American Pie
Don McLean
Don McLean’s “American Pie” has some of the most confounding lyrics to ever hit the top spot on the Billboard charts. The eight-minute, twenty-seven-second tune is packed to overflowing with oblique references and metaphoric images that have inspired university theses and fervent barroom dialectic.
One thing is certain — “the day the music died” is a reference to February 3, 1959, the date of the plane crash that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (The Big Bopper). Beyond that, the meaning is hazy. McLean offered no help, telling Life magazine’s P.F. Kluge in 1972, “I can’t necessarily interpret ‘American Pie’ any better than you can.”
For a quarter of a century, McLean has steadfastly refused to break the tightly coded lyrics. But the tune could be an apocalyptic vision about the death of music’s redemptive powers and the “we shall overcome” optimism of the flower-power generation. Or maybe it is about the death of rock and roll itself subsequent to Holly’s passing. Or perhaps it is about rock and roll’s refusal to die. The lyrics can have as much meaning as you are willing to grant them, or none at all, depending on where you sit in the great “American Pie” debate.
The roots of the song go back to 1959 when McLean was a thirteen-year-old paperboy. “February made me shiver/With every paper I’d deliver” refers to the chilly winter morning in his hometown of New Rochelle, New York when he delivered the sad news that Buddy Holly had been killed. McLean later admitted that Holly was the first and last person he had idolized as a kid.
The chorus, with its refrain “Bye, bye Miss American Pie,” is conjectured to refer to the death of the apple-pie-in-the-sky American dream, although one internet source wonders whether the “Miss” allusion has a beauty-pageant connection. It has also been submitted that the Beechcraft Bonanza, the red-and-white, four-seat light airplane that crashed on February 3, 1959, was called the American Pie.
“This’ll be the day that I die” is a plain reference to Buddy Holly and his 1957 hit “That’ll Be the Day,” a song title that was inspired by a quote from the John Wayne film The Searchers.
From here on in, McLean muddies the waters, piling pop-culture references on top of one another fast and hard. A longtime fan of early rock-and-roll radio, McLean cribs lines from his favorite tunes to flesh out his epic poem. “Did you write the book of love?” cites the Monotones’ 1958 hit “Book of Love.” “If the bible tells you so” might quote 1955’s “The Bible Tells Me So” by big-band singer Don Cornell.
“You both kicked off your shoes” refers to high-school “sock hops,” so named because dancers had to remove their shoes to prevent damaging high-school gym floors with their street shoes. “I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck/ With a pink carnation and a pickup truck” sounds like a reference to Marty Robbins’s 1957 hit “A White Sport Coat (And a Pink Carnation).”
No critical history of rock and roll would be complete without a nod to Bob Dylan, and “American Pie” doesn’t disappoint. “When the jester sang for the King and Queen” refers to a Martin Luther King rally, attended by John F. and Jackie Kennedy, at which Dylan performed. “In a coat he borrowed from James Dean” likely refers to the red wind-breaker Dean wore in Rebel Without A Cause. Dylan wears a similar coat on the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan.
The line about “Lennon reading a book on Marx” seems to allude to John Lennon and his growing political awareness in the late 1960s. “I met a girl who sings the blues” probably refers to Janis Joplin who died from a heroin overdose just as the 1970s began.
Verse four opens with “Helter Skelter in a summer swelter,” an obvious reference to the Beatles’ song Charles Manson mistakenly took to be a warning to Americans of a racial conflict that was “coming down fast.” “The birds flew off with the fallout shelter/Eight miles high and falling fast” could have something to do with the Byrds and their 1966 single “Eight Miles High.”
In the homestretch, things get even more ambiguous. “And there we were all in one place” is probably referring to Woodstock. “And as the flames climbed high into the night/ To light the sacrificial rite” seems to allude to the Kent State tragedy where student demonstrators where shot after setting fire to military buildings. “And in the streets the children screamed” may be a comment on the flower-power protests and the death of 1960s idealism.
The song closes with what seems to be a religious analogy (McLean had studied in several Catholic schools): “The three men I admire the most/The Father, Son and Holy Ghost.” But it is more likely a reference to Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens. Or, alternatively, as is sometimes suggested, it may allude to JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. “They caught the last train for the coast” is undeniably a reference to death.
The symbolism doesn’t end with the lyric sheet. “American Pie” uses studio technology to represent the evolution of rock and roll. The song starts in monaural and is gradually boosted into stereo, illustrating the change in recording techniques in the rock era. Full stereophonic sound is reserved for the last chorus.
Although the song was reviled by critics (the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called it a novelty song, rating it D plus), it was an immediate hit in 1971, selling seventy-five thousand copies a week for several months before hitting the top of the charts in January 1972. The song was so celebrated that it even inspired another Number One hit. Singer Lori Lieberman saw McLean perform “American Pie” at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, and the next day, she told songwriters Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox about McLean’s moving rendition of the song. They took her experience and turned it into “Killing Me Softly With His Song,” a Number One hit for Roberta Flack in 1973.
In recent years, the enigma surrounding the lyrics to “American Pie” have become a source of amusement for McLean. In 1996, he teased that he was considering starting a 900 phone line to explain the song (and to help pad his bank account). Once, when asked to analyze the lyrics, he joked to a reporter that it meant that “I don’t ever have to work again if I don’t want to.”
Bruce Goes to the Library: Bruce Springsteen based “Darkness on the Edge of Town” on Tom Joad’s last speech in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Ron Kovic’s Vietnam tome Born on the Fourth of July (later a movie by Oliver Stone) inspired Springsteen to pen “Born in the USA.”
Mother and Child Reunion
Paul Simon
A chicken and egg dish from a Chinese restaurant in New York City was the unlikely source for Paul Simon’s first solo hit record. The soft reggae rhythms of “Mother and Child Reunion” took Paul Simon to the Top Five for the first time without his sidekick Art Garfunkel.
Near the end of Simon & Garfunkel’s run at pop stardom, Paul Simon found himself moving away from the pop/folk formula that had fueled their biggest hits. Simon had been listening to ska, the up-tempo dance music of Jamaican dance origin that emphasizes the offbeat rather than the Westernized onbeat. This reversed beat was extremely popular in Jamaica during the first half of the sixties, producing the first wave of homegrown Jamaican pop stars.
The final album of S & G’s golden years, 1970’s Bridge Over Troubled Water, was to have included a ska track, “Why Don’t You Write Me.” But it didn’t turn out the way Simon had hoped, so it was scrapped. When he got the chance to record a solo album, he decided to take another run at the world-beat rhythm. He booked the Dynamic Sound Studio in Kingston, Jamaica — the same studio that can be seen in the Jimmy Cliff film The Harder They Come. Now all Simon needed was a song.
While having supper at New York’s Say Eng Look Restaurant, Simon came across an elaborate chicken and egg dish called Mother and Child Reunion. Starting with the poultry dish’s name, he crafted a tale about a “sad and mournful day” — the day he lost his “little darling” to a car accident. In actual fact, the little darling was a beloved pet dog that had recently been run over and killed. It was the first death he had experienced pers
onally. He said that at the time, he couldn’t remember a sadder day. The lyrics for his proposed ska tune came directly from that incident.
Arriving in Jamaica, he was told by his band of hired musicians that they didn’t play ska anymore. Now they played reggae. “What does that sound like?” Simon asked. The band cranked up and introduced Simon to the repetitive bass riffs and offbeats of reggae music. He quickly wrote a reggae arrangement of his new song and rehearsed the band. “It was a good band,” Simon told Giles Smith of Q Magazine in 1993, “a lot of ganja smoked.” Later, many of his hired hands would go on to join reggae pioneers Toots & The Maytals.
Simon’s first foray into musical globe-trotting was warmly received. Reviewing the eponymously titled album in the Village Voice, Robert Christgau gushed, “I’ve been saying nasty things about Simon since 1967, but this is the only thing in the universe to make me positively happy in the first two weeks of 1972.” “Mother and Child Reunion” hit Number Four on the Billboard charts in February 1972.
The Say Eng Look Restaurant has since taken Mother and Child Reunion off the menu, but the chef will still whip up this exotic dish given twenty-four hours’ notice.
Henry Gross claims to have written his 1976 hit “Shannon,” the story of a dear-departed pet dog, in only ten minutes. He threw in the falsetto vocals as a tribute to Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Bad, Bad Leroy Brown
Jim Croce
Jim Croce was the living embodiment of the singer-songwriter. A writer of heartfelt tunes, he drew from his own life experiences to craft the melodic narratives that took him to the top of the charts. His first Number One, “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” was based on a real person.
Jim Croce started his career in music as a disc jockey at the Villanova University campus radio station. In the mid-sixties, he got caught up in the performing side of music, playing guitar in rock bands in the Phillie area. Never really a rocker, he soon found himself in New York’s Greenwich Village. Croce spent the Summer of Love playing guitar in folk clubs such as The Bitter End and Cafe Wha? He and wife Ingrid released one album of their songs, 1969’s Approaching Day, to a tepid response. Discouraged by the failure of the record, they moved back to Pennsylvania where he took a job as a truck driver.
Continuing to write songs, Croce would soon meet the man who inspired his first big hit. Yearning for a stable career, Croce joined the Army, going to school to learn how to become a telephone lineman. While stationed in Fort Dix, New Jersey, he met Leroy Brown. Brown wasn’t cut out for army life nd only lasted for about a week before going AWOL. Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, Brown returned at the end of the month to collect a paycheck. He was taken away in handcuffs and placed under military arrest. “Just to listen to him talk and see how ‘bad’ he was, I knew I was going to write a song about him one day,” Croce told Bob Gilbert and Gary Theroux, authors of The Top Ten.
Croce’s experience as a truck driver gave him a good knowledge of engines and the inner workings of vehicles. He put this to good use during his lean years, scavenging junkyards in search of spare parts for his “$29 cars.” Each of these junkyards would have a guard dog with “an axle tied around their necks or an old lawn mower to hold ’em or at least slow them down.” He incorporated that image into “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
Blending both these experiences, he created an indelible image of a badass that would eventually come to life on the radio. An accident with a sledgehammer had damaged one of his hands, forcing him to develop a unique way of playing guitar. Nonetheless, he always wrote on acoustic guitar. Once he had completed “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” and five other tunes, he contacted his old university friend Terry Cashman, now a record producer in New York. Cashman and partner Tommy West thought the songs had potential and invited Croce to the Big Apple for a recording session at the Hit Factory.
There they recorded the demos that would land Croce a deal with ABC Records. “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” wasn’t considered polished enough to be included on the debut album Don’t Mess Around With Jim although it yielded the hits “Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels)” and the title track. Eager to re-create the success of the first album, the same team was assembled to cut 1973’s Life and Times. While gathering material for the new disc, Croce pulled out several songs left over from the initial sessions.
Cashman and West liked “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” but they made some suggestions to improve the tune. On Croce’s demo, the song was a straight acoustic number with a shuffle beat. The producers felt it would work better on piano, so they lifted the distinctive piano vamp from the 1958 Bobby Darin hit “Queen of the Hop” to open “Leroy Brown.” Croce liked that idea, but he put his foot down when they asked him to change the lyrics. They thought the “meaner than a junkyard dog” line was hard and crass and didn’t belong in the song. Croce disagreed, arguing that it was the tune’s most memorable phrase. Fortunately, the line was saved.
ABC released Life and Times in February 1973 to favorable critical response. One writer called it “perfect commerciality,” while another called it “a relief from post-hippie confessionalism.” “One Less Set of Footsteps,” the initial single release from the album, only reached Number Thirty-Seven in March 1973. Croce would have to wait until July of that year to score his first Number One with “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown.”
With a Number One single and a best-selling long player on the charts, Croce suddenly had a high profile. Another cut from Life and Times, “Time in a Bottle,” was used as the theme for She Lives, a television movie of the week starring Desi Arnaz Jr. and Susan Hubley. The exposure the film gave the song convinced ABC to release it as a single. It went to Number One in December, but Croce would not live to see its success.
On September 12, 1973, the night of the television movie’s broadcast, Croce finished his third album I Got A Name. A week later, he flew to Northwestern Louisiana University in Natchitoches to give a concert. After the show, a chartered plane was waiting to take him and the band to their next gig seventy miles away. The light aircraft crashed on takeoff, killing Croce and five others including guitarist Maury Muehleisen. Jim Croce was just thirty years old. ABC mined his existing albums for posthumous singles, placing “I Got a Name,” “Time in a Bottle,” “I’ll Have to Say I Love You in a Song” and “Workin’ at the Car Wash Blues” in the Top Forty.
Today, complex sound-effect loops are produced with the aid of samplers and computers. In 1973, when Pink Floyd was recording Dark Side of the Moon, it took some elbow grease to get the job done. Recording the opening rhythmic cash-register sequence for “Money” was a lengthy process involving several feet of reel-to-reel tape. Recording the sound of a bag of 50p coins being dropped to the floor on one set of tape loops, the cash register and paper tearing (from a sound-effects album) on others, David Gilmour cut and pasted the long loops of tape, skillfully manipulating them to play in 7/4 time.
Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room
Brownsville Station
Anyone over the age of thirty will remember the summer of 1974 when Cub Koda’s band, Brownsville Station, ruled the radio with “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room.” From its opening guitar riff and spoken word introduction — “How you doin’ out there? Did you ever have one of those days where it just seems that everybody’s on your case, from your teacher all the way down to your best girlfriend?” — the song positively drips with attitude. It’s an anthem to teenage rebellion from a band who were punk long before punk meant bondage pants and spiky hair. Brownsville Station were brash, loud and proud.
“Smokin’ ” is two minutes and fifty seconds of rock-and-roll posturing. “It’s a good simple rock-and-roll song,” said Koda. “When you see what it was up against at the time on the charts, it really stuck out. It was different. It was straight-ahead rock and roll at a time when there wasn’t a lot of that out. There was a lot of hippie stuff, and there was certainly all types of big-hair pop at the time.”
The inspiration for the song dates back
to Koda’s pre-adolescent days in Michigan. Every Friday night, his parents would drop him off at the Clinton Theater “so they could go out drinking.
“When we were eight or nine years old,” said Koda, “me and my buddies would swipe some of our old men’s cigarettes and go downstairs into the boy’s room. They had a little hole in the wall where they had this Chase and Sanborn coffee can to stick your butts in. We’d be down there puffin’ away, actin’ like tough guys, and you could hear the theater manager Frank “the Crank” Mendez coming up the stairs after our asses. He knew something was up. This guy sounded exactly like Edgar Kennedy, the guy who played the cop in the Little Rascals. He started every sentence with the word ‘Say.’ ‘Say! What are you kids doing down there?’ ‘Nothing Mr. Mendez,’ we’d say, stuffing the cigarette can into the hole. We’d get the faucet going and sprinkle water all over the place to cut down on the fumes.”
“Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room” was written on the recommendation of record company executive Doug Morris. “He would throw out song titles at me and say, ‘Go ahead, see if you can write a song about this,’ ” remembered Koda. “It would be some ridiculously outrageous title like ‘They Call It Teenybop, But the Money’s FM to Me.’ ” Morris proposed the title “Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room,” and Koda, with bassist Michael Lutz, banged out the tune in half an hour.
The song made it all the way to number three on the Billboard charts. “ ‘Smokin” was just another cut on the album,” said Koda. “There were other things we wanted to release as 45s and did, preceding that, but [‘Smokin’ in the Boys’ Room’] took off on its own.”
Who Wrote the Book of Love? Page 10