Don McLean & American Pie Still Keeping the Music Alive

Fifty years after his iconic single, American Pie, shot up the charts to #1, Don McLean is still keeping his music alive—he’s on a year-long world tour, has released a children’s book (“American Pie: A Fable”), and also a documentary (“The Day the Music Died”) that tells his remarkable tale from being a newspaper boy in upstate New York to becoming a rock/pop legend, a tale that has seen him sell over 50 million total records.

That infamous tune has been called a “magnum opus, a sprawling, impressionistic song” inspired initially by the deaths of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in a plane crash in 1959, and by the developments in American culture in the following decade. McLean’s song popularized the saying "The Day the Music Died" in reference to the crash.

Let’s look at some of those heartfelt and insightful lyrics and what meaning and references they have to McLean, himself.

A long long time ago, I can still remember

How that music used to make me smile

Buddy Holly was one of the originators of roots rock and roll—he played groundbreaking rock and roll, rockabilly and pure country-pop. And, young Don McLean was a huge fan of Holly’s music, saying: “I loved that early rock and roll that Buddy and his band played. In honor of him, my band and I kicked off our year-long tour in Clear Lake, Iowa where Buddy played his last show in February 1959.”

And I knew if I had my chance

That I could make those people dance

And maybe they'd be happy for a while

“Yes, hopefully, I’m still making people ‘happy for awhile’— I’m loving it, playing with a great band, we rock and roll like crazy, I play guitar and sing songs from all my albums. I was recently very happy to discover that the RIAA has certified that I’ve sold over 50 million records, overall. That’s not too bad, is it?!”

But February made me shiver

With every paper I'd deliver

Bad news on the doorstep

I couldn't take one more step…

“My recently published children’s book (American Pie: A Fable) starts off with, ‘A long, long time ago…in a small town, there lived a lonely newspaper boy.’ And I was that 13-year-old newspaper delivery boy in upstate New York during that cold, cold winter when Buddy Holly tragically died in that plane crash. For me, that was the ‘day the music died’.”

But something touched me deep inside

The day the music died

“Buddy Holly was a very personal thing for me, I was more than a fan, he was my guy. Like Elvis or John Lennon may’ve been your guy. His passing was a big personal loss for me. I had to deliver the paper with the headlines of that plane crash—a real heartache.”

Now for ten years we've been on our own

And moss grows fat on a rolling stone

 “I had carried that tragic story with me since 1959, but nobody seemed to care much. When I started researching Holly stories, there was little around. Then I’m playing with Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival in 1969, and I approached the Everly Brothers who had known Buddy and I asked Phil, ‘Can you tell me a little about Buddy? What happened?’ Phil told me, ‘He had to do his dirty laundry, so he took a plane to the next town to do his laundry. He took the other guy’s laundry with him, too.’

“So, there was this guy who was like a music god to me, and it turns out he was a regular guy making a living. So that’s where it started, and I’d also been wanting to write this long song about America. Now I had it, I fused Buddy’s death with all of this other stuff going on in America, all the good things and the tumult and said, I’ve got it. I felt like, it’s alive!”

And while Lenin (Lennon) read a book on Marx

“Did I mean John ‘Lennon’ or Vladimir ‘Lenin’? In some copies, the lyric goes ‘Lenin read a book on Marx’ and then we had Marxist-Leninism. And then sometimes it’s ‘Lennon read a book on Marx’ and John became a socialist, basically. So, I’m referring to both of them in the song. That’s the problem I have with the lyrics, they’re open to interpretation.”

Do you recall what was revealed

The day the music died?

“I was inspired by what was going on in America—I’d been observing all going on around me, and I wanted to structure the song so that it covered that 10 years, all the events going on, all the tumult. But I also wanted to make it timeless. I wanted to make it a fable of some sort, like King Arthur’s myth or an impressionistic painting. Plus, I was obsessed with this idea of loss—The Day the Music Died—and it all came into me from where I don’t exactly know, and I wrote the verses down in Philly in less than two hours. I could hear it, I could feel it, something was going on, bigger than me. I saw the movie version of the song, and then I wrote what I saw. That’s how I write. I see the movie then I write what I see. I think American Pie, the song, did it.”

Country legend Garth Brooks, who has superbly covered the song, suggested McLean’s American Pie “could be the greatest song in music history.” So, how does McLean respond to that: “Music can inspire. Garth is living proof that different kinds of music, whatever it may be, can change your life and inspire you to do something extraordinary, beyond the normal…when your imagination gets awakened by music. Look at all the other groups that were spawned by what the Beatles did, look at the influence of the Beatles and the Stones and those inspirational bands, and the bands that came later and did amazing things in the 70s.”

Drop in on Don McLean’s website and also on his PR/Media company’s site for tour info, bio, and photos.