#AMERICAN PIE SONG BUDDY HOLLY FREE#

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. So it only got to number two in the UK, being kept off the top by Chicory Tip's 'Son of My Father' and Nilsson's 'Without You'.Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died on February 3, 1959, during the second week of a midwestern tour. The 'American Pie' single matched exactly that, going to number one in the US for four weeks in 1972, as well as topping the charts in Australia, Canada and New Zealand. The album topped the charts in the US (going double platinum) and went to number two in the UK (going gold). 'American Pie' was first released on the American Pie album on October 24, 1971, as the opening track. When was 'American Pie' released and where did it get in the charts? 'I wanted to write a song about America, but I didn’t want to write a song about America like anybody ever wrote before.'

'All this bedlam and riots and burning cities. 'The country was in some advanced state of psychic shock,' McLean said in the doc. In 2022 Don unpicked some of the references in a documentary celebrating the song's 50th anniversary, and said that ultimately it was a fictional, impressionistic piece. It acknowledges the influence those players had on McLean becoming a musician himself ('And I knew if I had my chance/ That I could make those people dance'), and musings on the power of music ('Do you believe in rock 'n' roll? / Can music save your mortal soul?').įrom that starting point, though, the song becomes a whirling storm of impenetrable nods and references that are open to all sorts of interpretation.ĭon McLean - Children's Book, 'American Pie: A Fable”. The song directly references the young paperboy Don finding out about the crash on the newspaper front pages ('But February made me shiver/ With every paper I'd deliver').

#AMERICAN PIE SONG BUDDY HOLLY FREE#

'If it was over eight minutes, it could have been 16.' What is 'American Pie' about?ĭon McLean plays a free show at Hyde Park in 1975.Īs we've already said, and everyone already knows, the main influence behind the song was The Day The Music Died, the tragic plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper. 'He just kept writing,' Proffer told The Guardian. So on the single, it was split into two parts: side one of the 7' was four minutes and 11 seconds, and side two was four minutes and 31 seconds.ĭocumentary maker Spencer Proffer revealed that there were plenty more lyrics that never even made the cut. That's obviously much too long for a 45rpm single, and the 'invention' of the 12' single was still about four years away. On the American Pie album, it clocks in at eight minutes and 36 seconds. The word 'epic' is overused, but 'American Pie' is just that. A Celebration of American Pie - As Featured on KTLA (Los Angeles)

American pie song buddy holly