Back when Buddy Holly was around, rock & roll artists just wanted to “make those people dance, and maybe they’d be happy for awhile.” In McLean’s present-day ‘70s, things aren’t so simple. Using double entendres, puns and a few inside jokes, he paints the picture of a topsy-turvy decade dominated by the Stones (“Moss grows fat on a rolling stone”) and Bob Dylan (“The jester sang for the king and queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean,” a reference to the jacket worn on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan), two artists whose music always reflected the times in which they were living. Things in America have become more complicated since 1959, and the state of popular music has been volatile, too. “I knew I was out of luck the day the music died,” he sings in the second verse, using the rest of the song to explain how America lost its own innocence in that crash, too.Īs the song moves into its third verse, McLean whisks us away to the end of the 1960s. When February third comes along, though, McLean finds himself delivering bad news to every doorstep. At the beginning, he’s your typical American teenager, concerned with little more than music, girls and his morning paper route.
Every verse is a new chapter, and McLean pulls double-duty as the main character and narrator. “American Pie” unfolds like a story, right down to the fairytale-ish opening line (“A long, long time ago…”). It was the end of an era, the demise of a smooth-sailing decade that would soon be replaced by the turbulent sixties.
There were 11 months left in the year, but for most people, that was the day the 1950s officially ended. All four occupants died, hopefully instantly.
Minutes after takeoff, the plane crashed into a frozen cornfield at 170 miles per hour and skidded for nearly 600 feet, turning end over end. The pilot was young, the hour was late, and the weather was bad. Valens and the Big Bopper took the remaining seats.Įveryone knows the rest of the story. Desperate to avoid another long, cold drive, Holly hired a small Bonanza plane to fly him and two other passengers to Minnesota. It was freezing outside, and Holly’s drummer had been hospitalized by a bad case of frostbite, thanks to a broken heater inside their tour bus. The boys had just wrapped up a performance in Clear Lake, Iowa, and their next gig was scheduled for Moorhead, MN, more than 350 miles away. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died on February 3, 1959, during the second week of a midwestern tour.
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