liz_marcs | Ode to an Unofficial National Anthem

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Ode to an Unofficial National Anthem

Sometimes the strangest songs crop up when I set the media player on random. Sometimes, I don't even realize that I had the song anywhere on file, and sometimes I have no idea how I got my hands on it.

Take the MP3 I have of Garth Brooks doing a live, acoustic cover of 'American Pie.'

First I went, "Bwah?"

And then I went, "Hey, this ain't too shabby. Good job, Brooks."

And then I went, "Wait a second. The audience is singing along with the whole song."

Keep in mind, this is a song that is 8-and-a-half minutes long. Think about that a minute. In Brooks's live version of 'American Pie,' you can hear the audience singing along for 8-and-a-half minutes. And not just the undeniably memorable chorus, but the verses, too. And I don't just mean the beginning and the closing verses, but every single verse.

In that moment I had a realization that bordered on an epiphany. 'American Pie' is one of those songs. You know what I mean, right? It's a song that just about everyone knows. Age doesn't really factor into it, neither does level of education, or region of the U.S. you come from. Hell, even people with only a glancing familiarity with American pop music know this song.

If you're American (or if you've been in America for any length of time), if there's someone standing in front of you with a guitar and a good grasp of the lyrics, you can not only sing along with almost the entire song, you also know what the song's about. You might not get every single reference in the lyrics, but you know damn well that the song is about the death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper in a plane crash. You might not know that the plane crash happened in 1959. You might not know it happened in Iowa. But you definitely know the who and the what happened.

Yet, to say that 'American Pie' is about the death of Holly, Valens, and the Bopper kind of misses the point. 'American Pie' is about growing up, losing your innocence, and realizing that (as Paul Simon once famously wrote in 'American Tune') "you can't be forever blessed."

If 'The Star-Spangled Banner' (our official national anthem) represents what the United States should be, I would argue that here at the dawn of the 21st century, 'American Pie' best illustrates what the United States really is.

This song, which was unleashed on an unsuspecting public in 1971 by Don McLean using his own knowledge of the musical history of the rock 'n roll era, is at its heart a damn cynical song. It starts with hope and slowly sinks into disillusionment. Poppy beat notwithstanding, there is nothing happy about this song. There is no redemption, no moment of coming to terms with loss, no heroic struggle to recapture what was lost.

In short, the saga simply...ends.

And maybe that's the whole point.

'American Pie' merely states what is, couched in terms of popular culture, it's true, but a harsh reality nonetheless. In a way, it makes McLean a prescient kind of bard singing out the history of the United States in the latter half of the 20th century using a very specific conceit.

All 'American Pie' tells us is a history we know (or at least suspect). What we do with that knowledge is ultimately left up to us, the listener. Do we merely accept it? Do we try to turn back the clock to an era that we think is more innocent? Or do we move on, wiser for what we've experienced?

The ultimate irony of 'American Pie' isn't that us notoriously short-attentioned, and short-memoried Americans are familiar with this 36-year-old, 8-and-a-half minute song. The ultimate irony is that even at the time of the song's release, the only person who knew what all of the lyrics meant was McLean himself...and he still ain't talking. As more time lapses between its release on the pop music landscape in October 1971, the more mysterious all those lyrics are to many of us. Yet, we still know at least 90% of those lyrics, we still sing along, and we still get the gist.

'American Pie' is, in short, our Unofficial National Anthem. It'll never be used to open a sporting match, it'll never be played when American athletes win the gold at the Olympics, and it'll never get any kind of official recognition by anyone. Yet, it doesn't make it any less of a national anthem.

Sure, there's room for debate on whether 'American Pie' is or is not such a creature, but what do you call a song that everyone seems to know almost by osmosis?

For a somewhat cobbled-together stab at deciphering the lyrics of 'American Pie,' Wikipedia has a detailed entry.

And while I'm at it, here are a few song downloads: The original studio release of American Pie by Don McLean and the live version American Pie (Acoustic/Live) by Garth Brooks. Note that Brooks's version is missing a a couple of middle verses, but this version still runs 7-and-a-half minutes.

If you're interested in seeing what Madonna did to 'American Pie' when she covered it, here's a video from YouTube. Frankly, I think Madonna kind of missed the whole point of 'American Pie.' As an original song, it would've worked. As a remake? It's iffy at best.

And for the heck of it (and because I can't resist), here's a download of Weird Al Yankovic doing his version of 'American Pie' (with the blessing of McLean, no less) with The Saga Begins (Episode One). Even though the lyrics are about Star Wars, I think Weird Al's version edges out Madonna's by quite a lot.

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I remember when this song came out. (Yes. I am old. Shut up.)

I remember listening to the radio with my older sister. We still shared a room. She was 13, I was 10. This song got played over and over and over on the radio and we listened to it. It's engraved on my memory along with the room, the layout of the twin beds, the bedspreads, the white-and-green plastic case of the radio on our bedside table.

Yes indeed.

The first clear memory I have of this song is riding around with my family on a Sunday drive and this song coming on our crappy radio. I remember it was the Buick Station wagon, I remember we were driving around some wooded road, and I remember that I was probably 8. I also remember that by the end of the song I was humming along with the chorus.

It's weird how I can go ages without hearing it, yet the second those opening bars sound on the radio or in iTunes, I immediately slip into sing-along mode and stay there for the whole song.

It's like it's been carved indelibly into our brains, isn't it?

Kind of like a prayer wheel to... OK, not Cthulu, perhaps, but Someone. *grin* I snagged the original, Garth Brooks, and Weird Al versions.

The first time I can really recall hearing this was... in California, obviously, but I'm pretty sure it was at a church dance or talent show or something. It hooked me right from the start. And it's one of those songs that, despite my evolving tastes in music, has always stayed right up there as one of my favorites. Despite hitting almost none of my usual musical kinks. : )

Hmmm... being that I first heard the song as a college freshman, immersed in the same musical culture Don MacClean drew on, I wonder about the glaring error in the Wikipedia article about "Fire is the Devil's only friend-" the music behind that line quotes Arthur Brown's "Fire" (specifically the "I'll see you burn" phrose).

And after one long drive around the Olympic Peninsula with "The Saga Begins" on repeat I too have line confusion with Weird Al's song...

Julia, yeah, I can sing the original, and have been able to since about a week after it was released :)

I adore 'The Saga Begins.' When I first saw the video, I laughed myself sick. Right after that, I realized that Weird Al cleans up nice. :-)

The Wikipedia entry is interesting, and I think some of the interpretations are...questionable, despite the fact that I'm not tremendously familiar with half the references they're talking about.

Personally, I have a secret suspicion that McLean will go to his grave without explaining 'American Pie' because I suspect it took on a life of its own far beyond what he expected or even intended.

But like I said above: The song has been carved into our brains via radio waves. :-)

I can sing along with the whole song as well. I can sing most of it without the actual song playing.

It was a big thing for my high school theater department.

Ooooooh, now that's a challenge. I don't think I've ever tried to sing this song from memory.

As it is, even with the song playing, I tend to fumble the line right after "Helter Skelter in the summer swelter/the Byrds flew off with the fallout shelter/Eight miles high and falling fast." I think it's because McLean breaks the song's cadence on "fast" and does something a little bit different, which tends to garble the next line for me.

But it is scary, isn't it? I know you're younger than me, and you and fellow your high school theater rats could sing this song from memory.

Well, I do have to shout part of the line "When the players tried to take the field/THE MARCHING BAND! refused to yield"

We had several technicians and chorusters who were in the marching band as well.

But, yeah. Of course, we also had three techies who were obsessed with the Beatles (I still can't listen to them without wincing thanks to it), and we all hit up Ella and Billie a lot.

But the tradition of always playing American Pie before every performance of every show . . . I think that went back for years.

What I really didn't know is that Killing Me Softly is written about American Pie.

Now that entire part of the entry is rife with delicious irony, isn't it? The trivia part I'll definitely trust Wiki on. Like I said, some of the interpretation parts strike me as a little questionable.

My head was saying "I'd never heard" but my fingers were saying "I'd never known". But, yeah. There's a whole bunch of stuff that I don't necessarily take at face value, and truthfully, a lot of it, even if the interpretation is correct doesn't make it *right*. Which, well, is true of pretty much everything ever written.

When Garth did "Live in Central Park" his very special sekrit guest was Don McLean. Garth stood off to the side and watched as the HUGE crowd sang along.

And if you get a bunch of people of a certain age, who play guitar, and they play long enough (I'm talking about ACOUSTIC players, now) eventually they will end up all playing American Pie and singing along.

When my friend Sean and I were playing guitar together he sang the words to 'the Saga Begins' to me and I just about wet my pants laughing.

Madonna should be hanged for even thinking about that song, IMHO. (no fan of Madge's, thank you!)

Maybe, yes, *our* unofficial anthem - I'm old enough to remember "Look up in the sky, high above the north,
there are three new stars brightly shining forth,
they're shining oh so bright, from Heaven high above
Gee, we're gonna miss you, everybody sends their love",

one of those songs that was thrown together and released after the plane crash.

And...what Bruce Springsteen said, on the Storytellers CD, still holds here. The song means what the person listening to it wants it to mean.

That's what makes it such a great song.

That song you linked to is...The lyrics hurt. It comes from the same place that 'Abraham, Martin, and John' comes from. The writer means well, but...damn...please stop poking it with a stick.

Madonna's version falls into the "what was she thinking?" category. I don't have a knee-jerk dislike of her, and I actually like Ray of Light and her earlier stuff before she became and "artiste," but damn, what was the point of this exercise? I'm not saying treat 'American Pie' with kid gloves, but the whole vamping thing she's got going on while a truncated version plays is jarring.

With Weird Al, my brother and I started taking bets that he'd been waiting years to use 'American Pie' for a song. 'The Saga Begins' is a masterpiece of parody in its own right. You know that song took a hell of a lot of work.

I would kill, absolutely kill, to hear the Brooks-McLean duet on this one. That must be something to hear.

But, yeah, I think you're absolutely right. The meaning of 'American Pie' really is left up to the listener and as a result it's just taken on a monster life of its own. McLean is right to stay away from explaining it. At this point, anything he had to say would almost take away the magic of it.

I know I wasn't 10 when the plane crash happened, but my next door neighbor (and baby sitter) was about 13 and she cried for DAYS. She was in love with Richie Valens.

I wonder if you went to the HBO Vaults if they would have the Garth/Don duet. I'll go looking...if I find it, I'll let you know.

But you know, it must hurt to have the FIRST song of your career be the one the defines you for the rest of your career.

My sister and I, since we were teenagers, have had this /thing/ with American Pie. Whenever it plays on the radio, we have to listen to the entire song, and we have to sing along. Even if we've gotten where we're going, we stay in the car till the song ends.

Also, somewhat randomly, when I was in marching band (yeah, I'm a band geek) in college, that song would invariably get played on away trips. We all sang along, of course, and when we got to the line that goes "The players tried to take the field, but the marching band refused to yield. Do you recall what was the deal..." it was shouted at the top of our lungs.

I haven't thought about either of those things in awhile. Thanks for reminding me. :)

Oh, God. I'm glad I'm not the only one who will stay in the car and finish listening to the whole song, even if I'm running late.

The two lines I always sing really loud is: "Oh, and there we were all in one place/A generation lost in space/With no time to start again" and "And as I watched him on the stage/My hands were clenched with fists of rage." I don't know why those two lines always stood out for me, but they did.

But, yeah, 'American Pie' is kind of like that, isn't it? You could go ages and ages not thinking about it and wham you hear it and all those memories come flooding right on back.

If you're American (or if you've been in America for any length of time), if there's someone standing in front of you with a guitar and a good grasp of the lyrics, you can not only sing along with almost the entire song, you also know what the song's about.

I think that if you had someone standing infront of you with a guitar and a good grasp of the lyrics, you can sing-along with almost any song that you can imagine. In fact, it's not necceary for you to have heard the song before, and you can still probably sing along with the guitar-person.

Sure, there's room for debate on whether 'American Pie' is or is not such a creature, but what do you call a song that everyone seems to know almost by osmosis?

A meme. A very potent meme, like "STELA!" or that the majority of the planet knows the plot to "The Wizard of Oz." It might be more similar to Doctor Who, though, in it's cross generation impact and that people might know what it is without ever actually seeing it or understanding it (though the memeage is stronger on the internet than in 4D-Land.)

All 'American Pie' tells us is a history we know (or at least suspect). What we do with that knowledge is ultimately left up to us, the listener. Do we merely accept it? Do we try to turn back the clock to an era that we think is more innocent? Or do we move on, wiser for what we've experienced?

Tying this section to the part of where you say "The saga simpley... ends" this makes sense and is a beautiful turn of phrase. "American Pie" as a saga reflects this view, and I do like this a lot.

But if you look at it a diffrent way, it's less so. If "American Pie" as history, it just reflects the over-all arch of the displine of history. There are no tidy conclusions to history, it just winds along to the place where you have to stop because you've simpley run out of things that have gone before the present to report upon.

In the end, I'm not entirely sure that I think that you're wrong, I just don't think you're... entirely right? To use a really bad metaphor, I think we calcualted the same solution, but we rounded off our answeres diffrently. Whose answer is closer to the calculated answer, I can only guess.

look what I found at Amazon.com

I actually remember the night the music died. I was 12 years old, and I loved Richie Vallens, Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. I remember listening to the radio report of the plane crash, and crying.
American Pie brings that night back to me every time I hear it. I was singing along to it just the other day, as I was driving along in my car..

please tell me that you have a column
or are writing a book

Yes, it's cool if the audience is singing the song; I've got a live version of "The Bard's Tale" by Blind Guardian (something akin to Folk Metal, or whatever that genre is called), and the singer sings, maybe, 10% of the text. And even then, you can hear the audience. (Fun question: Is there another word for audience?)

And thanks for the likns; American Pie is, indeed, a very good song. (Even if it took me ages to understand what McLean sings acoustically.)

The way that Madonna sings 'American Pie' always reminds me of someone I met in Mozambique who could play, and sing, a wide selection of British and American songs but who spoke no English at all. He had learned them phonetically without understanding what any of the words actually meant. Her total lack of any feeling gives the same impression. It's mechanical, emotionless, and utterly dire. Pisses me off more than almost any other cover version except perhaps All Saints' ghastly rendition of 'Under The Bridge', Eva Cassidy's massacre of 'Fields of Gold', and the current UK 'Comic Relief' desecration of 'Walk This Way' by Girls Aloud Vs. Sugababes.

The wiki entry is fascinating. I knew some of the general info, but the specifics -- nowhere near that level. The larger meaning behind the song seems ever more relevant.

haven't heard the Weird Al version (although I plan to once I get home now) but if it's what I suspect it is I can see why it would edge out the Madonna version. I suspect it's all about disillusionment as well.

What do we do when we discover the world isn't the bright, shiny place we were told it was? Sometimes we resign ourselves and accept it, sometimes we get out the polish and rags and get to cleaning it up, and sometimes we look a little to the left or right and see things aren't exactly as we thought they were but they are far from dismal. Each response has it's appropriate time and place. When that is we have debated amongst ourselves as long as there have been people.

I know you're not the biggest fan of the anon. posts, but I had to back you up on this post, good stuff. Also, Weird Al's version has cemented for me his place as an absolute genius in my book and no matter what he does from that moment on he will always have my respect. Except for maybe drowning puppies for fun and profit, that would be bad.
JimboS

I can't recall the first time I heard it, but I can certainly remember the most poignant. My best friend from college invited me home for Thanksgiving our senior year. I'd gone the past two years, but this one was different--her dad had died that September. In my family, Thanksgiving is my parents, my brother and I (now my sister-in-law and not me since they live close and I don't). For my best friend it's a tribe event: cousins, aunts, uncles, grand-parents step cousins, and on and on.

There was nothing definite about the evening, but things were clearly askew from years passed. Her aunt (her dad's sister) had just been diagnosed with the same illness he had so there was a touch of false cheer in the air. I also have a clear snapshot in my mind of my best friend, her younger siblings and her mom all sitting together on the couch and there was a space, like they'd unconsciously left room for their father.

Anyway, we're driving home from the evening, back to her place. Mom at the wheel, 15 year-old sister in the passenger seat, 19 year-old brother in the back with the two of us 22 year-olds. Pretty silent in the car for the first ten minutes of the ride--everybody lost in thought, my guess is about the same thing--when, of course, American Pie starts on the radio. Well, as you'd guess, we all started singing along...to the whole thing. Even her little sister knew all the words.

I don't know, somehow it broke all the tension cause once the song ended life returned to everybody in the care and instead of being silently introspective we were all talking and laughing about the good things that happened that night and "wouldn't dad have gotten a kick out of..."

So yeah...that's pretty much what I think of when I hear American Pie.

Heavy. You ought to try to submit that to a newspaper or magazine.

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Ode to an Unofficial National Anthem

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