American Pie

[Heorhij]

Dear folks,

What do you think of the famous Don McLean's song, "American Pie?"

I first heard it when I was still living in the old Soviet Union, and back then, I did not understand its lyrics (not that I did not know any English - I just failed to grasp the context and the meaning of the lines...). Later, when I was a young postdoc in the USA of the 1990's, it suddenly hit me like a load of bricks. So much emotion over some really essential moments of our growing up, our "dancing in the gym," our becoming fascinated with the "jester" (Bob Dylan?), with The Beatles, with "the girl who sang the blues" (Janis Joplin?), and with the various others who fascinated us... and eventually with "the three... (we) admire the most..." And this unique mix of the youthful joviality and the  upbeat-ness and the true sadness over something that truly "died" (in that American Pie plane crash or otherwise), and over something about which only "the children screamed, the lovers cried and the poets dreamed..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZszDTZKs_g

http://www.lyrics007.com/Don%20McLean%20Lyrics/American%20Pie%20Lyrics.html

[username!]

I've seen him play it right up the road from my house!

[Heorhij]

I've seen him play it right up the road from my house!

Wow. I never had a chance to be so close to the rock music stars.

However, I once sat at the dinner table with Svyatoslav Richter (in 1974), and he even shook my hand!!!! It really was like being touched by Divine...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sviatoslav_Richter

(The mother of one of my classmates, Zoya Vyacheslavovna Bogomoletz-Snezhkova, was a childhood friend of "Slava" Richter in the days of his growing up in Odessa.)

[Tallitot]

It's long been a favorite of mine. We studied it in my senior English lit class. I once won $50 from a couple of guys in a bar at O'Hare airport betting I could sing the entire lyrics by heart.
However Don McLean has never indicated any particular interpretation of the lyrics; it is all in the ear of the listener.

[Heorhij]

It's long been a favorite of mine. We studied it in my senior English lit class. I once won $50 from a couple of guys in a bar at O'Hare airport betting I could sing the entire lyrics by heart.
However Don McLean has never indicated any particular interpretation of the lyrics; it is all in the ear of the listener.

Yes, that's what I read, too... There are numerous interpretations of his lyrics, but he never "officially endorsed" any of them, nor did he ever offer his own. Ingmar Bergman was this way, too - sometimes even said that he himself did not know, just what this or that part of his film mean.

[Αριστοκλής]

Ah, yes. I remember the evening when this was declared song of the year. Another generation came of age and lamented the loss of innocence.

[The young fogey]

Not to take away from the coolness of McLean's answer but I think it's a touch of remorse from the boomers who'd just destroyed the culture that gave them life. (Years later open nostalgia for it would become socially acceptable.) Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper were part of the 1950s and 'other', early 1960s I like, the vital period that accomplished things. Arguably Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were too, and given the period when McLean wrote, the grief could be about them too.

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