Music may have died but words keep fans enthralled

The music may have died almost 60 years back, but this week’s sale of Don McLean’s American Pie manuscript indicates his generation haven’t lost the cash to happily fork out millions for the memorabilia from their prime.

American singer Don McLean is one of the guest stars in this week's "They Sold A Million" show on BBC-2, Sunday, April 1st. Universal PictorialPress Photo. b/w. p/. 1973 photo. /music /musicians

The music may have died almost 60 years ago but yesterday’s sale of Don McLean’s American Pie manuscript indicates his generation haven’t lost the cash to happily pay millions for the memorabilia from their prime.

The New York auction of notes for McLean’s enigmatic 1971 hit made $US1.2 million ($1.6 million), equal to the then-record price paid in 2010 for John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics for A Day In The Life.

In June last year scribbled notes by Bob Dylan for the lyrics to his 1965 hit Like A Rolling Stone set a new record, reaching $2 million at auction in New York. The working draft for his finished song was written in pencil on a Washington DC hotel letterhead, along with revisions, additions, experimental rhymes and doodles of animals.

Christie’s auctioneers had ­expected McLean’s 18-page manuscript, written in 1970-71 in pencil, ink and typescript, would make ­between $1 million and $1.5 million. In the Christie’s catalogue McLean, 69, explained he released the lyrics to help people understand the true meaning of the song, which ­referred to turbulent upheavals in middle decades of the 20th century.

“It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music,” he wrote in February. Although “the day the music died” was long known to refer to the plane crash on February 3, 1959 that killed rock’n’roll pioneers Buddy Holly, JP “Big Bopper” Richardson and Ritchie Valens, speculation surrounds the meaning behind the six verses in McLean’s original eight-minute song.

“In American Pie things are heading in the wrong direction,” McLean explained. “It is becoming less ideal, less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense. I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015 ... there is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of American Pie.”

The Recording Industry of America and the National Endowment of the Arts named McLean’s song the fifth greatest of the 20th century, behind Harold Arlen and E.Y. “Yip” Harburg’s Over the Rainbow, Irving Berlin’s White Christmas, This Land is Your Land by Woody Guthrie and Respect by Otis Redding.

Born in 1945, McLean was brought up in New Rochelle, New York. He became interested in folk music as a teen, performing for family and friends, and became a keen fan of protest folk singers, the Weavers. He had bought his first guitar, a Harmony acoustic archtop, by age 16 and became friends with Weavers’ singers Erik Darling and Fred Hellerman.

He dropped out of Villanova University in Pennsylvania to move to New York City as a troubadour in 1964. Mentored by folk singer-activist and former Weavers’ performer Pete Seeger, McLean wrote mat-erial for his first album Tapestry while accompanying Seeger on his Clearwater boat trip up the Hudson River in 1969 to raise awareness about environmental pollution.

Recorded during student riots in 1969 in Berkeley, California, McLean had his first album rejected 72 times by labels. Finally released in 1970, he made the US Top 40 Easy Listening charts with Castles In The Air.

McLean recorded American Pie, on May 26, 1971, taking up both sides of a single disc. Also included on his second album, American Pie, the song was first played on radio a month later, on New York’s WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM, to mark the closing of New York concert hall Fillmore East.

It made No.1 on the US Hot 100 from January 15 to February 5, 1972, the longest song to reach No.1, although some stations played only part one of the original split-sided single. WCFL radio disc jockey Bob Dearborn began the tradition of unravelling the song’s lyrics with a published interpretation on January 7, 1972, although many more followed.

McLean’s Vincent, a tribute to Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh, reached No.12 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, while Perry Como had a hit with his Tapestry song, And I Love You So in 1973, but American Pie remained his biggest hit.

Until his interview for Christie’s auction magazine, when asked about the song meaning McLean often replied: “It means I never have to work again.”

The Christie’s catalogue stated it was safe to conclude that references to the king meant Elvis Presley, Helter Skelter referred to the Manson murders, and “the jester on the sidelines in a cast” was Dylan.

While McLean said it took months to find a chorus for his first lines, Bye Bye Miss American Pie, Dylan’s handwritten notes for Like A Rolling Stone show the lines of his famous refrain “How does it feel/To be on your own/ No direction home/Like a complete unknown”. It also included rejected phrases, such as “Al Capone” and “dry vermouth, you’ll tell the truth”.

While Columbia executives ­opposed Rolling Stone’s release ­because it ran for six minutes, after an employee took it to a nightclub where it played all night, DJs agitated to have it put out.

In the rush by baby-boomers to procure pop and rock music memorabilia, a lock of rock king Presley’s hair sold at auction in 2002 for $US115,000, eclipsing $US48,000 paid for a snip of Lennon tresses.

One of the most enthusiastic collectors must be Canadian dentist Michael Zuk, who paid $50,000 in 2011 for the first Beatle tooth sold at auction: he keeps Lennon’s rotten molar in a glass case at his surgery as he attempts to extract a genome to create a Lennon clone.

Originally published as Music may have died but words keep fans enthralled