The Washington Post reported
last week that, in order to secure the financial future for his wife and
children, aging singer Don McLean sold the original 16-page working manuscript for the lyrics to his chart-topping
1972 song “American Pie” for $1.2 million at auction. Somehow this mundane,
practical gesture seems a sad but fitting end for a song that lamented the end of an era of cultural
innocence.
“American Pie” was inspired partially by the shocking
deaths of young rockers Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper in a
plane crash in 1959. But it was about much more than “the day the music died,”
as one line goes; it rambled on with allusions to everyone from Karl Marx to Charles
Manson to Jackie Kennedy to The Beatles. “It was an indescribable photograph of
America that I tried to capture in words and music,” said McLean in a catalogue for Christie’s auction house. “Basically in
‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction. It is becoming less
idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a
morality song in a sense.”
“American Pie is the accessible
farewell to the Fifties and Sixties,” wrote Guardian
music critic Alexis Petridis, who considered it Bob Dylan Lite. “The
chorus is so good that it lets you wallow in the confusion and wistfulness of
that moment, and be comforted at the same time.”
I was never a fan. I remember the hit playing
incessantly on the radio, and despite its catchy chorus, at 8½-minutes it was
well over twice the length of the average radio single and felt even longer.
McLean’s other big hit, “Vincent,” an achingly touching ballad about the
world’s inability to grasp the genius of Vincent Van Gogh during the troubled
painter’s lifetime, was much better lyrically and musically.
But I was very young at that time and had no
capacity for nostalgia. It would be a few more years before I got my first sense
for how easily important moments and people can slip into the past, lost
forever, sometimes before you even realize how much they meant to you. At the
time, living in the present was all I understood, and the future seemed
limitless and bright. But then I got older.
It’s natural – and not entirely wrong – for
every generation to reach an age when it waxes nostalgic about the past and complains
that the present is “going to hell in a handbasket,” as my parents used to say.
But in his mid-20s at the time, McLean was ahead of the curve in recognizing
that things were “heading in the wrong direction.” Now 69, he remains
lugubrious about the state of the culture: “I was around in 1970 and now I am
around in 2015. There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore,
so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’”
That is an overstatement – after all, there
are still poetry and romance in the world; you just have to dig through whole
strata of cynicism and snark and irony nowadays to find them. But he is correct
that our cultural ability to appreciate beauty, romance, and poetry has
atrophied, or at least been devalued in what an old friend of mine used to call
our Age of Ugliness, and that is a disheartening loss.
In a verse that didn’t make the final cut for
the song, McLean falls down on his knees and offers everything he has to give,
“if only He would make the music live again.” If only it were that easy; it
will take a new generation of artists who value sincerity over oh-so-hip
detachment to breathe life back into the culture. McLean has worthy advice to budding
songwriters: “Immerse yourself in beautiful music and beautiful lyrics and
think about every word you say in a song.”
The music may have died once, but that
doesn’t mean it can’t be resurrected.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 4/17/15)
