A long, long time ago … Don McLean wrote those words. And then 863 more, creating a song capturing the history of rock music as it entwined with the changing of America.
A long, long time ago … Don McLean wrote those words. And then 863 more. A song that had taken shape at the back of his life for a decade, spilled out on to 16 sheets of paper early in 1971. They would change everything for him. Again.
His life had first been upended 12 years earlier, on February 3, 1959 – the day Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper (Jiles Perry “JP” Richardson) were killed in a plane crash in Iowa. He is almost never mentioned, but 21-year-old pilot Roger Peterson died too.
The event McLean famously labelled “the day the music died” gave birth to his unusual hit song, American Pie, at eight minutes 42 seconds the longest song to top charts anywhere – except Australia where in May 1974, Stevie Wright’s Evie went to No.1 clocking in at 11 minutes 11 seconds.
McLean’s much-debated lyrics seem hardly as abstract as many wished to believe – where there were messages, these were placed beneath well-signposted, easily upturned stones. Nonetheless, music writers fussed over them at the time as if they had deciphered the Enigma codes.
But a song capturing the history of rock music as it entwined with the changing of America through the 1960s was unusual. As was the arrangement. And it is a musical powerhouse driven by McLean’s forceful rhythm guitar, David Spinozza’s lead, Roy Markowitz’s propulsive drums and then the cream on top: Bob Dylan sideman Paul Griffin’s funky piano and his unforgettable, idiosyncratic fills, all done on the last day of recording and Griffin’s first day on the job.
Some of the musicians recognised the melody as perhaps similar to the lesser known 1958 Buddy Holly song I’m Gonna Love You Too, which Holly almost certainly wrote with his drummer Jerry Allison, but was not credited to them, a common occurrence in the early years as artists were robbed in the studio and often on the job. It was little reported that near Holly’s body, but months later when the snow melted, was found his pistol; rock and roll was a cash business back then and you could not be too careful.
The McLean-Holly roots run deep. Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup, who flipped a coin with Valens for a seat on Holly’s last fight (Allsup took tails and lost but lived another 58 years; Valens another half-hour) played for a time in McLean’s band.
The final take of American Pie was recorded on Wednesday, May 26, 1971. McLean was 25. The Billboard No.1 that day was Three Dog Night’s Joy To The World, which was written by Hoyt Axton whose famous tune, Greenback Dollar, McLean later covered and has described as a song “which sums up my whole life, really”.
“Some people say I’m a no-’count
Others say I’m no good
But I’m just a natural-born travelin’ man
Doin’ what I think I should, oh yeah.”
He has always sold himself short. McLean has long been much more than the 52-year-old American Pie, even if others – and perhaps even he sometimes – make too little of that.
He has written some of the most beautiful songs of the post-Beatles era: The Grave, And I Love You So, Vincent, Castles in The Air, Empty Chairs, Crossroads, It’s Just the Sun and If We Try.
But his superannuation is that monster hit from the first weeks of 1972. It topped Billboard and the Australian charts for a month and the Record Industry Association of America placed it at No.5 on its Songs of The Century list, seven spots ahead of Rock Around The Clock, rock’s national anthem.
And American Pie was a challenge. McLean thought he’d written something outstanding, but it was not readily interpreted in the studio.
“I’d grabbed a tiger by the tail,” he would say. Producer Ed Freeman was in charge – he’d been a roadie for the Beatles on their final 1966 tour – and at first didn’t want McLean playing on the song at all. The musicians worked on it for a fortnight, but the sessions were challenging.
“I was the only person who can (work it out). The song was not happening. And I was very unhappy about it. Everybody was starting to look at me like I was a jerk. Which I guess I am, but I knew what the hell I was after.”
McLean soldiered on. It was painstaking. “They weren’t playing the song, and it sounded like a polka. It was awful,” he recalls with irritation. Freeman’s magic moment was introducing Griffin to the mix. The souffle suddenly rose. “I don’t know where Freeman had found him … but he transformed everything,” McLean says.
McLean’s Martin guitar was back in the studio. “And I was pounding away on that thing because I’m a very good rhythm guitar player. And he jumped all over that and two of us made that thing and then the rest of them fell right into place because they knew what they had to do, but before that, it was not happening. Then we made a great record.”
It was always a curiosity. Freeman’s original idea had been to start the song as a mono recording and move into stereo as McLean’s lyrics cover Holly’s 1959 death before finally reaching the Rolling Stones at Altamont where the Hells Angels murder a fan (“No angel born in Hell”) and ending with “I met a girl who sang the blues … but she just smiled and turned away”, referencing Janis Joplin’s heroin death in October 1970.
After it was over Freeman had to work out the edit to cut the first four minutes 11 seconds (Part One) off from the rest (Part Two), which ran another four minutes 31 seconds so they could run each side of a single. It sounds odd, but this had been done two years earlier for the US release of Russell Morris’s The Real Thing.
American Pie’s Part One faded after the lines:
“The Quartet practised in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died.”
A crudely added chorus is joined at that point, perhaps, by the sound of it, with sticky tape. In any case, once the song took off, radio DJs played the album version.
Eight years ago the draft lyrics – long misplaced by McLean, but discovered in a cardboard box at home – were auctioned off by Christie’s for $1.75m. They were on foolscap pages torn from a spiral-bound notebook and consisted of 237 handwritten lines, many crossed out and many amended, and 26 lines of typed lyrics.
One of the sensibly deleted lines read “And I lost all my pride”, which would have preceded “the day the music died”. Pride intact, McLean completed the album, which also featured Sister Fatima, Vincent, Winterwood, Empty Chairs and his most powerful song, The Grave – and he dedicated it all to Buddy Holly, although you could be forgiven for believing it was in tribute to Hopalong Cassidy. The fictional gun-slinging good-guy cowboy was played in 66 films from 1935 by the charismatic William Boyd. The inside sleeve of the original vinyl version of the American Pie album included a photo of Boyd as Hopalong, and a poem McLean wrote about, or perhaps to, his hero.
“I know a lot about William Boyd,” says McLean. “I know a lot about a lot of things that most people wouldn’t be very interested in.” McLean loved Boyd’s character and saw Hopalong as emblematic of an American innocence that had been lost, an era on which Holly’s death slammed the door shut.
Boyd “was a contemporary of Valentino” and had lived the “life of a cinematic god before he ever became Hopalong Cassidy. And that was something special. Cecil B. DeMille actually discovered William Boyd and put him in epic movies”.
McLean was aware Boyd had Parkinson’s disease, but not that he was near death. Boyd died in September 1972, as McLean’s album slipped gracefully, finally, from the charts. The singer wrote:
“I believed in you so much that I’d take my Stetson
off and put it over my heart whenever anybody died.
My hat’s off to you, Hoppy … The black and white days are over.
So long Hopalong Cassidy.”
McLean’s words are etched on a bronze plaque at the hospital in which Boyd died. The actor, whom McLean never met, was a staunch Republican, but McLean’s politics are more complex.
As a boy he would write away for transcripts of evidence from the controversial House Committee on Un-American Activities, which persecuted those who were, or someone said might be, communists or anarchists, and entertainers were a particular target. Victims included Lucille Ball, Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Paul Robeson and Dorothy Parker. Pete Seeger’s folk outfit, The Weavers, were destroyed by it.
As a boy, McLean was a huge fan. “The Weavers were great; they invented the idea of a folk group. There was never anything like that before.”
He quite rightly described the band as “a hit machine” with songs including If I Had a Hammer, Guantanamera, Goodnight Irene and This Land is Your Land. “But they were cut down after about three years. Overnight, because their names appeared in a publication called Red Channels (a right-wing attack list of alleged communists) … there were a lot of suicides.”
McLean was friends with Seeger for years, and describes himself as having been radicalised, but came to believe some of the people the folk legend associated with “hated America. There was always a reason why America is at fault over everything. And I said ‘That’s bullshit. I don’t buy that’ ”.
McLean lets his music do the talking.
“The thing you got to understand about me is that I let my music take me wherever it takes me. I don’t care how, where it is, what it is. I follow it. I don’t write songs like anybody else that ever was.”
Don McLean is marking the 50th anniversary of American Pie with an Australian tour, his last. It starts in Brisbane on April 1. Tickets and show details at oneworldentertainment.com.au
