I remember first when I was very young, I don’t think it was even on the radio, it was just a song that everyone knew. We were camping in the summer and swimming—Mom and Dad and brothers–in Lake Michigan and somehow the chorus of this came up and everyone in our family (or was it just me?) sang it and sang it, from the inflation of the inner tubes to the sunning and drying off to the driving back to the campsite. I didn’t know what a levy was, didn’t know what rye was, but I could sing the hell outta that chorus. So there’s one level where this song reminds me of nothing but bright skies and sunburn and Pepsi in glass bottles getting warm too fast.
Then years later, after my parents divorced and a new record player became the centerpiece of our living room (the TV was on another floor entirely, in the basement, thank God), I’d take a break from throwing on 45’s of “Beat It” and “I Love Rock and Roll,” and it turned out that someone in our family actually had this album, so there it rotated, the mysteries of the verses reeling out like psalms. What I’ve heard is that Don McLean hated rock and roll, in truth, and that this was his statement against the undermining of folk in the mid-to-late 60’s. Whatever. Years went by, and during my teens, this song became MY statement against the predominance of dance music in particular and against the flaking away of innocence—mine and everyone else’s—generally. As an added bonus, lines like this were as bitter as anything in the Smiths catalogue: “I know that you’re in love with him / ‘Coz I saw you dancing in the gym / You both kicked off your shoes / Man, I dig those rhythm and blues.”
And since then, the bitter-sweetness of this song has only sharpened. I don’t really much care whether the passing of any musical movement is being mourned here; for me it’s a song of mourning, simply. I plugged it in when I graduated college, when Kurt Cobain died, whenever I moved from city to city. “I knew a girl who sang the blues / And I asked her for some happy news / But she just smiled and turned away.” I still get chills when I hear those lines, and it feels like the whole world is in love with being sad and I’m being encouraged on all sides to join them. But then I remember that someone wrote “American Pie,” that it got diffused a little, that there is no day the music died–not really, not yet, not ever.
