So I really don't understand what that's all about." And furthermore, he waited 40 years to do it.
"Dylan has come out lately and made a couple of terse remarks about 'American Pie,' assuming he is the jester," McLean says. “Don McLean, ‘American Pie,’ what a song that is," Dylan told the writer Bill Flanagan in a recent interview that was posted on Dylan's website. "A jester? Sure, the jester writes songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall,’ ‘It’s Alright, Ma’ – some jester … I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. Holly's death - "the day the music died," in McLean's immortal phrase - appears to leave in its wake a lot of pretenders to the throne. "Moss grows fat on a rolling stone." "Lennon a book on Marx." And "the jester sang for the king and queen/In a coat he borrowed from James Dean." For "jester," many read "Dylan." Including Dylan. "I would take Buddy Holly and Elvis over all those groups that came later from England and anywhere," he says. If you think that McLean, in the song, seems to be saying that he would trade in the whole pack of John Lennons, Bob Dylans, Rolling Stones and everyone else who came along after 1959 just to have Buddy Holly back, you wouldn't be on the wrong track. "What they try to do is turn it into a board game or a roman à clef, which it isn't, and I think that ruins the whole idea of the song," McLean says,īut he will offer this crumb.
All of which are beside the point, he says. He won't decode its famously dense, layered imagery, or reveal the autobiographical elements lurking underneath.
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