Originally published in Uncut Take 186 [November 2012], where McLean along with guitarist David Spinozza, bassist Rob Stoner, producer Ed Freeman and engineer Tom Flye tell us the story of this evergreen hit…
Originally published in Uncut Take 186 [November 2012], where McLean along with guitarist David Spinozza, bassist Rob Stoner, producer Ed Freeman and engineer Tom Flye tell us the story of this evergreen hit…
“’American Pie’ is a death song, really,” says Don McLean today. “Friends of mine who’d died in Vietnam were being brought back. There were flag-draped coffins, assassinations. Rock’n’roll and Buddy Holly had saved my mortal soul, as the song says. Holly’s plane crash in 1959 foreshadowed a series of deaths, from my father’s two years later when I was 15, which shattered my life, through to Kennedy’s. I came from a conservative, white middle-class background, and all this destroyed my belief in everything I had been taught.”
Don McLean was a regular on the New York folk circuit in the late Sixties. Taken under his wing by Pete Seeger, McLean released one album, Tapestry, in late 1970, which sold modestly. In March the following year, he debuted “American Pie”, in Ambler, Pennsylvania, while opening for Laura Nyro. Inspired by his childhood memories of reading the news of Buddy Holly’s death on February 3, 1959 in a newspaper, the song’s six verses then went on to deliver a coded history of rock’n’roll, from the optimism of the 1950s through to darkness at the end of the Sixties.
“The whole time we were doing it, we thought it was an album cut, because it was just too long,” remembers bassist Rob Stoner. Despite it’s epic length – 8 minutes 33 seconds – it became one of the biggest hits of the 1970s. “It was a summation of music, politics, life in America: everything,” says McLean.
DON MCLEAN: I was living in a little gate-house in Cold Spring, New York on the Hudson River, and I was upstairs in the room that I used to write songs in. I started singing this slow, opening part that was about Buddy Holly. It was just so pretty. It was like it came in on my radio. And I thought, “God, that’s nice.” For a long time I just had that. Then I made up this nutty chorus that I liked, and it’s really fairly pornographic – you know, “American Pie”. “Miss American Pie…” And then I had this idea start to develop about politics and music, that they flow together, parallel through history. I could definitely see it in the ‘50s and ‘60s. I decided to project that forward and create a kind of rock’n’roll dream.
ED FREEMAN: I had only produced 2 or 3 albums, so I was pretty green. But Don searched me out, on the basis of the first record I had made.
MCLEAN: Ed produced a record called Bird On A Wire by one of my favourite artists, Tim Hardin, and I thought it was the best Hardin album I’d heard. So I wanted Ed for this record. Unfortunately, he did not particularly like what I was doing. And I found him to be a condescending and insecure guy. So we did not get along.
FREEMAN: My taste at the time was much more towards authentic folk music, and I found him to be very commercial and self-consciously poetic. At the beginning, I wasn’t a fan.
MCLEAN: I knew that this guy had something that I wanted, and I was going to get it, but I didn’t have any idea how much bullshit I was going to have to go through.
FREEMAN: The first time I heard “American Pie” he had only written the first verse and the chorus, and I remember saying, “Hey, that could be a hit record.” And then I heard the finished thing, and I realised there was no way in hell that was going to be a hit record.
MCLEAN: He got the rehearsal studio in uptown New York of a guy named Dick Cutler. And wisely, Ed had put together a little group of guys – like Rob Stoner [then Rothstein] on bass. I think he had a piano player and maybe a drummer, and we went there and rehearsed for about a week.
ROB STONER: Our wives were friends, and so Don and I were hanging out socially and jamming. He and I rehearsed and worked up “American Pie”. He was constantly tweaking the lyrics. I thought it was a really great Buddy Holly tribute. The melody is a direct cop from Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too”. It’s the same exact melody and chords! – at least for the first 8 bars. It’s a homage to Holly, in more ways than lyrically.
FREEMAN: Don was not comfortable with the idea of working with seasoned studio musicians. So I put together a band who were not all slick studio players, and took a bass player and a drummer and worked out the song’s arrangement for a couple of weeks.
MCLEAN: That was really necessary for me. But nobody could get “American Pie” even close to right.
FREEMAN: The first verse stayed the way he played it on the guitar. It was my idea to switch it to piano, which I think he objected to.
MCLEAN: Then Ed saved the day by coming up with a piano player called Paul Griffin [who died June 14, 2000], on the day of the session at the Record Plant. I was playing hard, rhythm acoustic guitar. And Paul Griffin heard that guitar, and he started playing gospel piano all over that record, and that’s what made that track happen. Up until that day, it was a disaster.
DAVID SPINOZZA: Paul was famous for playing that way. Paul and I had mostly done black r’n’b dates. At that time, you didn’t get many black or r’n’b musicians who got called in to play on a folk-rock record. We were playing with Aretha – that was our roots. Paul brought a sort of churchy, gospel joyousness to this tune that was about death. He brought out that juxtaposition. It’s a bittersweet song.
MCLEAN: Everything was rocking and jumping, it was everything I wanted. The track itself on the record is live, with all the guys playing. Everybody felt it and just jumped all over it.
SPINOZZA: I remember the playing building in excitement. I thought that we hit on something. I didn’t have a name for it. I couldn’t figure out what genre of music it was. Because Paul was doing his gospel thing over there, and then Don’s acoustic guitar comes in and it goes to another level, and then I come in half-way through on electric guitar. It built very naturally.
FREEMAN: The body of the song was recorded all at once, except for the first verse, which has something like 16 splices. It turned out Paul Griffin was originally a violinist, he’d switched to piano quite recently. He was nervous about the solo, and didn’t really know what to do.
SPINOZZA: I’d done thousands of hours in the studio with Paul Griffin before we did “American Pie”. He was a great piano player.
TOM FLYE: Paul’s a great piano player, but together with Don’s singing, it’s two free-form, fluid things at once. So we took the razor-blade to it.
STONER: You can feel the excitement of the thing coming together – and one of the things that makes it exciting is that people didn’t really know the song. Before the last verse, the track slows down for a second. It’s like the end of “Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands”, when you can just feel the musicians looking at each other – is this the end? There’s a point where everybody’s going, “Is this the place where we stop and he goes into “I met a girl who sang the blues”?” It’s pretty loose, man.
SPINOZZA: Also what was different was that this was a song that started in tempo, went out of tempo, went to what they call robatto, a music term meaning he plays freely, and then all of a sudden goes back into tempo. That was used in Broadway musicals. It was never used in a pop record. Most songs started at a tempo and stayed that way.
FREEMAN: There was one take, the last one, where everybody crowded into the booth to listen to it. We were celebrating, back-slapping. There was a clear sense that this was a classic that would go down in history. But there was no sense that it would be a chart record, because there had never been one anywhere remotely that long.
FLYE: We actually got the whole thing on one side of a 45. We cut it at half-speed. But jukeboxes would have cut out before the end.
FREEMAN: Then we faded it out on one side and faded it up on the other. But the radio stations just played the album, and people went out and bought it.
FLYE: It sold millions of copies in the first couple of weeks.
STONER: You can fill in the blanks about which character you think is what. I mean people are always making such a big deal about it – term papers and theses on the meaning of “American Pie” – but it’s obvious. It’s a didactic story of rock’n’roll up to that point. It’s not very deeply coded.
FREEMAN: I was very aware of what the song was about: the loss of American innocence in the ‘60s, and the horrible, crushing death of the hippie movement. Somebody wrote a letter to Life magazine, two weeks after they wrote about “American Pie”. It was a woman whose husband had been missing in action in Vietnam. And she said that she used to cry and feel sorry for herself until she heard “American Pie”, and it made her realise how much we had all lost. “American Pie” was one of the first pieces of pop culture that acknowledged that there was a wound, that there had been a death. It was a very important song.
MCLEAN: There’s a sinister, dangerous quality to America. There’s a flaw. We’re a behemoth that I felt then was moving in the wrong direction, and I feel now is moving even more in the wrong direction. So all I did in writing the song and finishing it the way I did, was call the direction correctly.
FREEMAN: He played his first Carnegie Hall performance, a few months after “American Pie” came out. And he said, “There are a lot of people who I knew before who didn’t much care about me, and all of a sudden they’re coming up to me and trying to be friendly, and all I can say to you is: keep your distance.”
MCLEAN: When you’re that successful, you get sick of yourself. I cracked up. In the mid-‘70s I finally just snapped, and I started to cry a lot. But I got through it.
FREEMAN: As a songwriter he was running dry. That was his fling with greatness, but it didn’t last.
MCLEAN: It’s a song that replenishes itself, as I sing it now. Because as new things happen around it, it’s always there. All the songs that I play each night lead towards that song.
