Gloomy Don McLean reveals meaning of ‘American Pie’ — and sells lyrics for $1.2 million

The music died because Buddy Holly merely wanted what every touring musician wants: to do laundry.
Shoved into unheated buses on a “Winter Dance Party” tour in 1959, Holly — tired of rattling through the Midwest with dirty clothes — chartered a plane on Feb. 3 to fly from Clear Lake, Iowa, to Fargo, N.D., where he hoped he could make an appointment with a washing machine. Joining him on the plane were Ritchie Valens and, after future country star Waylon Jennings gave up his seat, J.P. Richardson, a.k.a. “the Big Bopper.” Taking off in bad weather with a pilot not certified to do so, the plane crashed, killing everyone aboard. The toll was incalculable: The singers of “Peggy Sue” and “Come On Let’s Go” and “Donna” and “La Bamba” were dead. Holly was just 22; incredibly, Valens was just 17. Rock and roll would never be the same.

Thirteen years later, Don McLean wrote a song about this tragedy: “American Pie,” an 8½-minute epic with an iconic lyric about “the day the music died.” Now, the original 16-page working manuscript of the lyrics has been sold at auction for $1.2 million.
“I thought it would be interesting as I reach age 70 to release this work product on the song American Pie so that anyone who might be interested will learn that this song was not a parlor game,” McLean said in a Christie’s catalogue ahead of the sale. “It was an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.”
That photograph was always a little bit blurry. At more than 800 words, the meaning of “American Pie” proved elusive even for a generation used to parsing inscrutable Bob Dylan and Beatles lyrics. McLean has said the song was inspired by the 1959 plane crash, but has been cagey about other details.
“People ask me if I left the lyrics open to ambiguity,” McLean said in an early interview, as the Guardian reported. “Of course I did. I wanted to make a whole series of complex statements. The lyrics had to do with the state of society at the time.”
But what state was that? It seemed like the song’s cast of characters — which include a jester, a king, a queen, good ol’ boys drinking whiskey and rye as well as “Miss American Pie” herself — were meant to represent real people. The song includes references to Karl Marx; Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (or, more likely, John Lennon); the Fab Four; the Byrds; James Dean; Charles Manson; the Rolling Stones; the “widowed bride,” Jackie Kennedy; and the Vietnam War.

Left: Don McLean in 1972. Right: McLean in Waterford, N.Y., in 1968. (Photos by AP)

What does it all mean? Just what a song about the day the music died seems like it might be about: the end of the American Dream.
“Basically in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction,” he told Christie’s, as the Newcastle Herald reported. “It is becoming less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right but it is a morality song in a sense.”
As ideals of the 1960s turned into the cynicism of the 1970s, this feeling was widespread enough to send the song to No. 1 in 1972.
“American Pie is the accessible farewell to the Fifties and Sixties,” Guardian music critic Alexis Petridis wrote in the catalogue. “Bob Dylan talked to the counterculture in dense, cryptic, apocalyptic terms. But Don McLean says similar ominous things in a pop language that a mainstream listener could understand. The chorus is so good that it lets you wallow in the confusion and wistfulness of that moment, and be comforted at the same time. It’s bubblegum Dylan, really.” (Perhaps of note: Dylan’s manuscript of “Like a Rolling Stone” sold for $2 million in June, besting McLean’s measly $1.2 million.)
Forty-four years after “American Pie’s” release, McLean, 69, wasn’t much more positive about the state of the world than he was a generation ago.
“I was around in 1970 and now I am around in 2015,” McLean said, as People Magazine reported. “There is no poetry and very little romance in anything anymore, so it is really like the last phase of ‘American Pie.’ ”
Nor was there romance in McLean’s decision to sell the manuscript. He did it for the dough.
“I’m going to be 70 this year,” he told Rolling Stone. “I have two children and a wife, and none of them seem to have the mercantile instinct. I want to get the best deal that I can for them. It’s time.”
Ahead of the Christie’s auction, McLean did offer some advice to all the budding Don McLeans out here.
“I would say to young songwriters who are starting out to immerse yourself in beautiful music and beautiful lyrics and think about every word you say in a song,” he said.
Here are the words of “American Pie” as transcribed by azlyrics.com, the savior of cover bands everywhere. (Note: AZ creatively transcribes what many hear as “whiskey and rye” as “whiskey in Rye.”)
[Intro]
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And maybe they’d be happy for a while
But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver
Bad news on the doorstep
I couldn’t take one more step
I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died
[Chorus]
So bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
Singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Verse 1]
Did you write the book of love
And do you have faith in God above
If the Bible tells you so?
Now do you believe in rock and roll?
Can music save your mortal soul?
And can you teach me how to dance real slow?
Well, I know that you’re in love with him
‘Cause I saw you dancin’ in the gym
You both kicked off your shoes
Man, I dig those rhythm and blues
I was a lonely teenage broncin’ buck
With a pink carnation and a pickup truck
But I knew I was out of luck
The day the music died
[Chorus]
I started singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
Singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Verse 2]
Now for 10 years we’ve been on our own
And moss grows fat on a rollin’ stone
But that’s not how it used to be
When the jester sang for the king and queen
In a coat he borrowed from James Dean
And a voice that came from you and me
Oh, and while the king was looking down
The jester stole his thorny crown
The courtroom was adjourned
No verdict was returned
And while Lenin read a book on Marx
The quartet practiced in the park
And we sang dirges in the dark
The day the music died
[Chorus]
We were singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
Singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Verse 3]
Helter skelter in a summer swelter
The birds flew off with a fallout shelter
Eight miles high and falling fast
It landed foul on the grass
The players tried for a forward pass
With the jester on the sidelines in a cast
Now the halftime air was sweet perfume
While the sergeants played a marching tune
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance
‘Cause the players tried to take the field
The marching band refused to yield
Do you recall what was revealed
The day the music died?
[Chorus]
We started singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
And singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Verse 4]
Oh, and there we were all in one place
A generation lost in space
With no time left to start again
So come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick
Jack Flash sat on a candlestick
‘Cause fire is the devil’s only friend
Oh, and as I watched him on the stage
My hands were clenched in fists of rage
No angel born in Hell
Could break that Satan’s spell
And as the flames climbed high into the night
To light the sacrificial rite
I saw Satan laughing with delight
The day the music died
He was singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
And singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Outro]
I met a girl who sang the blues
And I asked her for some happy news
But she just smiled and turned away
I went down to the sacred store
Where I’d heard the music years before
But the man there said the music wouldn’t play
And in the streets, the children screamed
The lovers cried and the poets dreamed
But not a word was spoken
The church bells all were broken
And the three men I admire most
The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost
They caught the last train for the coast
The day the music died
And they were singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
And them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
Singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die
This’ll be the day that I die”
[Chorus]
They were singin’ bye-bye, Miss American Pie
Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry
Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey in Rye
And singin’ “This’ll be the day that I die”

Justin Wm. Moyer is a reporter for The Washington Post's Morning Mix. Follow him on Twitter: @justinwmmoyer.

Obama Vows Supreme Court Nomination After Justice Scalia’s Death

by CHARLIE SPIERING13 Feb 201629

President Obama reacted to the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia after wrapping up his golf game in California this afternoon.

“Tonight we honor his extraordinary service to our nation and remember one of the towering legal figures of our time,” Obama said, describing him as a “brilliant legal mind with a pugnacious style, incisive wit, and colorful opinions.”

The president made his statement at Rancho Mirage, California.

But Obama quickly vowed that he would nominate a replacement to the Supreme Court and expected the Senate to confirm his choice.

“I plan to fulfill my constitutional responsibilities to nominate a successor in due time,” he said. “There will plenty of time for me to do so and for the Senate to fulfill its responsibility to give that person a fair hearing and a timely vote.”

Obama said he took his constitutional responsibilities “seriously.”

“They’re bigger than any one party,” he added. “They’re about our democracy.”

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Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dies at 79

www.washingtonpost.com

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, the intellectual cornerstone of the court’s modern conservative wing, whose elegant and acidic opinions inspired a movement of legal thinkers and ignited liberal critics, died Feb. 13 on a ranch near Marfa, Tex. He was 79.

The cause of death was not immediately known.

In a statement Saturday, Chief Justice John G. Roberts said: “On behalf of the Court and retired Justices, I am saddened to report that our colleague Justice Antonin Scalia has passed away. He was an extraordinary individual and jurist, admired and treasured by his colleagues. His passing is a great loss to the Court and the country he so loyally served. We extend our deepest condolences to his wife Maureen and his family.”

In the first official notice of Justice Scalia’s death, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said: “Justice Antonin Scalia was a man of God, a patriot, and an unwavering defender of the written Constitution and the Rule of Law. His fierce loyalty to the Constitution set an unmatched example, not just for judges and lawyers, but for all Americans. We mourn his passing, and we pray that his successor on the Supreme Court will take his place as a champion for the written Constitution and the Rule of Law.”

Justice Scalia, the first Italian American to serve on the court, was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1986 and quickly became the kind of champion to the conservative legal world that his benefactor was in the political realm.

An outspoken opponent of abortion, affirmative action and what he termed the “so-called homosexual agenda,” Justice Scalia’s intellectual rigor, flamboyant style and eagerness to debate his detractors energized conservative law students, professors and intellectuals who felt outnumbered by liberals in their chosen professions.

“He has by the force and clarity of his opinions become a defining figure in American constitutional law,” Northwestern University law professor Steven Calabresi said at a Federalist Society dinner honoring Justice Scalia at the 20-year mark of his service on the Supreme Court. He took his seat Sept. 26, 1986.

Justice Scalia was the most prominent advocate of a manner of constitutional interpretation called “originalism,” the idea that judges should look to the meaning of the words of the Constitution at the time they were written.

He mocked the notion of a “living” Constitution, one that evolved with changing times, as simply an excuse for judges to impose their own ideological views.

Critics countered that the same could be said for originalism — and that the legal conclusions Justice Scalia said were dictated by that approach meshed neatly with the justice’s views on the death penalty, gay rights and abortion.

It is hard to overstate Justice Scalia’s impact on the modern court. Upon his arrival, staid oral arguments before the justices became jousting matches, with Justice Scalia aggressively questioning counsel with whom he disagreed, challenging his colleagues and often dominating the sessions.

He asked so many questions in his first sitting as a justice that Justice Lewis F. Powell whispered to Justice Thurgood Marshall: “Do you think he knows the rest of us are here?”

Justice Scalia was just as ready for combat outside the court. He relished debating his critics at law schools and in public appearances, although he sometimes displayed a thin skin.

He tired of questions about his prominent role in the court’s 2000 decision in which halted a recount of the presidential vote in Florida and effectively decided the presidency for Republican George W. Bush. His response to those who raised questions years later: “Get over it.”

Despite his impact on the legal world, Justice Scalia’s views were too far to the right for him to play the pivotal roles on the court that his fellow Reagan nominees — Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony M. Kennedy — eventually assumed.

Justice Scalia was far better known for fiery dissents than landmark majority opinions. One exception was the court’s groundbreaking 2008 decision in.

An avid hunter and a member of his high school rifle team, Justice Scalia wrote the court’s 5-to-4 ruling that held for the first time that the Second Amendment afforded a right to gun ownership unrelated to military service.

“His views on textualism and originalism, his views on the role of judges in our society, on the practice of judging, have really transformed the terms of legal debate in this country,” Elena Kagan said about Justice Scalia when she was dean of Harvard Law School, alma mater to both. “He is the justice who has had the most important impact over the years on how we think and talk about law.”

After Kagan was nominated to the court by President Barack Obama, she and Justice Scalia became friends and hunting buddies — despite their distinct ideological differences and the fact that Kagan had never shot a gun. They went to Wyoming together in 2012 in hopes of Kagan bagging a big-game trophy like the elk, nicknamed Leroy, whose mounted head dominated Justice Scalia’s Supreme Court chambers.

But she shot only a white-tailed deer, which Justice Scalia later laughingly said “she could have done in my driveway” at his suburban Virginia home.

‘You’re not everybody else’

Antonin Gregory Scalia — “Nino” to family, friends and colleagues — was born in Trenton, N.J., on March 11, 1936, and grew up in the New York City borough of Queens. His father, Salvatore, came through Ellis Island at 17; he learned English and became a professor of romance languages at Brooklyn College.

Justice Scalia’s mother, the former Catherine Panaro, was a second-generation Italian American and an elementary school teacher. Not only was Nino their only child, he was the only child of his generation on either side of the family.

The whole extended clan doted on him, biographer Joan Biskupic reported in her biography “American Original,” and expected achievement. “You’re not everybody else,” Catherine would say, according to Biskupic. “Your family has standards, and it doesn’t matter what the standards of [others] are.”

In 1953, he graduated first in his class at St. Francis Xavier, a military prep school in Manhattan, and won a naval ROTC scholarship but was turned down by his first choice of college, Princeton.

A devout Catholic, he attended his second choice, Georgetown University, where he was the valedictorian of the class of 1957. In his graduation speech, he exhorted his fellow students: “If we will not be leaders of a real, a true, a Catholic intellectual life, no one will!”

Justice Scalia then entered Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review and graduated magna cum laude in 1960. That same year, he married Maureen McCarthy, a Radcliffe student he’d met on a blind date.

She, too, came from a small family, but they made up for it, with five sons and four daughters and literally dozens of grandchildren.

“We didn’t set out to have nine children,” Justice Scalia told Lesley Stahl on the CBS show “60 Minutes.” “We’re just old-fashioned Catholics, playing what used to be known as ‘Vatican Roulette.’ ”

He added that the other four sons were relieved when their brother Paul decided to “take one for the team” and become a priest.

The Scalias moved around. After traveling across Europe for a year while he was a Harvard Sheldon Fellow, the newlyweds moved to Cleveland, where Justice Scalia joined the Jones Day firm in 1961.

On the cusp of becoming partner, he left private practice in 1967 to become a law professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

In 1971, he became general counsel to the new Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon administration; the agency spurred development of the nascent cable industry. From 1972 to 1974, he was chairman of the Administrative Conference of the United States, followed by three years as assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal Counsel.

After Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, won election to the White House, Justice Scalia returned to academia as a professor at the University of Chicago law school.

Then Reagan came into office in 1981 and the next year nominated Justice Scalia to the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His name quickly appeared on short lists of potential Supreme Court nominees.

Reagan in 1981 made good on a campaign promise to appoint the court’s first woman with his choice of O’Connor, then an Arizona state judge and former legislator. His next chance to leave an imprint came five years later, when Chief Justice Warren Burger announced that he was stepping down.

The president decided to elevate Justice William H. Rehnquist to the chief’s job, and Justice Scalia and fellow D.C. Circuit Judge Robert H. Bork became the finalists for the opening. Bork was the more experienced jurist and a conservative icon, but the 50-year-old Scalia was almost a decade younger and brought the added political benefit of being Italian American.

Justice Scalia got the nomination. After a testy Senate battle over Rehnquist’s elevation, Justice Scalia sailed through his confirmation hearings and was approved 98 to 0.

Future vice president Joseph R. Biden, then a Democratic senator from Delaware and a stalwart of the Judiciary Committee, later said that his vote for Justice Scalia was the one he most regretted — “because he was so effective.”

Textualism and originalism

Justice Scalia set out immediately to make his views known — and became exactly the justice conservatives had hoped for.

He had been an influential early supporter of the Federalist Society, a group that political scientist Steven Teles called “the most vigorous, durable and well-ordered organization to emerge from [the] rethinking of modern conservatism’s political strategy.”

Reliance on legislative history as a key element of interpreting statutes was once commonplace. But Justice Scalia railed against the practice, saying that only the words of the statutes matter — a view known as textualism. He likened judges’ use of secondary sources such as committee reports or statements made by members of Congress during floor debates to “looking over the faces of the crowd at a large cocktail party and picking out your friends.”

Even though most justices continued to think legislative history was valuable in interpreting statutes, lawyers arguing before the court learned that they

George Clooney Nailed America’s Hate-Speech Problem, Says Business Insider

by BREITBART NEWS12 Feb 20161819

George Clooney, while promoting Hail, Caesar! at the Berlin Film Festival, explained that “hate speech” frequently heard on the campaign trails in American presidential politics is just “extreme voices” that “don’t survive.”

In an interview reported by Business Insiderthe actor commented:

I mean there are some extreme voices out there. I always have to caution people when they watch American politics that we go a little crazy during the political season and it’s a very long season. And the xenophobic, fascist sort of ‘no muslims are going to come into the United States,’ that’s never going to happen, you know, that’s not going to happen in the United States.

That’s not who we are, that’s not who we have ever been, that’s not how this country was formed.

Clooney adds that these voices don’t represent  America, “So you are going to hear some of these louder voices that are extreme, and a much smaller percentage of the country that always come up during these moments, but they don’t ever survive and we get past this.”

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George Clooney Nailed America’s Hate-Speech Problem, Says Business Insider

by BREITBART NEWS12 Feb 20161819

George Clooney, while promoting Hail, Caesar! at the Berlin Film Festival, explained that “hate speech” frequently heard on the campaign trails in American presidential politics is just “extreme voices” that “don’t survive.”

In an interview reported by Business Insiderthe actor commented:

I mean there are some extreme voices out there. I always have to caution people when they watch American politics that we go a little crazy during the political season and it’s a very long season. And the xenophobic, fascist sort of ‘no muslims are going to come into the United States,’ that’s never going to happen, you know, that’s not going to happen in the United States.

That’s not who we are, that’s not who we have ever been, that’s not how this country was formed.

Clooney adds that these voices don’t represent  America, “So you are going to hear some of these louder voices that are extreme, and a much smaller percentage of the country that always come up during these moments, but they don’t ever survive and we get past this.”

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Ben Carson: Black Dependence on Democrats Has Meant ‘Poverty and Broken Homes and Crime and Incarceration’

Stephen Maturen/Getty Images

by DAN RIEHL12 Feb 2016Washington, DC

GOP presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson discussed the overwhelming level of support for the Democrat Party among Black Americans during an interview on Breitbart News Daily interview with host Stephen K. Bannon.

Carson says that relationship, “has yielded more poverty and broken homes and crime and incarceration and it’s completely unnecessary.”

“We need to talk about the effects of out of wedlock birth. How that stops that woman’s education and sends that child into poverty,” he later added.

He also cited how not having a father figure has a deleterious effect on young black man coming up, “so that they don’t have a good appreciation of how to react to authority, which leads to a lot of death, which leads to a lot of incarceration.” He also discussed education and “how you can create your own pathway to success” as not having been emphasized enough within the Black community.

Carson also mentioned faith.

Throwing away faith and family are deleterious to any community and it’s extra devastating on the Black community. And I believe that many people who are trying to cultivate their votes know that and are intentionally destroying those pillars of strength to keep people in a dependent position.

When asked about the harshness of that charge, said Carson, “Well, you look at some of these welfare programs that reward people for having babies out of wedlock …that penalize people who have a family structure. There’s a prime example.”

“In the Black community in this country, there is over $1 trillion in assets. There are less than ten countries in the world that have a trillion dollar GDP. Learn how to turn your own dollars over in your own community a couple times before you send them out to create wealth. Reach back, pull other people up with you – you don’t have to be dependent on anybody else,” he added.

Carson encouraged people to review the policies on his website and insisted that he believes he’ll be competitive in South Carolina and is still in the race to win. The Breitbart News daily interview can be heard below.

https://soundcloud.com/siriusxm-news-issues/dr-ben-carson-on-bernie-hillary-targeting-black-voters

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Machete-Wielding Muslim Man Attacks Israeli-Christian’s Ohio Restaurant, Several Wounded

AP Photo/Kantele Franko

by JORDAN SCHACHTEL12 Feb 20161632

Police have shot and killed a man who allegedly attacked patrons of a Columbus, Ohio, restaurant Thursday night, wounding several people. One of the victims is in critical condition, according to reports.

The suspected attacker is a Somali national named Mohammad Barry, CBS reports. There are also reports that Barry was on a terrorist watchlist.

“Law enforcement is concerned that this incident has the hallmarks of the type of so-called “lone wolf” terrorist attack that they have been working to stop,” the report reads.

The suspect entered the restaurant earlier in the day and asked for the owner. He was then told the owner was not at the restaurant, and he left the building, WBNS-10TV reports.

Thirty minutes later, allegedly armed with a machete, the now-deceased suspect entered the Nazareth Restaurant and Deli at 6:30PM local time, witnesses say.

The owner of the restaurant is an Israeli Christian who formerly lived in Nazareth, Israel, according to reports.

“He came in and started beating up on another man, I thought it was a personal thing. Then he just started down the row hitting everybody; people were bleeding,” a witness told a local ABC affiliate.

A waitress said of the events as they unfolded:

He looked straight at me but he went over to the booths and just started going down the booths. It all seemed to happen in slow motion.

Karan Bass, who was in the restaurant at the time of the assault, said:

He came to each table and just started hitting them. There were tables and chairs overturned there was a man on the floor bleeding, there was blood on the floor… I fell like five times. My legs felt like jelly. I just thought he was going to come behind me and slash me up.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is now assisting with the investigation, policespokesperson Todd Lindgren revealed. The FBI is well-known as the nation’s preeminent domestic counterterrorism agency.

Police Sgt. Rich Weiner said there did not seem to be any “rhyme or reason” for the attack. He did not reveal the name of the suspect and did not explain why the FBI had gotten involved in the investigation.

Micki Zakas, one of the employees of the restaurant, had nothing but good things to say about the owner of the dining establishment.

“Everybody leaves here with a smile,” she told a local NBC affiliate. “It’s a real happy place, he [the owner] has been in business for 26 years, so he’s got a great reputation around here. The restaurant’s got a great reputation.”

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