McLean wrote“American Pie,” an eight-and-a-half minute acoustic epic that would become one of the most celebrated and debated songs of all time.
Sixty years ago this Sunday, just after 1 a.m., a plane carrying three rock ‘n’ roll stars and a pilot crashed into a frozen field north of Clear Lake, Iowa.
The impact killed all four immediately, changing the course of music for decades to come.
Across the country, a 13-year-old paperboy unfolded the next morning’s headlines to read words that would leave him devastated.
Buddy Holly, J. P. “the Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens died hours after striking a final note at the Surf Ballroom.
The news crushed singer/songwriter Don McLean.
“I was crazy about Buddy Holly,” McLean, age 73, told The Des Moines Register, which is part of the USA Today Network. “I was way into Buddy Holly. Something about him, really… he was my favorite. I listened to his records all the time.”
Twelve years later, McLean took pen to paper and delivered “American Pie,” an eight-and-a-half minute acoustic epic that would become one of the most celebrated and debated songs in popular music.
Buddy Holly died 60 years ago in a plane crash along with Ritchie Valens and The Big Bopper.| SHNS photo / Courtesy MCA Records, AP/File
The song opens by transporting listeners back to McLean’s 1959, to an America before the Beatles invaded Ed Sullivan and Vietnam War protests took over city blocks. “A long, long time ago,” he described it.
It’s in the first verse that he coined the Iowa crash with a name that would stick for decades to come.
“Something touched me deep inside the day the music died …”
Leading into the 60th anniversary of “the day the music died,” the Register spoke with McLean about Buddy Holly, the song’s legacy and if he’ll one day return to the Surf Ballroom.
