Donald McLean, Jr. (born
October 2, 1945, New Rochelle
, New York) is an American singer-songwriter.
He is most famous for the 1971 album
American Pie, containing the
renowned songs "
American Pie" and
"
Vincent".
The McLean
clan traces its roots to the island of Iona
in the
Scottish Hebrides. Both Don's grandfather and father were
also named Donald McLean.
The Buccis, the family of McLean's mother,
Elizabeth, came from Abruzzo in central
Italy
. They left Italy and settled in Port Chester
, New York at the end of the 19th century. He
has other extended family in Los Angeles and Boston.
Musical roots
As a young teenager, McLean became interested in
folk music, particularly
the Weavers' 1955 recording
At Carnegie Hall.
Childhood asthma meant that McLean missed long periods of school,
and although he slipped back in his studies, his love of music was
allowed to flourish. He often performed shows for family and
friends. By age 16 he had bought his first guitar (a
Harmony acoustic
archtop with a sunburst finish) and begun making
contacts in the music business, becoming friends with folk singer
Erik Darling, a member of the Weavers.
McLean recorded his first studio sessions (with singer
Lisa Kindred) while still in prep school.
McLean
graduated from Iona Preparatory School
in 1963, and briefly attended Villanova
University
, dropping out after four months. While at
Villanova he became friends with singer/songwriter
Jim Croce.
After
leaving Villanova, McLean became associated with famed folk music
agent Harold Leventhal, and for the
next six years performed at venues and events including the Bitter End
and the Gaslight
Cafe in New York, the Newport
Folk Festival, the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C.
, and the Troubadour
in Los Angeles. Concurrently, McLean
attended night school at Iona College
and received a Bachelors degree in Business Administration in
1968. He turned down a scholarship to Columbia University Graduate School in
favour of becoming resident singer at Caffè Lena
in Saratoga Springs
, NY.
In 1968, with the help of a grant from the
New York State Council on the
Arts, McLean began reaching a wider public, with visits to
towns up and down the
Hudson River. He
learned the art of performing from his friend and mentor
Pete Seeger. McLean accompanied Seeger on his
Clearwater boat trip up the Hudson
River in 1969 to protest environmental pollution in the river.
During this time McLean wrote songs that would appear on his first
album,
Tapestry. McLean co-edited
the book
Songs and Sketches of the First Clearwater Crew
with sketches by
Thomas B. Allen for which Pete Seeger wrote the
foreword. Seeger and McLean sang "Shenandoah" on the 1974
Clearwater album.
Recording career
Early breakthrough
McLean recorded his first album,
Tapestry, in 1969 in
Berkeley, California during the student riots. After being rejected
by 34 labels, the album was released by
Mediarts and attracted good reviews but little
notice outside the folk community.
McLean's major break came when Mediarts was taken over by
United Artists Records thus securing
for his second album,
American
Pie, the promotion of a major label. The album spawned two
No. 1 hits in the title song and "
Vincent."
American Pie's success
made McLean an international star and renewed interest in his first
album, which charted more than two years after its initial
release.
American Pie
Don McLean's most famous composition, "
American Pie", is a sprawling, impressionistic
ballad inspired partly by the deaths of
Buddy Holly,
Ritchie
Valens and J. P. Richardson (
The Big
Bopper) in a plane crash in 1959.
The song would
popularize the expression "The Day the Music Died
" in reference to this event. McLean has
stated that the lyrics are also somewhat autobiographical and
present an abstract story of his life from the mid-1950s until the
time he wrote the song in the late 1960s.
The song was recorded on 26 May 1971 and a month later received its
first radio airplay on New York’s WNEW-FM and WPLJ-FM to mark the
closing of The Fillmore East, a famous New York concert hall.
"American Pie" reached number one on the U.S.
Billboard magazine charts for four
weeks in 1972, and remains McLean's most successful single release.
The single also topped the
Billboard Easy Listening survey. It is
also the longest song to reach No. 1 with a running time of 8:36.
Some stations played only part one of the original split-sided
single release.
29 years later, pop singer
Madonna released a truncated dance-pop
cover version of the song. In
response, Don McLean said: "I have received many gifts from God but
this is the first time I have ever received a gift from a
goddess."
In 2001 "American Pie" was voted No. 5 in a poll of the 365
Songs of the Century compiled
by the
Recording Industry
Association of America and the
National Endowment for the
Arts.
The top five were: "
Over the
Rainbow" by
Judy Garland, "
White Christmas" by
Bing Crosby, "
This Land Is Your Land" by
Woody Guthrie, "
Respect" by
Aretha
Franklin and "American Pie".
Subsequent recordings
McLean’s third album,
Don
McLean, included the song "The Pride Parade" that provides
an insight into McLean’s immediate reaction to stardom. McLean told
Melody Maker magazine in 1973
that
Tapestry
was an album by someone previously concerned with external
situations.
American
Pie combines externals with internals and the resultant
success of that album makes the third one (
Don McLean) entirely
introspective."
The fourth album,
Playin'
Favorites was a top-40 hit in the UK in 1973 and included
the Irish folk classic, "Mountains of Mourne" and
Buddy Holly’s "
Everyday", a live rendition of
which returned McLean to the
UK Singles
Chart. McLean said, "The last album (
Don McLean) was a study in
depression whereas the new one (
Playin' Favorites) is almost the
quintessence of optimism, with a feeling of "Wow, I just woke up
from a bad dream."
1977 saw
a brief liaison with Arista Records
that yielded the Prime
Time album before, in 1978, McLean’s career changed
direction and he started recording in Nashville
with Elvis Presley’s
backing singers, The Jordanaires,
and many of Elvis’s musicians. The result was
Chain Lightning and the
international Number 1, "
Crying". The
early 1980s saw further chart successes in the US with "
Since I Don’t Have You", a
new recording of "Castles in the Air" and "It’s Just the
Sun".
In 1987, the release of the country-based
Love Tracks album gave rise to the hit
singles "Love in My Heart" (a top-10 in Australia), "Can’t Blame
the Wreck on the Train" (US country No. 49), and
"Eventually".
In 1991,
EMI reissued the "
American Pie" single in the United Kingdom and
McLean performed on
Top of the
Pops.
In 1992, previously unreleased songs became available on
Favorites and
Rarities while
Don
McLean Classics featured new studio recordings of
"
Vincent" and "
American Pie".
Don McLean has continued to record new material including
River
of Love in 1995 on
Curb Records
and, more recently, the albums
You've Got to Share,
Don McLean Sings Marty Robbins and
The Western
Album on his own Don McLean Music label.
A new album,
Addicted to Black, was released in May 2009
and is available for purchase at his North American concert
performances. It will become available on his website later in
2009. In addition, McLean is expecting to tour in Europe and
Australia in 2010.
Other songs
McLean's other well-known songs include:
- "And I Love You So" was
covered by Elvis Presley, Helen Reddy, and a 1973
hit for Perry Como
- "Vincent", a tribute to the 19th
century Dutch painter, Vincent van
Gogh. Although it only reached #12 on the Billboard
Hot 100, it proved to be a huge hit worldwide. It was a #1 hit
single in the UK Singles Chart. This song was also covered by
Josh Groban on his 2001 debut album.
- "Castles in the Air", which McLean recorded twice. His 1981
re-recording was a top-40 hit, reaching #36 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in late 1981.
- "Wonderful Baby", a tribute to Fred
Astaire that Astaire himself recorded. Primarily rejected by
pop stations, it reached #1 on the Billboard Easy
Listening survey.
- "Superman's Ghost", a tribute to George Reeves, who portrayed Superman on television in the 1950s
- "The Grave", a song that McLean had written about the Vietnam War, was covered by George Michael in 2003 in protest against the
Iraq War.
The
American Pie album features a version of
Psalm 137, entitled
Babylon. The song was
arranged by McLean and Lee Hays (of The Weavers).
Boney M had a number one hit in the UK with this
song in 1978 under the title
Rivers of Babylon, although the two
renditions are so different it is not immediately noticeable that
they are versions of the same song.
In 1980, McLean had an international number one hit with a cover of
the
Roy Orbison classic, "
Crying". It was only after the record became a
success overseas that it was it released in the U.S. The single hit
#5 on the
Billboard Hot 100 in 1981. Orbison himself once
described McLean as "the voice of the century", and a subsequent
re-recording of the song saw Orbison incorporate elements of
McLean's version.
Another hit song associated with McLean (though never recorded by
him) is "
Killing Me
Softly with His Song," which was written
about McLean
after
Lori Lieberman, also a
singer/songwriter, saw him singing his composition "Empty Chairs"
in concert. Afterwards, Lieberman wrote a poem titled "Killing Me
Softly with His Blues," which became the basis for the song written
by Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox and recorded by
Roberta Flack (and later covered by
The Fugees).
Concerts
McLean’s subsequent albums did not match the commercial success of
American Pie but he became a
major concert attraction in the US and overseas. His repertoire
included old concert hall numbers and the catalogues of singers
such as
Buddy Holly, and another McLean
influence,
Frank Sinatra. The years
spent playing gigs in small clubs and coffee houses in the 1960s
transformed into well-paced performances.
McLean's first
concerts at Carnegie
Hall
in New York and the Albert Hall
in London in 1972 were critically
acclaimed.
In the 1970s, McLean usually toured solo but from 1981 to 1996 was
accompanied by
John Platania on
guitar. He now tours with his own band of Nashville musicians: Tony
Migliore, Jerry Kroon, Ralph Childs and Carl "VIP" Viperman.
In 1997,
Don McLean performed "American Pie" with Garth Brooks at Brooks' free concert in
Central
Park
in New York City. CNN
reported that "Brooks was joined on stage by two surprise guest
stars,
Billy Joel and Don McLean, who
brought down the house with an acoustic rendition of 'American
Pie'."
Two years later, Brooks repaid the favor by appearing as a special
guest (with
Nanci Griffith) on
McLean's first American TV special, broadcast as the
PBS special
Starry Starry Night. A month later,
McLean wound up the 20th century by performing "American Pie" at
the Lincoln Memorial Gala in Washington D.C. Brooks again played
"American Pie" during
We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration at the Lincoln
Memorial on January 18, 2009.
McLean had a series of conflicts with
Saturday Night Live writer
Andy Breckman, starting when Breckman opened
for McLean on tour in 1980. Breckman and McLean have penned
competing renditions of the origins of this feud, both of which are
available online.
Later work and honors
In 1991, Don McLean returned to the UK top 20 with a re-issue of
"American Pie".
Iona
College conferred an honorary doctorate on McLean in
2001.
In February 2002, "American Pie" was inducted into the
Grammy Hall of Fame.
In 2004, McLean was inaugurated into the
Songwriters Hall of Fame. Garth
Brooks presented the award and said "Don McLean his work, like the
man himself is very deep and very compassionate. His pop anthem
'American Pie' is a cultural phenomenon".
In 2007, the biography
The Don McLean Story: Killing Us Softly
With His Songs was published. Biographer Alan Howard conducted
extensive interviews for this, the only book-length biography of
the often reclusive McLean to date.
In 2008, New York City radio station Q104.3 FM
WAXQ named Don McLean's "American Pie" number 37 in
their 2008
Top 1,043 Songs Of All Time listener-generated
countdown.
Discography
Albums
Compilations
Singles
| Single |
US Pop |
US
AC |
US Country |
UK Pop |
| "American Pie"
(1971) |
1 |
1 |
- |
2 |
| "Vincent"
(1972) |
12 |
2 |
- |
1 |
| "Dreidel" (1973) |
21 |
7 |
- |
- |
| "If We Try" (1973) |
58 |
- |
- |
- |
| "Everyday" (1973) |
- |
- |
- |
38 |
| "Wonderful Baby" (1975) |
93 |
1 |
- |
- |
| "Crying" (1980) |
5 |
2 |
6 |
1 |
| "Since I Don't Have You" (1981) |
23 |
6 |
68 |
- |
| "Castles in the Air" (1981) |
36 |
7 |
- |
47 |
| "It's Just the Sun" (1981) |
83 |
- |
- |
- |
| "You Can't Blame the Train" (1987) |
- |
- |
49 |
- |
| "He's Got You" (1987) |
- |
- |
73 |
- |
| "Love in My Heart" (1988) |
- |
- |
65 |
- |
| "American Pie" (1991 reissue) |
- |
- |
- |
12 |
|
- The original version of "Castles in the Air" was included on
the Tapestry album. In February 1971, it was released as
the first single from the album and reached #40 on the
Billboard Easy Listening / Adult Contemporary chart. After
the success of the "American Pie" single, "Castles in the Air" was
included as the B-side to its follow-up, "Vincent", and received
enough radio airplay to reach the Hot 100 chart as a "flip".
McLean's 1981 version of the song appears on his album,
Believers.
Rarities
| Year |
Title |
Additional information |
| 1982 |
"The Flight of Dragons" |
This song was recorded for the
film The Flight of
Dragons in the early 1980s. |
References
- Addicted to Black CD DonMcLean.com. Retrieved
23 June 2009.
- "Vincent" UK Singles Chart info Chartstats.com.
Retrieved 22 June 2009.
- Josh Groban album info JoshGroban.com. Retrieved 23
June 2009.
- Whitburn,
Joel (2004). The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 8th
Edition (Billboard Publications), page 416.
- Hyatt, Wesley (1999). The Billboard Book of #1 Adult
Contemporary Hits (Billboard Publications), page 166.
- "Annoy Don McLean, Win $200!" Tayt Harlin,
New York Magazine, October 31, 2007
- Don McLean vs. Andy Breckman on the WFMU website
- Don McLean US chart info AllMusic.com.
Retrieved 22 June 2009.
- Don McLean UK chart positions Chartstats.com.
Retrieved 22 June 2009.
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