AMERICAN PIE LYRICS POLL UGGHHHHH

I like this song

Tho not as much as "Vincent"

"I know that you're in love with him, 'cos I saw you dancin' in the gym" is a pretty good couplet...

english teachers have a lot to answer for.

-- tipsy mothra, Thursday, 1 November 2007 04:33

;_;

How do you feel about Maddy's version?

Not her finest moment but far from the desecration people usually claim it as. And it is a desecration of the original so she gets points right there.

But I suppose ANY cover of "American Pie" sounds like a desecration.

any version, you mean. including the original.

Madonna's version was a crime against humanity

Damn, 8:31? I had forgotten just how long the damn thing was:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHkT2YfqHE4

And just in case y'all haven't suffered enough:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcokdvY0bFw

I'll bet you people like Weird Al's version.

is it called American Thigh

The chief pleasure of Maddy's version is that you just KNOW her electro wussbeats and slithering all over the video enraged people who really do think that 2/3/59 (or whatever the hell is it) was the day the music died, i.e. people who love Don's original. In fact, that's probably the ONLY pleasure in Maddy's version. But it IS a pleasure.

Best Don McLean story (and Don epilogue) by WFMU funnyman-creator of TV's Monk Andy Breckman:

http://www.wfmu.org/LCD/andy/americanpie.html

Archie Shepp is still alive, last time I checked

Madonna's American Pie vs. TLC's If I Was Your Girlfriend

The tour started like this: we were on the plane. McLean glanced out the window. he said he saw a shooting star. I said make a wish. He said "I did, but it didn't work. You're still here."

It was downhill from there. During the day, McLean complained constantly. He humiliated Ray, our tour manager. He mocked "lesser" singer-songwriters, like Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. At night, he picked up young, woeful-looking Canadian folk groupies and brought them back to his room for what he called "dick autographs."

^^THIS IS AWESOME

I like how "dick autographs" is pretty much the only part of the story that Don's response doesn't address or object to.

Fourth: I never limited my "dick autographs" to only the young, or the Canadian.

more.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

chevy to the levee

but the groupie was dry

This song is what happens when you play madlibs with Dylan lyrics.

Speaking of English teachers, I had to grade a paper last year by a girl who analyzed these lyrics, apparently using a fan page as her major source, and she got into how this song is dense with religious symbolism and all other kinds of shit that some fan with a loose grip on Christian mysticism pulled out of their ass. Basically, she gave this song the sort of reading that only Paradise Lost should be subjected to.

And then I got depressed, because that's the sort of shit that would have blown my mind when I was her age.

Archie Shepp is still alive, last time I checked

Shepp is the son, Ayler was the holy ghost.

THE HOLY GHOST IS RED GRANGE, THE SON IS DICK BUTKUS

THE FUCK YOU THINK 'TOOK THE LAST TRAIN TO THE COAST' MEANS?

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

confused

"Folk groupies" lol:

Jon Landau (Rolling Stone): What was the Simon and Garfunkel groupie scene like?

Paul Simon: Simon and Garfunkel had a peculiar kind of groupie. We had the poetic groupies. The girls that followed us around weren't necessarily looking to sleep with us as much as they were looking to read their poetry or discuss literature or play their own songs.

JL: How did you feel about that?

PS: I think that maybe that was the best thing for me, because to a great degree it embarrassed me to pick up somebody on the road, because it was so obvious that you weren't interested in them. I felt it was insulting. You obviously didn't care anything about the person if you were just picking them up to take them back to a Holiday Inn with you . . .

I wasn't interested in their poetry, either.

Don McLean's "American Pie" has ripped out of nowhere and taken the country by storm both in its album and truncated single versions. It took exactly two weeks to shoot to the top of the charts, everybody I know has been talking excitedly about it since first hearing, and, even more surprisingly, it has united listeners of musical persuasions as diverse as Black Sabbath and Phil Ochs in unbridled enthusiasm for both its message and its musical qualities.

All of which is not so surprising once you've heard it, because it is a brilliant song, a metaphor for the death and rebirth of rock that's at once complex and immediately accessible. For the last couple of years critics and audience alike have been talking abut the Death of Rock, or at least the fragmentation of all our 1967 dreams of anthemic unity. And, inevitably, somebody has written a song about it. About Dylan, Buddy Holly, the Beatles, Stones, Byrds, Janis and others. About where we've been, the rush of exhilaration we felt at the pinnacle, and the present sense of despair. Don McLean has taken all this and set it down in language that has unmistakable impact the first time you hear it, and leaves you rubbing your chin -- "Just what did that line mean?" -- with further listenings because you know it's all about something you've felt and lived through. A very 1967ish song, in fact, in the way it makes you dig for deeper meaning, but not the least bit mawkish.

It opens with a slow, mournful sequence abut reading the headlines about the deaths of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper while delivering papers as a child, then into the chorus: "Bye bye, Miss American Pie/Drove my Chevy to the levee but the levee was dry/Them good ole boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye/And sayin' this'll be the day that I die." Then all at once it rears up and charges through the years in a giddy rush: "I was a lonely teenage bronckin' buck/With a pink carnation and a pickup truck," the "Book of Love," sock hops in the gym and puppy jealousy, and then into the heart of the myth, where Dylan is a Jester "in a coat he borrowed from James Dean," laughing at the king "in a voice that came from you and me."

The halycon days of Sgt. Pepper are brilliantly caught: "The half-time air was sweet perfume/As Sergeants played a marching tune," but suddenly the Jester is on the sidelines in a cast, the stage is taken by Jack Flash ("Fire is the devil's only friend"), and Altamont, the Angels and the despairing resentment the Stones left many fans pass in a dark panorama. Finally coming down to the levee again, where the good old boys are draining the bottles and talking as if it's all over, as they did when the plane bearing "The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost" fell and as they will again and again through the years. It's just the old Calvinist sense of impending apocalypse and perdition, but they're good old boys anyway and we can't resent them because we too "believe in rock 'n' roll/And (that) music can save your mortal soul." Because they're us.

"American Pie" is a song of the year, and its music is just as strong as those lyrics, propelled with special resonance by the piano of Paul Griffin, who played with the Jester when his myth was at pinnacle. If you've ever cried because of a rock & roll band or album, or lain awake nights wondering or sat up talking through the dawn about Our Music and what it all means and where it's all going and why, if you've ever kicked off your shoes to dance or wished you had the chance, if you ever believed in Rock & Roll, you've got to have this album.

- Lester Bangs, Rolling Stone, 1-20-72.

Further reading on
Super Seventies RockSite!:
Single Review:
"American Pie"

Don McLean:
In His Own Words

"American Pie" FAQ

This first album for United Artists is a sensitive, lyrical collection of original material, the essence of Don McLean. "Vincent," a stirring plea for understanding of the work of Van Gogh, appears to be autobiographical in part. FM programmers should hear "Till Tomorrow," "Empty Chairs" and of course the title cut, "American Pie."

- Billboard, 1972.

The title cut is the great novelty song that may be about the death of rock and roll or may be about its refusal to die. The other material here indicates that McLean himself believes the former, but since it also indicates that he couldn't have composed "American Pie" -- he just took dictation from the shade of Buddy Holly, who must be taking some pretty strong drugs up there to make such a mistake -- you might as well judge for yourself. And do so like a real novelty-lover, by buying the single -- unless you're in the market for a song about how nobody understood Van Gogh. C-

- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

Above McLean reviews from http://www.superseventies.com/mcleandon.html

ILX POLL VOTERS OTM

why do people hate this song so much?

"Why do pseuds pseudbash?"