Feb. 3, 1959, is widely regarded as “the day the music died.” Three of rock and roll’s brightest stars—Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and the Big Bopper—perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The tragedy sent shock waves throughout the United States, reaching all the way to New Rochelle, New York, where a 14-year-old boy named Don McLean was delivering newspapers. More than a decade later, McLean would release his second studio album, American Pie—featuring a title track that coined the phrase everyone now recognizes as the day we lost rock n’ roll’s first superstars. On this day (Jan. 22) in 1972, American Pie kicked off an impressive seven-week run atop the U.S. albums chart.
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Don McLean’s “American Pie” Went Beyond This Terrible Tragedy
With American Pie, Don McLean had hoped to capture the zeitgeist of an era in much the same way his favorite Beatles album did. “I was really influenced by the Sgt. Pepper album, and the American Pie album was my attempt to do that,” he later recalled. “But the song totally overshadowed the album.”
In the title track, McLean used the deaths of Holly, Valens, and the Big Bopper as a vehicle to explore the emotional upheaval of both his own childhood and the broader sociopolitical climate of the 1960s. Roughly nine months after the crash, the Grammy Hall of Famer would experience a much more personal loss when his father died “almost right in front of me.”
“I heard it said someplace, ‘There’s pain that hurts, and then there’s pain that alters’ … This pain altered me,” McLean told People magazine last February. “I was never the same afterward. There was no getting over this … and Buddy was part of that.”
At the same time, “The whole country was basically on the same emotional plane as I had been,” added McLean, now 80.
“American Pie” still ranks among the most hotly-debated lyrics of all-time. But don’t expect its author to clear anything up for you. “When people ask me what ‘American Pie’ means, I tell them it means I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to,” McLean has said.
‘American Pie’s’ Lesser-Known Hit
American Pie’s second single, “Vincent,” also paid tribute to a tragic figure—Vincent van Gogh, the highly celebrated Dutch Impressionist painter who died by suicide at age 37. Like the three rock n’ rollers in “American Pie,” Van Gogh’s death also occurred at the height of his fame.
In a 2010 interview, Don McLean told the Daily Telegraph that he wrote “Vincent” after reading a biography of the Starry Night painter. “Suddenly I knew I had to write a song arguing that he wasn’t crazy. He had an illness and so did his brother Theo,” he said. “This makes it different, in my mind, to the garden variety of ‘crazy’ – because he was rejected by a woman. So I sat down with a print of Starry Night and wrote the lyrics out on a paper bag.”
“Vincent” topped the UK singles chart for two weeks and peaked at No.1 2 in the U.S.
Featured image by Michael Putland/Getty Images
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