![]() ![]() “I’ve heard this a few times in my life,” Dion told me late last year, “but it never resonated ’til recently, but my priest told me back then, ‘Dion,’ he said, ‘In our life relationships don’t end. And by not getting on that fateful flight, Dion took on a feeling of guilt that precipitated a bout with drug addiction and a burden that’s still with him today. The first verse reveals that I was not alone in those thoughts. The day the music died happened the day after my 15 th birthday and was a wakeup call that my idols were not immortal. Pundits have said “American Pie” as a whole chronicles the evolution of pop music from pop confections for teenagers to a substitute religion for the masses. I think I’ll get a straight job somewhere. And over the years all these songs began to emerge because of all sorts of different things that happened that wouldn’t have happened if I’d laid down and said, ‘This is too much. I just keep rockin’, just keep movin’, keep doing the things that I want to do. I sang on the back of trucks and outside. I don’t care what I have to do to keep my career going.’ So, all of a sudden, I was a millionaire, and I thought to myself, ‘Gee, this is pretty nice. ‘“American Pie’ was a double-edged sword because people who took me seriously as a composer and a singer and everybody suddenly saw this song as being too commercial, and so I had to overcome, again, another thing that I never dreamed or thought about….I didn’t have any money. That’s the promoters, and that’s the club owners and people like that. You’re dealing with people who only understand money and power and a brick to the face. “It’s just been a very difficult struggle. (it was) ‘You’re not very good.’ And that’s a hard thing to overcome. It’s ‘You stink!’ Okay? It’s not like, ‘We don’t like your songs,’ or ‘We think you’re wonderful but…’ No. “This was an enormous struggle, an enormous struggle against so much negativity, and it’s a very personal kind of negativity. “In order to get to this place, I just didn’t sit here and let this happen,” McLean told me in 2012. But in many ways, it has cast a shadow over McLean’s career as dark as the events of February 3 rd, 1959.Īt first the song was a double-edged sword. It resides in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry and was named by the Recording Industry of America (RIAA) a top 5 song of the 20th Century. In preparing his “American Pie” manuscript for auction in 2015, McLean referred to the song as “an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.” One of his four handwritten manuscripts of the lyrics was auctioned by Christies for just over $1.2 Million. He recently was presented with a plaque for multi-platinum certifications for “American Pie” and a platinum certification for “Vincent.” He’s also just released a children’s book, American Pie: A Fable. Louis, Missouri on May 19 th to Posthof Zeitkultur Am Hafen Linz in Austria on November 13 th. McLean is currently on a 50 th Anniversary American Pie World Tour that has him booked into 67 venues from the Blanche M. In the song McLean also decries the rise of the new youth culture with oblique references to John Lennon who “read a book of Marx,” The Byrds who are “eight miles high and falling fast,” The Beatles who “played a marching tune,” and the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash” who “sat on a candlestick ’cause fire is the devil’s only friend.”īut it’s the Iowa plane crash that sets the stage in the first verse of McLean’s most famous song. ![]()
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