Pretty much everyone agrees that the Jester, a recurring character in the song, is Bob Dylan. There’s a Lennon/Lenin pun, which might also be a pun about Karl Marx and Groucho Marx. 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. 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. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”
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. Of those lyrics, McLean once wrote, “They’re beyond analysis. If you’re going to attempt to interpret the lyrics of “American Pie,” you’re going to venture into the realm of pure conjecture. 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. McLean found his way into folk music, playing up and down the East Coast and falling under Pete Seeger’s wing. When he learned about the crash, he was folding the newspapers that he’d have to deliver that morning. McLean grew up in New Rochelle, New York, and he was working as a paperboy in 1959. Richie Valens was 17, just four years older than Don McLean. That plane crashed shortly after takeoff, killing everyone on board.
So he chartered a plane to fly him to the next show in Moorhead, Minnesota. 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.
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. This was a ridiculous tour, all small upper-Midwest cities and cold climates. One night in February 1959, Buddy Holly and his band had just played a show in Clear Lake, Iowa. In The Number Ones, I’m reviewing every single #1 single in the history of the Billboard Hot 100, starting with the chart’s beginning, in 1958, and working my way up into the present.ĭon McLean was 13 on the day the music died.
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