Rarely does the experience of being a paperboy influence one's life. Usually, the job of the young boy -- or girl -- is to get the newspaper put together and placed either in the mailbox or on the driveway or on the front porch of the recipient. There's nothing that memorable about it.
Well, that is unless you were Don McLean and the day was February 4, 1959. It was that cold, winter Wednesday morning when McLean, then a 13-year-old living in New Rochelle, N.Y., opened up the stack of newspapers that had been dropped off that early morning to deliver to people leaving for work before he had to go to school. And it was there on the front page that McLean saw the story that changed his entire life.
The death of his music idol, Buddy Holly. Holly, the gangling Texan with the glasses who had scored major hits in the late 1950s with "Oh, Boy," "Peggy Sue" and "That'll Be The Day" with his group, The Crickets, was killed in a plane crash along with two fledgling stars of the young rock 'n roll era, J.P. Richardson, aka The Big Bopper, and 17-year-old Ritchie Valens, whose career was beginning to soar because of his single, "Donna." The trio of stars were flying out from Clear Lake, Iowa on a plane that Holly had chartered after a tour performance by the artists at a dance to take to Fargo, N.D., when pilot Roger Peterson flew into a blizzard he never got an advisory for to steer clear. The plane crashed killing the trio of stars and the pilot and it wasn't until the next day when among the snow drifts that had formed in the cornfield where the lifeless bodies laid could anyone get to them.
It was a tragedy that shook the country -- and McLean -- to the core. McLean lived with that memory all through the 1960s as he saw the world of music change dramatically and radically. And in early 1971, he started writing what would become a legendary opus while living in Cold Spring, N.Y. Once done, he got to perform his piece as the opening act for singer-songwriter Laura Nyro on Sunday, March 14, 1971, at Philadelphia's Temple University.
McLean put his heart-felt feelings of how his 13-year-old self reacted when he crafted the composition that would become "American Pie," calling it "the day the music died."
In an interview on the British TV show Songbook, McLean explained how he opened the song by saying, "For some reason I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way. As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), 'Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.' I thought, 'Whoa, what's that?' And then the day the music died, it just came out. And I said, 'Oh, that is such a great idea.'"
But it was far from a complete thought. McLean was about to embark on the 12-year journey of rock 'n roll after the plane crash and how things turned out.
"And then I thought, 'I can't have another slow song on this record,'" McLean said of the melancholy start to the record, looking to make a change of pace after the first verse. "I've got to speed this up. I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal.
"Buddy Holly's death to me was a personal tragedy," McLean continued. "As a child, a 15-year-old, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. I mean, 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 that would overtake me when I would look at this album, 'The Buddy Holly Story,' because that was my last Buddy record before he passed away."
Make no mistake -- McLean's grief over what happened on that February day still made an impact on him. The emotion was raw. In composing the other five verses, he introduced "other characters" in the next 12 years of the song to tell the story of rock 'n roll.
"The King," of course, was Elvis Presley.
"The Jester" was singer/songwriter/poet Bob Dylan. The line "While the king was looking down, the jester stole his thorny crown" is an apparent reference to Dylan taking over for Presley as the prominent American male solo star of the 1960s.
"Helter skelter in the summer swelter, the birds flew off in a fall-out shelter -- eight miles high and falling fast" was in reference to The Byrds, the folk-rock act who had a hit single that had a drug aura to it in "Eight Miles High" in 1966.
When he sang "Sergeants played a marching tune," the thought was McLean was describing the Beatles and their legendary 1967 album "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" in which they experimented on the album with different sounds while reportedly taking acid.
"While Lenin read a book on Marx" may have been an elbow nudge and "name play" toward Beatle John Lennon and his so-called socialistic idology of Marxism he was partaking in after the Beatles' breakup and the beginning of his solo career.
The "helter skelter" part mentioned before had something to do with the Charles Manson cult murders of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969, killed by Manson's "followers" who reacted and acted through mind control and drug use.
"And there we were all in one place, a generation lost in space with no time left to start again" is an undeniable reference toward the famous three-day Woodstock concert in upstate New York in August 1969.
"And as I watched him on the stage, my hands were clinched in fists of rage. No Angel born in Hell, could break that Satan's spell," is another clear reference to the night of December 6, 1969, and the infamous free rock music festival at Altamont in California in which a young African-American man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death by members of the Hell's Angels gang who was hired by the Rolling Stones, performing when the murder took place, to "keep order" that night.
What McLean did was go from the innocence he felt as a young boy in the early days of rock 'n roll and show how that innocence got wasted away by the darker and bleek side of the evolving music scene in the late 1960s in comparison.
After going through all six verses of this tune, McLean summed up his emotion that he couldn't go back to those "better" days of the 1950s, singing, "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. And the three men I admired most -- the Father, Son, and The Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast the day the music died."
McLean knew he had a masterpiece on his hands and when he recorded it, he did something clever with producer Ed Freeman -- they started the song in monotone to represent the style the music was recorded in during the 1950s, then when the beat of the song got faster and the story was being told of the next 12 years, it switched to stereo sound.
And what a recording! When it was all said and done, "American Pie" was a whopping, unheard of 8 minutes and 22 seconds, over two times longer than a normal song. And that caused a problem when United Artists Records decided to release "American Pie" as the first single from the album of the same name. They were not abashed by releasing it as the whole 8-minute and 22-second version on the album, but radio stations resisted playing it because of the length, some having a "rule" that no song was to hit the airwaves going longer than 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
So UA Records hatched yet another plan: The song would be cut into two halves for the single -- Part I was on the "A" side and Part II would be the "B" side. Even doing that, the song was still over four minutes long on both sides.
But those radio stations that did want to play it knew they had something special. And those stations did play the album version from start to finish, while the Top 40 stations would play either side "A" or side "B."
And when the song leaped from No. 69 to No. 34 on December 4, 1971, it left the staff at American Top 40 with a quandary of what to do or how to play the song. So they would normally play the "A" side of the single as the record jumped from No. 34 to No. 25 to No. 9 by December 18, 1971. The following two weeks when AT40 was off from the regular countdown to do a Christmas countdown show during that week and to count down the 40 biggest songs of 1971 the week of New Years, "American Pie" jumped from No. 9 to No. 3 to No. 2, now in the on-deck circle to become a No. 1 song.
So when AT40 returned with the regular countdown the following week on January 8, 1972, the show made the conscious decision to play the entire 8-minute, 22-second version. It probably wasn't what did the trick, but the very next week of January 15, 1972, "American Pie" had displaced "Brand New Key" by Melanie as the No. 1 song in America. It would begin a four-week run at the top, which would include February 3, 1972 -- the 13th anniversary of the deaths of Holly, Richardson and Valens.
AT40 would play "American Pie" one more time in its 8-minute, 22-second version the week of March 18, 1972 as it looked as if its run on the chart was over.
The song made McLean instantly famous -- something he never felt comfortable with.
""I was headed on a certain course, and the success I got with 'American Pie' really threw me off," McLean said in a 1973 interview. "It just shattered my lifestyle and made me quite neurotic and extremely petulant. I was really prickly for a long time. If the things you're doing aren't increasing your energy and awareness and clarity and enjoyment, then you feel as though you're moving blindly. That's what happened to me."
McLean never revealed the true meanings of any of the lyrics within the song after the first verse, saying that he left that up to others to interpret. But when asked in an interview in the 1980s what "American Pie" was all about, McLean jokingly said, "It means never having to work again for the rest of my life."
Well he did work. "Vincent," his ode to tormented painter Vincent Van Gogh, was a No. 12 hit as the follow-up. Overall, McLean finished with six Top 40 hits and had a second Top 10 hit in 1981 with a country-tinged remake of Roy Orbison's 1961 classic, "Crying," peaking at No. 5.
In 2000, Madonna brought "American Pie" back in a remake for a movie she starred in, The Next Best Thing. But even with the best of intentions, Madonna's version was badly panned and a lot of people consider her version of a legendary classic "the worst song ever recorded." But one person praised her for doing the song -- McLean. He put out a statement saying, " It is a gift for her to have recorded 'American Pie.' I have heard her version and I think it is sensual and mystical. I also feel that she's chosen autobiographical verses that reflect her career and personal history. 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 have ever received a gift from a goddess."
In April 2015, McLean's original manuscript for "American Pie" was sold at auction for a tidy little sum of $1.2 million. In the catalog description, McLean wrote, "Basically in '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 song in a sense. I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015… there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of 'American Pie.'"
And that alone makes "American Pie" the classic that it became, one of the greatest songs ever recorded. McLean said he was proud of making the song.
"It is biographical in nature and I don't think anyone has ever picked up on that," McLean wrote on his Web site, www.don-mclean.com. "The song starts off with my memories of the death of Buddy Holly. But it moves on to describe America as I was seeing it and how I was fantasizing it might become, so it's part reality and part fantasy, but I'm always in the song as a witness or as even the subject sometimes in some of the verses. You know how when you dream something you can see something change into something else and it's illogical when you examine it in the morning, but when you're dreaming it seems perfectly logical. So it's perfectly OK for me to talk about being in the gym and seeing this girl dancing with someone else and suddenly have this become this other thing that this verse becomes and moving on just like that. That's why I've never analyzed the lyrics to the song. They're beyond analysis. They're poetry."
Poetry that a former paperboy made into a pure classic.
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