Don McLean on the tragedy behind American Pie: “I cried for...

W.When Don McLean was 15, he had a hunch that his father was going to die. Distraught, he ran to tell his grandmother. “Don’t be ridiculous, Donny, why would you say that?” She said. “Because it’s going to happen,” replied the boy. A few days later, his father fell dead right in front of him. “I saw what he looked like,” says McLean. “It had turned green. I didn’t know what I would do without him. He was the king, the boss. He knew everything. “

The singer-songwriter behind the classic American Pie from 1971 speaks of his home in Palm Desert, a city in California where he is now in the so-called “desert phase” of his life. Forest fires are still burning across the state. You can’t see the sun for the sharp smoke. “I feel it in my lungs,” says the 75-year-old.

What did he do when his father died? “I cried for two years,” he says. “I blamed myself.” We talked for half an hour about death – his father’s and his own feelings. “I’m nearing the end of the high dive,” he says. “You know what I mean?” It’s the big McLean theme that runs through his songwriting, from American Pie to the virtually unknown Run Diana Run, a strange musical lament about Princess Diana.

However, we meet to talk about his epoch-spanning epic: the frenzied eight and a half minute run-through of the 1960s after the end of the decade. The Recording Industry Association of America has the song in the top 5 behind Over the Rainbow and White Christmas. It has been covered by everyone from Madonna to Tyson Fury who sang it after knocking out Deontay Wilder earlier this year. and the original handwritten texts sold for $ 1.2 million (£ 800,000) in 2015, the third highest auction price ever for an American literary manuscript.

McLean wrote it half a century ago at the age of 24 – and to mark the anniversary, a new documentary called The Day the Music Died is being released. A Broadway show is planned for 2022, even a children’s book. There’s a lot of fuss about a song: McLean’s moment maybe to tell the world once and for all what the lyrics actually mean.

There is general agreement that the song is about the US cultural and political decline in the 1960s, a departure from the American dream after the assassination of President Kennedy. “Bye bye Miss American Pie,” he sings. “Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.” But McLean always stumbled upon the allusions in his verses. “Carly Simon is still shy about who you’ve been so vainly written about,” he says. “So who cares who shits?”

A lot to do. Every line of American Pie was exposed. There are fan websites that are solely dedicated to decryption. Who was the fool who sang for the king and queen in a cloak he borrowed from James Dean? What exactly was revealed on the day the music died? The Vietnam War, the social revolution, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, JFK, Mick Jagger, Martin Luther King, Charles Manson, Hells Angels, the Beatles, hallucinogenic drugs, God the devil – they’re all in there, aren’t they? ? Nobody can be quite sure except a man.

For McLean, however, the genius of the song lies in its structure, not in its words: a perfect amalgamation of folk, rock’n’roll and old-fashioned pop music. The slow intro is the pop part, but then the piano kicks in and the tempo accelerates into the chorus – that’s the rock and roll piece. The folk component is included in the verse-chorus-verse composition. “I haven’t told anyone that in 50 years,” says McLean.

Hmm, I’m saying this is not really the bullet I was looking for. But then there’s no point in asking McLean direct questions about what the song means: he’s too skilled at shedding it. “It means I’ll never have to work again,” he quipped.

Instead, our conversation goes back to his childhood before his father’s death – to what he calls the “terrible, ugly secret” of his sister Betty Anne. Fifteen years older than him, she was an alcoholic, drug addict, and bum who ruined his childhood, he says. “You couldn’t talk about her because you couldn’t tell the truth about what happened to her. It was a disaster to see that. She was always so tied up. It was terrible.”

She would straighten up, leave the house, but then come back in chaos, he says. “It happened over and over again.” He’s upset just talking about it. “That’s why I’m a blue guy, I think.” He sighs. “All of my things are about loss – and a certain kind of psychological pain. I’ve never been really happy. “

With all the catchy sing-alongs, there is little to cheer about in American Pie. It is without hope. McLean came up with a more optimistic verse in which the music is “reborn” in the end. But he dropped it. “Things didn’t go that way,” he says. “I haven’t seen America improve intellectually or politically. It went steadily downhill, just like the music. “

It takes me back in time – to the innocent days of the 1950s that American Pie laments. But McLean hated growing up in a small house in an upper-middle-class neighborhood of New Rochelle, New York State. People discriminate above all else, he says. “If you didn’t drive the right car, if you didn’t have enough money, if you didn’t wear the right shoes. I hated these fuckers. “

He is already burdened with the pain and sadness of his childhood. The opening of American Pie is widely accepted as the mourning of Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash in 1959. Holly was McLean’s musical idol as a child, but could this verse also be about his father? “You hit the nail on the head,” he says. “I mean, that’s exactly right. That’s why I don’t like to talk about the lyrics because I wanted to capture and say something that was almost inexpressible. It’s indescribable. He adds, “American Pie is a biographical song.”

The cultural innuendos, he continues, are his own jokes that make fun of some of the big acts of the day. “Just the idea of ​​choosing names that people can identify with: different artists, what they did, what they had done. I made fun of everything. “

It is widely believed that the fool in the song is Bob Dylan stealing the limelight from Elvis Presley as the new messiah: “And while the king was looking down / The fool stole his thorny crown.” Dylan himself seemed over the club to annoy. “Yes, American Pie, what a song that is,” he said in a rare 2017 interview. “A joker? Sure, the fool writes songs like Masters of War, A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall, It’s okay, Ma – a fool. I have to think he’s talking about someone else. Ask him.”

So I ask him. “I can’t tell you,” says McLean. “But he’d be a damn good joker, wouldn’t he?” He tells me Dylan’s son Jacob asked him the same question, but he didn’t tell him either.

McLean likes to be responsible. He admits that. That’s why he plans to put most of his possessions up for auction before he dies: lyrics, weapons, saddles, hunting knives, banjos, guitars, bespoke boots, his car. It’s part of a cleaning process, he says, “I don’t want to let someone else figure out what to do with this stuff.”

Perhaps unraveling the secret of American Pie would also mean losing control of it. “I always need to know where I’m going,” says McLean, who doesn’t trust the media to give him a fair hearing and claims to seldom read anything that has been written about him. “Don’t read good and bad things,” he says, “because everything is a bunch of shit.”

This seems like an equally good time to ask McLean how he handled the situation when he was arrested and charged after his ex-wife accused him of domestic abuse. (McLean pleaded guilty and paid a fine, although his attorney said this was “not because he was actually guilty of anything, but to close his family and keep the entire process as private as possible”.)

“I can really say that my ex-wife is the worst person I have ever known,” he says. “There’s no one to compare.” Patrisha McLean, who he divorced in 2016, spoke about their relationship in a traveling exhibition on domestic violence called Finding Our Voices and founded a non-profit organization of the same name. He says it took four years to break up. “All those love letters she sent me every month for 30 years – they instantly turned to salt.”

Before we close, McLean offers me this reflection on a Thomas B. Allen painting hanging in the living room of the Maine country house. It shows Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift and Marilyn Monroe as in the movie The Misfits: they are all photographed, but their faces look like they have been shot, even murdered.

This is how he feels, he says, thanks to American Pie heritage. “Writing a song that everyone on earth knows shouldn’t piss you off,” he says. “But you better have a lot in you – because it is sucked out.”

• The film Day the Music Died and the children’s book American Pie are out next year. The musical will follow in 2022.