Was he singing about Mick Jagger and The Beatles? And who was the jester? To this day, McLean has remained tight-lipped. I was trying to write about America, not Elvis or The Beatles. The ensuing fame was not an easy fit for the introverted McLean.
But it was a conflict, because I just wanted to continue on my journey. I was running like mad — and I mean days a year. Honoring the 50th anniversary of the song, McLean himself was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this summer, right outside the Pie Hole restaurant. Confined to bed as a child because of asthma, McLean became an avid listener of music, counting both Buddy Holly and Frank Sinatra as early vocal role models. The young musician took opera lessons and taught himself to play the acoustic guitar at Join today and get instant access to discounts, programs, services, and the information you need to benefit every area of your life.
He also spent time on the Clearwater, Seeger's Hudson River sloop, which influenced the environmental themes behind Tapestry' s title track. McLean recorded his debut album, Tapestry , in while student riots at Berkeley were raging. McLean's debut album was released on the minuscule indie label Mediarts after being rejected, as the legend has it, by 72 others. A young McLean was on his newspaper route when he found out about the tragic plane crash in Iowa that took the life of his beloved idol.
That's why I don't talk about the lyrics — I want people to come up with their own interpretations. I'm more of an inventor. I don't even know how I do this. Pretty soon, we got a shipment of an edited version that was a little over four minutes long.
How did that make you feel? I always played the long version. DM: There must have been a lot of that because people started to hear the long version and clammer for it. It just kept going. When it got played, you got double from BMI.
BH: To explain that, when a song is over a certain length of time, the songwriter gets twice the rate. If you put it in the jukebox, it had two sides so it was two hits there. You wrote it.
It went to No. You let that song tell you how to sing it. A song is supposed to make us feel something, and you change your tempo and you change your emotional delivery three or four times where you should in that song. It is just a knife twister in the most excellent way Did any of the characters that are supposedly in the song, Dylan, Roger McGuinn, Jagger, did they ever ask you about it personally?
BH: Even after all these years, and I say this with respect so take it that way, do you even get how important this song is, Don? DM: I try not to be prideful. If I started to think about the things people say about me these days, the introductions I get, the things they tell me about And I think, "Lord have mercy, all I did was put one foot in front of the other.
It seemed like an uphill struggle to me. It seems like I was always fighting with somebody: a record label, a producer or an agent or whatever. I went back and listened to it a couple times this week, knowing we would do this interview. Not so, say Pie connoisseurs. The lyrics more closely match the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway in December , where "Jack Flash sat on a candlestick".
The Stones' frontman Mick Jagger really did appear on stage that night dressed in a flowing red cape, singing lyrics inciting fire and rebellion. Meanwhile at the stage perimeter members of the Hells Angels motorcycle gang - hired as security - engaged in bloody clashes with the rioting audience.
Jagger was later accused of failing to halt the performance, infuriating McLean's narrator: "I saw Satan laughing with delight; The day the music died". Just as Woodstock was heralded as the landmark of the counterculture movement, "Altamont was the event that signalled its demise. Reality steps in," says Fann. The tragedy served to finally "burst the bubble of youth culture's illusions about itself," wrote Todd Gitlin, an eyewitness, in his book The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage.
And in the final verse of McLean's parable, when he "goes down to the sacred store, where I'd heard the music years before" he finds that sadly:. And these words are not just symbolic. But even more so, "the cynicism of this generation had annihilated the innocent world the narrator had grown up in. Forty-three years later, it would be nice to think that - whatever the revelations to come from McLean's original scribbled notes - they will not burst the bubble for the millions of fans who still dream of Chevys, whisky and rye.
Secrets of American Pie revealed? McLean to receive lifetime award. Bob Dylan lyrics set auction record. McLean to reveal American Pie secret. A long, long time ago Don McLean says his original lyrics reveal "everything there is to know". American Pie is the longest song ever to top the Billboard Hot , at eight minutes and 36 seconds. This video can not be played To play this video you need to enable JavaScript in your browser. Could these scribbles solve the riddle of American Pie?
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