I met a girl who sang the blues/ And I asked her for some happy news/ But she just smiled and turned away: Janis Joplin OD’d October 4, 1970. While sergeants played a marching tune: The Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”Īnd as I watched him on the stage/ my hands were clenched in fists of rage/ No angel born in hell/ Could break that Satan’s spell/ And as the flames climbed high into the night: Mick Jagger, Altamont. With the Jester on the sidelines in a cast: On JDylan had a motorcycle accident that kept him laid up for nine months. Elvis and Connie Francis (or Little Richard)? John and Jackie Kennedy? Or Queen Elizabeth and consort, for whom Dylan apparently did play once? Dean’s coat is the famous red windbreaker he wore in Rebel Without a Cause Dylan wore a similar one on “The Freewheeling Bob Dylan” album cover. The Jester sang for the King and Queen in a coat he borrowed from James Dean: ID of K and Q obscure. Them good ole boys were … singing “This’ll be the day that I die”: Holly’s hit “That’ll Be the Day” had a similar line.

(I love the Internet.) No room to reprint all the lyrics, which you probably haven’t been able to forget anyway, but herewith the high points:įebruary made me shiver: Holly’s plane crashed February 3, 1959. For the rest we turn to the song’s legion of freelance interpreters, whose thoughts were most recently compiled by Rich Kulawiec into a file that I plucked from the Internet. Not much to go on, but at least it rules out the Christ imagery. And McLean goes on, painting his picture,” blah blah, segue to record. The Stones and the flames in the sky refer to the concert at Altamont, California. The court jester he refers to is Bob Dylan. The most important one is the death of rockabilly singer Buddy Holly in 1959 for McLean, that’s when the music died.

But he explained some of the specific references that he makes. Straight Dope musicologist Stefan Daystrom taped the following intro from Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 radio show circa January 1972: “A few days ago we phoned Don McLean for a little help in interpreting his great hit ‘American Pie.’ He was pretty reluctant to give us a straight interpretation of his work he’d rather let it speak for itself. Don McLean has never issued an “answer key” for “American Pie,” undoubtedly on the theory that as long as you can keep ’em guessing, your legend will never die. If you can’t clarify the confused, certainly the pinnacle of literary achievement in my mind, history (e.g., the towering rep of James Joyce) instructs us that your next best bet is to obfuscate the obvious.

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