When “American Pie” was atop the charts, he told me, the questions were incessant to the point of making his life a bit crazy. Because, again, he “didn’t plan anything out.” And it largely came to him in a extended flash of inspiration. I could see how it might well be an irritant not just over time, but especially back when the song was a cultural phenomenon. The “American Pie” inquiries and analyses still swirled about as the ’70s ended: People continued to come up after shows and ask, “Who was the jester?” and such. The young McLean in the hills above Cold Spring, NY, where he started writing “American Pie” Let me repeat that with emphasis: “I didn’t plan anything out. And the way he started explaining the song’s birth reveals a key point: “I didn’t plan anything out. I know because he told it to me decades ago.

I’m not saying that McLean was being disingenuous, per se, when he said that the 18 pages of handwritten and typed lyrics and revisions to one of the most iconic songs in classic rock divulge “everything there is to know” about “American Pie.” But he’s not telling the whole story. And its writer, Don McLean, finally – as headlines blared on CNN.com and in the Washington Post – “revealed” the “last secret” (England’s Daily Mail) behind the ongoing phenomenon of speculating about, analyzing, parsing and deconstructing its text. On April 7, 2015, the working manuscript of the eight-and-a-half minute 1971 song that hit #1 on Janu(and stayed there for four weeks) was sold by its writer for a cool million and then some, fetching “the third highest auction price for an American literary manuscript,” notes its auction house, Christie’s.

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