IT’S AS EASY AS ‘PIE’
Singer Don McLean explains exodus from NRA convention
A half century after Don McLean released his monster folk-rock hit “American Pie,” that music is still making him smile.
McLean, fresh off a headline-grabbing pullout from last month’s National Rifle Association convention, said that singing “American Pie” still satisfies him, and that he still sees generations of Americans “lost in space.”
“My theory was that music and politics influence each other,” McLean told the Daily News, reflecting on his 1971 smash single. “It’s a very simple theory. And I see it working today, just as it did then.”
McLean, whose cryptic nine-minute song about a society at the crossroads is still popping up plenty on radio airwaves, took his theory for a test drive after the shooting of 19 schoolchildren in Texas.
The 76-year-old songwriter led an exodus of politicians and performers from the lineup card for the NRA’s yearly meeting, which launched in Houston three days after the Uvalde massacre.
McLean, a political independent who is not a member of the NRA, was asked to perform at the gun rights’ group’s convention last year before the event was canceled, he said. The performance got pushed back to this spring.
“And then this whole horrendous thing happened,” he said of the Uvalde shooting. “And I became aware of that and instantly said, There’s no way I could ever do this. Because it would be in terribly bad taste to do this. And it would also show a callous indifference to the horror of what happened there.”
He said his exit had a domino effect. Larry Gatlin of the Gatlin Brothers dropped out. Larry Stewart of the country band Restless Heart jumped ship. And Lee Greenwood, known for “God Bless the USA,” slipped off the performance list.
McLean said he thinks the wave led the country music world to ask a question: “Do we really want to be connected with this if their position is that they don’t want background checks and they want to continue to sell these horrible assault rifles?”
The Uvalde horror and the racist rampage in Buffalo that left 10 people dead 10 days earlier were both carried out by teenagers with assault-style rifles, authorities said.
President Biden called for an assault weapons ban after the shootings, but the move is a nonstarter for Republicans in the Senate, where a more modest measure expanding background checks passed Thursday.
“If these men in Congress and the Senate were to look at what this man, this boy, did with this gun to these children, what they did to their faces and their bodies — if they’re able to see that and vote to allow these guns to continue to be sold, there’s something wrong with them,” McLean said.
He said his politics are a mishmash drawn from both major political parties and that America’s politics are characterized by a certain “insanity” that he tried to work into “American Pie.”
The song describes Lenin — or was it Lennon? — reading Karl Marx, while a “quartet practiced in the park.” Many of the lyrics are absurdist or contested, and some may be rooted not far from New York City.
McLean was born in New Rochelle in Westchester County, where, according to legend, there was once a bar called The Levee that may have inspired the core of the song’s chorus: “Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry — them good old boys were drinking whiskey and rye.”
Or was it Rye, a city near New Rochelle? For his part, McLean has said the song does not refer to a Levee bar in New Rochelle.
But he has sometimes played coy about the song’s much-analyzed lyrics.
“There’s a lot of things about that song: There’s my life going on,” he said. “There’s the life going on in the country. And then there’s this story that I’m creating with these characters that means several things at once.”