Don McLean – Still Touring and Recording Strong After ‘American Pie’ (INTERVIEW)

Don McLean wrote (and sang) perhaps the most iconic song in American rock & roll, “American Pie.” Yet, he has done so much more than that one song which propelled him to fame, fortune and sold out concerts the world over following it’s release in 1971. McLean, a prolific songwriter, had hits throughout his fifty years and counting career, notably a lush and lovely “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night)” and “Castles In The Air;” not to mention the Top 5 cover of Roy Orbison’s “Crying” in 1980. He is in the Songwriters Hall Of Fame, has received a BBC Radio Lifetime Achievement Award, was just recently awarded a BMI Million-Air Award (given to an artist whose songs have surpassed one million US airplays) and beginning this month one of his Martin guitars, as well as original lyric pages for “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night),” will be on display at the Country Music Hall Of Fame in Nashville as part of their Sing Me Back Home: A Journey Through Country Music permanent exhibit.

McLean, a New Yorker who became fascinated with folk music and played at such NYC singer/songwriter hot spots as The Gaslight Café, found his footing singing melodic songs about not-always-happy circumstances he saw in his life. His first album was 1970’s Tapestry, which got him noticed with the song “Castles In The Air.” His sophomore effort, 1971’s American Pie, made him a superstar with it’s finger-snapping walk through history – American, World and musical – that made everyone an analyst of what the song was really about and reignited interest in the music of Buddy Holly. As he continued to record albums on a near-yearly basis, McLean added songs by Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Marty Robbins, Little Walter and George Harrison to his catalog, while Elvis Presley, Madonna, Josh Groban and George Michael have sung his songs, either live or on record; or in the case of Alice Cooper, slipped a few lines into his own classic, “I’m Eighteen.”

At 72, McLean is still as prolific as ever. He’s touring, he’s writing music, he’s still looking at the world with a scrutinous eye. “American Pie” may have become one of his most listened to songs but if you sit a spell with a lot of his other songs, “General Store” and “The Grave” come to mind, you will hear a man with a soft-spoken voice having no fear in telling it like it is, which may be his greatest gift after all. I spoke to McLean on a crisp early morning recently to learn more about the music he crafted, his new exhibit, life after THAT SONG and his thoughts on being a fearless songwriter in today’s world.

The Country Music Hall Of Fame just added some items of yours into an exhibit. Can you tell us more about that?

It’s a rotating, constant kind of a program they have at the Museum and they are doing a six month spotlight on my music and my career. The items that I have provided are one of my signature guitars, which I’ve used on the road for the last twenty years, and these are all on loan by the way, and a color photostat of the “American Pie” manuscript, which sold two years ago at Christie’s [for $1.2 million]. Then there’s the original manuscript of the song “Vincent (Starry, Starry Night),” which has never been seen before and it’s never been out of my hands or out of my house.

The guitar you’ve lent them you said you’ve used for twenty years. What made that particular one so special?

Well, throughout my career, which has been fifty years long now so far, I’ve used ten guitars, maybe eight guitars. I have the guitar that I am using all the time and then I have a spare, or a second one, that had a good ten or fifteen years of being used all the time before it became the backup. So around 1999, the Martin Company, which is the only kind of guitar I play, this Martin guitar, they were nice enough to make me a signature model, a Don McLean Martin guitar, which I helped design. And they sounded so good that I put two of them on the road and used them all the time. So this is one of those two.

Did somebody or something turn you on to Martin guitars?

When I was growing up, all I could afford was a Harmony guitar and that’s pretty much all that we had in our town of New Rochelle, New York, where I grew up. I grew up in New Rochelle, New York, which is a suburb of New York City, and back in the 1950’s, if you wanted a really good instrument or you wanted something that was pretty much the best, you either had to go to New York City or if you were living in a rural area, you would have to order that and it would come in a month or six weeks or something.

I was a kid and every album I had had somebody playing these beautiful guitars, and they were acoustic guitars. I saw Elvis and Elvis was playing one and I saw Josh White and he was playing a different one and I would see some other folk or rock album – Ricky Nelson had one. So I was asking myself, what are these? I knew what Gibsons were but I didn’t know what a Martin guitar was. And that became my standard. I started my career really in 1963 for a year before I went back to school for a few years. I had this great Martin guitar that I went everywhere with. Everybody else played them too. They were just the best. All your country artists, didn’t matter if it was Hank Snow or George Jones or whoever. It was THE best. And you know, it felt nice to be able to have the best. It was a great thing.

When did banjo come in?

I loved the Kingston Trio and I loved the Weavers and I loved Earl Scruggs and I loved Pete Seeger, who I thought was a really fine player, and it just seemed like a great, fun thing to do. So I decided to try to learn to play it. Seeger had a little book called How To Play The 5-String Banjo. I want to tell you that back in 1959 and 1960, you have to realize that there was basically very little television, there was no communication of any kind, except the telephone which hardly ever rang; there were no books about how to do anything and there were certainly no videos because there were no videos. So what you would do is if somebody came on television and played the guitar, you would stare at him and try to figure out what he was doing with both of his hands. If a banjo player came on TV, and that was a lot rarer, then you’d really have to try to figure out what he was doing because the strokes on the banjo are very unique, whether it’s Scruggs’ style or frailing or double-thumbing or any of these things. And without a little songbook to kind of begin to help you, or without knowing somebody that really knew how to do this, you weren’t going to figure this out.

So the book really helped and I began to get a basic strum down and from there I got to know a great banjoist named Erik Darling, who was also a guy who formed the Rooftop Singers and had a #1 record called “Walk Right In” in 1962. So in addition to knowing him, I was right in the middle of a #1 record that was going on in his life so I got to feel what it was like to be around a group that was a hit group. He taught me a lot about guitar, a lot of banjo and later on I got to know Seeger and I tried to pick up every single trick that guy knew (laughs). And I pretty well did.

Did you ever try Mandolin?

No, that fingerboard is a little too small for my fingers. There are a lot of people that are great at a lot of things and I have to work real hard to be good at anything. So it was a lot of practice and a lot of singing exercises and a lot of work on songs. It didn’t come easy to me. I worked hard.

A lot of people tend to associate you with folk and rock & roll but how did country music influence you?

I learned this the other day talking to this guy from Goldmine Magazine, that there is apparently a category called Americana now and apparently I am right up there in the front ranks of that. So that is pretty much what this particular exhibit is about. But I have a lot of very strong ties to Nashville. I had a number of hit records in the early 1980’s and they were recorded in Nashville with the Jordanaires and all the great A-Team – Bob Moore, Ray Edenton, Jimmy Capps and all those guys who did a million sessions a week. I was just another day at the office for them. But we had hits.

I got to know the Jordanaires and then I had my legal people there and the record company was there that I was signed to through Capitol, which was EMI in Nashville. Then I got to know everybody’s families and kids, so that’s the only place that I have ever had that kind of personal connection to. Alan Stoker, who was the head curator of documents, he’s got a title of some sort that’s very good, he’s the son of Gordon Stoker, who was my very good friend who sang in the Jordanaires. It goes on and on. I mean, I know just a heck of a lot of people there and done a lot of recording there. In fact, I’ve recorded there exclusively since 1978.

I know on your Chain Lightning album you did Roy Orbison’s “Crying” but you also did “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” along with a few others, and I found your version of that song very, very tender.

You know, a lot of times what I do, and I do that with a song, even Roy’s song “Crying,” is kind of a rumba. It was (singing) “I was alright, da dum dum dum, for a while, da dum dum dum;” like that. And I changed it to (singing) “I was alright, doo doo da doo, for a while, doo doo da doo,” and built it very slowly and Roy liked it so much, he started to do it that way. And Larry Butler was just a brilliant producer and I wish I’d done more with him. I did two albums with him but I’d always end up doing different stuff. I don’t remember what the next thing was that I went to but I just move around quite a bit. I never really stay stuck for too long.

You’ve said that songs like yours don’t really exist anymore. Why do you think people don’t do these songs that have stories in them anymore?

I think that melody and lyrics have taken a serious hit in the last twenty years or more, since the eighties when video came in. I think that a little chant or a sort of very poorly written chorus repeated a thousand times is what people call a song now. And it isn’t a song. It’s just basically a few notes and a few words and not much meaning to any of it. The only people writing songs still and caring about them in some fashion are people in Nashville. And even they have limited their scope of what they write about. I mean, if you look at the repertoire of Johnny Cash and the kinds of songs he sang, he sang funny songs like “The One On The Right Is On The Left,” and he sang beautiful songs, all these ballads. He sang songs by folk singers like “Ira Hayes,” which Peter La Farge wrote. He sang songs with Dylan and songs by different writers, and Kristofferson of course comes to mind, but there were many, many other writers that he used. He was like every great interpreter, he was a magnet for writers who write songs cause Sinatra and some of these other people, they just gobbled these songs up. They were always making records.

And he did that to the end

Yeah, he just liked to work. First of all, he was a sharecropper and he knew what hard work was and he knew he was getting away with murder being in show business, because it ain’t work, it’s fun! All those guys that worked hard knew that show business was a joke. You talk about working hard, they’re not working. Picking cotton was working. I was different. I had never worked so to me show business was work. I had to get used to realizing that it wasn’t (laughs).

When you first started writing songs, were you trying to emulate anybody in particular?

Well, now and then I would have a little thought in my head, a certain chord change would turn me on or a certain song maybe would thrill me, but I never copied anybody, I never did. I always say, don’t do that, alright. If that thought comes into your head, put it out of your mind, find something that is your own. I remember the great Lester Flatt, who wrote a lot of good songs, bluegrass songs, just good country songs – he was just pure country. I wish I could have met him. But somebody asked him, “What advice would you give a songwriter?” And he said, “Don’t copy too close.” (laughs). That’s terrific advice because a lot of times if you’re a songwriter you don’t know where to start and you say, well, “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” okay, I’m going to try to write something like that. Feel it out or whatever but don’t copy too close is what Lester said.

During the time of your first couple of albums, and just prior, the world was in turmoil with the assassinations and the protests and the Vietnam War. What was going through your head at that time?

You know, I went to the March On Washington [August 28, 1963] and I participated in some things. I always was willing to sing at anti-war rallies. I still would do that today. I am very much opposed to a lot of these wars that kill our boys and girls that are really just an excuse to try out equipment on people and different theatres of war because we have this amazing military industrial complex that’s gobbled us up exactly as Eisenhower said it could. So I’m still exactly the same that way as I was when I first started out.

But I never was a joiner. I really didn’t do a lot of drugs and I didn’t brag about how drunk I was last night and all that stuff. I tried to have some dignity and in some cases people thought my dignity was a little bit haughty, that I wasn’t down & dirty. But I’m not that kind of guy, you know. The songs I write I think have a certain elegance and I’ve tried to become somewhat sophisticated as I’ve grown older – not too much (laughs), just a little. But I think one of the things that’s happened to me is I’ve become more tolerant of everybody’s struggle. I mean, somedays I hate everybody but most of the time I love everybody and I wish them well and try not to make their day harder than it’s probably going to be.

“General Store,” I believe, is one of your most poignant songs of your early work.

Yeah, back in those days, I didn’t have any money and I lived in a little gatehouse in Cold Spring, New York, on the Hudson River, which was basically a working community, mostly Italian, people who were descendants of people who had worked along the Hudson. And Cold Spring could be a little dangerous but I found myself on the property of a fellow who was an investor in New York City and he had purchased a beautiful home there and had fun fixing it up. On the property there was this little gatehouse, a little gingerbread, Hudson River gothic-type house, and that’s where I probably wrote most of my best songs.

There was a lady named Mrs Campbell, who lived in the estate, if you will, or the property that was next to the property of this man, and there was in this town a certain Ku Klux Klan element as well as some other strangeness. So I fantasized this idea of a guy kind of going in, and I’d met people like this and I had one experience kind of similar to this actually. I won’t go into it but I was in a place and some fellow was just kind of jawing, you know, trash-talking people, and all of a sudden he starts talking about Hitler and this and that. He’s got a funny little pin on that looks like a white supremacist thing and he was smiling the whole time. And I said, man, that’s the face of it right there, that’s the general store guy. He goes in there and he has a little talk and he gets his rope and his shells and his gun and then he passes the time of day and says, “Yeah, we got to teach people how to stay where they belong;” these people that think that their idea has to be enforced by them. They are out there, believe me. They are all over the place.

But I had all sorts of crazy ideas for songs. I think before I die I’m going to do one more album and it’s going to be really out there. I’m going to make some sort of symphonic record maybe with songs in it, cause I wrote a bunch of songs that I never recorded. One of the ones was so psychological and that was a psychological-type song. One of them was called “Aftermath” and that song got put on the re-release of the CD of American Pie. The two songs that were going to be on that album, American Pie, that were not on it were put on the CD re-release. If you ever get ahold of that, you can hear the song “Aftermath” and that is probably one of the most interesting things I ever did, because of the guitar work, I was really into playing guitar, and the idea of this song was a person in a mental institution. It’s almost like a one man Cuckoo’s Nest. You should try to find that if you can.

On American Pie there is a song called “Babylon,” which I understand is an old traditional song and it’s very unique.

Yeah, that is an old song that was from the thirties and I did an arrangement of it, which I adapted it, and I got that from Lee Hays, who was my friend and used to sing in the Weavers, who was blacklisted, and that was the capper for the record. I put that on there and I worked out a banjo arrangement. Then, what I would do I would get 5,000 or 10,000 people to sing that song in three different parts, back in the days when I used to do that. That was part of the folk thing that I like, getting people to sing something interesting, not just everything.

The funny thing about the sing-a-long thing is, and I suppose I can tell you this, Pete Seeger was a communist and he was really a communist. He wasn’t just a had been one or whatever; he was all his life. And communism and fascism are pretty closely aligned in some ways and one of the things they want to do is get hold of your mind and get you to thinking like they do. Hitler had these youth camps and what they would do is they would SING ALONG! They’d all sing along and pretty soon they were all one, you know. So the whole left-wing sing-a-long thing was the left side of that whole thing, getting people to sing along. If you sing along maybe you’ll start to believe it.

After the success of this great album, American Pie, did you have the record company breathing down your neck at all?

I had everything breathing down my neck. I was very ill-prepared for what happened to me and I was also very much alone. I had nobody. I was kind of not close to anybody in my family. My relationships were sort of splintering. I could see I was suddenly becoming valuable property. And I was being worked hard. It was very exciting and there was a lot of stuff going on but I think I began to extrapolate and look forward and I could see that the business was starting to take over. I think that pretty much ended the love affair that I had with making music and being in the music business. All of a sudden, the dye was cast that this was my life and that whether I liked it or not, I was going to have to do it and make the most of it. I made a lot of adjustments in those few years and came around to liking it a lot. I liked the business side of it and I liked the music side of it but I was pretty much pure fantasy in the beginning, if you know what I am saying, because it was all a dream. I mean, who would ever imagine this could happen.

For you, what was your first big I can’t believe I’m here moment?

Oh I had so many of those. That’s what kept me going. I got out of high school, I didn’t want to go to college. My mother and I lived together in a small two-room apartment after my father died. The life that I knew, kind of family life or whatever, was over. I was sort of a grownup from the time I was fifteen. When I was seventeen or so, I graduated from high school and I didn’t want to go to college and my mother said, “You have to go to college.” That was something she was adamant about. I didn’t care, you know, but somehow I got into Villanova University and I lasted about four months and I quit again. I spent the year 1964 out of school and I was very lonely. My mother wasn’t around much and I had a couple of friends who were basically guys who’d dropped out of school. I just wasn’t doing very much.

I went back to school in 1965 and went to college. At the same time, I kept my musical connections and worked in the summertime. Then in 1968, I graduated with a degree in Finance & Economics, with a minor in Philosophy. And I began again to attempt to break into the music business but by this time I had a manager, I had a direction, I was going to sing with Pete Seeger in this thing that he was doing, which was very interesting and a lot of fun, so I was moving in a certain direction.

But the first thing I did when I was fifteen years old was to call up Fred Hellerman, who was in the Weavers. I called him on the phone! (laughs). I didn’t have anybody to stop me doing anything. I was on my own when I was fifteen, basically. I did what I wanted. So I called him up. I said, I have to know about this group. I’m tired of reading about it, there’s nothing to read, I’m going to call this guy up. The next thing I know, I called another guy named Erik Darling and I told you about him. In 1962, I found myself in his living room, playing music with him. So that probably was the first big moment right there. But there were so many.

I’ve noticed that in a lot of your early songs especially, you have no fear as a songwriter.

No and I still don’t have any fear. If fear would creep in to what I do, into anything, I’d be done. Then I wouldn’t be any good anymore. Then I would be burlesquing myself. I’d be impersonating Don McLean. I cannot do that. I’ve written a song called “Run Diana Run,” about Princess Diana, which you can find on YouTube. I was on a show in Nashville recently called Vinyl Lunch and it was really a wonderful show and the first thing I did was, I said, “Play ‘Run Diana Run,’” because it’s about the assassination of Princess Diana by the media and by photography and all that stuff. I think you will see I have not lost that particular thing. The business, show business, is a very easy place for an artist to lose himself and Elvis Presley is a perfect example.

When Buddy Holly died, you were just a kid, so had his music really touched you by that time or did that come later?

No, I was way into Buddy Holly. He was very important to me, everything he did. I can’t even go into how important he actually was because that would take a whole other interview. But it was just my sense of good taste that led me to him, and in a major way, and his variety of songwriting, his singing, his guitar playing, the Crickets and everything which really became the bible for rock & roll bands. There was nothing like that before Buddy Holly. Elvis wasn’t that way. Elvis had a trio behind him and a gospel quartet. It was a whole different thing.

But Buddy Holly was somebody that I was just mad about and of course at a tender age, when you’re fifteen years old, fourteen or fifteen, life is just getting started and any kind of death, any kind of shock to your world, is an earthquake. So that plane crash, to me, was an earthquake. I went to school, and by this time Buddy had been off the charts for a couple of years, and I said this happened and the kids I was in school with said, “So what.” They didn’t care. I found there was no interest whatsoever, or a feeling whatsoever, for that event among people that I went to school with. That’s when I realized I didn’t really want to be a part of that. Fifteen was an important age for me because I realized that, number one, I didn’t want to be a part of my generation. And number two, I realized that nobody cares. You’re on your own.

Do you think they care now?

Not really. I think they care to the extent that something pleases them. I think artists go onstage, young artists who are successful, and start talking about their problems and their troubles and the audience just grumbles. They don’t want to hear that stuff. They don’t care. They want to hear you, they want YOU to entertain them, they want YOU to make them feel good. They paid a lot of money to come there. You know, I had a friend who was dying, a woman who was a friend of our family at that time, and all these people go, “Oh, we’re going to do this and we’re going to do that.” And they didn’t do a thing. Maybe it’s just here or whatever but I’ve seen this in my life too when my father died. My mother had a tough time getting along. She didn’t have a lot of support.

You see it now with people that all of a sudden make an accusation against somebody in the media and everybody runs for cover! Everybody is wearing black! I mean, nothing has been proved, nothing has been litigated, nobody has been arrested. There is a certain subconscious to people that is panic-driven and if the situation isn’t right, if the conditions aren’t right, they’re gone.

Do you think it might spur some new music, like, on a bigger extent, how the Vietnam War spurred all these artists to come out and sing these certain kinds of songs.

Well, the Vietnam War had a particular effect on people because every guy’s ass was in a sling. Today we have a volunteer army of kids who don’t get through high school, or if they do they want benefits and they think it’s a career and they go where they are sent. They are even talking about bringing some sort of mercenary army and this is bad. I mean, you got to have an army where nobody wants to be in it in order to have a democracy. And that was us. We didn’t want to be in the army, man. A few kids joined up but anybody who knew the situation, you had to be drafted and THAT made people write songs.

Your song “The Grave” is about the war but you said it was inspired by a dream. Was that subconscious fear coming out?

I lost a number of kids I remember very well that I grew up with. I carry the name of a friend, of a kid I knew, who was sort of my nemesis in school. I’d be out in the field, you know, I’d be centerfield and he’d be right field, and I’d drop a ball and he’d go, “Hey McLean, you stink!” And he got killed. He was nineteen. He was Johnny Olsen. And I said, okay, Johnny, I’m going to carry your name. And I did. You know, they’d never done anything to us. What we did to them, they’re not around flying planes into buildings. They are beautiful people and it was none of our business and it hasn’t made a bit of difference in the world. It was a complete waste.

What do you have on your agenda for 2018?

Well, I’m going to be going around the world in the next two years. If you look at my schedule, you can go to my website, and you will see a lot of dates in the States and then a bunch of dates overseas. There will be more dates overseas later on in the year and next year I will probably go to Australia and Asia as well as my stateside work. That’s my plan, to run while I can run! (laughs)