The song is about one man’s struggle to be a pastry chef.
Posted on 04/09/2015 4:35:32 PM PDT by nickcarraway
The music died because Buddy Holly merely wanted what every touring musician wants: to do laundry.
Shoved into unheated buses on a “Winter Dance Party” tour in 1959, Holly — tired of rattling through the Midwest with dirty clothes — chartered a plane on Feb. 3 to fly from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., where he hoped he could make an appointment with a washing machine. Joining him on the plane were Ritchie Valens and, after future country star Waylon Jennings gave up his seat, J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. “the Big Bopper.” Taking off in bad weather with a pilot not certified to do so, the plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. The toll was incalculable: The singers of “Peggy Sue” and “Come On Let’s Go” and “Donna” and “La Bamba” were dead. Holly was just 22; incredibly, Valens was just 17. Rock and roll would never be the same.
Thirteen years later, Don McLean wrote a song about this tragedy: “American Pie,” an 8½-minute epic with an iconic lyric about “the day the music died.” Now, the original 16-page working manuscript of the lyrics has been sold at auction for $1.2 million.
“I thought it would be interesting as I reach age 70 to release this work product on the song American Pie so that anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game,” McLean said in a Christie’s catalogue ahead of the sale. “It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.”
That photograph was always a little bit blurry. At more than 800 words, the meaning of “American Pie” proved elusive even for a generation used to parsing inscrutable Bob Dylan and Beatles lyrics. McLean has said the song was inspired by the 1959
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
Sometimes a song is just a song.
Yep, that’s pretty much it. IIRC, Lori did contribute somewhat to the lyrics, using notes she jotted on a cocktail napkin at The Troubadour in West Hollywood.
And you’re not going to explain?
What’s not to like?
bookmark
The song is about one man’s struggle to be a pastry chef.
Thank God Waylon gave up his seat.
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