They put that thing out and it starts right in with, ‘Bye Bye Miss American Pie’ and two or three songs and the chorus 20 times at the end, going to the hook. You wrote it.ĭM: I didn’t have a co-writer. If you put it in the jukebox, it had two sides so it was two hits there.īH: And two hits because you didn’t have a co-writer. When it got played, you got double from BMI.īH: To explain that, (when a song is) over a certain length of time, the songwriter gets twice the rate.ĭM: So it’s like having two hits at once. I always played the long version.ĭM: There must have been a lot of that because people started to hear the long version and clammer for it. So they had to go out and buy the album so it wasn’t too bad. I was grappling with everything that was going on, and I didn’t control the record company.īH: I didn’t play the edited version. How did that make you feel?ĭM: I didn’t feel anything at that point. Pretty soon, we got a shipment of an edited version that was a little over four minutes long. I went and bought the album at the record store because of your thumb and put it on. I was a 16-year-old DJ in a rural town when that song came out. It was so simple and still looks great.īH: Let me ask a couple specific questions about the song. The guy that did the cover understood what I was doing. The producer understood what I was doing. I probably bought five copies of the vinyl because I wore it out.ĭM: Everybody picked up on this. I was a DJ at the time, but if I’m telling you the truth, I bought the album because of the cover and I got to discover what was in it. I’m looking down the guitar.īH: By the way, one of the greatest album covers ever! I knew about you a little bit. He heard the song and I went to his studio and he told me he was going to paint my thumb. I had so many creative people around me, like the guy that did the cover, George Whiteman. My thumb is up like I just pulled it out of the pie. These children’s nursery rhymes are woven into the song. There’s the ‘Jack be nimble, Jack be quick’. I love the title, "American Pie."īH: Because it couldn’t have been anything else, really.ĭM: There’s a lot of little things in there. The form of this song is different from almost any song you would hear. Then I slowed down the fifth verse so it starts slow, rocks in the middle and slows at the end. Later on, three months later, I wrote five more verses of the same length, following forward with this idea, almost in a rock dream kind of idea. This is how the form of the song established itself. I needed to come up with a chorus that was crazy and rip it, rather than lay there with it. It was the one that would follow "Tapestry." It was in flux.It was (then going to be) a ballad record and I didn’t want that. I had the second album going and didn’t have a name for it. It’s where you get into yourself, and I had that (song) in my mind for a couple of months. 'The form of this song is different from almost any song you would hear'ĭM: Writing songs is a lonely thing. But I’ll just start singing a song, an idea. I had the tape recorder on and I just sang, "A long, long time ago, I can still remember how the music made me smile. And I knew if I had my chance, I could make those people dance. Maybe they’d be happy for a while.”ĭM: Oh yeah! ".but something touched me deep inside, the day the music died." I said, “What the heck was that?” And I had it on the machine.īH: I am stunned in this moment. I even did it on my last album, "Botanical Gardens." I’ll start to sing into the recorder. I don’t write the lyrics down. I don’t write the melody down. I can’t read music. I was in my little room where I used to write songs. What I do is I put a tape recorder on. I had no idea it would take root and I’d have to talk about it all these years. But I am happy to talk about it, because it leads me into a discussion of the country which I am very interested in and love. And the music represents that. And this was the theory of "American Pie." And it was just one of my ideas. Part of what "American Pie" is, is a spiritual song, about the spirit of the country and what was happening to it. I still maintain that even though my politics have changed a lot since 1970, I’m still against all this, anything spiritually bad for the nation. DM: We should see them again, because maybe we wouldn’t have these wars that are invisible, because this is not good.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |