song, but also not entirely relating to the man behind it. In terms of his politics and views. However, as Don McLean is eighty on 2nd October, I couldn’t pass up on the chance to spotlight his best-known song. I am going to start with features that look inside the track. Its origins and why it is so effecting, historic and brilliant. Even if the song unfortunately inspired a series of gross and terrible films of the same name, we can overlook that. Get back to the genius of the 1971 song. Why, fifty-four years later, it has taken on a whole new light and meaning. If its creator might not relate to Gen Z and younger listeners who have their own relationship with American Pie, that is okay. We salute the genius who created the song!
I am going to come to an interview with Don McLean from The Guardian that was conducted in 2020. Even if people think American Pie is about the souring of the 1960s and the death of Buddy Holly, there is also family relevance and tragedy that connects to it. American Pie has spawned, among other things, a film, stage show, and a children’s book. It has this amazing and evolving legacy. I want to move to Tom Breihan’s piece for Stereogum and their Number Ones series. He wrote about American Pie. Even though he is indifferent and recognises American Pie means a lot to many but not him, his interpretations at least are really interesting. He explores the lyrics and the origin of the song:
“Don McLean was 13 on the day the music died. One night in February 1959, Buddy Holly and his band had just played a show in Clear Lake, Iowa. This was a ridiculous tour, all small upper-Midwest cities and cold climates. The routing didn’t make any sense. Holly was sharing the bills with Dion & The Belmonts, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, and a young Waylon Jennings was playing bass in his band. Holly usually travelled by bus, but he was sick of wearing dirty clothes, and he wanted a little time to unwind and do laundry before the next gig. So he chartered a plane to fly him to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota. That plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board. The Big Bopper was 28. Buddy Holly was 23. Richie Valens was 17, just four years older than Don McLean.
McLean grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and he was working as a paperboy in 1959. When he learned about the crash, he was folding the newspapers that he’d have to deliver that morning. It left an impact. McLean found his way into folk music, playing up and down the East Coast and falling under Pete Seeger’s wing. And a decade after that plane crash, McLean started writing “American Pie,” a sprawling and portentous epic that did its best to tie that crash to the death of a whole generation’s innocence.
If you’re going to attempt to interpret the lyrics of “American Pie,” you’re going to venture into the realm of pure conjecture. McLean isn’t talking. Of those lyrics, McLean once wrote, “They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.” In one interview, asked about the meaning of the song, McLean snapped, “It means I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to.” Four years ago, McLean sold his handwritten lyric sheet at auction for $1.2 million, and he wrote, “I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”
McLean left those lyrics cryptic and elliptical enough that high-school English classes and stoned kids in dorm rooms have been puzzling over them for decades. There are all sorts of little references in there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Kent State, Altamont, Janis Joplin, Charles Manson, the Byrds, the Cold War. There’s a Lennon/Lenin pun, which might also be a pun about Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. Pretty much everyone agrees that the Jester, a recurring character in the song, is Bob Dylan. Dylan steals James Dean’s coat and Elvis’ throne, and then, after his motorcycle crash, he finds himself sidelined in a cast. And all this has something to do with the burst of excitement that greeted the birth of rock ‘n’ roll — that whole mythic ’50s ritual of drag-races and backseat makeouts — and the way it eventually turned into nothing. The levy was dry”.
There are actually a couple of Don McLean interviews I will source, as it is interesting reading his reflections. Let’s get to that interview with The Guardian from 2020. I was not alive during the 1960s so not really aware of the impact of what Don McLean was writing about and where he was coming from. I was not alive in 1971 when American Pie came out. However, I get something different from the song. Someone younger, looking at it through a different lens. I did not know how old Don McLean was when he wrote American Pie, so it is startling to discover that fact! A huge achievement for any songwriter but, only in his twenties, it gives American Pie extra meaning and weight I think:
“McLean wrote it half a century ago, at the age of 24 – and to mark the anniversary, a new documentary, inevitably titled The Day the Music Died, will be released. A Broadway show is planned for 2022, and even a children’s book. That’s a lot of fuss for one song: McLean’s moment, perhaps, to tell the world once and for all what the lyrics actually mean.
There’s general agreement that the song is about the cultural and political decline of the US in the 1960s, a farewell to the American dream after the assassination of President Kennedy. “Bye bye Miss American Pie,” he sings. “Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry.” But McLean has always kept stumm about the allusions in his verses. “Carly Simon’s still being coy about who You’re So Vain was written about,” he says. “So who cares, who gives a fuck?”
Plenty do. Every line of American Pie has been stripped bare. There are fan websites dedicated entirely to decoding it. Who was the jester who sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean? What exactly was revealed the day the music died? The Vietnam war, social revolution, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, JFK, Mick Jagger, Martin Luther King, Charles Manson, Hells Angels, The Beatles, hallucinogenic drugs, God, the Devil – they’re all in there, aren’t they? No one can be totally sure, except one man.
For McLean, though, the genius of the song is in its structure, not its words: a perfect fusion, he says, of folk, rock’n’roll and old-fashioned popular music. The slow intro is the pop part, but then the piano kicks in and the tempo speeds into the chorus – that’s the rock’n’roll bit. The folk component is in the verse-chorus-verse composition. “I’ve never said that to anybody in 50 years,” says McLean.
Hmm, I say, that’s not really the scoop I was looking for. But then there’s no point asking McLean direct questions about what the song means: he’s too well practised at flicking them off. “It means I’ll never have to work again,” he used to quip.
For all its catchy sing-along jauntiness, there’s little to really cheer about in American Pie. It’s devoid of hope. McLean did come up with a more upbeat verse where the music gets “reborn” at the end. But he ditched it. “Things weren’t going that way,” he says. “I didn’t see America improving intellectually or politically. It was going steadily downhill, and so was the music.”
He takes me back in time again – to the innocent days, supposedly, of the 1950s that American Pie is lamenting. But McLean hated growing up in what he describes as a small house in an upper middle class neighbourhood of New Rochelle, in New York. People discriminated about everything, he says. “If you didn’t drive the right car, if you didn’t have enough money, if you didn’t wear the right shoes. I hated those fuckers.”
He’s burdened by the pain and grief of his childhood, even now. The opening of American Pie is largely accepted as mourning Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean’s musical idol as a kid, but could that verse equally be about his father? “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” he says. “I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable. It’s indescribable.” He adds: “American Pie is a biographical song.”
That’s how he feels, he says, thanks to the legacy of American Pie. “Writing a song that everyone on Earth knows shouldn’t make you resentful,” he says. “But you better have a lot inside you – because it’s gonna get sucked out”.
I am going to pick up from a bit later in a Goldmine interview from 2022. A particular point that interests me. They spoke with Don McLean to mark fifty years of a masterpiece that he still beams with pride about when people ask how he wrote the song. McLean was also very kind about Madonna and her cover version. Recognising how she provided her own take. I do wonder if any modern artists will cover American Pie very soon. It might take on a new angle given where America is now under Donald Trump:
“Eventually, the topic changes to interpretation, a topic McLean is used to addressing, especially the burning question about whether Bob Dylan is the inspiration for the jester.
“If I had wanted to say Dylan was the jester, I would have said his name, and if the king was Elvis, I would have said Elvis. Only Jesus had a thorny crown, so I meant these things to be open-ended because it was a dream. That’s the idea of the song, it’s always morphing.
“I mention James Dean by name, so it’s not like I didn’t want to mention names.”
McLean never mentions Buddy Holly by name, either. Nevertheless, he thinks it is a waste of time to overanalyze the song’s iconic lyrics for some hidden or deeper meaning.
“It’s a mistake to do that with the song. When you see this movie that is coming out next year about the making of the song, it goes everywhere; it goes to the drugstore where I wrote the chorus, the house where I wrote the rest of the lyrics, the music store that I said was the sacred store in the song on Main Street in New Rochelle. It will shed a lot of light on a lot of things.”
What is clear when you talk to McLean, is the song’s impact on the career of his musical idol, Buddy Holly.
“I got a letter from John Goldrosen, I found it the other day. He said that when he wrote his book about Buddy Holly, nobody was interested in a book about a dead rock star until after the song came out, and that is what elevated Buddy to the status he deserved. He probably would have anyway because of Paul McCartney or something, but it happened because of ‘American Pie.’
“I met both of his brothers; he had one named Larry and another named Travis. They were both involved in the Holley Tile Company (Buddy’s stage name was spelled differently) and Buddy would have either been picking cotton or laying tile in Lubbock if he wasn’t a musician.
“Larry was a nice guy, but he always liked to hold court. Travis looked like Buddy but was more shy and reticent. I have several letters from him.
“Travis was at a thing we did in 1979 or 1980, and he told me he wanted to shake my hand and told me he was driving in his truck, heard ‘American Pie’ and he pulled over to the side of the road and jumped for joy.
“You have no idea how wonderful it made me feel,” McLean said.
McLean and Holly’s legacy will be forever entwined. It is a huge source of pride for McLean and lends insight to what makes “American Pie” so special. At its core, it’s a song about the relationship between Holly and McLean, a fan and artist relationship any music lover can appreciate. “I brought Buddy back to life, and he brought me back to life”.
I will finish with an article from Metro from last year. Not to sour or take anything away from the more glowing recollections of American Pie, Don McLean was asked what American Pie means today. Even if his opinions on a more progressive and woke society is misguided and ill-informed, it is interesting hearing McLean discuss the song, and America, fifty-three years after he wrote one of the greatest song ever:
“When asked what American Pie means to him today, McLean begins: ‘The song really does open up a whole historical question about what happened in the 60s and assassinations and the history that forms the backbone of the song as it moves forward.
‘This song talks about the fact that things are going somewhat in the wrong direction, and I think that they’re still going in the wrong direction. I think most people looking at America now kind of think that too.
‘I mean, we certainly have a wonderful country, and we do wonderful things, but we also are in the middle of all this woke bulls**t, you know, and all this other stuff that there is absolutely no point to, as far as I can see, other than to undermine people’s beliefs in the country. That’s very bad.’
Expanding on so-called ‘wokery’ and what type of person he is, McLean declares himself as someone
But there’s a constant flow of information and suddenly nothing makes much sense. You have to concentrate in order to write songs like I did, or like other songwriters did in the past, or screenplays or novels or poetry.’
He continues: ‘We have the opportunity to make a change and make a difference in people’s lives simply because we’re alive and you can do a good thing for somebody, you can forgive someone, you can help someone, you can love someone, rather than be angry all the time.
‘There’s so much anger out there. So many of these college students have been given everything, and they’re just angry. They don’t know why they’re angry. They don’t even know what to be angry about.
‘It’s really a symptom, I think, of the fact that they’re frustrated. They don’t have a path that they can tread in life that leads to a better life’”.
Don McLean celebrates his eightieth birthday on 2nd October. Rather than put out a career-spanning playlist, I wanted to focus in on his best-known and loved song. He has written other classics (such as Vincent), through American Pie is the most enduring and adored. One that is still being talked about to this day. I have heard American Pie numerous times and its appeal and power still hits hard. It moves me as much as the…
FIRST time I heard it.