'I had to fight so many battles to get this thing done': Don McLean looks back on his masterpiece, American Pie
Don McLean has been listening for decades as people sing his classic American Pie on the last call or at karaoke — and praise his efforts.
“I’ve heard whole bars blast this song when I was across the room,” McLean told The Associated Press from a tour bus bound for Des Moines, Iowa.
“And they had so much fun singing it that I realized, ‘You don’t have to worry about how well you sing this song anymore. Even if it’s sung badly, people are very happy with it.'”
Happiness may be an understatement. American Pie is considered a masterpiece, selected among the top five songs of the century compiled by the Recording Industry Association of America and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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McLean — and his single about “the day the music died” — is now the subject of a full-featured documentary, The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean’s American Pie, streaming on Paramount+.
This is an essential spectacle for McLean fans or anyone who admires his sonic treasures. It also represents the film’s elegant blueprint for future deep dives into a song and its wider cultural relevance.
For those wondering about the lyrics they sing loudly in bars and cars, McLean shares his secret.
“It was fun writing songs,” he told the AP.
“I wake up at night, smile and think about what I’m going to do with this.”
A speech for the American dream
The documentary begins when a single-engine plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and Jiles P Richardson, the “Big Bopper,” crashes into a cornfield north of Clear Lake, Iowa, on February 3, 1959, killing the three stars and their pilot. .
McLean was 13 years old and living in a middle-class suburban home in New Rochelle, New York, when the accident occurred. He suffers from bronchial asthma, which prompted his portrayal in American Pie as a “lonely teenager.” The “holy shop” he sings about is the House of Music on Main Street, where he bought his first LPs and guitar.
Young McLean was a newsboy – “every paper I sent him” – and adored Elvis, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley but especially Holly, whose death affected him deeply.
Years later, McLean would pour that pain into American Pie, burning his own sorrow over his father’s death and writing a speech for the American dream.
He made his second album in 1971 when the US was rocked by assassinations, anti-war protests and civil rights marches. He thought he “needed a big song about America”.
The first stanzas and melodies just seem to fall off. “Long, long, long time ago…”
It climaxed in a large sing-along chorus: “We sang, ‘Bye-bye, Miss American pie’/Driven my Chevy down the embankment, but the embankment was dry/They good old boys were drinking whiskey ‘n rye/ And sing, “This will be the day I die.'”
“I said, ‘Wow, that’s something. I don’t know what it is, but that’s what I’ve been trying to hold onto – that feeling about Buddy Holly – for years and the plane crash,” McLean said.
“I always feel a tug inside me whenever I think of Buddy.”
This 90-minute documentary combines snippets of ’70s news and uses actors in recreation. Cameras captured McLean visiting the sacred Surf Ballroom on Clear Lake, the last place Holly and fellow musicians played before their fatal flight in 1959.
There were interviews with musicians—Garth Brooks, “Weird Al” Yankovic and Brian Wilson among them—as well as Valens’ sister Connie, and actor Peter Gallagher, whose character’s death on Zoey’s Amazing Playlist promoted the on-screen appearance of American Pie.
British singer Jade Bird, Cuban-born producer Rudy Perez and Spanish-language singer Jencarlos Canela talk about how the song has resonated far beyond America.
The documentary reveals that recording the album was not a smooth process. Producer Ed Freeman wasn’t impressed with McLean’s songs, and didn’t think McLean was ready to play rhythm guitar on American Pie. He finally relented.
‘I had to fight so many battles’
McLean—along with several session musicians—rehearsed for two weeks without nailing the song, growing frustrated. The addition of pianist Paul Griffin at the last minute was a genius move that made the whole song click.
But recording that song was only the beginning of the trouble ahead. At more than eight minutes, radio stations refused to play it, and McLean’s record label, Media Arts, went bankrupt about the release of American Pie.
After seeing the documentary, McLean was struck by the common threads in his career.
American Pie is packed with cultural references, from Chevrolet to nursery rhymes, while checking out the names Byrds, John Lennon, Charles Manson, and James Dean. The lyrics – dreamlike and impressionistic – have been studied for decades, dissected for meaning.
Documentaries answer some questions, but not all. McLean reveals the skewed references to kings and clowns have nothing to do with Elvis or Bob Dylan, but he is open to other interpretations. He explained that “marching band” meant the military-industrial complex, and “sweet perfume” was tear gas.
The line in the chorus “This will be the day I die” comes from the John Wayne film The Searchers, and the farewell is a riff to Bye Bye, My Roseanna, a song sung by his friend Pete Seeger. McLean was going to use “Miss American apple pie”, but dropped the fruit.
The end of the song asks for “happy news” — an echo from the first verse — but there is none. The three men that McLean admires most—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—“take the last train to the coast”, which means Los Angeles. “Even God has been corrupted,” McLean says in the film.
“He loved opening up because he and his manager thought it was time to do it and this was the platform to do it,” said music producer and songwriter Spencer Proffer, CEO of media production company Meteor 17, which helped make the film.
“My hats off to Don for writing something so amazing. My job is to bring it to life.”
For McLean, the song was the blueprint of his mind at the time and a tribute to his musical influences, but also a roadmap for future history students.
“If it starts to make young people think about Buddy Holly, about rock ‘n’ roll and that music, and then it teaches them maybe about what else is going on in this country, maybe look at a little history, maybe ask why John Kennedy was shot and who did it, might ask why all of our leaders were shot in the 1960s and who did it, might start to look at the war and its folly — if that could happen, then the song really has a great purpose and a positive purpose.” he says.
AP
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