With only McLean on guitar and a bassist and drummer, “it kept sounding like a polka,” McLean says over rare footage from those rehearsals more than 50 years ago. “I just knew that I had something that was incredibly great and fun but that nobody else might dig at all,” says McLean over home movies of his original lyrics.īut as the exclusive clip below shows, capturing the right sound in the studio proved elusive. “No one’s ever written anything like it since,” says Brooks, and even McLean knew he had something special. “One day it all came out like a genie out of a bottle.” “I’ve got to have a big song about America,” he recalls thinking. Writing the song was the easy part, McLean says in the documentary, as he looked at a country roiled by Vietnam and still reeling from the 1968 assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. The accident affected the then 13-year-old deeply, leaving him almost obsessed with finding out more. 3, 1959, when Holly, the Big Bopper and Ritchie Valens all perished in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. As most fans of the song know, “the day the music died” references Feb. McLean grew up in New Rochelle, N.Y., feeling loved but distant from his family, and entranced by artists such as Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent. Think Pink: The 16 Cutest Barbie Collabs to Shop Right Now
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