The Day the Music Died

In the early morning hours of 3 February 1959, an inexperienced pilot lost the horizon and unintentionally crashed a single engine Beechcraft into a snow covered corn field near Clear Lake, Iowa killing all four souls on board, including himself.  If you know anything about anything, you know that this fateful event ended the lives of three musicians – J.P. Richardson, Ritchie Valens and Buddy Holly.  If you know even less than that, you likely know that this day has come to be known as the day the music died as coined and memorialized in Don McLean’s early 1970s hit American Pie. 

J.P. Richardson was a Beaumont, Texas DJ, an Army veteran, and by all accounts a loving husband and doting father.  Musically, he was effectively a novelty act however and if not for the ill-fated events mentioned above you would probably not know his name (and might not anyway in all reality).  His death, though tragic in every conceivable way is not the stuff a legend makes.

Ritchie Valens was / is an icon in the Latino rock ‘n’ roll community.  He influenced and has been covered by artists as obvious as Carlos Santana and as diverse as the Ramones and MxPx.  I want to be careful not to negate that legacy, but be honest; if you hadn’t watched that shitty Lou Diamond Phillips movie in the late ‘80s would you know his name?  Valens should be celebrated because he gave hope to a still marginalized segment of the American population, not because he won a coin flip with Waylon Jennings and died in a corn field as a result.

Buddy was by far, the most prominent of the three.  I won’t bore you right now with the particulars of his life or music because quite honestly you should already have them committed to memory.  Suffice to say that his significance in the lexicon of rock ‘n’ roll is of a singular and unequaled fashion.  His shadow is indeed long.

Don McLean’s song has never been fully explained and nobody really knows for sure what the artist truly intended and that is entirely by his design.  I’ve always imagined it as a metaphor for what he saw his country going through at the time, during his life.  As much as I’m capable of, I get it.  The 1950s, at least from a white, middle class perspective were apparently a helluva lot of bubble gum and sock hop nonsense or whatever and this calamity was the first that forced the collective to acknowledge an actual reality.  Intellectuals have debated AP’s cryptic lyrics for years and even in the least progressive of circles, the song is regarded as little more than a vehicle to carry McLean’s thesis of America’s lost innocence to a deaf ear.

In his magnum opus, McLean refers to them as the three men I admired most, the father, son and the Holy Ghost…

I can’t put myself in his mental state at the time he wrote those or any other words, nor can I know what it felt like to be his precursor self; a thirteen year old paperboy folding newspapers in New Rochelle, New York and seeing a headline recounting the night before plane crash.  Between those two points in time however – barely a decade, American life had certainly taken a well documented turn.  The bubble gum and sock hops of his youth, the American ideal as it were had been replaced with unprecedented social unrest and body counts from an increasingly unpopular war in Southeast Asia on the evening news.  That must have sucked, but to reference their passing as comparable to that of the Christian Holy Trinity?  Come on, bro.

That he chose to use this tragic event as the first domino of what he saw as America’s stumble, though artistically valid and possibly dead on point has always irritated me.  He’s yet to come clean about his intent and that feels cheap.

The truth of the matter, at least as I have always viewed it is this.  In no uncertain terms, the events that precipitated the writing of American Pie are heartbreaking but at this point in time, all involved are better off because of it.  Forgive my impertinence, but Richardson was never going to be more than a local celebrity, a footnote in history at best without this.  Yes, I’m sure that fact is of little condolence to his surviving family.  Valens may not have been given his earned and public due as a pioneer of Chicano music and culture if not for that Midwestern night.  Again, there is no comfort for his family in that statement.  Buddy was a star, but there were indications that even his star was waning rapidly.  His widow could care less what I think, but I’m almost glad Buddy died that night.  He was supposed to die then…they all were.  That's harsh perchance, but fifty-five years have passed from that day to this though and I’m okay saying it.

Rationally, Buddy’s best music was behind him most likely.  He had already disbanded The Crickets and begun experimenting with un-rock ‘n’ roll orchestral arrangements.  Lubbock was in his distant rear view and the naïve purity with which he insisted those early records were formed and recorded was a secluded recollection.  His aspirations reportedly were steering him away from music all together and more toward a hopeful career in Hollywood.  He had recently fallen in love with and married a beautiful Puerto Rican girl named Maria Elena, and was only on tour because of a legal dispute with his dipshit manager who was siphoning nearly all earnings away from the Holly’s.  Maria miscarried their first child upon hearing the news of his death.

American Pie is a predictable metaphor and in my opinion should in no way be viewed as anything more than that.  It's a helluva good song, but the hell of it is that this wasn’t even nearly Don McLean’s best song.  His are some of the most insightful lyrical words and music you will never hear.  There are amazing lyrics buried in the grooves of his records that most people have sadly missed.  In spite of the fact that I view him perhaps unfairly as a lecherous douche bag in a business model, I dig that he said what he felt.  Even in the aforementioned mania, this jewel is buried…I was a lonely teenage broncing buck, with a pink carnation and a pickup truck… Who hasn’t felt that way in their life, right?

Did he choose the wrong metaphor?  In my opinion, yes.  His presumed intent was to celebrate, but he ultimately only trivialized all three men AND didn't even mention the pilot.  I’m still a little pissed off about it, but I feel better after writing it all incompletely down – maybe that’s the way Don felt too.  Maybe we would know if he wasn’t so immaturely consumed with and protective of his own art.  As much as you insist that it is, 3 February is not about you Don McLean.

Regardless,

Rest in Peace:

Roger Arthur Peterson

Jiles Perry, J.P. The Big Bopper Richardson

Richard Steven Ritchie Valens Valenzuela

Charles Hardin Buddy Holley (Holly).

You were all good people, and the music has most definitely not died.