Who exactly was ‘Miss American Pie?’
Songwriter Don McLean says it’s Mad Men’s ‘Betty Draper perfection’
“All roads lead to American Pie,” says Don McLean of the song that made him famous.
He recalls coming up with the phrase at 25, as a struggling singer-songwriter with a head full of philosophy, music and art. “As American as apple pie was the saying. It was some kind of a big American song that I wanted to write, which would be a conclusion for my show and bring all the songs home, which it still does. I can go anywhere I want with American music and come home to that. And it all makes sense.”
Released in 1971 as the title track of McLean’s second album, his emotionally elegiac, lyrically cryptic eight-and-a-half-minute epic spent four weeks at No. 1 in the American singles chart, and is now firmly established as a modern classic. Last month its 69-year-old composer sold the original lyrics at auction for $1.2 million.
His 18 pages of scribblings, scratchings out and alternate verses revealed clues to some of the song’s mysteries. As many suspected, the jester on the sidelines is Bob Dylan, the king with the thorny crown is Elvis, the quartet in the park is the Beatles, helter skelter referenced Charles Manson, “the day the music died” in the opening verse was the 1959 plane crash that ended the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper, while Jack Flash and the Satanic penultimate verse conjured up images of the Rolling Stones’ murderous Altamont Free Festival in 1969.
“The cover of Sgt. Pepper was a subtle inspiration. I was into making collages, black-and-white pictures of many different artists, and then the Beatles would be in colour.”
The song is a kaleidoscopic picture of the effect of Sixties rock counter-culture on the old American dream.
But who, some of us still wondered, was the original Miss American Pie to whom the singer, perhaps reluctantly, bids farewell? McLean’s surprising answer is it’s Don Draper’s ex-wife.
“I had the idea of the prom girl. If you’ve seen the show Mad Men, that Betty Draper perfection: she’s got the hair done, the clothes are always immaculate, she knows all the rules of the social role, that kind of girl. All of a sudden it was ‘ bye’ to a lot of things that had happened before.”
The song mourns the passing of an era while simultaneously affirming a generational shift. “There’s a moral tone to the song, losing some kind of innocence,” McLean acknowledges. “Before the Beatles, America was musically a very conservative country. You can see film footage of people at a baseball game, they all had hats and ties on, and the women were dressed up like they were going to church. That was the America that I started getting interested in musically.”
So now that the manuscript is out does American Pie hold any secrets? There is one line fans still argue over. When he sings “While Lenin read a book on Marx,” is he really referring to the communist revolutionary or is it a coded reference to pop revolutionary John Lennon? “I never talk about that,” insists McLean, sticking to a lifelong practice of refusing to explain. But suddenly he relents, shrugs and smiles, as if realizing it doesn’t matter any more. “It’s actually both at once. There. You’ve got an exclusive.”
To talk to the genial, whitehaired McLean about American Pie is to talk about his life, from the music he listened to on the radio as a boy (“folk, pop, Johnny Mathis, Elvis Presley, The Moonglows, all mixed up, that’s how my head is, the key to my music is the way the charts were when I was 12”) to the death of his father when McLean was just 15 years old.
“He was Scottish and very stiff. My parents were not musical and they were not effervescent people; everything was very quiet. The mu- sic that I played was loud, it used to drive them up the wall. My father died, and that was a tragedy for everybody, but suddenly I didn’t have anybody to stop me from doing what I wanted to do. And more than that, I saw how he spent his life: he was a district manager for a utility and really got very little for it, and I made a vow that I was never going to work for anybody. I was going to find a way to make a living with a guitar.”
He adds: “I’ve never done anything but what I wanted to do with my life. I don’t think too many people can say that. I wrote the songs I wanted to write, for me. I had no idea that American Pie would relate to anybody.
“It changed a lot of people’s lives, I guess,” says McLean. “It certainly changed mine.” From struggling on the American folk circuit for 10 years, suddenly he was world famous.
“There was so much going on that you don’t have time to have any life at all. It’s like a whirlwind, you’re in the centre, the eye of the tornado, but it’s smashing a lot of stuff around you — family, relationships, marriages, friendships — all these things, wooooh, but it’s also sucking people in like crazy, too. It’s a vortex of some sort.”
McLean had more hits during the ’70s but gradually pop fame faded.
“What gives me a lot of happiness is that I’ve touched a lot of artists’ lives with my music.
“That’s all part of my own collage.”
I wrote the songs I wanted to write, for me. I had no idea that American Pie would relate to anybody.
DON MCLEAN