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Some people say the "Miss American Pie" part refers in part to a romance Don McLean had with a Miss America pageant candidate. Unlikely. More likely is that he has feminized 50's rock music here, the fact that it's a virgin (Miss) form of music that's as American as apple pie.
The Chevy is a symbol of the American spirit. So too is rock 'n' roll. McLean may well have driven a Chevy in his youth as well. The Levee refers to a bar where McLean and his buddies hung out in New Rochelle, N.Y., drinking beer and listening to rock 'n' roll. It went "dry" when it went out of business. Keep reading to see what happened next (a nice pun is coming).
"Them good ol' boys" were Don and his buddies hanging out at the levee, at least on level one. The "whiskey in rye" refers to what happened when the Levee closed down: Don and his buddies had to drive over to Rye, N.Y., just across the river from New Rochelle. This has been documented by direct interviews with Rye residents (by me).
A play on Buddy Holly's signature song, "That'll Be the Day." American Pie has many levels of meaning, but one of the primary motifs is that it is a tribute to Buddy Holly.
Prologue
- A long, long time ago I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.
- And I knew if I had my chance that I could make those people dance
- And maybe they'd be happy for a while.
- But February made me shiver with every paper I'd deliver.
- Bad news on the doorstep, I couldn't take one more step
- I can't remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride,
- But something touched me deep inside the day the music died.
This very important line establishes one of the personal motifs that runs through the song: that of Don McLean growing up. He takes us back to the fairy tale mysticism of youth. From this innocent start, we will see not only rock music become contaminated, but also McLean growing up. "That music" is the early rock 'n' roll, symbolized by Buddy Holly's music.
Here he shows us his dream: to be a rock performer. Later, we'll see how that dream worked out.
The wistful underlines his nostalgia motif. Here he tells us how temporal the joys of youth are: "for a while."
Buddy Holly died in a plane crash on February 3, 1959. Don McLean was indeed a newspaper delivery boy in his youth so he may well have heard of Holly's death by reading it in the papers he was delivering. Of course, the shiver indicates the cold of a February morning in New Rochelle, N.Y., but more importantly, the chill that spread through McLean's heart when a boyhood hero passed away.
Further development of the death of Holly and its impact on McLean. "I couldn't take one more step" probably indicates that his attempts to become a performer were halted then.
"The widowed bride" is Maria Elena Santiago, Buddy Holly's bride of less than a year. She was Puerto Rican and they married in secret.
"The day the music died" is not a single day in history. The music, like some cartoon character who spins and gambols 5 minutes before actually keeling over, took a decade to die. But the death of Holly on Feb. 3, 1959 marked the beginning of that slow death which the song will now chronicle.
So...
Verse 1
The song now begins to chronicle rock 'n' roll after Holly's death. This verse is about the Teen Idol period in the early 60s. The Monotones say "The Book of Love." Holly joins this early 60s song with rock's religious roots. This song is an epic poem as well as an allegory. An epic is a long poem of heroic proportions. Usually the deities are involved. Here we see God on the side of good rock McLean speaks positively about a number of songs and performers throughout the 60s.
Probably just a further connection between rock and the church, the place many rock historians say the music sprang from. Holly sang in his church choir. He was a Southern Baptist. Perhaps this is why McLean includes the line"If the Bible tells you so" which comes from a children's church song, Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.
More of the same.
Reference to the slow dance music of the early 60s.
It's important to identify the pronouns in this song. The I is McLean. The You is the youth of America (and could also be a person memory of a love lost in McLean's youth), and the Him is the Teen Idol. The Teen Idols of this period included Fabian, Bobby Rydell, Frankie Avalon. Here we see McLean lamenting the passing of his kind of music into this trite drivel.
The sock hop is depicted here. In the second half of the line, McLean lets us know that this wasn't his kind of music. He likes the R&B of the 50s.
A reference to "White Sports Coat," a song by Marty Robbins. It is possible McLean really was driving a pickup truck himself, but the key ingredient here is that he was lonely because his music was out of style.
I started singing...
Verse 2
The ten years is the 60s. McLean is looking back at this decade as he writes the song in 1970. "Moss grows fat on a rollin' stone" alludes to Dylan's song, "Like a Rolling Stone." McLean here is saying that the music, by 1969, had gotten totally stale (his pun with the aphorism, A rolling stone gathers no moss, reveals this).
The time period he's referring to now is NOT the 50s, but the early Dylan period. This verse is about that period which overlapped the Teen Idol music a little and stretched up to the British Invasion.
The jester is Bob Dylan as will become more evident as we go along. The coat is a red windbreaker he wore on an album cover which looked like the same one James Dean wore in the movie, "Rebel Without a Cause." The king is probably Elvis because Elvis shows up two lines hence. The queen is hard to say, maybe the actual Queen of England for whom Dylan is reported to have performed. I couldn't confirm this. Some say it's a reference to Connie Francis but I'm skeptical.
Dylan sang Folk Rock...the voice of the people, particularly the young people.
Elvis, the King, looked down in 1958 when he was drafted into the army. While there, the field was wide open for a new king. Dylan tried to be it, but he stole the crown, didn't rightfully earn it. The "throny crown" is another connection of rock 'n' roll with religious symbols, this being the crown Christ wore at his crucifixion.
The courtroom is the record-buying public, the music consumers. Dylan was not pronounced the new king during this interim period between Elvis' disappearance from the music scene and the arrival of the Beatles.
Here come the Beatles. John Lennon, coupled in a pun with the founder of communism in Russia, Vladimir Lenin, is getting his social message going while the quarted, the Beatles, practice in Europe (the park). Practice will soon be over when the Beatles arrive on the shores of American Pie.
McLean is sorrowful as he watches the death (dirges) of simple rock music and the death of his youth continue its work.
We were singin'...
Verse 3
Verse 3 could be entitled, "The British Invasion." While McLean has nothing against the Brits, he does show this to be a further evolution of rock ' n' roll away from its American roots. "Helter Skelter" was perhaps the Beatles most heavy metal song. McLean uses it to symbolize both the Beatles arrival in America and the social climate of the mid-60s. The Byrds, another British group, sang song with messages pertaining to nuclear war.
The Byrds hit "Eight Miles High" is reputed to be the first significant drug song. The Byrds denied that it was promoting getting high, but whether true or not, McLean uses this song to show that simple rock was now filling up with covert messages, a further contamination.
Grass means marijuana. Landing foul probably points at all the rock 'n' rollers who got busted for drugs during this time period. The players are the rock musicians. Using a rugby or soccer metaphor, he shows them trying to move the music to other areas.
Dylan got in a motorcycle accident in the mid 60s. The cast is both real and figurative: his career was plummeting at this time.
Now the half-time air was sweet perfume while the sergeants played a marching tune
A clear reference to Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles 1967 album that changed rock 'n' roll forever. It was the first theme album, the first to put lyrics on the cover, the first to use synthetic sounds. It had no hit singles, another new concerpt in album production. It had proported hidden messages, mostly drug messages in songs like "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds (LSD). McLean liked it (sweet perfume).
All the youth got into this album. They didn't get the chance to dance because the Beatles had now pushed rock music away from its dance roots. They use orchestras. They wrote long, slow songs with ponderous rhythms.
The rockers (players) tried to wrest the mantle of rock's leadership from the Beatles, but they simply would not go away. They were the dominant influence on music throughout the middle 60s.
What was revealed? Tough call. Maybe the drug messages. Maybe all the thing mentioned in this analysis so far. Maybe the splitup of the Beatles, which will be alluded to in the next verse.
We started singin'...
Verse 4
The "one place" is Woodstock. The generation is the young people. "Lost in space" means burned out, mainly by drug use. The year here is 1969.
McLean says the innocence is gone now. The splitup of the Beatles marks the final gasp of music's innocence.
"Jumpin' Jack Flash" is a Rolling Stones song. Here Jack refers to Mick Jagger, the Stones lead singer. The candlestick just about has to be Candlestick Park in San Francisco, the place where the Beatles played their last concert together. There is another possibility here: I have read that the Stones, prior to their disastrous Altamont concert, played at Candlestick Park and during the performance Jagger took off his jacket in a frenzied moment and beat on the stage saying, "I am your sacrifcie." I cannot confirm this however, and I fear I may have mixed up some incidents. At any rate, the Beatles are dead; the Stones and their ilk are in control now.
The devil is simply the evil force that is destroing the fun dance music of the 50s that McLean loved. The fire is a reference to the bonfires which were built during the open air concerts the Stones held in California. The Stones, attempting to duplicate some of the Woodstock experience, offered free concerts to their fans. But violence broke out and the Stones, worried about their own safety, hired a group of Hell's Angels bikers to guard the stage for them at one such concert at a speedway in Altamont, California. Fans rushed the stage during the concert, one was stabbed and died while the Stones played on. It's said, though not confrimed, that the song they were playing at the time of the stabbing was their new hit, "Sympathy for theDevil." Whether this is true or not, McLean uses this event and this song to frame the rest of this verse and his theme of the final death blows to rock 'n' roll.
Him is Mick Jagger. The stage is the stage in Altamont. McLean is plays very cleverly with the song "Sympathy for the Devil" by doing what the character of the devil did in that song: being there when bad things happen.
It's obvious by now that the "angel born in hell" is the Hell's Angel who did the stabbing.
Again, the bonfires are shown. The sacrificial rite would parallel Jagger's cry of "I am your sacrifice" if that is indeed what he said. (Somebody help me out on that one.)
Satain, the foe of good old American Pie, is happy for he has totally destroyed rock 'n' roll at this point in 1969. The music was contaminated by teenybopper-ness in verse 1, social messages in verse 2, drugs and the British onslaught in verse 3, and now violence in this verse.
He was singing...
Verse 5
The "girl who sang the blues" is Janis Joplin who, in a hotel in London in 1969 died in her own vomit. McLean asks her, "Is there any hope for our music?" He includes her because she is a blues artist.
She died. This is McLean's eulogy for her
The sacred store is likely the record industry. It is now 1970. McLean has his music ready at last
"The Man" was common parlance for the recording industry. Don's style of music, particularly this song, just wouldn't play. It was too long (over 8 minutes), too folksy, and too late.
"The children" are the protestors. They screamed in particular at Kent State where four were gunned down by the National Guard. "The lovers" are the hippies, their movement of peace and love dead. "The poets" are the songwriters of that period in general, and Simon and Garfunkel in particular, who had recently penned and crooned, "Bridge Over Troubled Waters." This verse is about the troubled waters in American society.
With the 60s coming to a tumultuous end, music had no answers to the problems of itself and of the youth culture that fed on it.
There can be no doubt that, at least on one level, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost refer to Buddy Holly, Richie Valenz, and the Big Bopper (Sonny Richardson), who died on that fateful morning in an Iowa cornfield. However, they are merely symbols for all the heroes of 50s rock 'n' roll: Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and others.
Elvis has left the building. Buddy Holly is no more. Rock 'n' roll is over, at least in its original form. And Don McLean can only watch them go and sing, "Bye-bye, Miss American Pie..."
They were singin'...
Look at the full text explanation of other verses of the song:
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