Posted on 07/20/2022 9:31:11 AM PDT by OneVike
A long, long time ago – five decades to be exact – America was roiled by wrenching generational showdowns, massive street protests, and a blazing array of social justice movements. Now, half a century later, similar events and dynamics dominate the public conversation. So, perhaps, it’s poetic that precisely five decades have elapsed since a song that captured all that cultural turmoil, American Pie, became a smash hit. “It’s a song that spoke to its time,” said Spencer Proffer, who has produced a comprehensive new documentary about the song, titled The Day the Music Died. “But it’s just as applicable now.”
The event, which McLean dubbed “the day the music died”, shattered the pop world of its day and had a formative effect on the songwriter. On a frigid night in 1959, a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and JP Richardson (The Big Bopper) crashed in a corn field in Clear Lake, Iowa, minutes after take-off, killing everyone on board. The documentary begins with that event, traveling back to the Surf Ballroom, where the stars played their final show. The film-makers scored a coup by bringing on camera a man who saw that fateful concert, as well as the man who owns the aviation company that rented the doomed plane. More, it features a moving interview with Valens’ sister Connie, who we see thanking McLean for immortalizing her brother in song.
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Buddy Holly was his musical idol. If his death instigated the song’s words, a more personal loss altered the course of McLean’s life. When he was 15, his father died suddenly of a heart attack. “That had a profound effect on him,” Proffer said. “He has carried the death of his father in his soul.”
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
I originally heard Breckman rant against McClean on his radio show on WFMU years ago.
Breckman later went on to co-create the TV series "Monk", btw.
Sorry, by the way, for your loss. Amazing how music can transport us back in time.
Whenever I hear it, I start singing Weird Al's version...
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So sorry for your loss. Tragedies can help us to understand the griefs of others. But tragedies are still tragedies. So sorry for you. I’m glad that you have grown and persevered through it all.
“The world is likely more complex than Maclean could divine”
The world is more complex than anyone can put into a pop song, even one that runs at 8 minutes and 41 seconds. The point of art is hardly to explain the entire complexity of the world in one work.
I know a lot of people like to hate on that song but for me, it's a nice time capsule of what was going on in pop culture at the time.
The best backstory (about the 1959 crash) was when Waylon Jennings gave up his plane seat to the Big Bopper because he was not feeling well and unable to sleep on the tour bus. Supposedly Waylon then had a good natured verbal exchange with Buddy that went something like this:
Buddy Holly: "I hope your darn bus freezes up again"
Waylon Jennings: "Well I hope your 'ol plane crashes."
Perhaps apocryphal but Waylon got mileage out of that one for decades.
Nothing about Waylon got into the song though so I guess Don McLean was not a country fan.
It's also not clear how much McLean was driven by some intention or meaning or sense and how much he just followed the rhymes. Even people who had no trouble spotting references to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones still wondered what -- if anything -- McLean was trying to say.
Nice find. Thanks for posting.
And — boy — wouldja look at all the critics comin’ out.
FR sure ain’t what it once was.
Thank you for sharing this story. Many songs take us back to a moment, a day, or a season. You probably turned into an adult that day, I would bet.
I still play the American Pie album. Lots of good songs. I skip the title song because I have heard it so many times.
MacArthur Park was just bizarre... it’s like the ultimate millenium-cupcake moment (or would have been if the era had been right) because of the lyrics “Someone left the cake out in the rain — I don’t think that I can take it”
How about "I want a hippopotamus for Christmas?
Too true.
OTH, I would say that lyricism is not innocent because we like it sung.
According to the movie, and Waylon, they flipped a coin for the ride...................
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