If you find yourself around a campfire this summer
There's a good chance that someone is gonna try to start a sing-along of Don McLean's American Pie
Originally released in 1971 the song quickly became a cultural relic thanks to its combination of catchy hooks and enigmatic
lyrics. Though McLean himself has been reluctant to come out with the songs meaning,
it's been the subject of many discussions ever since its release. And many of these analyses have come to the same conclusion
The song is about a crossroads in the history of American society,
culture and perhaps most of all, music. Let's take a closer look
The first verse of American Pie contains the clearest reference and one that serves to give us direction for the rest of the song
The day the music died.
On February 3rd, 1959,
a plane went down near Clear Lake, Iowa. The passengers of that plane were rock-and-roll icons,
Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper
At the time people called the incident the day the music died and many worried that it would be the death of rock and roll
as a movement
The song's narrator recalls this black day and breaks into the chorus, a lament for the innocence lost by that plane crash
The chorus is a nostalgia for the time before Buddy Holly died, a nostalgia for America of
the 1950s. It's laden with American symbols mentioning Chevrolet's and rye whiskey and of course the titular miss American Pie
The symbol of miss American Pie is a callback to
idyllic images of America in the 1950s
with dreams and memories of fresh baked pies and pinup models
These images plunge us into the second verse bathed in nostalgia for a more innocent time
The narrator sings of faith in God and dancing to rock and roll at wholesome high school sarcas
This verse features references to a pair of
1950's hit songs too. The Monotones' 'Book of Love' and Marty Robbins' 'A White Sport Coat and A Pink Carnation'
and while this image may seem perfect on the surface tensions were boiling beneath. At this time many Americans were
disenfranchised by institutional racism and sexism, while America is a country had a shifting role on the global stage
Musically, people were becoming less conservative too. And rock-and-roll was far from dead
We see that, as the next verse jumps us a decade ahead to 1969
Gone are the simple days of high school dances and the Bible, replaced with complex
archetypal figures and power struggles that show the evolution of music over the next decade
The figure that dominates this verse is The Jester who many take to represent Bob Dylan. On the cover of
1963 is The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan. Dylan wears a leather jacket
reminiscent of James Dean and 'Rebel Without A Cause'
But Dylan was to shift away from Dean,
He was a rebel with a cause. As McLean puts it he sang with the voice of the people
Singing protest songs for the youth and the disenfranchised. In doing so he became the face of American music
stealing that crown from the king Elvis Presley
This line features biblical allegory too. It's a crown of thorns, like the one Jesus wore, and it weighs heavy on Dylan
The rest of the verse pans out the music scene building up to 1969
with John Lennon getting into left-wing politics and rock moving into darker more introspective territory
From here we cut back to the nostalgic chorus before diving face-first into the disarray of the late 1960s
'Helter Skelter' is a reference to the Manson murders of
1969. In which Charles Manson believed the Beatles song contained hidden messages
For some this was a dark end to a hippie movement that had seemed so promising and optimistic
The rest of the fourth verse deals with that very movement looking at the way people were trying to push forward
music and thought at this time
The Jester is once again Dylan who got criticized for his electorate shift in
1965, and then got in a motorcycle crash a year later
This nearly ended his life taking him out of the music scene for a time, on the sidelines in a cast
Undeterred bands like The Beatles drove music forward with albums like Sgt pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
referenced clearly
But the sergeant's aren't just a reference to The Beatles, the word also carries double meaning
militaristic connotations. In the mid-60s America was knee-deep in the Vietnam War, which would last almost another decade
And that war revealed a lot about America
Changing the country's perception on the world stage and bringing out
tensions on the home front. At the end of the verse McLean talks about how Buddy Holly's plane crash
factored in. His death revealed the grime and disarray beneath the slick surface of 50s America
The fifth verse brings us to the incident that inspired American Pie. The Altamont Speedway Free Festival
Two years after the roaring success of Woodstock, another free concert was planned. An attempt to recapture that hippy magic
Headlined by the Rolling Stones, the concert turned out to be a disaster. The massive crowd became drunken and disorderly
As did The Hell's Angels who were hired for security. By the time The Stones took the stage at sundown,
it was chaos and a man named Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death after pulling a revolver in the crowd
The fifth verse captures all of this in beautifully symbolic language
It references the Rolling Stone song 'Jumpin' Jack Flash'
while playing up the biblical imagery that has driven the song
One of the altercations during the show happened while The Stones were playing 'Sympathy for the Devil'
something that McLean parallels with his lyrics about Satan
The Altamont concert could be seen as a living representation of American culture. A chaotic dark end to a decade that
kicked off with so much optimism
The sixth verse of the song deals with the fallout of this, with a musical shift from an upbeat jam to a
slow sad lament
The girl who sang the blues could be Janis Joplin
in a reference to the deaths of rock greats like Joplin, Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix that
signaled the end of the decade in an echo of the day the music die. The verse ends on a lasted biblical reference,
which some have taken to reference the assassinations of Martin Luther King, John F Kennedy and Robert Kennedy
However, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost could also be Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper
And this brings us to one final nostalgic chorus
It may seem like a call for a return to the days of miss American Pie
But I don't necessarily think that's the case
The song acknowledges that the idyllic 50s were an illusion and that illusion came crashing down
the day the music died. And while there was conflict in tension and many life's lost throughout the sixties,
it was also a decade defined by change and progress. And of course some of the greatest music ever made
It was a turning point for American culture that still has impacts today as we sit at another
historical crux. And that's why American Pie is such a beloved song
When you break out the guitar and try to sing it at that campfire
You're tapping into a deep history of music,
politics and social change. And you're joining yourself up as another thread in the great web of music history
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