DON McLEAN MARKS 55TH ANNIVERSARY OF _AMERICAN PIE

0:04 Hi, you love, don too censure W for see wow for you young? I was how fucked to the day didn't you use it? I started singing bye bye this American Pie drol Machem. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four C Y Radio, And I'm here with our next guest who uh man, I'm very excited about because we're so brain and anniversary. I can't believe it like mixed me feel but uh here we have don McLean.

0:48 How are you? I'm very well, thank you, happy to be here. Man. I can't believe it's been fifty five years of American Pie. I can't either. It's like, you know, my life is groundhog Day. I'm just. Sometimes that's not a bad thing, right. No, it isn't so as long as you own the property and you get paid, all right. It's a bad thing if you don't own it and everybody talks about it and somebody else owns it. There you go. So let me just start off with for those that don't know what led you to this song, For those that don't know the story.

1:30 Well, first of all, for those that don't know the story, they need to see the movie The Day the Music Died the story of Don McLean's American Pie. And it's a documentary movie. It's more than an hour devoted entirely to this one soul and how I wrote it. You can see it on Amazon, you can see it on Paramount Plus, and if you like it a whole lot, you can buy it on Amazon. And I think it's worth having in your collection because it's very detailed. And in this documentary I go into the meaning of the lyrics as best I can, because there were things I just threw in. There was things that meant two things at once. There were all sorts of things. But I was trying to make get the feeling of forward movement in the song through a through a decade, and I succeeded, I think, in doing that. So you know what led me to it was that by the time I was singing with Pete Seeger on the Hudson in nineteen sixty eight, sixty nine, seventy in there, I had already decided that I wanted to do a big song about America, and so that's what led me to it.

3:02 I love it, and you know, he has definitely said the test of time. For sure, people even. Today all you'd. Have to do is mention that song and they know it. There aren't many songs in history that hold that stature. I'm very proud of it, and I'm very happy that I was able to connect myself with Buddy Holly and Richie Allen's and the Big Bopper. I'm very happy that I was able to capture the sadness that I felt as a thirteen year old reading about that event in the newspaper. It stayed with me for years and years.

3:45 So I just want to say that I really didn't know if I was ever going to do anything with it. You know, I just suddenly I did. So that's what happened. Well, and that's usually how it happens, isn't it. Like usually the things that happen in our life or especially in music, they just they just happen. You don't really like folks, Well. You know, most professional songwriters they write songs about, you know, one thing or another, and they do it on a pretty much daily basis. I won't write anything for months and then I'll come out with something. So I'm not like them. I'm not a professional in a sense. I'm sort of a dreamer and I make things up and I have little films in my head. I don't really read music. I do not really read music. I do not read music, and I cannot write it down, so it's all in my head.

4:47 I love that because to me, that makes you a true artist. Like I think a lot of times when it comes to creating an kind art, whether it's writing a song, writing a book, thing like that, you have to be kind of in the vibe and it has to kind of come to you. Like I'm a published author. Why my books it took me six months. It took me six months to write the first half because I wrote the first half in like one day and then took six months off and then finished. Because you weren't ready to finish. It exactly exactly. You can't just if anybody the people that worked on deadlines, with the people that wrote those horrible songs for Elvis in his movies, that's the kind of people they are. Yeah, you know, you don't write something really good unless you really feel it and you grab that feeling. But you know, I've man, I don't know how I've managed to do it.

5:49 I've still managed to make well over twenty studio albums, and there are live albums, and there are compilations with new stuff on there, and they're maybe two hundred songs I've written, and not the usual enormous amount. I mean, but every song matters to me, and I was very careful about the way I use words and the songs that I sing, because that's what I'm going to be remembered for, and it matters. You know, you can't be in a hurry just to do something you know that's no good. Oh absolutely, And you know the thing is too is it's got to come naturally, you know, so you can't really force it to me. And listening to what you're just saying, the first thing popped in my head was quality over quantity.

6:43 You know, Well, there are people out there there, there are musicians who I will not name, who are very successful, who are able to spew out stuff and just always coming with a new album and it really it's it's it's not bad, it's not good. It's just what they do and they have a facility. But I know, I get the sense there's no not really a brain attached to it anymore. It's just, you know, I'll knock out something that I think people will like, and yeah, that kind of thing, and they do, they're very successful. I'm not going to mention who I'm talking about, but there are a lot of there are quite a few very successful substandard songwriters well.

7:48 And I find it also comes with the times, because from the times of when you did American Pie, Okay, I tend to think, my opinion is there was a lot more to being a songwriter or a musician. It's like today they kind of use formulas, they do enough just to get by. I kind of look at as you're the type of songwriter that relates to somebody that's in school that strives always to get a's, and those other people you're talking about, they're happy to just pass the class. Well, you know when the old days in the seventies, now they really are the old days, right. If you walked into the studio, there were a lot of very good musicians there who had been on a lot of sessions and heard a lot of things, and so you're going to be presenting this music for them to play, and you don't want them rolling their eyes. Yeah, you know what I mean. Totally, it was a challenge, you know, to go in the studio and have this stuff. Most all the time I was a big because I was loaded, I had I had my dozen or fourteen songs ready, and they were all really good and different, and so the musicians would look forward to playing on my records because there was a you know, real music, and it

9:19 was different. I love it. And different is a good key word there, because I think that's very, very important that it be different and unique. I think that's another comparison I find today compared to music in the seventies sixties. You know, it's like. Everything was kind of different than now. You find there's so many artists and so many music artists that a lot of them aren't doing the same thing. There's nothing unique. Well, I don't hear anything I can whistle. That's a good that's a good gauge right there. Yeah. If I can't whistle it, it it ain't music. Right that what a great gauge. I'd love that.

10:02 And I don't hear anything. I really don't. I don't even know how kids remember this stuff because I can't whistle it. I could never sing it. But yet they seem to know what they're doing and they are loving it and it's their world and they're entitled to it. Well, you know what, I'm world right, And you know what I've found is by interviewing bands of today is that they have to kind from them, They have to appeal to the attention span of today, which people have the attention span of half of a goldfish. You know. Well, that's what's wrong all across the board, and that's the failure of get me started. Primarily education, which has been watered down into socializing social issues rather than learning your you know, parts of speech and math and memorizing things. Oh my god, the mind is not being asked to do very much, no, you know. I mean we had to have spend forever learning multiplication tables and all this stuff. No, they don't know that now, you know, just look at their phone.

11:19 Listen. I can outdo math in my head of anybody holding a calculator, as most of us from that time in life, you know. And it's like I remember, even my kids, forget my grandkids, even my kids, like I used to upset, They're like, Dad, we need a calculator for school. I'm like, you're not allowed to have a calculator in school. Use your brain. No, the teacher said, it's required for. The Like well, I think the teachers wanted an easier job. Teaching was a very hard job in the old days. Yeah, they worked from the day that a minute they got into the morning until three in the afternoon. They were sweating and working and putting that chop dust all over them and writing stuff all over the board and you know, and all that and grading papers at night. Blah blah blah. Yeah.

12:14 I don't know what's going on now, but I do know that we are dead last in about everything. So yeah, ever's going on, it's not working. And it's terrible that they take art out of schools too, because I think art is a huge part of education. How could you not, like I kind of imagine not growing up with art, you know, whatever form it was in school. I think, if I may say this, I think fizz ed is the most important thing they've let go, because the condition of young people is drastic, and it's bad. They have to be You've got to start climbing that rope to the top of the you know, the gym and doing a hundred pushups and they better started soon and dig into what they're eating. And oh lord, it's just gotten away from us so badly. And that's why so many of our young people now are coming down with the illnesses that were reserved for older folks. But you know, I was thinking about something, you know, going back just one hundred and forty years to the Civil War, right, we put into the Civil War on both sides because it was both of us North and South, millions of young men who were the best condition that a person could be in. And kill them all, and think of

13:44 all the descendants who would be you know, prime physical specimens coming from that group of people. Just in the Civil War. Forget about Korea and Vietnam and all the rest, where we killed so many more of these a very able body, physically able and physically perfect people, leaving behind the ones who were defected. It's like these, especially these wars like Vietnam and all this stuff, like you know, Iran and Iraq which was a disaster, and all these others, we've purposely gone in and removed the best physical specimens from the gene pool. Yeah, for no reason. You know, it's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And you'll never get that back because that has evolved over hundreds of years, you know, to get a person like that that's gone.

14:41 Now I love that you brought that up because I never even thought of that the way you put that, and you're saying, and I'm going, oh my god, that makes so much sense. The people are not And then the idea, you know, of having a no fail kind of an environment in school, You got to fail, you know, you got to have that horrible feeling of being, you know, failing the test, and if it hurts enough, you make sure you don't have that feeling again, you know, and you work a little harder. Well, I think I'm also a motivational speaker, and I believe you have to fail in order to succeed, and you know, you learn from those failures. And also if you're not failing, sometimes you're not really trying. Because sometimes when you try very hard, you fail, and that's how you get to where you need to be. You take somebody like Edison. Let you have like over one hundred failed inventions before he vented the light bulb. Today we wouldn't have light.

15:54 Well, I understand this. You know. It's very hard, I know for me to break into the show business, and I never had any I never had any grand plans for myself. I just wanted to make a living. And I thought, if I was really good, you know, I as a singer, songwriter, performer, guitar player, banjo pick or whatever, that I could you know, learn to perform and you know, make a few dollars in nightclubs and have a little house maybe, And you know, so that was my goal.

16:34 And the funny thing is that so many good things happened to me and I ended up becoming really very wealthy. But there are a lot of reasons why that happened. It wasn't accidental, and it wasn't automatic. It was because of me and the way I did things. But many many of the guys that I knew in the sixties, who were real popular in the folk world, if not in the rock and roll world, ended up homeless or destitute. Yeah, well, so what was it? What was it?

17:15 Do you remember what that moment, I'm sure you do, that moment in time where you caught the bug for music. Well, I always liked singing for people, and I always had I always had a beneficial effect on people when I would sing a song in school or wherever. And I think I just remember it now, and again my memory is faulty because you know, there are lots of other things that happened, but what sticks out in my mind is an age about eleven in nineteen fifty six, is when Elvis really broke through, seeing him on the front of TV Guide with you know, holding the guitar up and he had a red windbreaker and black pants and he had this Martin guitar. It was a a D eighteen. And I looked at that and I said, you know, if I could learn to play that thing, you know, I could do that, you know nice. And it was a very reasonable goal, you know, you know, it wasn't like you had to be a genius technology person or anything, just learn. So but here's the funny thing.

18:41 So many interesting things happened to me. I happened to have in my neighborhood a guy who was the son of the announcer who was on the Dorsey program. So the announcer of the Dorsey program Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and they were the first ones to put Elvis on television. So this guy, the father of this friend of mine, had a sixteen millimeter film of Elvis singing you know, flip Flop fly or whatever the song was on Dorsey and he would put it down a big screen and he would run it and you could see like you could never ever see back in nineteen fifty six, a big screen version of this cat doing this thing. So my friend was also a musician, and I'll tell you a couple of things. So he said to me one day, because I was already now, I was completely in you know, I knew if I could learn to play this thing.

19:50 I had it on my mind just a little bit. This is where I was headed, especially after seeing that huge film. So the son of the same man, his name was Brad. He said, I've got a guitar and I can play. And I said, no, you don't. I don't believe you. We were like twelve, you know. He said, well, come on over to my basement and I'll show you. It's like right out of you know, leave it to Beaver, which is like life. Was really right.

20:31 So we go in his basement and there's this harmony guitar and he said, here's a chord. Play this E chord. He said, now play this chord A and this is a tough one. You use all your fingers B seventh. So I learned the first three chords on the guitar and I walked out of there knowing how to do that. Well, here's the funny thing. Recently, I've reconnected with him. His name is Brad and I've asked him a lot of questions about those days and his life and everything. This is forty fifty years later. And he said he was in the audience when Elvis came on stage at the Dorsey show and he said, you don't know this, but everyone started to laugh. They thought Elvis was a comedian.

21:28 What do you think about that? Wow, Compared to everything else in the world, this cat doing what he was doing was hilarious. Wow. And the audience laughed and he said they thought he was a comedian. That's wild. I never even heard that story about it. Well, you won't ever hear about it. Because right, but he was there. Wow, And think about it, think about the comic aspect to Mick Jagger. Yeah, these people are hilariously funny, you know, Little Richard, you know, Chuck Berry. They're doing their thing.

22:15 It's when they make the records and you start to live with the music they're making that it becomes a serious thing and then life changing. Right, you know, But if you just look at these people. I mean, I remember meeting working with the Jordanaires. I made two albums with them. I took them to England for a TV special. I took them to Carnegie Hall three or four times. I had hit records with them, crying since I don't have you castles in the air. These were hit records. And Ray Walker, who sang in the group, he sang bass. He said, the first time I met Little Richard, his face was painted purple. Now just stand back, and they didn't think about that for a second. A cat with a purple face who was singing tooty fruity, that's not funny.

23:15 I don't know what it is that is. I'm like, think about it my head. I'm like, that's hilarious. But that's how far out these guys were, I mean, and those were the big ones. You know, you're not talking about screaming Jay Hawkins and some of these other guys that were, you know, completely crazy. So it's always been a crazy business, the music business, rock and roll side of it especially, but wonderful. So now is it crazy to you that in twenty twenty seven, Surf Ballroom is creating this life size ron statue honoring you, does that blow your mind or what it?

24:05 Truly? It really does? You know, I'm really it's like I put myself in my own movie. I was a dreamer. Marilyn Monroe said a funny thing she said talking about all the showgirls that she started out with. You know, she said, we all dream, but I dreamed the hardest. And that's a very Marilyn remark, you know, but that's very true. I almost felt like I dreamed my way into having it happen. My mind is important, for sure. Something going on there because I knew exactly who I was, I knew exactly how I wanted to be. I knew exactly where I wanted to go, and I wasn't gonna stay stuck in folk music. I wasn't gonna stay stuck in anywhere. I was going to make my own music and do my own thing, especially on these records that I made. I knew that was the biggest opportunity of all to really fully explore the music that I was hearing in my head, not just with my limited skills as a guitarist or a five string manajo player. So I had my plan and I enacted it, and then it worked, and it all happened, and you know, the Surf Ballroom. They have contacted me a number of times

25:40 and through the years and said, you know, we want to honor you somehow because of your song and what it meant to the legend of Buddy Holly that everyone now calls February third, the day the music died. And you know your music and you did this and we want to honor you and can we do And I said, well, I don't know. And so then I was talking with my friend Zenos for Dakas, who is the sculptor who is the premier sculptor really in the country, and he just finished a ten foot sculpture of Muhammad Ali in Lewiston, Maine, which you can you would see if you google Ali.

26:25 He's a thousand sculptures up all over the world. And he said, I will do it for nothing if you want to, you know, find a home for it. And I said, well, I'll ask Peter Bradley, who's with the Buddy Holly Society, what he would think of asking this Surf ball Room if they'd like that. So they said, yes, no, there we do. There it is. That's how it happened. And listen, I mean. The Buddy Holly Educational Foundation. Like even they're like super thrilled that you're getting this statue because you're so closely taught.

27:05 You know, I found out some things because to me, Buddy looks like a cowboy. You know, he's tall, text you look good in the saddle. He was very pro Texas, you know, he was like, don't mess with Texas type of a guy. I wouldn't have even thought of that. Yeah, he was, though I've learned about that from people. He was very much a Texan and proud of it. And Gully there's it's really hard to imagine anyone more of a babe in the woods than Buddy was. Really. There's a very interesting YouTube conversation with Buddy and Decca Records, which you can call up at some time and listen.

27:56 You can listen to what it's on YouTube, and Buddy is he's been dropped by the label and he's talking to a VP or an important guy. And you can tell this guy is New York. He's sharp, he's a slick operator, and Buddy is not. You know, Buddy is very simple country boy, a genius of course, and it's an interesting phone conversation because Buddy is figuring he's all finished since Decca Records dropped him, and he's asking if he could get the records and sell them in Texas, you know, on the road, and it's, oh, no, no, what about the the other songs that I made that you haven't put out? What's going to happen to them?

28:45 Maybe I can, No, no, nobody, We're gonna put those out later. Of course, he died and then they became number one. But Buddy, if you if you listen to the Chirping Crickets record or the first record or those earlier, really there were just those two or three. He's really playing with the crickets and it's all just very clean, very simple, magical, brilliant, untouchable rock and roll of the first order for the first time ever. Later on he's working with strings and you know, on the Buddy Holly's Story it doesn't matter anymore, and Moon Dreams and Reining in My Heart, Oh my god, these were such beautiful songs he sang. He was such a great singer, and he had these wonderful stringer ranges. Bink, don't think, don't think, don't think, don't think. That's a long way away. From the crickets. So Buddy Holly was very experimental, you know, he was trying new things even though he was only twenty two when he finally took that tour. And he took that tour because his money was being held up from him so he wouldn't receive the money he was owed, and he had a wife with a child on the way, so he had to go on the road and take this cockam amy tour that he took. So it's it's not a good story in that sense. Because he was

30:19 living in New York and writing these songs in his apartment. We all know that now, and they they were gotten hold of by Norman Petty, who did a very good job of putting other instrumentation on those records and making the Buddy Holly Story Volume two, which is a wonderful record. You know, cry and wait and hoping. That's all right? You know all these songs now we're one. Ain't that that makes it tough? Peggy Sue got married and he did. They did a good job on that one. Just a brilliant artist, a brilliant, wonderful, wonderful artist who I don't think was treated very well and who managed to. But you know, none of the great rock and roll stars, and even all of them except for Elvis because he had the great manager, they were all on small, little labels.

31:21 You know. The Everly Brothers are on Cadence Records, was owned by Archie Bleier, who was married to one of the Cordetts, and the Cordets recorded for Cadence. Cadence the Sky must have made an ortionin because the Everly Brothers. Everybody had ever these Brothers records. The albums were magnificent, the records, the recordings of songs. I mean, these guys were right up there with Elvis Presley and they were on this little, you know, diddlely shit record company Cadence, and Buddy was on Brunswick, which was a very low label, discount label, almost with Decca Records. So you know, Little Richard was on specialty records. And you just look at look at some of your hits, you know, and you'll see these crazy record companies that popped up, you know, in order to get this great music out there. But yeah, there were no major labels except for RCA for Elvis Presley, and RCA was like a bank. They made sure there was never an empty seat, not that there would be in an Elvis concert.

32:34 Well, it's amazing, like the life you've lived in this industry and the people you've been around. I don't even know if people realize how iconic that is. And you're one of those icons. Thank you very much. I'm and I'm also a very interested observer that I mean. Right. I remember there was a guy named I'm gonna I'm gonna malign him right now, but his name. He was the head of United Artist Records, and his name was Mike Stewart. And Mike Stewart was importantly guy and he had been the he had been the road manager for the Golden Gate Gospel Quartet, you know, and so he rode manage these cats and he managed to work his way up. And there's this story. My friend Joel Dorn told me. He's there in the office, it's the end of the day and they're bringing in hookers for him to look at. Which one he wants.

33:36 That was the music business. I think that one, that one there, that one's nice. I like her. Yeah, that got on. I don't think that's changed much either. Well, Ben, yeah, but but the truth is out. The cats out of the bag in those days, people were supposedly had morality, but you know it was a morality. I'm not making any judgments, but it's just very funny story. Yeah, totally. Well, I love these stories and I could talk to you all day, and man, it's just amazing fifty five years and I can't wait to see this bronze statue myself when it finally goes up, because man, I don't even know what that would feel like if somebody was making me a bronze statue like that.

34:25 That's that makes it all worthwhile, doesn't it. Well, I've got a wonderful friend in Zenos, who'se who's doing this for nothing. That's how much he wants to see it happen. Wow. And you know, I hope that that other musicians, you know, some of these billionaire artists that are out there that oh, buddy, Holly a lot. You know, we want to put up a few hundred thousand and maybe get some others, get the statues up of the primary people, and that would make it a beautiful thing. And you know a Dr Dion Diona Belmonts, he was on that tour. Waylon Jennings was on that tour, So it could be quite an interesting sculpture garden over the years. If they make an effort to do that in the future.

35:14 They should because that is a great idea. Well, do you have a final words for our listeners, so we don't keep you here all day. No, I'm just very excited about everything I'm doing, and there's so many things. I have two children's books out, one is Vincent, the other's American Pie of Fable. We have the documentary. They're still talking about a Broadway show. Can you see American Pie right up there? And you know all these it's basically the same story that's in the movie about my journey and using a lot of songs of mine. So that's in the works. And there's a company that's affiliated with Sony that put out my last album, American Boys. They're releasing more than twenty of my albums on CD and vinyl. These are albums that I own because I own almost everything. I own all my songs and all my owner control all the albums I've made. So there's a lot of stuff going on for me, and I'm very fortunate and thankful.

36:29 I think it's amazing and artists like you at this stage is still extremely active, extremely relevant, and I thank you for being an inspiration to so many artists through these all these years and all these decades. And thank you for being on the Adventures of Pipe Man. I enjoyed it very much and I get by with a lot of help from my friends. So that's all I have to say. There you go, love it, Bye bye. Hi. This is Don McClain and you're listening to the Pipeman on W four c Y Radio. Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipemin on W for c u I Radio.