On this Day: ‘American Pie’ hits top spot on the pop charts
For the past 45 years, fans have been arguing about what the lyrics really mean.
ON January 15, 1972, ‘American Pie’, an epic poem in musical form that has long been etched in the American popular consciousness, hit number one on the Billboard charts.
The story of Don McLean’s magnum opus begins almost 13 years before its release, on a date with significance well-known to any pop music fan – American or otherwise – who was alive and conscious at the time.
Tuesday February 3, 1959, was the date of the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the JP ‘the Big Bopper’ Richardson – a date that would be imbued with transcendent meaning by Don McLean when he labelled it “the day the music died.”
One might reasonably point out that the baby-boom generation has since invested its entire rock-and-roll experience with transcendent meaning, but ‘American Pie’ wasn’t written to be a generation-defining epic; it was written simply to capture McLean’s view of “America as I was seeing it and how I was fantasising it might become.”
When asked to explain what exactly he was trying to say with some of his more ambiguous lyrics, McLean has generally declined.
Many others have applied themselves to the task, however, and even today the Internet bristles with exhaustively reasoned interpretations of ‘American Pie’ and its web of lyrical references to the youth culture of the 1950s and ’60s.
The meaning of the ‘stolen crown’ and ‘marching band’ may be of interest only to the most obsessive, but almost all of us know the chorus of ‘American Pie’ and the chances are good that our great-grandchildren will, too.
Which isn’t bad for a song that was written and recorded by a struggling folk singer who merely hoped that it would “earn two or three thousand dollars and make survival for another year possible.”
(Information from This day in History)
When people ask Don McLean what does American Pie really mean, he likes to reply: “It means I never have to work again.”
(bbc.com)
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