And I thought, “God, that’s nice.” For a long time I just had that. I started singing this slow, opening part that was about Buddy Holly. “It was a summation of music, politics, life in America: everything,” says McLean.ĭON MCLEAN: I was living in a little gate-house in Cold Spring, New York on the Hudson River, and I was upstairs in the room that I used to write songs in.
Despite it’s epic length – 8 minutes 33 seconds – it became one of the biggest hits of the 1970s. “The whole time we were doing it, we thought it was an album cut, because it was just too long,” remembers bassist Rob Stoner. Inspired by his childhood memories of reading the news of Buddy Holly’s death on Februin a newspaper, the song’s six verses then went on to deliver a coded history of rock’n’roll, from the optimism of the 1950s through to darkness at the end of the Sixties.
In March the following year, he debuted “American Pie”, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, while opening for Laura Nyro. Taken under his wing by Pete Seeger, McLean released one album, Tapestry, in late 1970, which sold modestly. I came from a conservative, white middle-class background, and all this destroyed my belief in everything I had been taught.”ĭon McLean was a regular on the New York folk circuit in the late Sixties. Holly’s plane crash in 1959 foreshadowed a series of deaths, from my father’s two years later when I was 15, which shattered my life, through to Kennedy’s. Rock’n’roll and Buddy Holly had saved my mortal soul, as the song says. There were flag-draped coffins, assassinations. “Friends of mine who’d died in Vietnam were being brought back. “’American Pie’ is a death song, really,” says Don McLean today.
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