Where were you the day the music died? I was living in rustic Littlestown, Pennsylvania, and at the tender age of 4 months I didn’t know Buddy Holly from a jar of pureed peas.
But that’s the amazing thing about Don McLean’s 1971 masterpiece “American Pie.” I can’t listen to it without feeling a sense of immense loss. McLean brings the November 1959 plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa that took the lives of Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper and lays it at my door.
The music didn’t really die that day; had that been the case, Don McLean wouldn’t have had the material to write the moralistic social and musical allegory that is “American Pie.” Anyway, without further ado, here are some random thoughts on some words and music that spoke to an entire generation.
1. “American Pie” succeeds as a piece of narrative poetry. It’s not great narrative poetry like Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” mind you, but its’ encapsulates the years between 1959-1969 in order to anatomize two kinds of death; first, the death of first wave rock and roll in that frozen cornfield in Iowa, and second, the death of hippie innocence personified by the murder of Meredith Hunter at the hands of the Hell’s Angels at Altamont.
2. McLean kept mum about the meaning of his lyrics for decades. He told one interviewer, “They’re beyond analysis. They’re poetry.” When another interview asked what the song meant he replied, “It means I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to.”
3. Buddy Holly chartered that doomed Beechcraft 35 Bonanza because he wanted to catch up on his laundry. In short, he didn’t die in the name of rock’n’roll. He died in the name of clean underwear.
4. In addition to Holly, Valens, and The Big Bopper, the song’s cast of characters includes Elvis Presley, the Monotones, Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, James Dean, those three martyred Civil Rights workers murdered by the KKK near Philadelphia, Mississippi in 1964, John Lennon, Charles Manson, the Byrds, Karl Marx, JFK, RFK, and MLK, the Beatles, Altamont and the Hell’s Angels, Janis Joplin, the Chevrolet Motor Company–and I’m sure you’ll be happy to point out any names I’ve missed.
5. At 8 minutes and 36 seconds, “American Pie” remains the longest song ever to top the Billboard 100. On a completely unrelated note, brothers James and Livingston Taylor were amongst the uncredited singers who provided backing vocals for the song. They remained uncredited because it was illegal at the time for more than one member of the singing Taylor family to be in the same room at the same time.
6. The lyrics are elegiac, yet except for the beginning and end, “American Pie” is uptempo. A lesser songwriter might have played this one, and understandably so, as a dirge. But McLean opted to play it as rock and roll, because it’s rock and roll he’s singing about. And that’s what makes it so great–it gallops.
7. As of this date, some 11,379,438 school students around the globe have written term papers about “American Pie.” You would think this would make it the most written about song in the history of the world. You would be wrong. That honor goes to Rush’s “Xanadu.”
8. Boy, is Don mean to the Rolling Stones! He says they’ve got moss growing on ‘em! And he basically accuses poor, feckless Mick of being a satanist, if not Satan himself! How the Stones felt about this I don’t know. Bob Dylan, on the other hand, was not amused by being code-named “the Jester.” In 2017 he told an interviewer: “A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’–some jester. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else.” Touchy much, Bob?
9. Parsing the lyrics of “American Pie” is a wonderful pastime for the whole family. I spent a lot of time doing this when I was a young sprog, and it was almost as much fun as jerking off. Which, the last time I checked, is not a wonderful pastime suitable for the whole family.
10. “Do you believe in rock and roll?” is the third question on the standardized Iowa Test of Basic Rock Skills, right behind “Are you experienced?” and “How does it feel?” According to test creator Dorothea Felch, “It’s the question on the test that is most often answered incorrectly, because if you really love rock and roll you don’t believe in anything.”
11. Don may know his rock history, but he doesn’t know jack about sports. He follows a baseball metaphor (“It landed foul on the grass”) with a football metaphor (“The players tried for a forward pass”) and I’m really rather surprised he didn’t follow that one with a hockey metaphor (“And promptly got called for icing”). But cut him some slack. He’s a poet, for God’s sake.
12. Inexplicably, McLean makes no mention of the Sam the Sham, Richard M. Nixon, Timothy Leary, or Mr. Ed. Seriously–how did he miss Mr. Ed?
13. I’m assuming that “the sacred store” refers to McLean’s first record store. My first record store was on Queen Street just off the town square in Littlestown, and wasn’t really a record store at all. It was a very small appliance store that stocked the popular singles of the day. My older brother used to pay me a legal nickel to run down there to buy them. Those nickels are probably the only honest wages I’ve received my whole life.
14. The first release of “American Pie” split the song between the A- and B-sides. You literally had to flip the damn single over to hear the second half of the song. That must have been exasperating. Even more exasperating than listening to the pretty folky dreck of “Empty Chairs,” the B-side of the re-release.
15. I’m the proud owner of Do You Believe in Rock and Roll?: Essays on Don McLean’s “American Pie” (McFarland & Company Inc.: 2012). I’ve never read it. But you should buy it and here’s the reason: I’m a footnote! Seems a holiday I invented to celebrate the anniversary of Altamont (“Punch Marty Balin in the Mouth Day”) captured the imagination of one of the book’s contributors. How he found me I’ll never know. But–I’m a footnote!
16. Yes, the much-maligned Madonna cover is an abomination, even if it did shoot straight to the top of the Romanian pop charts. But if you think it sucks, you should hear the Brady Bunch version. Only one band has ever done the “American Pie” justice. I’m talking, of course, about Killdozer.
17. No discussion of “American Pie” would be complete without mention of Don’s iconic red, white and blue thumb. I wonder who did the make-up.
18. In a mere 871 words Don McLean transmuted the raw material of one of America’s most star-crossed decades into a myth of joy, hope, heartbreak, and betrayal. It’s all in there between the lines about the music, mostly unspoken but tautly reverberating; the Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam War, and the pointless and idealism-shattering deaths of the three men an entire generation admired most.
“American Pie” is a haunting song about a violence-haunted era when the hopes of America’s young people were raised only to be dashed, as young people’s hopes almost always are. I have no idea what McLean was referring to when he talked about American pie, but I sometimes wonder whether he wasn’t making reference to H. Rap Brown’s famous quote about violence being “as American as cherry pie.”
19. Buddy Holly’s signature eyeglasses were thought lost until 1980, when they were discovered in a manila envelope at the Cerro Gordo County Sherriff’s office. They’d been sitting there since April 7, 1959–having been uncovered by melting snow some two months after investigators combed the crash site for personal effects.
20. The correct answer to “Do you believe in rock and roll” is “Turn it up!”
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
