What Is the Song American Pie Referring to
Due west hen Don McLean was fifteen years sometime, he had a premonition that his begetter was going to die. Distraught, he ran to tell his grandmother. "Don't exist ridiculous, Donny, why would y'all say such a thing?" she said. "Considering it'due south going to happen," the boy replied. A few days later, his begetter dropped dead right in front of him. "I saw how he looked," says McLean. "He'd turned light-green. I didn't know what I was going to do without him. He was the male monarch, the boss. He knew everything."
The vocalist-songwriter backside the 1971 classic American Pie is speaking from his home in Palm Desert, a boondocks in California where he is now well into what he calls the "desert phase" of his life. Wildfires are all the same burning beyond the state. You can't come across the lord's day for the acrid smoke. "I'm feeling it in my lungs," says the 75-year-former.
So what did he do when his father died? "I cried for ii years," he says. "I blamed myself." Nosotros've been talking nigh death for half an hr – his father'due south and his feelings about his own. "I'g nearing the end of the high-dive," he says. "Know what I mean?" It's the big McLean theme running through his songwriting, from American Pie to the virtually unknown Run Diana Run, a weird musical chant about Princess Diana.
We're coming together, though, to talk about his era-spanning epic: that rollicking eight-and-a-half minute run-through of the 1960s after the decade airtight. The Recording Industry Association of America has the song in its meridian five, behind Over the Rainbow and White Christmas; it's been covered by everyone from Madonna to Tyson Fury, who sang it later on knocking out Deontay Wilder earlier this yr; and the original handwritten lyrics sold in 2015 for $ane.2m (£800,000), the tertiary highest sale cost ever for an American literary manuscript.
McLean wrote it one-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 fifty-fifty a children's volume. That's a lot of fuss for 1 vocal: McLean'south moment, perhaps, to tell the world in one case and for all what the lyrics really hateful.
There'southward general agreement that the vocal is about the cultural and political decline of the US in the 1960s, a farewell to the American dream after the bump-off of President Kennedy. "Adieu adieu Miss American Pie," he sings. "Collection 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 almost who You lot're And then Vain was written about," he says. "So who cares, who gives a fuck?"
Enough do. Every line of American Pie has been stripped bare. There are fan websites dedicated entirely to decoding information technology. Who was the jester who sang for the rex 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 Rex, 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 1 man.
For McLean, though, the genius of the vocal is in its structure, not its words: a perfect fusion, he says, of folk, rock'n'whorl and old-fashioned popular music. The slow intro is the pop function, just then the piano kicks in and the tempo speeds into the chorus – that's the rock'due north'coil bit. The folk component is in the verse-chorus-poesy composition. "I've never said that to anybody in 50 years," says McLean.
Hmm, I say, that'due south not actually the scoop I was looking for. But then there's no point request McLean direct questions about what the song ways: he'south too well practised at flicking them off. "It ways I'll never take to work again," he used to quip.
Instead, our chat drifts back to his childhood, earlier the death of his male parent – to what he calls the "dreadful, ugly undercover" of his sister Betty Anne. Fifteen years his senior, she was an alcoholic, a drug addict, and a bum who ruined his childhood, he says. "Y'all couldn't talk about her because yous couldn't tell the truth almost what was happening to her. It was a disaster to see information technology. She was e'er so shackled. It was terrible."
She would straighten herself out, get out home, just then come back in a mess, he says. "It happened over and over." He gets upset just talking near it. "That'south why I'm a blue guy I estimate." He sighs. "All my stuff is near loss – and a sure kind of psychic pain. I've never actually been happy."
For all its catchy sing-along jauntiness, at that place'due south little to actually cheer nearly in American Pie. It's devoid of hope. McLean did come upwards with a more upbeat verse where the music gets "reborn" at the end. Merely he ditched it. "Things weren't going that style," he says. "I didn't run across America improving intellectually or politically. It was going steadily downhill, and and then was the music."
He takes me dorsum in fourth dimension once again – to the innocent days, supposedly, of the 1950s that American Pie is lamenting. Simply 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 nearly everything, he says. "If yous didn't bulldoze the right car, if you lot didn't have enough money, if you lot didn't wear the correct shoes. I hated those fuckers."
He's burdened by the hurting and grief of his childhood, even at present. The opening of American Pie is largely accepted every bit mourning Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean's musical idol as a child, only could that verse equally be most his begetter? "You've hit the nail on the caput," he says. "I hateful, that'due south exactly right. That's why I don't like talking about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was nigh unspeakable. It'south indescribable." He adds: "American Pie is a biographical song."
The cultural allusions are, he continues, his own in-jokes, poking fun at some of the big acts of the day. "Just the idea of choosing names that people could place with: different artists, what they were doing, what they'd washed. I was making fun of it all."
The jester in the song is widely assumed to be Bob Dylan, stealing the limelight from Elvis Presley equally the new messiah: "And while the king was looking down / The jester stole his thorny crown." Dylan himself seemed to take umbrage with the clan. "Yep, American Pie, what a vocal that is," he said in a rare interview in 2017. "A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like Masters of War, A Difficult Rain'south a-Gonna Fall, Information technology'south Alright, Ma – some jester. I take to think he's talking about somebody else. Ask him."
So I ask him. "I tin can't tell y'all," says McLean. "Merely he would make a damn adept jester, wouldn't he?" He tells me Dylan'due south son Jacob asked him the same question, simply he didn't tell him either.
McLean likes to be in charge. He admits that. Information technology's why he's planning to put almost of his possessions up for auction before he dies: song lyrics, guns, saddles, hunting knives, banjos, guitars, custom-fabricated boots, his auto. Information technology's part, he says, of a cleansing procedure: "I don't want to leave it to someone else to effigy out what to do with this stuff."
Perhaps unravelling the mystery of American Pie would mean losing control of that too. "I always have to know where I'chiliad headed," says McLean, who doesn't trust the media to give him a fair hearing and claims rarely to read anything that'south been written about him. "Don't read good things and don't read bad things," he says, "because it's all a bunch of bullshit."
This seems as expert a moment as any to ask McLean how he dealt with the state of affairs when he was arrested and charged afterwards his ex-married woman accused him of domestic abuse. (McLean pleaded guilty and paid a fine, though his lawyer said this was "non because he was in fact guilty of annihilation, just to provide closure for his family and keep the whole procedure as private as possible".)
"I can truly say that my ex-married woman is the worst person I ever knew," he says. "There's nobody who compares." Patrisha McLean, who he divorced in 2016, has talked about their relationship in a travelling showroom about domestic violence called Finding Our Voices, and has established a non-turn a profit of the aforementioned name. He says it took four years for the breakup to sink in. "All these dear letters that she sent me every calendar month for 30 years – they immediately turned to table salt."
Earlier nosotros close, McLean offers me this reflection, nearly a painting by Thomas B Allen hanging in the living room of the country mansion he has in Maine. It captures Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe as they were in the film The Misfits: they're all existence photographed only their faces look like they're beingness shot, assassinated even.
That's how he feels, he says, thanks to the legacy of American Pie. "Writing a song that everyone on Globe knows shouldn't make y'all resentful," he says. "But you lot better have a lot inside yous – because information technology's gonna get sucked out."
The Day the Music Died film and the children'southward book American Pie are out next year. The musical will follow in 2022.
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Source: https://www.theguardian.com/music/2020/oct/22/don-mclean-american-pie-its-meaning-family-deaths-tragedy-60s
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