AS WITH many other allusive pieces of writing, like The Waste Land, the effect is more to do with the creation of atmosphere, evoking several images at the same time, than a simple 'a-means-b' relationship. However, a few things can be said with assurance. The most important thing to remember is that the song isn't simply about the death of Buddy Holly, although that is certainly the theme of the first verse. After that, the song offers a chronological account of American youth throughout the sixties, focusing on the latter years of that decade. There are several references to specific individuals, some more obvious than others. So, for instance, the Jester is Bob Dylan, the line 'with the Jester on the sidelines in a cast' a reference to the motorcycle accident that temporarily halted his career. The King is Elvis Presley (of course), the Queen I'm not sure about. The Quartet are the Beatles, hence the previous line's 'while Lenin read a book on Marx' (McLean pronounces Lenin as 'Lennon') and the park is Candlestick Park, San Francisco, where they played their last live concert (another 'day the music died.')
Jack Flash, unsurprisingly, is Mick Jagger, as is the 'Satan' (an allusion to the Stones' Sympathy for the Devil) later on in the verse, which seems to deal with the Altamont concert, where the group's Hell's Angel bodyguards (hence 'no angel born in hell/Could break that Satan's spell') stabbed to death a young black concertgoer named Meredith Hunter.
'A girl who sang the blues' is Janis Joplin, and 'The Father, Son and Holy Ghost' refers both to the three singers who died on Buddy Holly's plane (Holly himself, Richie Valens and J P Richardson, the Big Bopper) and to the three most prominent assassination victims of the sixties, Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy and JFK.
The song's non-musical allusions are rather less straightforward. However, I would say that it alludes to events including the Charles Manson killings ('Helter Skelter/In a summer swelter' - the Beatles' Helter Skelter was the song that inspired Manson's family), the Vietnam War ('the Sergeants played a marching tune' - a reference to Sergeant Barry Sadler's gung-ho Ballad of the Green Beret), anti-war demonstrations including the 1968 riots at the Democrats' Chicago convention ('The players tried to take the field/The marching band refused to yield'), and Woodstock ('there we were all in one place').
Overall then, American Pie paints a picture of the sixties, linked by a number of 'days the music died' from Buddy Holly's death, the singer's teenage romance, Candlestick Park, Chicago 1968, Altamont to the decade's uncertain end. It's one of the first songs to deal with the death of Sixties optimism, and one of the most effective.
David Cottis, Cardiff
