THE QUINTESSENTIAL ONE HIT WONDER

Pie Charting: Three decades after penning one of the best known yet most enigmatic songs known to man and karaoke warblers, Don McLean still isn't letting on what American Pie is really about. In fact, it may all have been a dream. (Alan Taylor, 11 May 2003, Sunday Herald)

A LONG, long time ago -- February 3, 1959 to be precise--Buddy Holly died in Texas in an air crash. That same day, so the story goes, 13-year-old Don McLean was delivering papers as usual. As he placed the bad news on doorsteps in his home town of New Rochelle, New York, he cried for Holly's widowed bride. At least he thinks he may have done. The truth is he can't quite remember. Be that as it may, something surely touched him deep inside and years later, after he'd given up his paper round and started to carve out a career in showbiz, he would describe it as the day that music died, taking Holly's untimely death as the inspiration for an epic song about the state of America on the cusp of the 1970s.

American Pie and Don McLean go together like Bernstein and Woodward. Released in 1971, American Pie made its composer -- the reluctant bard of 'a generation lost in space' -- very rich and very famous. For what seemed like an eternity it was the soundtrack at almost every social occasion. Lasting over eight minutes -- almost three times the length of most pop songs -- it crept insidiously into lives and homes, ultimately achieving ubiquity in karaoke clubs where tin-eared inebriates droned on about driving a Chevy to the levee as if they been brought up on the banks of the Mississippi. Like me, of course, most of them didn't have a clue what a Chevy was, let alone a levee.

But the same could be said of most of American Pie's lyrics. For over three decades sad people who ought to get out more have pored over them like Talmudic scholars in a vain search for meaning. Is the song a Bible-tinged foretelling of the apocalypse, an oblique account of the Kennedy assassination or a lament for the innocence of the 1950s? The speculation was fuelled by McLean's refusal to offer any explanation, believing that if he did it would destroy the very magic which made the song special in the first place. All he would say was that it has less to with 'the stupid nostalgia thing that everyone tacked on to it' than with the theme that 'commercialism is the death of inspiration. If only one person can relate to it on that level I'd be satisfied.'

It's always seemed like it was the song's elegiac quality, coming in the midst of a dreaful era--when we all knew that something we valued about America had died--that struck such a chord. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 16, 2003 7:49 PM