Perspective always helps to evaluate phenomena. Now, half a century after Don McLean first introduced half the world to his American Pie, we can say without hesitation that almost everything about it was extraordinary. Starting with its length, that rare 8 minutes and 32 seconds that made it the longest song to reach number 1 in the United States for 49 years. And with its unusual ambition, this retrospect in six very long stanzas focuses on the country’s turbulent socio-cultural history in the 1960s, which was characterized by generational conflicts, street protests and the desire for more social justice. Now, a Paramount+ documentary, The Day The Music Died, not only reconstructs the song’s story, but also attempts to decipher its meaning almost word for word. Urgent Note: Not even with such a glamorous apology did the author want to make any promises about the big questions that remain about these 119 verses.
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The origin of the whole story is known. Donald McLean was a 13-year-old boy who died on February 3, 1959, when three of the country’s most famous musicians, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Big Bopper, lost their lives when their plane crashed in a remote Iowa cornfield. That was “the day the music died” that American Pie speaks of, a traumatic episode that over the years would take on a deep symbolic dimension: The Happy Fifties came to an end, an open, hopeful time with an innocent gaze , and the decade of great changes, upheavals and conflicts began, from the Cold War to Vietnam, the assassination attempts (John Fitzgerald and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King) or the arrival of man on the moon.
It wasn’t easy for young McLean either, traumatized by the sudden death of his father, the victim of a heart attack, when he was just 15 years old. A big fan of traditional music, particularly The Weavers, Donald struck up a certain friendship with the city’s folklorist par excellence, Pete Seeger, and began hitting the stages of New York’s Greenwich Village, the same bohemian neighborhood that gave birth to Dylan. In his case, however, the prospects were anything but rosy. Her debut recording Tapestry went completely unnoticed in 1970, although Carole King used the same title to record one of the most influential albums of the decade just a year later. And his small label MediaArts invested little in advertising when the second LP, American Pie, was released in October 1971.
However, this endless 8-minute chatter that opened the work was to change the life of its signer. Set out to “write a song about the end of the American Dream,” Don accepted his own challenge with feverish passion. It is revealed in the Paramount documentary that the lyrics were written in an hour and that the final version of American Pie uses barely half the existing verse. “It could have been 16 minutes,” says The Day The Music Died producer Spencer Proffer, for whom what is most astonishing about this song is that “it spoke for its time, but in many ways it still applies to the time is convulsive momentary current”.
McLean applied the lesson from his friend Pete Seeger that any song, however narrative, must have a very buzzing chorus (“Bye bye, Miss American Pie. / Drove my chevy to the levee / but the levee was dry “; in Spanish: Goodbye, Miss American Cake. / I took my Chevy to the dam, but the dam was dry). And the album’s producer, Ed Freeman, gave him the crucial sonic twist when he invited a sought-after studio pianist, Paul Griffin, a regular on Dylan or Steely Dan recordings, to the session. He was the one who gave the whole piece that almost gospel feel. There were already too many ballads on the album, from Crossroads to Till Tomorrow, Empty Chairs to the beautiful Vincent dedicated to Van Gogh, and that quickening in the metronome of American Pie was crucial in getting the song off the ground on American radio.
Back then, MediaArts executives made the unusual decision to release American Pie as a single but split the song in half: four minutes and 10 seconds for side A and four minutes and 20 seconds for side B. Pancho Varona remembers it well . Lieutenant of Joaquín Sabina for four decades and co-author of more than fifty songs by the Jaén artist. “I was 15 at the time, but my sister was already in college and the song had caused quite a stir in college circles,” he says. “It was a full-fledged look back at the social and cultural history of an entire country. The fact that you had to turn the record over to hear the whole song struck me as very strange, but this formula of consecutive verses with such a beautiful and catchy chorus made me fall in love. And even more so its slow ending, almost pub style, like friends humming in a bar.
American Pie also played a lot in the home of Víctor Manuel and Ana Belén, who had just started a relationship that also celebrates half a century this year. “We listened to her until we were tired,” the Asturian singer-songwriter is honest. “It was extraordinary and unusual at the same time because of its duration and apparent simplicity. And I suppose, given the changing times, that’s unrepeatable.”
Other much younger Spanish authors confess that they are also touched by McLean’s influence, notably Marwán of Madrid, who was seven years from appearing in the world in 1972. “I listened to it a lot three or four years ago, just as I was preparing my album El viejo boxeador,” he reveals. “I was looking for the influence of classics that would move me a lot and I didn’t stop listening to him or Paul Simon, his brother in terms of sound and melodies. It has always fascinated me that, beyond American Pie, Don has remained a great unknown or forgotten in Spain. Other songs of his, from And I Love You So to Winterwood, were at least as beautiful.”
Curiously, in 1973 the famous Paul Simon, already separated from the Simon & Garfunkel tandem, outlined another great chronicle of recent national history with American Tune, a song written in the heat of Richard Nixon’s election and in which the New York troubadour represented the statue of liberty “sailing out to sea”. But nothing ever quite quite matched American pie in historical packaging. The feature film Paramount+ notes formal and conceptual parallels between this theme and Hallelujah (1984) by Leonard Cohen, which, curiously, was also the subject of a recent documentary, A Journey, a Song. “But Hallelujah is a spiritual analysis of reality, while American Pie approached criticism from a sociological perspective,” says Proffer, producer of The Day The Music Died.
And here we come to the great Gordian knot of this whole story. Now, 50 years later, can we know once and for all what exactly Don McLean meant in those six long stanzas that could have been so much more? The documentary checks almost every syllable with the author, but gets more negatives than certainties. For now, and contrary to what half of humanity had previously suspected, the “king” the composition is talking about is not Elvis Presley. But it so happens that McLean also debunks two other recurring and entrenched myths: the “girl who sang the blues” wasn’t Janis Joplin, nor were the mentions of the fool intended as a tribute to Bob Dylan.
Finally the reality? American Pie is a great epic that can be freely interpreted. We are left with only a handful of certainties, such as that the verse “eight miles high and falling fast” serves as a homage to The Byrds and their song Eight Miles High or that “sergeants played a marching tune” (the sergeants played a marching tune) contains a nod to The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s, an album McLean was truly obsessed with. But we can keep listening to this historic 512 seconds of music and draw our own conclusions. Pancho Varona, for example, believes that American Pie influenced Dylan himself in Hurricane, who also opts for this very long verse structure. And Marwán points to the possibility that McLean is among the great inspirers of Father John Misty, one of America’s greatest contemporary singer-songwriters.
As always with works of such colossal proportions, American Pie overshadowed all of Don McLean’s remaining oeuvre. Its atypical expansion initially forced the omission of two notable songs from the LP, Mother Nature and Aftermath, which only saw the light of day in a 1992 compilation, Favorites and Rarities. And McLean immediately, at just 26 years old, felt overwhelmed by the certainty that he would never repeat a phenomenon of this magnitude, even though he was aware that only copyright law would allow him to live comfortably for several lifetimes. As if that wasn’t enough, Madonna contributed to that income when she recreated American Pie for the soundtrack of the movie Something almost perfect in 2000. The reading is so controversial that a BBC poll in 2007 dubbed it “the worst version of history” but it peaked at number one in the UK charts. The McLean original had to settle for second place in 1972.
Any little blur in this story of colossal success? At least a few of them, albeit very small. American Pie didn’t get either Best Song or Best Recording Grammy nominations, credit for both of which went to Roberta Flack’s beautiful First Time Ever I Saw Your Face (only the original was by Ewan MacColl). The other setback is more recent: As of November 2021, credit for the longest song to top the US charts goes to Taylor Swift’s All Too Well. Well, like many of the readers who spent this article mentally humming “A long, long time ago / I can still remember / How this music made me smile” would be able to remember how Swift’s song begins ?
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