Making Sense Out of a 1959 Iowa Plane Crash

and Don McLean’s ‘American Pie’ 

By Tom Anselm

It was a wintry Tuesday night, February 3, 1959. Sixty years ago. A single-engine Beechcraft couldn’t handle the weather and crashed in a cornfield just outside Cedar Lake, Iowa.
Lost were the pilot, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “BigBopper” Richardson. It was, according to the song by Don McLean, “the day the music died.” Holly, of “Peggy Sue” fame, was 22. Valens, just 17, singer of “La Bamba.” Richardson, a long time disc jockey and the oldest at 28, had his huge hit “Chantilly Lace.”
Holly had just disbanded The Crickets. Dion DiMucci and his Belmont’s were with their tour of
the Midwest, but on the buses. McLean was a 13-year-old paperboy at the time, a “lonely teenage bronkin’ buck” obsessed with music. It wasn’t until 12 years later that he wrote the song “American Pie.”
Some say the over 800-word ballad is THE farewell to the beloved ‘’50s and raucous‘60s, and hello to the cynical ‘70s. It has been called the Ultimate Boomer Anthem. The song became our road trip theme as me and a couple college buddies drove to Miami just after Christmas in 1971 as the SLU soccer team defended its national championship at the Orange Bowl.
We sang with the radio ‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.’ But we drove VW Bugs. And had little or no idea what any of it meant. Over the years, however, the meaning has become clearer. “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie… the levee… this will be the day that I die.”
The composer was dating a beauty contestant, there was a bar called ‘The Levee’ near where he grew up. Holly also sang ‘that’ll be the day, that I die.” Farewell to the old days? There was “The Book of Love” from the ‘50s group The Monotones, “both kicked off your shoes” at the sock hops, the slow dancing of youth.
Who was the “Jester” who sang for the King and Queen? Most say it was Bob Dylan, and the Queen was protest-folk-singer Joan Baez, the King either Pete Seeger or Elvis. I’m going with Elvis. Or Jack and Jackie? Your call, here. “As Lenin read a book on Marx, the quartet practiced in the park, and we sang dirges in the dark.”
The Beatles, and John Lennon, the other Lenin being long dead, a play on words. Remember how those sweet-love-song-singing Boys from Liverpool turned radical with the album ‘Revolution’ in 1968? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The group broke up April 10, 1970. Maybe another ‘day the music died.’
As for dirges, think two Kennedys, a King, and thousands of soldiers killed in Southeast Asia. “Helter Skelter… summer swelter… birds fly high in a fallout shelter…eight miles high?” Again the Beatles with the song reference, the Manson Family murders, the devil taking over, the Byrds with “Eight Miles High.”
“Halftime air with sweet perfume . . . players take the field… marching band refused to yield… in the streets the children screamed?” Think marijuana, Vietnam War protests in every city. Think napalm. Think the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Think Kent State.
“Here we were all in one place, a generation lost in space. Jack Flash… the devils only friend… angel born in Hell… Satan laughing with delight.” How about Woodstock, and “danger, Will Robinson.”
In 1969, the Rolling Stone headlined what was billed as a second Woodstock at the Altoona Speedway in California. The Hells Angels were used as security, and it became a bloodbath as they beat the concertgoers. Jumpin’ Jack Flash and his band were helicoptered out as ‘the flames climbed high into the night.”
“I met a girl who sang the blues…” Janis Joplin. “Sacred store.” McLean’s neighborhood record shop. “Not a word was spoken.” Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence”, a nihilist-depressing anthem if ever there was one. More ‘music dying? ’‘Church bells all were broken… the three men I admire most, the Father, Son and the Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast.”
For McLean, a Catholic, had God abandoned us? Fled to the West Coast, Land of Moral Breakdown? (My words, not his.) What else died in the collective American soul during those days? But still, we keep singin’… “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie. Drove my Chevy to the . . .”

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