Past Selves Reflected in Records, Part 6

Eight Minutes 42 Seconds of...

I’ve been going through all my old vinyl, including some records I’ve owned for 50 years.

Each record tells a story. With most of the records, I can recall who I was when I got it and what I thought when I first listened.

Each record also gives me a glimpse of one of my past selves. Including the ones that are deliberately vague or open to interpretation.

For a long time, you couldn’t get away from Don McLean’s song “American Pie.” It was a fixture on the radio and worked well as a way of covering DJ bathroom breaks. It was also (for decades) the longest song to hit number one, with the album version clocking in at a whopping eight minutes and 42 seconds. And sure, it was broken up to fit on two sides of a 45, but I never heard anyone play the edited version on the radio.

It was also a song whose lyrics seemed to exist to be poured over and studied. In pre-internet days, that meant obsessing over the lyrics after listening over and over and discussing it with your reprobate music-loving friends. Sure, it was about the loss of innocence and the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly (along with Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper) and touched on what seemed to be discussions of Elvis, Dylan, the Beatles, the Byrds, the Rolling Stones, JFK, Charles Manson, and much, much more.

Now, it’s easy to call up a dozen articles that dissect the song line by line and offer interpretations, but for a long time we were left to our own devices and speculations. Don McLean himself was no help and for decades when asked what the song meant he’d reply “it means that I never have to work again.”

The song was around so much (as was its follow-up “Vincent”) that I never thought to buy it until the 1980s. I got it used and (as the photo shows) well-worn. I paid a whopping 23 cents for the record and more than got my money’s worth.

The highlight of the record for me was always “Everybody Loves Me, Baby,” a (hopefully) tongue-in-cheek lament by a national leader about the one woman who somehow is able to resist his charms. There are plenty of eerie, downbeat numbers as well "(“The Grave,” “Sister Fatima,” and others) and the album is all over the place in terms of the types of songs, the tone, etc.

But you couldn’t escape from the song “American Pie” and even in later years when you could read interpretations of the song everywhere (and after McLean finally broke his silence and talked about what had inspired the lyrics) I’d listen to it every year or so.

Nearly 55 years after the record first came out (and more than 67 years after the death of Buddy Holly), I let this one go.

I’m confident I got more than my 23 cents worth over the decades.

And I still recall what was revealed long after the day the music died.