As McLean reveals in the documentary, his mention of the “marching band” actually refers to the military-industrial complex, while “sweet perfume” was his euphemism for tear gas.

The burgeoning singer-songwriter carried on with his professional music aspirations, eventually channeling his pain and grief from both events into “American Pie” while working on his second album.īut the song goes far beyond those two moments, using “the day the music died” as a metaphor for “the loss of American innocence,” as Matthew Leimkuehler wrote for the Des Moines Register in 2019. It hurt me.”Īs a teen, McLean delivered newspapers he also suffered from bronchial asthma, which often kept him home from school and made him “a lonely teenage broncin’ buck,” per the song’s lyrics.Ī few years after the plane crash, McLean suffered another loss when his father died. “I was in absolute shock,” he says in the film. When the 1959 crash took the lives of some of his favorite musicians, McLean was 13 years old. “This film was a concerted effort to raise the curtain.”

“I told Don, ‘It’s time for you to reveal what 50 years of journalists have wanted to know,’” says Spencer Proffer, the documentary’s producer, to the Guardian’s Jim Farber. It also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the at-times strained process of rehearsing and recording the song, which radio stations were initially reluctant to play because it was so long. The 90-minute film includes archival news clips, interviews with musicians like Garth Brooks and Brian Wilson, dramatizations by actors and footage of McLean visiting the last place Holly, Valens and Richardson played before the crash. The Day the Music Died, now streaming on Paramount+, offers a line-by-line breakdown of the song’s lyrics, which are packed with cultural references and phrases that are open to interpretation, while also exploring the broader cultural significance of the catchy, mysterious tune. Though fans and journalists have long tried to make sense of every word, McLean has mostly remained silent about the true meaning of the song or specific lyrics-until now.

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