Category: Don McLean

The Day The Music Died

I feel as though I “knew” Buddy Holly. I’ve owned and listened to his songs by him and the Crickets


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and also through the cover versions by the Beatles (Words of Love), Linda Ronstadt and lots of others. Little wonder that Paul McCartney snatched up the rights to Buddy’s songs. I also saw the The Buddy Holly Story with Gary Busey in the lead.

I felt as though I was familiar with Richie Valens,


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between the Los Lobos cover of La Bamba and the movie La Bamba with Lou Diamond Phillips.

I have little feel, though, for The Big Bopper. I know that his son had him exhumed under some bizarre paranoid theory that the Big Bopper survived the plane crash but was shot and killed going for help. But other than the one slightly randy hit Chantilly Lace, he’s a mystery.

Of course today mars the 50th anniversary of the deaths of these three musicians in an Iowa plane crash. I was alive but too young to remember the event first hand.

At the end of my 35-year high school reunion, someone had everyone stand around to sing. I had no idea what it’d be. Turned out to be American Pie, which I thought was kind of weird, in as much as it came out after we all graduated. Some people knew some parts, misremembered others. Here are the lyrics, along with one interpretation of same, not all of which I ascribe to. And here’s Don McLean singing it. I saw him in the late 1970s – I’m thinking in Dutchess County, NY, around Poughkeepsie – and of course he HAD to perform it. I wonder if he ever tires of it?
LINK.

ROG

ROG

My Musical Obsessions

For a time, I was pretty obsessed with the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside”; I blame the French. Actually, I blame my friend Deborah who lives in France. She turned me onto the Ricardo Montalban and Esther Williams version of the song that appeared in the 1949 film Neptune’s Daughter. Subsequently, I learned that Red Skelton and Betty Garrett reprise the song in the same film.

The Montleban-Williams version was recorded, but it was not the first one released. That honor went to Dinah Shore and Buddy Clark, one day before Margaret Whiting and Johnny Mercer, and BOTH of those recordings charted on the same day.

One of the best versions was done by Louis Armstrong with Velma Middleton. The story of the Satchmo version can be seen here.

What reminded me of all this was a version of the song on Coverville by Zooey Deschanel & Leon Redbone from the Elf soundtrack.

Also on the Coverville Annual Holiday Cover Show was Mele Kalikimaka/Waters Of Babylon by The Priestess & The Fool. The first song, of course, is the classic Hawaiian-sounding song by Bing Crosby with the Andrews Sisters. The second, though, is a song by Don McLean, the “American Pie” guy, originally called Babylon.

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Initially, I thought: “what a bizarre segue!” Babylon is based on Psalm 137, scripture most pastors I’ve known dreaded preaching about, as it’s depressing as hell. BTW, Psalm 137 is also the source of Rivers of Babylon by the Melodians from The Harder They Come soundtrack.

But the I began rethinking my objection to Babylon. Though it’s not very “Christmasy”, one of the earliest events after the birth of Jesus in Matthew 1 and 2 was the slaughter of the innocents, ordered by King Herod in Matthew 2:16-18, not unlike the events around Moses’ birth. Maybe the musical segue is not so strange after all.

The great thing about blogs is that it lets me obsess, then ideally, release it.

ROG

ROG
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