"American Pie" by Don McLean: Everything You Didn't Know

Jordan and Alex dive into McLean's 1971 musical eulogy for both Buddy Holly and the '60s utopian dream. Learn about the secret choir of celebrities that sang on the chorus, the truly insane number of edits it took to stitch this 8-minute epic together, the non-Buddy Holly rock pioneer who inspired Don McLean to write it, plus the heartbreakingly tragic reason why Holly took that fatal flight in the first place. Then buckle up for their lengthy interpretation of the dense lyrical poetry — and discover how McLean's work helped launch Tupac, Gary Busey, Roberta Flack, and Greenpeace. (Though not in that order.) 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of I Heart Radio. Hello,

(00:08):
ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret history and little known facts
behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows, and more. We
are your Rajas of research. My name is Jordan run
Tog and I'm Alex Heigel, and today we're going to
talk about American pie Don McLean's eight minute and forty
two second epic which top the charts fifty years ago

(00:30):
this year. The song is a kaleidoscopic journey through the
best of the Boomer years, using the death of rock
pioneer Buddy Holly as a metaphor for the death of
a generation's innocence. McLean described the song in recent years
as quote a rock and roll dream sequence about in
America that was coming apart at the seams during the
tumultuous sixties, giving way to the cynicism of the seventies. Now.

(00:51):
It's a song that's earned a fair bit of scorn
over the years, some from my co host Alex Heigel
for essentially being the earth text of Boomer hagiography, but
its influence is undeniable. The recording industry of America and
the National Endowment of the Arts cited American Pie is
the fifth gradest song of the twentieth century, just under
Over the Rainbow, White Christmas, This Land Is Your Land,

(01:13):
and Respect by Otis Redding. So not bad company. The
historian Douglas Brinkley has described it as an essential Americana poem,
emanating wistful recollection blues, valentine, and youthful protest rolled into one.
What do you think about this track? I'm gonna bite
my tongue in half throughout the course of this. Why

(01:34):
you read off your cherished collection of pro American pie chestnuts?
I hate this song? What do you mean why it's
bad on every level? I don't know. I thought Margaritaville
was the nader of our working relationship. But this is God,

(01:58):
this is this is a new level. Well, I really
don't have a segue out of that. Um, So I'm
just gonna pretend that you didn't say all that, and
maybe I'll cut it, you know how. Well. The thing
that's so interesting to me about American Pie is that
it's such an evocative history lesson told through these allegories,

(02:20):
and it's one that's palatable for the masses. Uh, The
music critic for The Guardian, Alexis Petritis, has described American
Pie as quote the accessible farewell to the fifties and sixties.
Bob Dylan talked to the counterculture and dense, cryptic apocalyptic terms,
but Don McLean says similar ominous things in a pop
language that a mainstream listener could understand. The chorus is

(02:42):
so good that it lets you wallow in the confusion
and wistfulness of that moment and be comforted at the
same time. It's bubble gum Dylan, and I feel like
accessibility is an important word for Don McLean. His other
big hit is Vincent Parenthesis Story Story Night, his tribute
to Vincent van Gogh and artists. Don McLean was drawn
too because he felt that he was really one of

(03:03):
the most accessible painters. And this was due to his
deep well of pain. And I shudder to think what
you're about to say it I'm about to say, Like
Van Gogh, don McLean had a lot of pain in
his life. Ah. He classifies himself as quote a blue guy. Good. Yeah,
this is gonna be fun to edit together, as I'm

(03:24):
gonna try to cut your bits of bile out and
stitch my my Sonny Sonny over intellectualizing this song. I
just o, God, yeah, I don't know, man, it just
drives me. I mean, did you not hear this song? Thing? Enough? Well,
I actually here, I'm probably doing this in a certain
ways an apology to my father, who, when I was

(03:44):
a toddler, sat through an entire Don McClean concert that
he was like doing it some fair and right as
he was about to finally launch into American Pie a
k A. The only song that everyone sat through the
whole concert for, I started to scream and cry and
they had to take me out of there, And so
he missed hearing the song and had good every time
I hear that song. So now I I have. I

(04:06):
have this probably like a lot of the boomers who
hear it, this deep well of regret and sadness that
I think about. The only thing my dad ever did
was when the song came on, he would recite to
me the body version of it that he and his
hesher friends came up with. Well. Speaking of the various interpretations,
including the one by your father, of this song, Don
McClain has been pretty tight lipped about the precise meaning

(04:28):
of his eight hundred and sixty eight words by my account.
But there's a new documentary on the horizon for Paramount
Plus on July nineteenth, in which he claims to reveal
a lot more about the creation of the song, which
is interesting to one of us. But until then, this
episode will be the final word on the history and

(04:48):
interpretation of American Pie. So keep listening to learn about
the secret choir of celebrities that sang on the chorus,
the truly insane number of edits it took to stitch
this eight and a half minute epic together, the non
Buddy Holly rock pioneer who inspired Don McLean to write it,
and why Buddy Holly took that fatal flight in the
first place. Plus we'll do our interpretation of the dense

(05:09):
lyrical poetry. So without further ado, here is everything you
didn't know about Don McLean's American Pie. Okay, you're really
gonna start this off for me? Yeah, okay. American Pie

(05:30):
has its roots in Don McLean's childhood, spent in the
New York City suburb of New Rochelle in the nineteen fifties.
It is a very cute little town in affluent Westchester County,
immortalized in your favorite era of pop culture, as the
setting of the Dick Van Dyke Show. And you know,
given the rosy glow of this era that American pie

(05:52):
is filtered through, it's easy to assume that Don had
enjoyed the quintessential fifties American upbringing in this upper middle
class town. But only that was not the case. He
has said that he hated growing up there because the
citizens were snobbish and judgmental about everything. Quote, if you
didn't drive the right car, if you didn't have enough money,
if you didn't wear the right shoes. I hated those.

(06:15):
I feel like that wouldn't dear him? Do you? Class
warrior attitude now, all right? And then he became everything
he hated. Uh McLean first got into music when he
became bedridden due to asthma as a boy, when he
started pouring over the music of Frank Sinatra and the
true starring figure of this song, Buddy Holly Um. There's

(06:37):
an entire listical waiting to be written about musicians who
are bedridden as a formative era of their music. Probably
your favorite Ringo Starr his appendix burst as a little boy,
spend a here in the hospital where in a truly
grim Dickenzie in Turns staff arranged a makeshift band in
the children's Is it good for their because I spent

(06:59):
all the time in bed? H Yeah. Ringo's first drumming
was done in a hospital cabinet with a makeshift cotton bobbin.
Cat Stevens, who wrote a bunch of his songs while
recovering from tuberculosis in the sixties. I'm pretty sure Lindsay
Buckingham developed his fingerstyle while laid up in a hospital bed,
and Joni Mitchell did that too, was not necessarily while

(07:20):
she was suffering from it, but I'm not sure if
she took it up as a form of therapy. But
that's where she gets all her weird chords from um,
which I think also we talked about with New Young Yea. Anyway,
So yeah, I think of all the great music you
have to chalk up to bedridden children. Think of how
much good music we've lost thanks to Netflix. Now kids

(07:41):
can just sit in bed and watch minions and not
learn how to write American pie. I had consider that
a blessing. Apparently he took opera lessons with what his
one octave range voice. I taught himself out play the
acoustic guitar at the age of fourteen. Probably, I'm guessing

(08:03):
because of his age, is a correlayer of the folk boom.
He spent much of the sixties playing the Greenwich Village
folk scene and coffee shops, where Pete Seeger and the
rest of his band The Weavers tooked on under their
wing mentored him. But despite that co sign um and
in what is the second kind of instance of a
pathetically low selling debut record we've talked about in a week,

(08:27):
Don named his debut album Tapestry, came out in nineteen seventy,
a year before another little record you might know, Carol
King's Tapestry, one of the best selling records of all time.
Don McLean's album was rejected by a whopping seventy two
record labels before he was signed. His record includes Castles
in the Air and and I Love Her So, which

(08:51):
Elvis and Glenn Campbell recorded. Perry Como's version was nominated
for a Grammy. Jesus Uh title track Tapestry not the
Carol King's song. Here's a great example of Don McLean
being a piece of um. He says this song inspired
the creation of green Peace. UM which you made a
bullet point in here, and I went on to Greenpeace

(09:15):
their site. He's not mentioned once, although it is on
his site, so that's his version of it. Talked about
in the interviews, the number of time it was about
being People keep interviewing him for some reason. This is
from green Pieces site. In a small group of activists
set sail to the am Chitka Island off of Alaska
to try and stop a US nuclear weapons test. The

(09:36):
money for the mission was raised with a concert starring
James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and phil Oaks phill Ox, phil Oaks.
Their fishing boat was called the Green Piece. I don't
know how Don got his name in there, but you know,
I just want to fact check him. But this album
sold poorly. He went into the studio to record his

(09:57):
follow up and one label executive if allegedly told his producer,
look this McLean asked, was a no talent jerk. Your
budget is twenty five grand. If you can make it
for twenty grand, I'll split the other five with you.
The music industry. What a hell hole. The producer, a
man named Ed Freeman who we will get to later,

(10:18):
turned down this offer. Don was so broke that he
had a day job playing music for the public school
system in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, playing banjo for the children in kindergarten,
to which I say, suffer the little children. Uh Now,
many people credit, or in your case, blame, Buddy Holly
with the creation of American pie, but the spark was

(10:41):
provided by another early rock pioneer, Phil Everley of the
Everly Brothers. Now in, Don McLean was playing the Newport
Folk Festival, which is the legendary annual concert series where
Bob Dylan famously went electric four years earlier, and Don
ran into the Everly Brothers, who were also on the bill.
So Don went up to Phil Everley and did the

(11:02):
thing that I'm sure all famous people just love, where
they get approached by strangers who asked them about other celebrities,
their celebrity friends, not even their own stuff, but other
people they know right now and speaking to a z
Central earlier in two Don mc lean says he went
up to Phil Everley and started peppering him with questions
about his musical hero Buddy Holly, who he ran in
the same circles with in the fifties. Specifically, Don wanted

(11:25):
to know more about the way that Buddy died, and
he said, I know you knew Buddy Holly, and like
a kid. I was just like a kid, he said,
what happened? Can you tell me what happened? I wanted
to know more than just he got on the plane
and about his death. Well, yeah, okay, that's kind of
a weird. Yeah, I get that. UM and Phil relayed

(11:45):
some really heartbreakingly humanizing details about the plane crash that,
though over mythologized, did in fact change the course of
music history. The Day the Music Died very real thing.
And Phil Everley said in short that after weeks on
the road touring in a bus, Buddy Holly chartered a
plane to get to his next destination early so that
he could do some laundry. That's just like that breaks

(12:08):
my heart. Uh. And now we're gonna go back in
time a little bit and do a brief history lesson
on the death of Buddy Holly. Ritchie Vallens and JP
the Big Bapa richardson the famous Day the Music Died
February three. UM. In February nine, Buddy Holly was in
the midst of a winter dance party package tour through
the Midwest United States with fellow early Rocks figures Richie Vallens,

(12:32):
who made labomba hit and followed it up with the
immortal fifties ballad Donna and is probably best remembered by
a certain segment of the population for the Low Diamond
Phillips biopic. In the eighties, there was Jp the Big
Boppa Richardson, who's known chiefly for, outside of dying in
This Plane Crash, the pseudo novelty song Shantilly Lace, and

(12:53):
also on the tour was Dion and the Belmont's who
everyone forgets was there, who famously did Teenager in Love
run around to Great doop Icon and someone named Frankie
Sarto who was also there. I don't know who that is.
I love that putting walk hard when they're they're like
at the Teenage Talent Show, John c Riley is teenage
Dewey Cox off stage and they were watching the Big

(13:15):
Boppa do the phone stick like hello baby, this is
a big Boppa calling It cuts to them and they're
just also like stone face, like how are we going
to follow that? Again? There was less music back then,
so people coasted before grandfathered in just making garbage and
we don't talk about it enough because it's been enshrined.

(13:39):
My god, if these people heard like dubstep, their heads
would have exploded. Not because dubstep is good, but like,
at least it's interesting. I think I will say, though,
that they ground it out. This is impressed. These guys
are like black flag Man. Yes, the Winter Dance Party
tour was basically disaster. Even before the plane crash entered

(14:02):
the picture. The musicians dubbed it the Tour from Hell,
and they weren't kidding. In the grand tradition of d
i y gig in groups, there was zero consideration for
travel logistics. The gigs were daily and often hundreds of
miles apart, so the musicians were just pinballing through the Midwest,
often on rural two lane highways because the interstate had
been completed yet. The tour buses, which were essentially rejected

(14:25):
school buses, frequently broke down and they were unheeded. And
this is the West. In early February, when temperatures were
occasionally recorded at negative thirty five, it was so cold
in these busses that one musician came down with frostbite
and needed to be hospitalized, and the flu quickly spread
through their ranks. At the top things off, there were

(14:47):
no roadies. The musicians were expected to load and unload
their gear themselves, so by the time Buddy Holly arrived
at the Surf Ball Room in clear Lake, Iowa, on
February two, ninety nine to play what would be his
final gig, he was piste, and rather than face another
freezing eight hour bus ride that night after the show,
Buddy charted a private plane to fly himself and his

(15:08):
band up to Fargo, North Dakota for the next day's
gig for the princely sum of thirty six dollars a
person or a three fifty dollars in today's money. This
flight wasn't cheap, and he wanted to get to Fargo
because this would give him some extra time, as I said,
to do some laundry and to get some much needed
rest that night. So we hired a tiny, single engine
Beechcraft Bonanza, which only seated three passengers in the pilot,

(15:33):
and contrary to urban legend, the plane was not called
American Pie and had no name at all. Don mc
lean made the title up, and also, contrary to popular belief,
Buddy Holly did not hire the plane just for headliners only,
as he says in the La Bamba movie, it was
initially just for the two members of his band, Tommy
als Up and future country legend Wayland Jennings, who played

(15:54):
bass for Buddy on this tour. And there are numerous
versions of how the passengers wound up on that fatal flight,
and the most common version of that Richie Valens, who
supposedly had a fear of flying, asked Tommy also for
his seat on the plane because he was ill prepared
for the cold and didn't even think to bring a
winter coat, so he was freezing on this tour of
the whole time. And instead of telling Richie basically, you

(16:16):
know tough, Tommy Alsop agreed to a coin toss backstage
after their gig and clear leg and Richie Valens won
and he was supposedly hurt to say, wow, that's the
first time I've ever won anything in my life, and
then he happily went to the airport to the plane
ride that would lead him to his death. Whalen Jennings,
the other member of Buddy Holly's band, was persuaded to

(16:37):
give up his seat on the plane due to the
sorry site of JP, the big Bopa Richardson, who had
come down with the flu and wanted to get to
the next tour stop early to see a doctor. Uh. Supposedly,
he offered Whalen Jennings a new sleeping bag to keep
him warm on the bus to sweeten the deal, so
Whalon just took pity on JP, and in another possibly

(16:57):
apocryphal bit of banter, Buddy supposedly eased dim when he
found out he wasn't gonna fly, but he said, well,
I hope your old bus freezes up, and Jennings responded, well,
I hope you're old plane crashes, and his last words
to his friend Buddy haunted him for the rest of
his life. To make matters worse, Whaland had to fill
in for Buddy as the lead singer on the final

(17:18):
weeks of the tour after his death, which is just brutal.
It's like an Oh Henry short story. This whole thing
is so sad. The plane took off at twelve am
on the morning of February three, nineteen fifty nine, and
crashed around five minutes later in a corn field, and
the cause of the crash is controversial, but believed to

(17:38):
be pilot error due to poor weather conditions. And this pilot,
who was a young man named Roger Peterson, apparently wasn't
properly rated to fly in low visibility scenarios and this
was nighttime there was lots of wind and snow flurries.
He was only twenty one years old, Buddy Holly was
just twenty two, and Richie Vallens was just seventeen. Good
Lord Buddy's widowed bride that are Buddy don mcleans so

(18:01):
eloquently saying about Maria Elna Holly learned of his death
on television and she suffered a miscarriage shortly after, which
she attributed to psychological trauma, and Buddy's mother learned of
the death through the radio, leading to another ugly scene.
And supposedly, I don't know how how much of a
myth this is. Buddy's death supposedly lead the protocols being

(18:21):
put in place where authorities don't release the names of
the deceased until the next of kinner notified and um.
And there was another weird situation. One of the reasons
that Tommy also Up, one of Buddy's bandmates, wanted to
get to Fargo early was because his mother had sent
him a registered letter to the post office up there
and he wanted to pick it up. So Buddy agreed
to go pick it up for him and told him

(18:41):
to hand over his I D and I guess Tommy
was taking too long to fish it out of his wallet,
so Buddy was just like, just give me your whole wallet.
I'll give it back to you, don't worry. And then
when the plane crashed, authorities found this wallet for this
guy and searched in Vain for his body. So early
news reports cited Tommy also up among the dead, and
I guess a neighbor frantically tried to get in touch

(19:02):
with his mother so she wouldn't hear it on TV.
But he was all right, and I think he lived
until a couple of years ago. My buddy Jeff Nolan,
who was the hard Rock Cafe chief curator, showed me
the wallet a few years back, and he cites this
as his favorite artifact in the eighty thousand items that
the hard Rock has collected in their archives. So interesting
bit of rock ephemera there. Also was interesting a few

(19:26):
months after the plane crash, in this cornfield they found
a gun that they thought maybe belonged to one of
the guys on the flight, and they investigated the theory
that maybe this gun had gone off in the middle
of the flight and that was responsible for the plane crash.
And for some reason, I don't really know why this was,
I thought that maybe JP, the big Bopa Richardson, you
have to say his full name, it's like a tribal quest.
They thought that maybe JP was the one who got shot.

(19:48):
So they actually, I think they exhumed his body and
did you know, an X ray of it to search
for any kind of bullets, and didn't find any fragments,
So I think that whole theory was put to rest.
But um, yeah, the day that music died really just
one bomber after another. I can't believe he wrote an
eight minutes song with nearly a thousand words and didn't
get any of those truly tragic details in there. With

(20:11):
the poetry. There's there's there's a lot of this is
a lot of tragedy in that song. We're going to
take a quick break, but we'll be right back with
more too much information in just a moment, back to dawn,

(20:34):
to happier climbs. I guess. So having pump fill Everley
for the graphic details of his friend's death. Uh Dawn
honed in on the detail of laundry, the small scale,
heartbreaking detail that apparently Holly even took some of his
pals dirty laundry on the plane to uh do when

(20:55):
he got to the next tour stop ahead of them.
Uh Don, just such age just humanizes this, this event
that's become so enshrined in rock mythology. It's something so
like when I learned that recently, just researching this episode,
that put a lump in my throat too. Just this
kid from Texas on a clean shirt, you know what
I mean? Yeah. Uh Don later told Azy Central that

(21:17):
blew my mind right there. It brought everything cascading back.
Everything had been sort of etched in stone, the photographs,
the notes on the back of the record covers, had
all been static for all of those years, and now
suddenly there was this movement, and it all brought him
back to nine when he had first learned about Buddy's
death ten years earlier, which is possibly where we get

(21:38):
the for ten years we've been on our own line,
although that is debated. We'll get into that in a second.
At the time, he was a thirteen year old paperboy
out delivering the news of his heroes passing in the
freezing cold streets of New Rochelle uh and, like many
rock fans, the loss felt like a personal one, like
the death of a friend. As he told the UK
TV show Songbook quote Buddy Holly's death to me was

(22:01):
a personal tragedy. I went to school and mentioned it
and they said, so what. So I carried this yearning
and longing, if you will, this weird sadness. And you know,
we just mentioned that line ten years. But Don's father
died in nine, ten years before American Pie comes out,
which is what has led people to speculate that for
the ten years we've been on our own line had
that personal connection to him. We will get to McLean's

(22:25):
historical evasiveness about painting down an exact meaning to this song.
Although he has repeatedly said that it is a biographical song,
he's made reference to his older sister, who struggled with
substance abuse issues during his childhood and was, as you
might imagine, a source of a lot of strife in
the family household. He talked about this to The Guardian,

(22:48):
saying that's why I'm a blue guy. I guess all
my stuff is about loss and a certain kind of
psychic pain. I've never really been happy. When asked point
blank whether or not adverse about his father, You've hit
the nail on the head, he says, an unambiguous idiom,
if ever there was one. I mean, that's exactly right.
That's why I don't like talking about the lyrics, because

(23:09):
I wanted to capture and say something that was almost unspeakable.
It's indescribable. So it's not just about the death of
Buddy Holly, but about the death of the good old
days and the innocence and optimism that come with childhood.
So all of these feelings, all these memories are rattled
around Don's head, and they become the intro of the song.
More or less fully formed. He sings them into a
tape recorder. The melody in the words come together once,

(23:33):
and he wrote it down after the fact, kicked around
the intro for a few months before figuring out what
he wanted to do with it, later saying I could
have gone one hundred different ways with this. I could
have made it a slow song. I didn't want any
more slow songs. I wanted a rock and roll song.
He wanted a song that evoked the intersection of politics
and music and how one influences the other. And that's

(23:54):
what led to the six verses of this. And there's
a persistent rumor that he wrote these ver this is
at a bar in Saratoga Springs called the Tin and Linz,
and then got so drunk that he left them behind,
and American Pie wouldn't exist as we know it today,
at least had a kindly student not scooped up these
missing notes and return them to down the next day.

(24:15):
That's the myth. If I had a time machine, my
first two stops baby Hitler, Strangle Baby Hitler, stop this
student from giving Don McClean his notes. Well, Don denied
this story, though, so you might be wasting your trip,
he said an interview with the NPR. American Pie is
a little bit like the Mayflower. Everybody's been on it,

(24:35):
or their parents were on it, or something. People knew
me that I didn't know, And people know things about
me that you know, they imagine and it's just the
way things are. But what makes me think this is
funny is that I've kind of been knocking these stories
down for years, and yet it persists. So it makes
you wonder how can you believe history? And McLean says
that he actually wrote the lyrics to the verses of

(24:57):
American Pie were walking into a drug store in the
small town of cold Spring and upstate New York, and
he later said, I came up with the course walking
into the damn store. I said, I've got to write
this down. I ran home. It was several miles away.
And I bring this up only because I visit cold
Spring a lot, and I was recently house sitting for
a friend up there, and I unknowingly went to this

(25:17):
exact pharmacy, which he describes being next to a wine store,
which is also still there. And I didn't have a
car when I visited, and so I also had to
run home on foot. So just a few weeks ago,
I inadvertently took the same route that Don McClean took
while writing the verse and choruses to American Pie. And
I feel fantastic about that. I feel I feel a

(25:39):
kinship um. He later said that he finished writing the
song in Philadelphia, which feels appropriate given the whole Americana thing,
and premiered it for the first time at Temple University
when he was opening for Laura Niro on March fourteenth,
and during this initial performance, there quite possibly was an
addition old verse, a long lost verse in American Pie. Now,

(26:04):
for all of its catchy sing along jauntiness, there's really
very little cheer in American Pie. It's devoid of hope.
McLean did come up with a more upbeat verse where
the music gets reborn at the end of the song,
but ultimately he ditched it. He said, things weren't going
that way. I didn't see America improving intellectually or politically.
It was steadily going downhill, and so was the music.

(26:26):
So what's that great? I think Orson Wells or um
Hitchcock I forget which you know. You can make any
comedy a tragedy or any tragedy comedy depending on where
you end the movie. It's like that way with this song. Yeah,
it's probably for the best that he didn't add another
verse to the six verses that had already made the
final cut, because it is famously a very long song,

(26:48):
and when he played it for producer Ed Freeman for
the first time, he's sang in abridged version just the
first verse in chorus, because blasting your producer with an
eight and a half minute song right out of the
gate is sort of a it's a tremendous power move,
let's put it that way. And Ed Freeman, this producer,
is an interesting guy. He produced both the song and
the American Pie album, and he grew up in Boston

(27:09):
where he learned to play the renaissance loot. And he
was paired but Don McClean and the recommendation of folk
singer Tom Rush. And in addition to Don McLean, this guy,
Ed Freeman worked with Carly Simon, Gregg Allman, and Tim
Harden before chucking it all to become a photographer who
since become renowned for his nudes, and he shot a
cover for Playboy magazine in twenty nineteen. So yes, the

(27:31):
producer of American Pie has also produced a cover for Playboy.
Good for him. American Pie was recorded on the twenty
six of May ninety one inside Studio A at New
York's Record Plant, and initially Don McLean wanted to record
American Pie with just an acoustic guitar, similar to the
albums that Freeman had produced for the folk singer Tom Rush,

(27:52):
which can you imagine if this was just like a
nine minute acoustic guitar phil Oaks style rant. It's a
good thing that Freeman persuaded him to use a rhythm section,
and speaking to Classic Rock Magazine a few years back,
ed Freeman said that convincing Don to use a full
band was quote the most crucial thing I did for
that whole record. Don had not really had any experience

(28:13):
of playing with other people, and he was very leary
about it. So instead of getting in a bunch of
seasons studio musicians who could knock out the take in
five minutes, I deliberately got musicians who were good but
weren't slick, burned out superstar players, so not they were right,
so they'd be able to approach down on the same level.
He said. He basically he wanted good live players who

(28:34):
were just as green in the studio as Don was.
And this is a really interesting sentiment to me because
these guys seem like pretty heavy hitters from where I sit.
There's pianist Paul Griffin, who played on Bob Dylan's Bring
It All Back Home. Highway sixty one, revisited Blonde on
Blonde and Blood on the Tracks and he also played with,

(28:54):
among many other people, Steely Dan on Asia and that's
him playing keyboards on Peg one of the best songs
I've ever written. And then Rob Stoner, who was Dylan's
basis for Rolling Thunder. He takes a truly unnecessary bass
solo on isis Um and that's all that guy has done,
and he still plays that song like his bar gigs

(29:17):
and still takes that bass solo. And then there's my
favorite session player on this track is Dave Spinoza, who's
familiar to me mostly for playing on my favorite solo
Paul McCartney album, ones Ram, and he went on to
work with John Lennon for his album Mind Games. A
few years later, during the height of the post split
Beatles acrimony, and Spinoza discovered that John didn't know that

(29:41):
he had previously worked with Paul, and he really tried
to hide it from him because he was afraid to
be fired if John found out that, you know, he'd
already been tainted by Paul or whatever, given all their
recent feuding in the media. And I guess when John
did learn of it, his only comment was that Paul
quote knows how to pick good peoples. There Knows also
appeared on Ringo Stars seven album Ringo the Fourth, earning

(30:04):
him the distinction of having recorded with three of the
four Beatles. Good for him, Yeah, uh so, Don rehearsed
with this band for two weeks before recording it in
order to nail all the dynamic changes. I mean, you know,
it's an eight and a half minute song, so a
lot of changes there, and they nailed it pretty quickly. Apparently.
The final backing track that you hear is almost a

(30:25):
single complete take except for a small edit of the
piano part on the intro, So the instrumental backing track
pretty simple, the vocals not so much. Producer Ed Freeman
says that they were stitched together from twenty four separate takes,
and that's when they're doing this with razor Blade and
Scotch tape Jesus and Freeman said his nickname back then

(30:47):
was Slash for that very reason. He was just making
really yeah exactly for being extremely precise with all of
his edits, and it got to the same point that
he says that there's one three syllable on the final
track where each syllable is from a different take, and
I'm not going to try to find out where that is.

(31:07):
He declined to name it. But uh, but why was
this required, you may ask, because, as producer Ed Freeman
explained in Yahoo and as diplomatic away as possible, Don
is an excellent, very very talented singer. But someone apparently
made fun of him because he apparently sang things with
the exact same vocal inflections every time, so he decided
to be more improvisational when they were recording American Pie.

(31:29):
And this is Ed Freeman talking. My estimation was that
his improvisations just didn't work, and we're muddling up the song.
And when I kept asking him to sing it in
a certain way, he wouldn't do it. He wanted to
play with it every time, inserting slides and other things
to it that, in my mind, didn't fit. So we
ended up recording him twenty four times and took different
parts from different takes until I got every word the

(31:51):
way I wanted it without all the play. And I
don't think Don appreciated that much. In Don's case, I
think he was happy with the finished vocal, but he
was not happy with someone else having that much influence.
And as you can imagine, with all these redos things
got a little testy in the studio. Ed Freeman said,
we had quite a tempestuous relationship. I wasn't an easy

(32:12):
person to work with. Don wasn't an easy person to
work with. So working with the two of us together
must have been like watching two wasps go at each other.
I think he missed the bug and not New England's
white people. Yeah, they would have just been sitting on
opposite Yeah. He also said that Don McLean badly needed
an editor because he couldn't bring the best out in

(32:35):
himself and edit what needed to be edited, considering the
finished song is almost nine minutes. Um, yeah, maybe maybe
could he used some kind of editor. But but then again,
so could we. But Don must have liked something, considering
he booked ed Freeman to produce his next two albums.
So I guess they kissed and made up. I like
this Ed Freeman guy. Yeah, the real hero of this story. So,

(32:57):
speaking of the vocals, the non on razor bladed together vocals,
if you're listening closer to the background vocals on the song,
you can hear some famous folks. Apparently uncredited singers on
the final background chorus are James Taylor, Carly Simon, James
Taylor's brother Livingston Taylor, Which, sure, do you have any

(33:18):
Livingston Taylor and Live Taylor? Like, I mean not Live
Taylor's right, Live Tyler Tyler? No, he went by now
was he had a he had a big album in
the early seventies. He was just called Live. No, he was,
I mean definitely not up there with James Taylor, but
he had some good stuff in the early seventies. Nepotism.
We're checking out Taylor too. There's sister. It's also a

(33:39):
very talented singer. Man, if you were just a white
guy strumming a guitar in the seventies, you could just
bring your whole family along with you. Guess what we
have seventies six Wayne Rights kicking around. Um and Pete
Seeger Oh, Pete segers On there too. Yeah, what a group.
It was quite a star studded cast, and one that

(33:59):
I've really should have photographed. Freeman said, Um, but they
neglected to credit these people, probably because of contract stuff,
right like these are these were they were all contracted different.
So Springsteen is my favorite collaboration of all time, not
to lie, my favorite collaboration for the purpose of this podcast.
At this exact moment Springsteen's uncredited spoken words section in

(34:21):
Street Hassle by Lou Reid. Do you imagine two people
less predisposed collaboration. I love that, And he was incredited
because I think he was fighting with Hammond at the time.
But yeah, so they were built simply as the West
forty four street rhythm and noise choir. It's a good name,
Yeah it is. I gotta give Don some credit. He
wanted to have the mixing of the song mirror the

(34:44):
transition from the nineteen fifties to the sixties. He wanted
the song to begin mono transition from monitor stereo as
the song progress, but the guy who engineered the session,
Tom Fry, has discredited that. He told Performing Musician magazine
that it was Freeman's idea. He said he originally wanted
American Pie to start in mono and then go to stereo,

(35:05):
but that wasn't really doable with the board we had,
so I talked him out of it. Yeah. I don't
buy that that's a mixing thing. That's not Maybe it
just was more trouble than it was worth for this
high cons I think that was already seem spiraling out
of you know, twenty four different takes ditched together. They

(35:25):
probably spend to get it at the tour. Yeah, speaking
of that length, you know, this is one of the
many technical problems post by American Pie Narrow when many
radio station, particularly AM stations, were demanding radio edits around
three and a half to four minutes. American Pie is
a tidy eight minutes and forty two seconds. Much of

(35:49):
it out kind of doesn't really works. That's all so
essential sorry, um As and Freeman says, there was no
way to physically put an eight minute song on one
side of a forty five, which would have been the
single release for it, so we split it part one,
part two. Even so, I spent weeks in the mastering

(36:10):
lab looking at every groove under a microscope to see
if we were actually getting the song on there. So
the needle wooden't skip, and we still had hundred thousand
returns on forty five because the needle did skip. Oh
my god, it was a nightmare, hundred thousand. Imagine being
ed Freeman and like, not only is the creation of

(36:30):
this song nightmare, but the mixing of it, the mastering
of it. You get it out the door a sense
of piece returns to your life for the first time
in months, and then you hear that it hasn't been
mastered correctly and people are sending the forty five back.
Oh Man, the only person more haunted by this song
than I am American. Pie was released in October of nine,

(36:53):
spent four weeks the number one on the Billboard Hot
one hundred. Fittingly, it remained there on the thirteenth anniversary
of the The music died that February. If you're a numerologist,
that might be interesting to you. It was also the
longest song to top the charts, a record it held
for fifty years until Taylor Swift released her re recorded
version of All Too Well in November, which clocks in

(37:16):
at ten minutes and thirteen seconds. Since you Saying to
Me that Don's other major chart hit, which is this
tribute to Vince e Vengo Vincent uh is about the
loss of another important cultural icon. So loves eulogizing eulogize
there was most likely the eulogize in his high school
year book, Just Loves writing about incredibly beloved, widespread, massively

(37:42):
popular figures who don't need to be eulogized. Just taking
shots at dawn, come at me down. I'll fight you
in a par I'll fight you in a new Rochelle
Parking lot. I'll fly there on my own time. Watch
him like whip my ass, Watch like eighty year old
Don McClain, like throw hands, break my jaw. That would

(38:03):
be my most high gol come uppance. I shoot my
mouth off in a boomer musician with one hit to
his name, just like Rex my um. Thankfully, it was
snubbed at the Grammys, where it lost both Song of
the Year and Record of the Year to ROBERTA. Flak.
Thank I. Oh my god, that would have been my
third stop on the time machine if this song had

(38:24):
beat out ROBERTA. Flack for Record of the Year and
Song of the Year. First time ever I saw your face. Well,
it's a beautiful song. It's tremendous, and you have more
bits about it. Yeah. This is interesting to me because ROBERTA.
Flack won the same pair of awards Song of the
Year and Record of the Year the following year at
the Grammys for Killing Me Softly with his song, which

(38:46):
was actually written about Don McLean. In nine one, a
singer named Lorie Lieberman saw Don McLean perform at the
Tubadoor Theater in Los Angeles, and she was so moved
by the experiences she wrote a poem about it, which
she relayed to lyricist Norman gimbal who wrote killing Me
Softly around It, which became a gargantuan smash for a

(39:07):
bird of flak and it was also famously covered by
the Fuji's. But that's not Don McLean's only tie to
hip hop legends. His work has influenced the likes of Drake,
who sampled two of his songs the Wrong Thing to
Do and When a Good Thing Goes bad for his
song doing It Wrong. But according to the movie Tupac
the Resurrection, Tupac Shakur was heavily influenced by Don McClean.

(39:32):
He's quoted as saying, my inspiration for writing music is
like Don McLean did when he did American Pie, or
Vincent Lorraine Handsbury with a Raisin in the Sun, like
Shakespeare when he does his thing like deep stories, raw
human needs. And he also cited Vincent as his favorite song,
telling the l a times the lyric on that song

(39:52):
is so touching. That's how I want to make my
songs feel, and reportedly his girlfriend played Vincent Tupac on
his deathbed, which makes it the last song that he
ever heard. The last song that Tupac Shaker ever heard
was Don McLean's Vincent. Isn't that nuts? How do you
feel about that? Anyway? Oh? This will this will make

(40:15):
you even happier? Anyway? Back to American Pie. The track
inspired a host of covers over the years, all of
them fairly ill advised, but none were as terrible as
the earliest cover by The Brady Bunch, television's favorite blended
family recorded the song in two, just a year after
the original, for their album Meet the Brady Bunch, and

(40:38):
they also did uber poppy versions of You and Me
and a Dog named Boo, Bad Fingers, Day After Day,
and Baby I'maa Want You by Bread. But of particular
note is their truncated version of American Pie. It's only
three and a half minutes, which sort of cuts the
guts out of the song. But I didn't really want
to listen to any more of the Brady Bunch anyway.

(41:00):
It's been frequently included on lists of the worst cover
songs of all time, and as actor Barry Williams, who
played Greg Brady, wrote in his memoir Growing Up Brady.
Worst of all, though, was our extraordinary, awful rendition of
American pie Ouch, so at least he's aware of it.
On the flip side, I'll always have a soft spot
for weird Owl star Wars inspired song the Saga Begins.

(41:22):
Was that a big one for you? Yeah? Do you
know why this song rules? Sure? No? So, I mean
obvious other than all the obvious things. Uh. Weird Ol
wrote it from pre release internet spoilers Lucasfilm. Lucasfilm turned
him down. He wanted an advanced screening of it, and he,
on his own dime, subsequently went to a pre screening

(41:43):
where the proceeds were going to charity, and the spoilers
were so accurate that he had read that he didn't
really have to change much in the song. And uh.
It is the second weird Owl song about Star Wars,
which is nineteen eighties Yoda, which is a parody of
Lola by the Kings. That's good, m I guess. Tom

(42:04):
McLean is also a big fan of The Saga Begins,
and he's admitted to nearly singing weird Al's lyrics in
concert because his children played the song so often, which
God Love Yeah. The only cover version of American Pie
to actually chart is the one done by Hichael's favorite Madonna,
who recorded it for her two thousand movie The Next

(42:24):
Best Thing with Rupert Everett. Um, I guess in the
movie Madonna and Rupert Everett singing at a funeral. I
haven't caught this one in a while or ever. But
the studio version was included on the soundtrack and released
as a single, which topped the UK charts and peaked
at twenty nine in the US. And this version was
voted the worst ever cover in a poll by BBC

(42:46):
six Music in two thousand and seven. But one fan
of Madonna's cover is McLean himself, who felt moved to
release a statement about her version. Uh, he's been defending
it for years, so maybe he needed to release this
just to lie fend off the haters. Madonna is a
colossus in the music industry, and she is going to
be considered an important historical figure as well. She's a

(43:08):
fine singer, a fine songwriter and record producer, and she
has the power to guarantee success with any song she
chooses to record. It's a gift for her to have
recorded American Pie. I've heard her version. I think it's
sensual and mystical. Sensual and mystical. I also feel that
she's chosen autobiographical verses that reflect your career and personal history.

(43:28):
I hope it will cause people to ask what's happening
to music in America. I have received many gifts from God,
but this is the first time I ever received a
gift from a goddess. Wow. Quite a statement there. I'm
guessing he mostly appreciated the financial implications of Madonna's cover because,
as well discussed later, this guy really enjoys making money. Yeah.

(43:51):
Don McLean loves money. His oft repeated quote about this song.
What does American poet mean? Is it means I never
have to work again? Yeah? Yeah, you know once again. Wow,
I was in our generation doesn't get pensions or healthcare.
But I'm glad this guy can make six figures from
a fifty year old song something like three hundred thousand

(44:13):
dollars a year. According to an interview in market Watch,
he claims to have made a hundred and fifty million
dollars in his life thanks to wise investments and his
degree in finance from Iona College. But the interpretations of
this song came fast and furious. In January of nineteen
seventy two, just a few months after the release, Chicago

(44:34):
DJ published his interpretation of the lyrics, and this the
floodgates were opened. There are entire websites dedicated to decoding
the meaning of all nearly nine d words of this,
and one person who has declined to weigh in, at
least in a meaningful way is Don himself. In Night.
He did admit that the lyrics were an autobiographical take

(44:54):
of his own life from the mid fifties to the
mid sixties, but that's it's kind of it. He published
an open letter to fans as part of the syndicated
Straight Dope column in The Chicago Reader. Did he have
a syndicated column in the Chicago Reader? Was the answering questions,
I've never heard a straight dop. Oh, they published like

(45:15):
books and stuff. It's almost like a snoops, like they
all you know, fact checking kind of Oh that's pretty cool. Now.
We didn't get all weeklies in New Calf week We
didn't get anything. We got this John's Bathroom Reader. Yes,
like seven news I need Bathroomaders. They're like seven different

(45:36):
copies of those scatter at my house. Um, this letter
read in part as you can imagine. I've been asked
many times to discuss and explain my song American Pie.
I have never discussed the lyrics, but have admitted to
the Buddy Holly reference in the opening stanzas. I dedicated
the album American Pie to Buddy Holly as well in
order to connect the entire statement to Holly in hopes

(45:58):
of bringing about an intro to him, which subsequently did occur.
You will find many quote interpretations of my lyrics, but
none of them by me. Isn't this fun? Sorry to
leave you all on your own like this? But long
ago I realized songwriters should make their statements and move on,
maintaining a dignified silence. It sounds like the zodiacs letters

(46:19):
or something. Isn't this fun? Sorry to leave you on
your own like this? But I realized I must be
going now what a shudd Sorry, I make my statements
and move on. I'll just continue dining out on this
for the entirety of my natural life. Oh boy, Um yeah,

(46:41):
I'll read this line because there's no way you can
read this for him. The song has become an impressionistic
dreamlike fantasia of the youth culture explosion in the sixties,
and he preferred to keep it poetry rather than make
it literal and remove the power of the words through
the imaginative interpretation of the individuals. It is worth nothing

(47:04):
that he was not alone in this particular generation of
songwriters for uh, not really enjoying people playing these armchair interpretations.
The doors used to read these and laugh to each other,
which you know, Jim Morrison was drunk for of his life.
So I buy that. The Beatles, especially class Onion is
famously John Lennon was amused by people being handed his

(47:27):
lyrics in classes, right, like in like writing classes in school.
And so there's all these different troll lines in there, like, uh,
that's the one that has the walrists. Paul right tells
you about, Yeah, tells you about Strawberry Fields full in
the hill. He's living there still, uh McLean says he
did say if I told people what I meant, they
just say, no, you didn't, all right. Uh he has,

(47:52):
fittingly for someone who said I should make my statement
and move on. He has continued to talk about the
song recently, most notably when the man used for American
Pie was auctioned off in by Christie's. He said, basically,
an American Pie. Things are heading in the wrong direction.
It is becoming less idyllic. I don't know whether you
consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality

(48:14):
song in a sense. Ah He likened to singing the
line singing bye bye miss American Pie to an apocryphal
the apocryphal story of Nero playing the fiddle well Rome burned.
But much like Carly Simon's You're So Vain and Atlantis
says you ought to know, it will be one of
those songs where the true on the record meeting is

(48:34):
forever obscured by the mists of time. As you meditate
on that, We'll be right back with more too much
information after these messages. So considering Don McLean is not

(48:55):
gonna say let's have a little fun and delve into
the lyrics of American Pie, shall we? Yes? Let's have answer, Yes, Jordan,
let us have fun. Let's have fun. Isn't this a
lot from um Man? We just watched King of Comedy
a few months ago. We're going to have good, clean fun.

(49:18):
That's well, he's he's duct taped to the chair. Um
that's what that's what you're doing to me right now
as I go through all six verses of American Pie
strapping Baby, Yes, Here we Go. I've looked at quite
a few annotated versions of this song, but the best
one that I found is on a music site called

(49:38):
musical Holics, which, despite it's difficult to pronounce and slightly
problematic name, is kind of one of the best music
trivia sites I found lately. I stumbled across it recently
when I was researching something fun of the episodes we
were doing, and it's a cool site, some really great
deep dives, And this piece by Alva Yaffee on the
meaning of American Pie is really stellar. So I'm taking

(49:59):
a lot out of the interpretations I'm talking about from
that piece. Go check it out. It's really good. Verse
one we all know the opening verse A long long
time ago, with a young Don McLean is a paper
boy shivering on the doorstep of a neighbor's house as
he delivers the news of his hero buddy Holly's death.
The Bye Bye Miss American Pie chorus we've touched on
is believed to be about the loss of American innocence.

(50:21):
This notion of going in the wrong direction, but the
levy might have a more personal meaning to Don who. Again,
it should be noted, as always maintained, that this is
a very autobiographical song. According to some reports I've seen,
the levee was a bar that he and his friends
would hang out in a New Rochelle, And sometimes the
levee would close or the levy would be dry and McLean,

(50:45):
and his friends would drive across the Husson River to
drink in the town of Rye, New York whiskey and
Rye whiskey in Rye. And again that was formerly one
of the biggest oak bars. Wasn't used to be called
cookies right yeah? Famous two tho indie rock hot spot

(51:07):
you know, total meet me in the bathroom like spot YEA.
Also worth noting that Chevy had a famous jingle in
the fifties sung by Dinah Shore called See the USA
and Your Chevrolet, which featured the lyrics drive your Chevrolet
through the USA, America's the greatest land of all on
a highway or a road along the levy. Life is

(51:28):
completed in a Chevy. So make a day today to
see the USA and see it in your Chevrolet. So
even the choice of car in American pie is pretty
loaded the significance or it just rhymed um. Second verse,
we start in the good old days? Did you write
the Book of Love? Is a reference to not only

(51:48):
young teenage love but also the old do wop song
Book of Love by the Monotones. And Don touches on
faith with do you have faith in God above if
the Bible tells you so? Although the Bible tells me so.
It was also a hit song by Don Cornell in
nineteen five, so it could be another song reference. Then
Don makes the connection between faith and music with the

(52:10):
next line, do you believe in rock and roll? Can
music save your mortal soul? And this sounds like a
bit of teenage hyperbole, but it's something that Don apparently
believes in quite wholeheartedly, he said in a nineteen interview
with Phonograph magazine. Music is a very sacred thing. To
sell it fainted or abuse. It isn't just commercial. It's sacrilege.

(52:33):
Music touches the same universality that made Christ a saint
to many people, and that's very important. Uh. And it's
really unclear whether the line can music savor mortal soul?
Is meant to be sincere or sarcastic, because it could
also be viewed as people moving away from God and
looking to secular heroes like rock stars bigger than Jesus. Right, yeah,
oh yeah, there you go. Yeah. I just want to

(52:53):
point out one of my favorite rock and roll couplets
of all times by Mike Cooley from Drive By Truckers,
who uh, twenty years younger than Don McClean, but really
one of the greatest opening lines in to my mind,
rock history, which is in the song Marry Me by
Drive By Truckers. The opening line to that song is, well,

(53:16):
my daddy didn't pull out, but he never apologized. Rock
and roll means well, but it can't help telling young
boys lies. Ah wow, rock and roll mythology. I will
never stop believing in it, even as much as I
detest so much of that, so much of it. Sorry,
just just what it made me think of. Well, Don

(53:37):
mcclean's take on romance, at least back in the good
time era of the fifties. It's a lot more quaint
because he sings about the intimate, romantic courtship fifties style,
slow dancing in the gym at a sock hop, picking
up your date for prom with a pink carnation in
your boutineer, which is probably a reference to Marty Robbins
a white sport coat with a pink carnation later parodied

(53:58):
by friend of the Program Jimmy buff It in his
album titled White sport Coat with a pink crustaceans. That's funny,
I wouldn't say. If anything, this Batan death march of
a podcast is making me appreciate Jimmy Buffett more so.
The greatest trick the Devil and Jordan never pulled was
making Buffett look great by comparison. I love Marty Robbins, man,

(54:20):
Oh yeah great. Do you know that I didn't realize this?
And this makes so much sense from a practical standpoint.
Doo saw cops were a thing because they made kids
take off their shoes so they wouldn't scuff up the
polished ardwood floor in school gymnasiums. I actually did, because
yeah I did, because we did Greece and my wait,
you were in Greece. Yeah, I mean I was in

(54:40):
like the chorus. I was in the chorus of like everything,
and until until I played now thinking leer you were
king Lear, How old were you, uh sixteen, seventeen sixteen
or seventeen. Oh my god, I wish I hope somebody
recorded that I would love this. They didn't, and if
they did, I would have destroyed it. So when I
most more defying high school memories, my god, Well, let's

(55:04):
keep rolling. My suffering is legendary. To quote hell Raiser,
Uh verse three, Jordan, go ahead. Yes. Verse three opens
with one of the most debated verses of the song.
For ten years, We've been on our own and moss
grows fat on a rolling stone, but that's not how
it used to be, and the most obvious interpretations that

(55:26):
refers to the rolling Stones themselves. But interestingly, the line
a rolling stone gathers no moss is a line from
a Buddy Holly song Early in the Morning, So this
line might be tying a decade worth of rock tragedies
together the ten years, if you will, between Buddy Holly's
playing Crash in nine and the Rolling Stones concert at
Altamont in nineteen sixty nine, where Meredith Hunter was knife

(55:50):
to death by a member of the Hell's Angels. But then,
of course there's also the Bob Dylan song Like a
Rolling Stone, so multiple potential meanings there, but we mentioned
Bob Dylan. This, of course leads us into the Jester section,
when the Jester sang for the King and Queen and
a coat he borrowed from James Dean and a voice

(56:10):
that came from you and me, and while the king
was looking down, the Jester stole his thorny crown. The Jester,
of course, it is widely believed to be Bob Dylan,
and the coat he borrowed from James Dean is believed
to be the outfit he wore on the cover of
his Freewheel And album where he's walking down cold day
and he's gonna cope buttoned up. Um, that's a James

(56:32):
Dean jacket. Yeah, I mean I think he's looking at
the rebel without a cause, like red windbreaker kind of thing.
I don't know, it's it's if it's that one. The
voice that came from you and Me line is thought
to be a reference to Dylan's untrained singing style and
also his status as the spokesperson for his generation. Famously,

(56:53):
Um the King and Queen that the Jester sang for,
this gets a little thorny. There are some who believe
that This is a reference to a FK and Jackie
Kennedy playing off the whole camelot myth of the Kennedy
White House. And there are also someone take a literal
approach believing that King and Queen are actually Martin Luther
King and Queen Elizabeth the Second, who I guess Bob
Dylan did sing for on separate occasions um, which is interesting.

(57:17):
Taken alone, the line while the King was looking down
the jester stole his thorny crown seems to reference Bob
Dylan becoming the dominant force among young music fans, stealing
the mantle from the King of Rock, Elvis Presley, who
was either serving the army or serving in Hollywood. Either way,
he was kind of had a commission. The thorny crown
in question is thought to be the price of fame.

(57:40):
I guess Tom McClean was specifically asked about this interpretation
and a piece in the Guardian, and he got a
little testy. He said, as I've told people you're gonna
call Elvis the king the king, and my song is
a thorny crown, and only Jesus had a thorny crown.
I think I was very clear about that there's a
lot of reasons why I don't turn this into a
board game, because it's not American pies and impressionistic peace.

(58:03):
So okay, he's no help there. There are others who
go back to the Kennedy interpretation and that the jester
was Lee Harvey Oswald stealing the thorny crown from Kennedy
by assassinating him. Uh. This interpretation is bolstered by the
next line of the song, no verdict was returned, the
courtroom was adjourned, meaning that the nation got a never

(58:24):
concrete answer or closure regarding the assassination of JFK and
Don mcclus talked a great deal about the impact that
both the assassination and the fallout surrounding the controversies and
conspiracy theories had on his generation, and he said the
institutions began failing in the sixties because people didn't believe
in them anymore. My little theories that we were brought

(58:44):
up on rock and roll and God and country and
Western movies and morality plays about right and wrong. Everyone
knew hop along Cassidy and Roy Rogers and their code
of conduct. After Kennedy was killed, I read Mark Lanes
rushed to Judgment, which was a very famous book in
the mid sixties disputing the war in Commission Findings that
Lee Harpy Oswald act alone and killing JFK and Don

(59:06):
McLean said, all of us were in college realizing that
the government was withholding information about the assassination and still
is um I looked to pause right here. You know how,
there's this theory that the Zodiac Killer was never caught
because there was actually two people working as a conspiracy
and that's why all the evidence never added up the conviction.

(59:26):
I almost wonder if that's the case with these lyrics,
Like a lyric will have context in relation to the
line before it, and then that context will change when
you hear the line after it. So perhaps there are
multiple theories that are correct about the same lines, like
Schroedinger's interpretation. By merely speaking about it, you change the
context of it. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that these metaphorical figures

(59:49):
and archetypes have multiple meanings simultaneously. That could be what's
happening with this song. I think if anything has ever
summed up the dichotomy of your personality, it is waxing
rhapsodic about the interpretationtions of American Pie and somehow connecting
it to the zodiac and JFK and jf K yeah yeah,
And now we're going into my beloved Beatles. Here we go. Great,

(01:00:09):
we got this is really I mean, no wonder. I
wanted to do this episode so badly. While Lennon read
a book on Marks, the Quartet practiced in the park.
And this could be a fantastic bit of wordplay referencing
John Lennon reading up on communism and singing about revolution
as he did in eight, although in the single version
of Revolution he doesn't know if he's four or against

(01:00:30):
Chairman Mao. He sings count me out in in the
single version, but it could also be about the rise
of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe, and the Quartet
practicing in the park could be a reference to the
Beatles playing huge stadiums like Shay Stadium or Candlestick Park.
The World may Never Know verse four. In verse four,
we find the chaos of the sixties in full force,

(01:00:52):
helter skelter in a summer swelter, obviously a reference to
the Manson murders and possibly the riots in the summer
of sixty eight culminating in the clash between protesters and
cops in Chicago at the Democratic National Convention that August.
The Birds flew off to a fallout shelter eight miles
High and fallen fast, obviously a reference to the Bird's

(01:01:12):
song eight miles High, perhaps a reference to the center
of the music world, shifting from l A, where the
Birds are from, to San Francisco and sixty sixty seven
with the Jester on the sidelines in a cast. The
next line more mounting evidence that the Jesters indeed Bob Dylan,
because nineteen sixty six and nineteen sixty seven marked the
period of his semi mythical motorcycle accident and lengthy period

(01:01:35):
of recuperation, during which he withdrew from the music industry entirely.
The halftime air was Sweet Perfume while the Sergeants played
a marching tune. My interpretation of that is that it's
another reference to the Beatles, who released Sergeant Pepper's Lonely
Ards Club Band on June one, nineteen sixty seven, kicking
off the also semi mythical Summer of Love. Uh they

(01:01:57):
became the Sergeants who led the March of the counterculture,
thus leaving Dylan a k a. The gesture behind on
the sidelines in a cast. But at the peak of
the sweetly perfumed summer, there was civil unrest. We all
got up to dance, but we never got the chance,
he sings. He looked on as players try to take
the field, but the marching band refused to yield. This

(01:02:18):
line alone is hotly debated. Many say that the marching
band could have been police blocking civil rights protesters. Others
say it's the Beatles preaching non violence with their nineteen
sixty seven hit All You Need Is Love, verse five,
another chorus, and then we're in the verse five. Oh,
and there we were all in one place, a generation

(01:02:39):
lost in space with no time left to start again.
This seems to be the summer of sixty nine, when
the Youth Generation gathered at Woodstock, just weeks after Neil
Armstrong became the very first human to walk on the moon.
Flash forward a few months to the Rolling Stones concert
at Altamont in December of sixty nine, when drug use
led to violence at the hands of the Hell's Angels.
While the Stone is performed, opening with their new single

(01:03:02):
Jumping Jack Flash and as Don sings, so come on
Jack be nimble, Jack be quick Jack Flash sat on
a candlestick because fire is the devil's only friend. And
as I watched him on the stage, my hands were
clenched in fists of rage. No angel born in hell
could break that Satan's spell. Angel Boord in Hell seems

(01:03:24):
to me like a reference to the Hell's Angels, which
would make Satan Mick Jagger. I guess, um Satan's spell
Hell's Angels couldn't break it. I don't know. Um rhymes
and this song make me want to hear the Beastie
Boys cover this just so they can do that classic
like eighties wrap thing being like oh. And as I

(01:03:46):
watched him on then they all yelled stage, my hands
were clenched in fists of bridge. No angel born in
hell could break that Satan spell. That was that was
That was terrible. I love that, my God. Uh. Some
interpret Don McLeay and his holding Mick Jagger and the

(01:04:06):
rest of the stones responsible for the death at Altamont
as anyone who see in the Masals documentary Gimmi Shelter
could probably a test. And he continues with the line
and as the flames climbed high into the night, to
light the sacrificial right. I saw Satan laughing with delight
the day the music died. Trend is three line stretch
of end rhymes there, that's the only line in this

(01:04:29):
actually like it sounds like black Sabbath. I do want
to personally thank Don for not re releasing this song
after Woodstock ninety nine, which seems like a missed opportunity
for him to make money and also get on his
eye horse about this, with Stuck ninety nine, of course
famously being a orgy of destruction, arson and rape during

(01:04:51):
which the Red Hot Shelly Peppers covered Jimmie hendricks Is
Fire and when Biscuit covered their own song break Stuff,
leading people to set things on fire and break stuff
all right, in a way, we could have seen that
coming just reading the set list as an instruction manual.
Really prophetic boy. And then finally we slow it down

(01:05:16):
for the final verse. I met a girl who sang
the blues and asked her for some happy news, but
she just smiled and turned away a line I never
really made this connection. The line believed to be about
Janice Joplin and her death in October of nineteen, and
Dawn heads down to the sacred store, the record store
where he heard the music years before. But a man

(01:05:37):
there said the music wouldn't play. And this could be
a metaphor, or it could be a very literal meaning.
Record stores used to have listening booths for kids to
sample songs before they bought them, which was basically how
poor kids used to hear music on the cheap. It's
how the Beatles used to hang out at record stores
and crib the lyrics to the songs that they wanted
to play on their set because they couldn't afford to
buy them. So it's kind of a crucial place for

(01:06:01):
low resource kids to experience music. But by the seventies,
most stories had abandoned this practice, so that could be
it's kind of a stretch, but could be what that
line means. And in the streets, the children screamed, the
lovers cried, and the poets dreamed, but not a word
was spoken. The church bells all were broken. The sixties
dream had died. There's rioting in the streets. We live

(01:06:23):
in a godless world, and any references the Holy Trinity,
the three men he admires most, the Father of the Son,
and the Holy Ghost. Catching the last train for the Coast,
one of the most mysterious lines in the song. There
are some who believe that this is a reference to
the three um most uh generationally scarring assassinations of the era.

(01:06:45):
I guess you could say John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy,
and Martin Luther King. There are others who think that
this is a reference to the three men killed in
the plane crash, Buddy Holly, Ritchie Vallens and the Big Bopper.
And it's also an interesting bookend to the line do
you have faith? Thank God above? Because the Bible tells
you so? From earlier in the song. In nine six

(01:07:05):
there was a famous cover on Time magazine that read
is God Dead? And that kind of seemed to be
the prevailing notion at the time and now, and in
interviews that Don's given it sounds like he was really
more in the loss of people's connection with God. And
then we close with a final chorus backed with the
help of James Taylor, Carly Simon Livingston Taylor, and Pete Seeger,

(01:07:30):
and we are out. So what does this all mean? Hi?
What does this all mean? Well? I think the Father
Son and Holy Ghost is pretty self explanatory. Buddy Holly is,
of course the father. Ritchie Vallen's at the age of
seventeen is the son, which would make the Big Bopper
the holy ghost, um, which I believe in personally myself.

(01:07:53):
You imagine being haunted by the Big Bopper. It just
like in your room late at night, from your trying
to look up in the corner. He's like spread there
like the Exorcist, going in a checkered sports code all
they got old fifties rotary style phone doing his in

(01:08:14):
the afterlife. Um, Rosemaries Baby, it's also sixty eight had
come out and um, there's that line. God is dead,
God is dead, Satan live, Satan, Satan lives. This is
year one, the years one. Yeah, yeah, So maybe Don
McLean saw Rosemary's Baby. All right. So we mentioned earlier

(01:08:35):
that Don McLean, as he's wont to do, took credit
for this song creating a resurgence in the interest around
Buddy Holly, and I regret to inform you he was
correct about that. Uh. And the song did go a
long way in revitalizing interest in Holly and directly led
to the nine biopic The Body Holly Story starring Gary Busey,

(01:09:00):
who probably mean that probably means go go, Gary can
thank Don for his career. Uh. McLean has said, if
you talk to Maria Lena, the widowed bride mentioned in
the lyrics, she will tell you that Buddy got more
publicity after I wrote my song than he'd ever got
in his life. I know it sounds self serving, but
if you check it out, you will find that out.

(01:09:20):
And that started the whole thing going. The renewed popularity
of Buddy meant that writer John gold Rosen has said
he was finally able to get his hollibiography published and
that was the book that got adapted into the Buddy
Holly story starring Gary Busey. There's a very nice, uh sweet,
full circle moment. McLean autographed the wall at the Surf

(01:09:40):
Ballroom where Buddy played his last gig just hours before
he died. Although he was pleased to shine some light
on his hero, McLean has been frustrated that many have
reduced American Pie to just a story about Buddy Holly.
He said, the fact that Buddy Holly seems to be
the primary thing that people talk about when they talk
about American Pie is kind of sad but fine with me,

(01:10:03):
because only the beginning is about Buddy Holly, and the
rest of it goes on and talks about America, on
politics in the country, and trying to catch some kind
of a special feeling that I had about my country,
especially in nineteen seventy and seventy one, which was very turbulent.
But one person we have not heard from in relation
to this song is Bob Dylan. That's right, folks. He

(01:10:25):
did not appreciate the implication that he was the jester
in the song, addressing it during a rare interview in Seen,
in which he said, yeah, American Pie, what a song
that is, which is such a tremendous bit of shade.
He continued, a jester. Sure, the jester writes songs like
Masters of War, A hard reign is gonna fall, and

(01:10:47):
it's all right, ma some gesture. I have to think
he's talking about somebody else. Then Dylan adds asked him
talk about man Dylan interview are on this Dylan can
still pull out the knives. That is a murderous quote,
name dropping three iconic songs against one piece of I

(01:11:12):
love that. Uh. Someone did subsequently asked on because people
keep doing that as recently as McLean replied, I can't
tell you, but he would make a damn good jester,
wouldn't He didn't Steeler's Wheel, didn't. They also call him
the stuck in The jokers still left me, Oh jester, joker.
These people gotta stop clowning on Dylan man ah. He

(01:11:34):
then went on to add the Dylan's son, Jacob, no
stranger of course, to the machinations of music industry. Nepotism
asked him the same question, and he didn't tell Jacob
Dylan either. But yes, the lore around the American Pie
has only grown over the years. And in the working
manuscript that Don McLean used to write the song sold

(01:11:56):
that auction for one point two million, and considering the
song is nearly nine minutes long, it should come as
no surprise that this manuscript ran to sixteen pages, many
ripped out of a spiral notebook, and it contains lines
that didn't make the final cut, including and there I
stood alone and afraid, I knelt to my knees, and
there I prayed, and I prepared to give all I

(01:12:18):
had to give if only he would make it live again. Uh.
Dawn claimed that he would give away some of the
secrets of the song when it was auctioned off, and
I think in the auction booklet he confirmed the theories
about Dylan and the Jester, Elvis and the King, and
the climax of the song at Altimat, so basically the
more obvious ones he confirmed. But this manuscript sold to

(01:12:42):
an unnamed buyer for one point two million, which I
believe made it the ninth highest selling either manuscript or
lyric sheet of all time. Either way a lot of money.
And the hilarious part is that Dawn had more or
less forgotten that he even had the manuscript until Rolling
Stone editor Ben fong Torres asked him about possibly giving

(01:13:03):
this manuscript to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
and oh yeah that oh he said, he wasn't even
sure if he still had it, and then he went
looking for it, dug it out, and instead of donating
into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame like Ben
functorres asked, he promptly put it up for auction, which
is hilarious. I hope that he cut Ben Functores in
at least um done discussed the sale just before the

(01:13:27):
auction in rolling style. I believe I'm going to be
seventy this year. I have two children and a wife,
and none of them seem to have the mercantile instinct.
I want to get the best deal I ken for them.
It's time. And he's spoken at length about wanting to
sell all of his stuff before he dies, like song,
lyric sheets, guns, saddles, hunting knives, banjo's guitars, custom boots,

(01:13:51):
his car. It's this funny mishmash of like this Buddhist
sense of cleansing and also deep control freak sensibilities. I'm
really uscinated by that. Oh boy, tell us more about
Don McLean's lust for the Hobbits gold. Yes, he's very
good at making money again. He claimed a few years
back to have a massed a fortune of a hundred

(01:14:11):
and fifty million dollars. He majored in finance and minored
in philosophy, which I think is such a fascinating insight
into his psyche. He owns his song catalog and licenses
American pie out to ads, including one for Chevy in
two thousand two, appropriately enough, and they also had another
fantastic slogan, they don't write songs about Volvos, which is

(01:14:33):
pretty good ad copy for Chevy. I like that Dawn
also took a page from the Jimmy Buffett Margharita Ville
playbook and trademark titles and phrases from his biggest songs,
including American Pie, Starry Starry Night, The Day the Music Died,
and Bye Bye Miss American Pie. Do we have to
pay him now that we've said these on the show?
Almost as certainly? Um, And he says as much on

(01:14:54):
his website, which I think is a weird thing to
brag about, unless it's just meant as a warning. This
is the same website that claims that his song Tapestry
led to the creation of Greenpeace. So um, his website
is full of fun facts lies. There are multiple songs
written about Volvo's by the way, really yes Volvo Cowgirl

(01:15:17):
nine by Cheryl Crowe, the b side to one of
her early singles, an Old Vovo by Tom and Ellen Demaris,
recorded by a couple in Oregon that made it on
car Talk. Sorry, I just wanted to contradict Don McLean
to every puzzle, But these trademarked phrases came in handy
when Universal Studios made its American Pie film franchises in

(01:15:40):
the late nineties. Don McLean reportedly collected an undisclosed sum
for using his title, because nothing sums up the death
of the American Dream better than a sexually frustrated team
pleasuring himself with a baked good. Yes. McLean is a
candy businessman who follows in the footsteps of old fashion
management figures like Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and he's

(01:16:02):
also unbothered by the sizeable population, including my friend Alex Higel,
who find American Pie annoying. He said that he's considered
printing up I hate American Pie buttons because that's what
the Colonel did with Elvis. He wanted both sides. I
hate Elvis and I love Elvis. I hate American Pie.
I love American Pie. Not the original thought in his head.

(01:16:26):
And there you have it. Nihilistic capitalism is the illogical
conclusion to the American Dream. Bye bye, Ms, American Pie,
and well, folks, I think it's time to say bye
bye to this episode. I will give the final word
to producer Ed Freeman, who said that American Pie helped

(01:16:47):
close the book on the tumultuous sixties. He said, without
this song, many of us would not have been able
to achieve closure and move on. Don saw that and
wrote the song That's set us free. We should all
be eternally grateful for that. Here that high go, We're free, Geetie,
You're free. Yeah. Any any final screams, any final thought?

(01:17:15):
I like that. All I can say is you've outdone yourself.
How so? I can't think of something else that would
anger me this much. I watched the razor Head for you.
That's true. You did. That's true. You did, which took
less time than this and Margaritaville combined. You could have
watched four eraser heads in the amount of time that
I have now dedicated to listening to your what's the

(01:17:38):
guy from Zodiac, the journalist Gray Smith? Yea to listen
to your grace Smithy and investigations into some of the
worst songs of all time. Um No, I don't have
anything more to say to this. You know he could
probably have me killed. Um m hmm, many times over,

(01:17:59):
many times over. Alright, Well, if you've broken you've you've
broken me. We'll do Bruce Lee in the next episode.
Jordan's Folks, Jordan's one, Jordan one, Jordan One. Well, folks,
thanks so much for listening. My name is Jordan Ronzog,

(01:18:19):
Alex Tagel. I Will catch You next Time. Too Much
Information was a production of I Heart Radio. The show's
executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan run Talk. The
supervising producer is Mike John's. The show was researched, written
and hosted by Jordan run Talk and Alex Hegel, with

(01:18:41):
original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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(01:19:03):
and