When I ASKED THIS...I Was NOT Expecting This Answer! | Professor of Rock
817Don Mclean Shares a big reveal about he classic 70s hit American Pie that will blow your mind. The song that we've all sung together for years has an interesting tidbit from its creator....on Professor of rock.
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Do you believe in Rock and roll, and do you believe that music can save your mortal soul? I do. There was a time when rock and roll was pure and innocent and it went by the name of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, and Bill Hayley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Ritchie Valens These legends churned out feel-good records that truly matched the mood of the nation. You see the 50’s were an era of happiness and commonality. America had just won the war and set the world free from Natzi tyranny. Young Americans were searching for their identity and discovered it in the music coming out of the car radio’s and drive inns. They called this music Rock and roll. Buddy Holly stood out amongst the legends because well, he looked like you and me. Just a smalltown kid, horn rimmed glasses, from Lubock texas who set the world on fire with his music and unlike most…
He actually wrote it. Then just like that, he was taken from us. February 3 1959 the day the music died. Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper were killed in a plane crash. the next four years our nation would lose it’s innocence. That same year Don Mclean was 13 years old. He would see Holly’s death as the beginning of a chain of events that would challenge the hope and purity of a lost era. From that he would write a song that would capture the imagination of the nation like very few in history.
For McLean, the transition from the simple innocence of childhood to the dismal realities of adulthood began with the deaths of his father and Buddy Holly and conclude with the murder of President Kennedy in 1963, which was the start of a more difficult time for America from the Civil rights movement to Vietnam to the deaths of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. At over 8 minutes long, American Pie was the longest song ever to hit no. 1 on the charts At first the label released it in two parts, but DJ’s began playing it in full, because of it’s story. The song is a saga of a dozen years in rock and roll and american society.
Thought Mclean has never fully admitted to the meaning behind the lyrics, the song takes us from his wonder years of the 50s through the whirlwind cultural changes of the 60s and the battle to not let the despair conquer...