“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. I love the English language as much as anything in life, and words really do mean something. My primary interests in life have been America, singing, songwriting, and the English language. “For more than 40 years I have rambled around every state of the union and many, many countries of the world. McLean was the cover boy for the May 1973 issue of UK magazine Zigzag. He posted this personal note at his website in February 2015: For now, McLean is at least painting broad strokes. When McLean’s “American Pie” manuscript details circulate, they’ll no doubt corroborate these and other widely held interpretations. Back to Jim Fan: “As the 1960s revolution gathered momentum, the youth movement itself also gathered more players, as the more organized and pragmatic unity of the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left … began fragmenting into the Women’s Rights, Black Power, and Antiwar and Counterculture movements,” among others. McLean also uses a football field, speculators have written, to symbolize the battles between the establishment and all kinds of champions of change. The Byrds also appear (“Eight miles high and falling fast”), and the Rolling Stones’ Mick Jagger is supposedly “Jack Flash,” who “sat on a candlestick, ‘cause fire is the devil’s only friend.” Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan are there (“While the King was looking down/The jester stole his thorny crown”), and so are Beatles, multiple times (“The quartet practiced in the dark” and, later, “The sergeants played a marching tune”).

So as he raced through the imagistic verses of “American Pie,” McLean mourned the nation’s fading idealism. His references, as countless analysts have noted, were heavy on pop culture. I can’t remember if I cried/ When I read about his widowed brideīut something touched me deep inside/ The day the music died.īuddy Holly’s death was the inspiration behind “American Pie.” Don McLean grew up during the jukebox and sock-hop days of the 1950s, when Holly songs like “That’ll Be the Day,” “Peggy Sue,” and “Words of Love” were part of any teen’s soundtrack. “Big Bopper” Richardson.įebruary made me shiver/With every paper I deliveredīad news on the doorstep/I couldn’t take one more step And fans of the song will find out for sure what it all means: “The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge,” McLean told Reuters.įrom the beginning, McLean acknowledged that Buddy Holly’s death was the springboard for “American Pie.” Early in the song, he took us back to the winter morning in 1959 when, as a young paperboy, the shocking headline jolted him: Buddy Holly, his musical idol, had died in a plane crash along with fellow pop stars Ritchie Valens and J.P. The 16-page draft - 237 handwritten and 26 typewritten lines (complete with notes, edits, and deletions) - is expected to reel in $1.5 million. That’s when McLean’s original manuscript goes up for auction at Christie’s in New York. It may be the most analyzed song in pop music history: Don McLean’s “American Pie.” From the time it was released in 1971, fans and media alike began trying to decipher the 8-minute, 29-second pop masterpiece.īy April 7, 2015, any mysteries surrounding the long and winding lyrics should disappear.