Don McLean lets rip on Dylan and pop stars today; ‘American Pie’ the song that meant he’d never have to work again, reaches a milestone, but is still a mystery 50 years later.
Ever since its release in 1971, American Pie has been analysed, debated, raked over, pulled apart. Artists ranging from Madonna to Tyson Fury have covered Don McLean’s eight-and-a-half-minute odyssey. There are entire academic treatises on who the king, the queen, the joker, and the rest of its characters are based on. The Recording Industry of America lists American Pie as the fifth best song of the 20th century. At 75, McLean is celebrating the song’s 50th anniversary. What, though, does it all mean?
The Day The Music Died
“The day the music died” almost definitely refers to the 1959 plane crash that killed the pioneering rock’n’rollers Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper. Beyond that McLean has confirmed only that the song means he’ll never have to work again. Having always taken it as a story on the death of innocence, I am interested to know how its creator feels about American Pie’s relevance to the post-Trump US. His answer turns out to be a lot more than I bargained for.
“America hasn’t won a war since Korea in the 1950s,” McLean begins. He’s at his surprisingly modest house in Palm Springs, deep in the California desert. “We keep sending young men off to Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan to get blown to bits, we don’t care about the inhabitants, and for what? I don’t know what’s going on in America. All I know is that the left and the right are radicalised, 71 million people voted for Trump, and now we have President Biden who unfortunately seems to be quite frail. Jeez.”
American Pie reflected McLean’s troubled childhood and adolescence in the middle-class town of New Rochelle in New York, a childhood shaped by the death of his father when McLean was 15. It also reflected America’s journey through the 1960s, referencing not only the hippy dream of Woodstock, but Charles Manson, the murderous violence at the Rolling Stones 1969 concert at Altamont, and Vietnam. At least we think it does.
“Can you imagine having your foot blown off in a war? Can you?” McLean continues as some kind of answer to my further probing’s on American Pie’s allegories. “In 1960, when he left office, President Eisenhower warned the nation about the military industrial complex. We’ve had so many warnings since, and nobody listened. American Pie is celebrating its 50th year. That’s the reason we’re talking. We could have solved these problems in that time. But I don’t have any answers. I have only observations.”
McLean and American Pie
As to McLean’s relationship with American Pie, he says it is the same as it ever was. “I love to entertain people. I want to help people. I want to give something of myself to the world. I’m not really interested in Don McLean, actually, but if Don McLean can do some good … I’m happy to do it.”
American Pie was McLean’s second album.
McLean does come across as quite eccentric. The way he goes from sounding angry to reflective to uninterested, sometimes within the same sentence, suggests a restless and conflicted mind. And he has never really fitted in. While starting out in the folk clubs and coffee shops of downtown New York, he had something of a mentor in the protest singer Pete Seeger, whom he accompanied on a boat tour of the Hudson River in 1969 to raise awareness on pollution, but beyond that he has been out on his own.
“I’m not connected to anybody,” he asserts. “It’s very hard for me to connect to people.”
A Sense Of Sadness
There seems to be a sense of sadness and regret running through so many of McLean’s songs, not just American Pie but also Vincent, his tender tribute to Van Gogh, alongside Castles in the Air and countless others. “I’m a melancholy guy,” he confirms. “I try to be honest and say to the audience, ‘This is how I feel.’ I’m an artist and I want to tell the truth. The Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, all those other guys out there – it’s Mickey Mouse. It’s Disney World. It’s entertainment with a big E.’’
Original Film Clip
The one band McLean does rate, who may or may not turn up in American Pie as the quartet practising in the park and sergeants playing a marching tune, is the Beatles. “John Lennon took on the influence of folk music and got very political,” he says, before adding ominously: “I think that’s what got him killed.”
Hold on a minute. Didn’t a crazed fan called Mark Chapman kill Lennon at the entrance of the Dakota Building in New York in 1980? “J Edgar Hoover was killing a lot of people,” McLean explains, talking in slow, steady tones in order that the British journalist can follow him. “He killed John Kennedy. He was involved in that. He killed Martin Luther King. He was involved in that. These were state crimes, and I really think John Lennon was killed in the same way. It’s the same reason they made Elvis Presley go in the army. Be a good American boy or we’re going to blow your ass up. People in England really don’t understand America.”
McLean goes on to claim that he doesn’t care about what people think of his music. He follows his own interests and that’s all. And he doesn’t think much of modern songwriters. “I don’t think they have any brains. The phone and the computer have prevented young people from concentrating, and you have to concentrate to write a song like A Day in the Life, Good Vibrations or A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall. I’m a philosopher. I like to think things through. I’m not saying I’m anything special, but myself, the Beatles and Dylan had long periods of silence and contemplation when nobody cared about us very much. It allows a person to develop. Now people are poked with information from the day they are born. Ooh, Kim Kardashian has a fat ass! Who cares?”
Who Was The Jester?
In 2017, Bob Dylan, a songwriter McLean does rate, complained about being painted in American Pie as the “jester” who steals the king’s “thorny crown”. “Sure, the jester writes songs like Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, It’s Alright, Ma – some jester,” Dylan grumbled. I ask McLean if Dylan has taken him to task on it in person.
“Never met him,” he replies. “I did meet his son Jakob, though, and he said to me, ‘Is he the jester?’ I said, ‘I’m not going to answer that, but he’d make a pretty darn good jester, wouldn’t he?’ I gotta tell ya, I don’t really care about Bob Dylan. He doesn’t mean anything to me.”
McLean says he’s more interested in promoting his new album, American Boys (“It has some nice little songs on it”), going on tour, then doing nothing for the rest of his life. “I have an overwhelming desire to retire to my farm in Maine and not talk to anyone.”
This seems strange given he has a relatively new girlfriend, 27-year-old former Playboy model Paris Dylan. “Oh, she’ll be with me,” he confirms. “I’ll have horses too. I like animals. I like them a lot more than people in many ways.”
In 2016, McLean was divorced from his second wife, Patrisha McLean. “I don’t do well with relationships” is McLean’s only comment on it, after which our interview comes to an end.
“Now I’m with a great girl,” he says before he goes. “She’s different from me, I’m different from her, and we give each other a lot of room. I really haven’t changed at all. I’m the same guy I always was. I guess when it comes down to it, I’m just a loner.” A loner who will take the secrets of American Pie with him to the grave.
First published in The Times
