An old friend gave me an Amazon.com gift card for Christmas.
Now, let me explain something up front: I've always tried to use a gift card for something I think the giver might have chosen. OK, I haven't always succeeded at that, but I've done pretty well.
This holiday season, I've been thinking about my mother a lot. She was a big influence on me — the books I read, the movies I love, the music I listen to. Her fingerprints are all over my life.
Anyway, I've known this friend since my college days, and she was acquainted with my mother. Mom loved music, especially acoustic guitar, and my friend does, too. It really astonished me, when we knew each other in college, how similar their tastes were.
So I decided to use the gift card to get some CDs that remind me of Mom, and the first one that came to mind — Don McLean's "American Pie" — arrived today.
I vividly remember the day Mom picked me up at school after she had been to the record store to get "American Pie." She didn't get the single — the song was 8½ minutes on the LP, and it was divided up into two parts on the single. It is his signature song, and many people have tried to interpret its imagery over the years. McLean has confirmed some but not all, and he has said he prefers to let the song speak for itself.
The song was a huge hit when I was a child. For awhile, some radio stations played only part of it, but most played the entire recording. That isn't the kind of thing that happened very often in those days. For that matter, songs that are eight minutes long don't get played much on the radio today, either. But "American Pie" was the rare exception to the rule — like "Hey Jude" or "Layla."
Mom got the whole album, which seemed like a wild extravagance to me at the time, but it wasn't "American Pie" that drew her in. In fact, I'm not even sure if she had heard the song before she bought the album. She apparently was inspired to buy it because of another song — "Vincent," McLean's tribute to Vincent Van Gogh (although, at first, Mom thought she had gotten the wrong album because she believed the song's opening line, "Starry, starry night," was actually its title).
Well, those are the two songs that I have always remembered from that album, and those are the two that just about everyone would recognize. But the CD has reacquainted me with some really good songs I had forgotten about,
like "Till Tomorrow," a sensitive ballad that is probably as good as anything McLean has ever written.
It is followed on the album (after "Vincent") by a pensive tune, "Crossroads," of which I have a memory tugging at my brain of my mother humming when she played it on our stereo. And today, when I hear the lines, "They walk one road to set them free and find they've gone the wrong direction," it still has the power to take my breath away.
It is punctuated by a love song, "Winterwood," that reminds me of songs I used to hear on central Arkansas radio stations as a child. Perhaps it reflects McLean's influences, which included (in addition to Buddy Holly) Burl Ives, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger.
After that, the wistful mood returns with "Empty Chairs," a song that reminds me of the John Denver and Simon and Garfunkel albums my mother liked to play when I was growing up.
I guess McLean needed a change of pace; hence, "Everybody Loves Me, Baby," which, in a way, sounds like an outtake of "American Pie" with lines like "Fortune has me well in hand, armies 'wait my command My gold lies in a foreign land buried deep beneath the sand."
The CD has a song, "Sister Fatima," that was dropped from the reissue that came out nearly a decade after the album was first released.
Perhaps it, along with "The Grave," was too political. I've heard Vietnam vets speak of how affected they were the first time they heard "The Grave."
The album was capped by "Babylon," which actually wasn't written by McLean. It's a traditional tune with a McLean arrangement. It reminds me, in a way, of Crosby Stills Nash & Young singing "Find the Cost of Freedom."
Well, that's where the album that Mom had ended. And this is one of the times when I regret that Mom didn't live longer. The album was first released as a CD the year after she died, then, in 2003, a CD with two bonus tracks was released. The CD with the bonus tracks is the one I got, and it makes it seem like a brand–new recording.
I haven't been able to find videos of the bonus tracks, "Mother Nature" and "Aftermath," but the songs fit the mood of the rest of the album. It has kind of a somber quality, which is appropriate, I guess, for an album in which the most popular song repeatedly spoke of "the day the music died."
Well, 2010 is a good time to listen to this album and appreciate Don McLean's contribution to the culture. He will be 65 in October.
