Don McLean's "American Pie" has ripped out of nowhere and taken the country by storm both in its album and truncated single versions. It took exactly two weeks to shoot to the top of the charts, everybody I know has been talking excitedly about it since first hearing, and, even more surprisingly, it has united listeners of musical persuasions as diverse as Black Sabbath and Phil Ochs in unbridled enthusiasm for both its message and it musical qualities.
All of which is not so surprising once you've heard it, because it is a brilliant song, a metaphor for the death and rebirth of rock that's at once complex and immediately accessible. For the last couple of years critics and audience
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alike have been talking about the Death of Rock, or at least the fragmentation of all our 1967 dreams of anthemic unity. And, inevitably, somebody has written a song about it. About Dylan, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Janis and others. About where we've been, the rush of exhilaration we felt at the pinnacle, and the present sense of despair. Don McLean has taken all this and set it down in language that has unmistakable impact the first time you hear it, and leaves you rubbing your chin–"Just what
did that line mean?"–with further listenings because you know it's all about something you've felt and lived through. A very 1967ish song, in fact, in the way it makes you dig for deeper meaning, but not the least bit mawkish.
It opens with a slow, mournful sequence about reading the headlines about the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper while delivering papers as a child, then into the chorus: "Bye bye, Miss American Pie/Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/Them good ole boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye/And sayin' this'll be the day that I die." Then all at once it rears up and charges through the years in a giddy rush: "I was a lonely teenage bronckin' buck/With a pink carnation and a pickup truck," the "Book of Love," sock hops in the gym and puppy jealousy, and then into the heart of the myth, where Dylan is a Jester "in a coat he borrowed from James Dean," laughing at the king "in a voice that came from you and me."
The halcyon days of Sgt. Pepper are brilliantly caught: "The half-time air was sweet perfume/As the Sergeants played a marching tune," but suddenly the Jester is on the sidelines in a cast, the stage is taken by Jack Flash ("Fire is the devil's only friend"), and Altamont, the Angels and the despairing resentment the Stones left many fans with pass in a dark panorama. Finally coming down to the levee again, where the good old boys are draining the bottles and talking as if it's all over, as they did when the plane bearing "The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost" fell and as they will again and again through the years. It's just the old Calvinist sense of impending apocalypse and perdition, but they're good old boys anyway and we can't resent them because we too "bel
