The song is alive and joyful, yet fretful about a world gone wrong. With illusions to football fields and rock ‘n’ roll, river levees and nursery rhymes, the song cascades along like a boat going down Niagara Falls or a roller coaster that jumps tracks but floats instead of crashes.Īfter all these years, “American Pie” still makes me feel empowered and yet filled with a sense of loss. Like “Danny Boy” or “Streets of Laredo” or “Shenandoah,” it’s eternal. When “American Pie” suddenly is played on a jukebox or radio it’s almost impossible not to sing along. What makes “American Pie” so unusual is that it isn’t a relic from the counterculture but a talisman, which, like a sacred river, keeps bringing joy to listeners everywhere. Watching McLean deliver his most notable song in concert is to take part in a collective Happening. When McLean prods audiences by rhapsodizing “and they were singing” everybody spontaneously joins in with the “Bye, Bye” chorus.
Yet the encore number never loses its transfixing allure. Wandering far and wide, singing “American Pie” at windblown dance halls in Wyoming and cloistered colleges in New England, at huge amphitheaters in California and little coffee houses in the Hudson River Valley, McLean has performed his global anthem thousands of times.
Influenced by Pete Seeger and the Weavers, McLean proudly wore the mantle of troubadour in the early 1970s, when “American Pie” topped the Billboard charts, and has never shed the cape. There is magic brewing in the music and words of “American Pie,” for McLean’s lyrics and melody frame a cosmic dream, like those Jack Kerouac tried to conjure in his poetry-infused novel “On the Road.”
It’s important to think of “American Pie” as one would of Henry Longfellow’s “Evangeline” or Johnny Mercer’s “Moon River” – an essential Americana poem emanating wistful recollection, blues valentine, and youthful protest rolled into one. Having recorded his first album, “Tapestry,” in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the “generation lost in space.” When his cultural anthem “American Pie” was released in November 1971, it replaced Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin” as the Peoples Almanac of the new decade. Rock ‘n’ roll in those days was sort of like hula hoops and Buddy hadn’t had a big hit on the charts since ’57.” By cathartically writing “American Pie,” McLean has guaranteed that the memory of those great musicians lives forever. “The next day I went to school in shock and guess what?” McLean recalled. “The Big Bopper” Richardson had been tragically killed in an airplane crash in Clear Lake, Iowa. McLean was a paperboy when, on February 3, 1959, he saw that Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Douglas Brinkley Courtesy Douglas Brinkley
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