Montage of Loss

Bye bye Miss American pie, Drove my Chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. And them good old boys were drinkin' whiskey and rye, Singin' 'This'll be the day that I die.'

When it comes to nostalgia, the kids would seem to be at a disadvantage. After all, they have only yesterday to remember. But theirs is a big yesterday: the 1960s. The upsurge of rock culture during that decade left them with enough mythological heroes and heavies to fill a lifetime of remembering. Folk Singer Don McLean, 26, seems to evoke them all in his new 8 1/2-minute single American Pie. The song mixes the good sounds from 1960s jukeboxes with the bad news from 1960s headlines (notably Viet Nam) to produce the most surrealistic, impalpable pop lyrics since Bob Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues (1965).

The suggestive vagueness of American Pie may be one of its greatest strengths. Trying to identify its various references has become a parlor game among pop fans--doubtless the major explanation of the fact that the record has shot to the top five in the charts in only five weeks. The Rolling Stones are there, so are the Byrds, and so is the vanished spirit of Woodstock, or so it seems for a flickering moment. "I can't remember if I cried/ When I read about his widowed bride" may refer to John F. Kennedy's death. Or is it the legendary rock-'n'-roller Buddy Holly, who was killed in a plane crash in 1959? Essentially, McLean's montage expresses a sense of loss that seems to pervade the younger generation. The passing of rock music has become a sweeping metaphor for everything else that is gone:

I was a lonely teen-age broncin' buck, with a pink carnation and a pickup truck, But I knew I was out of luck The day the music died.

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