In the above video, McLean performs the nearly nine-minute song live at the BBC in 1972. Released only two years after the decade had ended, “American Pie” marks the first inkling of 1960s nostalgia, paving the way for Happy Days, American Graffiti and Grease. Though McLean has always claimed that except for the first verse of “American Pie,” the rest of the song’s lyrics are pure poetry, references to the 1960s are blatantly obvious, from allusions to icons like Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin to dark events like Altamont and the Charles Manson murders that signified the end of the era. Eleven years later, a singer-songwriter in Cold Springs, New York, poignantly wrote about the tragedy in the intro to his magnum opus “ American Pie,” dubbing it “The Day the Music Died.”Ī 13-year-old paperboy at the time of the plane crash (“But February made me shiver/With every paper I’d deliver”), Don McLean was devastated over Holly’s death he later said that the fallout from the event “created a sense of grief that lived inside of me, until I was able to exorcize it with the opening verse of ‘American Pie.’” “The Big Bopper” Richardson and Richie Valens plummeted to their deaths as their plane crashed in the fields of Clear Lake, Iowa. A long, long time ago - 60 years ago today, to be exact - Buddy Holly, J.P.
