And don't forget Scratchy...
Posted on 04/06/2015 4:37:53 PM PDT by 9thLife
A long, long time ago - to borrow the words of the song - Don McLean sat down to write the first lines of an epic. First released in 1971, American Pie is a classic that an entire generation memorised line by line, verse by verse.
Fans around the world have argued over the true meaning of one of the most enigmatic songs in pop history. Faced with all the speculation, McLean's own response is defiantly down-to-earth: when people ask him what it means, he likes to reply, "It means I never have to work again."
American Pie, famously covered by Madonna in 2000, remains a highlight of McLean's shows and his admirers will have a chance to hear it again when he starts a new UK tour next month. This Tuesday, meanwhile, sees a new chapter in the song's history when the original manuscript goes up for auction at Christie's in New York. Experts believe it could fetch as much as £1million.
Already a wealthy man thanks to the royalties, McLean seems matterof-fact about the prospect of his most famous work going under the hammer. In his own mind, at least, it has already passed out of his own hands to become public property.
Hidden away in a box in his home, the lyrics had lain almost forgotten for years. The soft-spoken singer finally decided to put them up for sale after he was contacted about the possibility of selling other memorabilia. After decades of touring and recording, it was time to take stock.
As he explains: "It occurred to me that there was some interest in the scratch work for a lot of the songs I had written. You know, I am going to be 70-years old this year, and my wife and children do not seem to have the knack of knowing when to sell something and when not to, so I said I had better do it for them.
It came out in pieces. It wasn't something I was figuring out Don McLean "Probably a year or two from now I will also sell a lot of my guitars and the clothes I wore on album covers."
Referring to the endless debate about the song's underlying meaning - its starting point was the singer's teenage memories of the death of Buddy Holly - McLean thinks anyone looking for revelations about "the day the music died" is likely to end up being disappointed.
"When the chance comes to get hold of the catalogue and look at some of the pages, you will see that it didn't come out that way," he explains.
"It came out in pieces. It wasn't something where I was figuring out who was going to be this and what was going to be that. I never did get involved in talking about it that way because that's not how it was written. People will see a song that's not a parlour game, but a song that went in a lot of different directions as I was trying to capture a dream. That's what I was trying to do."
We may like to think that all great tunes are written in a sudden eureka moment of inspiration, but McLean describes a very different process: "The first part - the "long, long time ago" part - came immediately. And then a little later I had the chorus, and I wanted it to be a fast song.
"Then I stopped thinking about it for a couple of months, because I couldn't figure out what to do, whether to go in an entirely different direction. A lot of that is reflected in the manuscript."
McLean's own journey into the music business was not exactly straightforward either. Raised in a conventional middle-class home in a well-to-do part of New York state, he knew that his father hoped that he would follow him down the safe and respectable path of office administration. Passionate about folk music - singing had originally helped him cope with childhood asthma - McLean hankered after a career as a performer instead.
When his first sorties seemed to lead nowhere he opted to study for a business degree at night school.
"I basically did it for my father, who had passed away a couple of years before," he recalls. "After I finished I thought 'Well I did it, Dad. Now I'm going to do what I wanna do'. I found I had a bit of an aptitude.
"A lot of the McLeans ran offices. My father did, my uncle did. I didn't want any part of working in an office, but I guess it was in my blood. After I finished studying I never looked back, but I did find it a lot of use for reading a contract."
Later, he was even offered a business scholarship at Columbia University in New York, but chose to stick to singing in the city's coffee houses. Rejected by countless labels, his first album was released in 1970. One year later American Pie changed everything.
McLean is far from a one-hit wonder - aside from Vincent, his melancholy portrait of Van Gogh, he also wrote And I Love You So, a ballad covered by crooner Perry Como. But it is American Pie that has defined his career. For some artists, the song might easily have become a millstone.
Don McLean in 1971 and the lyrics from the hit song he's sellingALAMY/CHRISTIES Don McLean in 1971 and the lyrics from the hit song he's selling McLean insists that was not the case: "There was never a time when I didn't sing it," he says. "I don't go to the theatre with the idea of disappointing the audience."
After what he tersely describes as "a bad marriage" early in his career and a long spell of footloose bachelorhood, he found domestic contentment relatively late in life. Since 1987 he has been married to Patrisha, a photographer, writer and mother of his two grown-up children, daughter Jackie and son Wyatt. Home is a spectacular lakeside estate in Maine where the couple focus much of their energy on growing roses. "It's 175 acres. Compared to places in Ireland and England it's not much," he says modestly. "I have quite a lot of fun fixing these places up."
THAT element of domestic tranquillity is reflected in the title of his forthcoming album Botanical Gardens. If he still seems resentful that some of the critics who championed him early on turned against him after the success of American Pie, he has come to terms with the fact that the song represented the high-water mark of his career. Throughout it all, he has remained busy, writing and recording. He even played Glastonbury in 2011.
Inevitably, though, the spotlight shifted away over time. After all, who could ever top that hit? "I had about as much fame around the world as I could handle," he says. "And I still have about as much fame as I can handle. I really was not a person who was seeking enormous popularity, so I wasn't heartbroken that my career might have been limited. I was already much more wealthy than my father had been. I had a fortune. As the years went on, more things happened and people realised, you know, that I was here to stay.
"What is it now, 46, 48 years that I've been around, selling out theatres and festivals and so on? I wasn't equipped to sustain that kind of popularity over a long period. I wasn't very comfortable with it."
• Don McLean's tour starts in York on May 15. For more information visit don-mclean.com
“has the same meaning as MacArthur Park and Blinded by the Light”
Naw.
MacArtnur Park is meaningless. Both Blinded by the Light and American Pie have meaningful passages and overall themes, as well as pure poetry.
Blinded by the Light is about playing in a New Jersey bar band, a kind of slice of life. e.g.
“Some silicone sister with her manager mister
Told me I got what it takes
He said i’l turn you on sonny to something strong
If you play the song with the funky breaks”
Dude with big breast-implant girlfriend offers him good drugs if he plays a song he likes.
“Go cart Mozart checking out the weather chart, seeing if it’s safe out side.”
Speed freak musician looking outside to see if the cops are around.
Etc...
What every line means is hard to say, but it’s not MacArthur Park.
oy. I just don’t know what to think about that. But as a singer, she does nothing for me.
I believe it was Diogenes who observed that the artist is the person least capable of explaining their work.
Vincent is an incredibly beautiful song.
American Pie seems to have a lot of obvious cultural references to the 50’s/60’s.
“American Pie” was, of course, the name of the airplane. It took three seminal characters in Rock ‘n’ Roll history down with it. The song is about the loss of McClean’s youth.
I can’t stand the song - way too long, embarrassing forced rhymes, and pretentious.
And don't forget Scratchy...
The song came about when Columbia president Clive Davis, upon listening to an early version of Greetings from Asbury Park N.J., felt the album lacked a potential single. Springsteen wrote this and “Spirit in the Night” in response.
According to Springsteen, the song came about from going through a rhyming dictionary in search of appropriate words. The first line of the song, “Madman drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summers with a teenage diplomat” is autobiographical—”Madman drummers” is a reference to drummer Vini Lopez, known as “Mad Man” (later changed to “Mad Dog”); “Indians in the summer” refers to the name of Springsteen’s old Little League team; “teenage diplomat” refers to himself. The remainder of the song tells of many unrelated events, with the refrain of “Blinded by the light, cut loose like a deuce, another runner in the night”.
“MacArthur Park” was written and composed by Jimmy Webb in the summer and fall of 1967.[1] The inspiration for the song was his relationship and breakup with Susie Horton,[5] who later married David Ronstadt, a cousin of singer Linda Ronstadt. MacArthur Park, in Los Angeles, California, was where the two occasionally met for lunch and spent their most enjoyable times together.[4] At that time (the middle of 1965), Horton worked for a life insurance company whose offices were located just across the street from the park.[4] In an interview with Newsday magazine in October 2014, Webb explained:
Everything in the song was visible. There’s nothing in it that’s fabricated. The old men playing checkers by the trees, the cake that was left out in the rain, all of the things that are talked about in the song are things I actually saw. And so it’s a kind of musical collage of this whole love affair that kind of went down in MacArthur Park. ... Back then, I was kind of like an emotional machine, like whatever was going on inside me would bubble out of the piano and onto paper.[5]
Webb and Horton remained friends, even after her marriage to another man. The breakup was also the primary influence for “By the Time I Get to Phoenix,” another selection of Webb’s authorship and composition.[4] After his relationship breakup, Webb stayed for a while at the residence of Buddy Greco, upon whose piano the piece was composed and originally dedicated. Greco closed all his shows with this number for the most recent forty years.
Madonna’s version is really bad. I mean, even for Madonna it is bad.
Well, yeah.
In my opinion, the song, “Vincent” was a better product.
Johnny Bravo! Groovy
Meanders is the key word. He seems to have had one thought - the Buddy Holly plane crash - and then filled up the rest of the space with some phrases that seem to have emotional content. You start to get caught up in the emotion, and then you stop yourself and say, "Wait... what?"
Up and coming touring acts are starving to death. You are correct. If they did not like playing music they would have quit long ago.
Country music— to quote Tom Petty (who was referring to the FL-GA line band) is “just bad rock with a fiddle”.
There is formulaic country crap music that literally derives from the same beat and melody lines, graphically represented from the studio tracks of the songs put together in this youtube (warning, they are ALL in the same key and beat pattern with equally idiotic pablum lyrics), and that is the “formula”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vapt5C3yDeY
Have seen that written as “Lennon read a book on Marx”.... then “the quartet practiced in the park” and “we sang dirges in the dark” the day the music died.
Referencing the Beatles, thought to be. As was the satan reference being hendrix. So, there’s that.
It sure sold.
Blinded by the Light written by Springsteen.
Madonna’s version sucks!!
There, I said it.
Where do you guys go and hang that you don’t see local bands playing local venues and getting bigger? Or great bands with loyal followings slowly growing through the ranks? It’s all still happening. One example I can think of currently is Coheed & Cambria.
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