Mom, Dad and American Pie

Periodically this summer, National Public Radio aired a series of remembrances under the heading “Mom and Dad’s Record Collection.” In these pieces, per the description NPR host Melissa Block gave at the outset of the final one on September 7, listeners shared stories “about their parents’ music, and one song that stayed with them.”

I found most of the pieces I happened to hear affecting in some way, and I mean at some point to catch up with the others, as they’re all available on NPR’s Web site. But the final interview in the series particularly moved me and put me in a reflective mood, because of the particular song that was spotlighted and the inconceivability that anything like it would’ve been in my own parents’ record collection.

Block introduced the segment by saying she believed she’d already wrapped up the “Mom and Dad’s Record Collection” series when an e-mail came in from a woman in Cincinnati named Mel Fisher Ostrowski that prompted her to conduct one last interview. As the two women began talking and Ostrowski’s tale unfolded, I quickly saw why Block had elected to un-retire the series.

The song Ostrowski wanted to discuss was folk singer Don McLean’s “American Pie,” a sprawling ballad from a 1971 album of the same name that begins nostalgically with the lyrics “A long, long time ago/I can still remember how the music used to make me smile.” It proceeds—first tenderly, then rockingly, then, finally, in the manner of an Irish wake—to seemingly, but never explicitly, tell the story of the 1960s, bookmarked at the outset and end by rather more clear allusions to the February 3, 1959, death of rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Buddy Holly at age 22 in an Iowa plane crash.

I wrote “never explicitly” because, for all of the song’s seeming allusions to societal watersheds of the 1960s and the musical artists who chronicled or paralleled those events, McLean himself has never gratified those who’ve asked him what the song’s all about, except to confirm that he had learned of Holly’s death while folding newspapers for his paper route—echoing the lyrics “February made me shiver/With every paper I delivered/Bad news on the doorstep.” McLean has steadfastly refused to say more on the subject, preferring that the words speak for themselves and be interpreted however listeners might choose. (He once responded, cheekily, that what his monster hit really means is that "I never have to work again.”)

I loved McLean’s opus—at 8 minutes and 33 seconds, the longest song ever to top the Billboard charts—the very first time I heard it, relishing even as a teenager its catchiness and the depth evident beneath its singsong chorus about “Good old boys drinking whisky and rye/Singing this’ll be the day that I die.” It undoubtedly helped, too, that I was, and am, a huge Buddy Holly fan—a guy who, like the narrator of “American Pie,” grieves for the deceased’s “widowed bride,” as well as all the great music the gifted songwriter and performer never got a chance to make.

But, back to Mel Fisher Ostrowski, who by the definition of  “Mom and Dad’s Record Collection” must  be quite a bit younger than me. McLean’s American Pie LP, after all, was in my record collection, not that of my parents’. (In fact, I may still have the vinyl album, but I’m afraid to assess the condition of the LPs that long have been moldering in boxes in our basement crawlspace.) What had attracted Ostrowski to American Pie, and to its title track in particular, was the fact that they conjured for her a father she'd barely known.

As she recounted to Block, she’d been only around 4 or 5 years old when her parents split up, and 10 when he died. One of the few keepsakes from her father that she possessed in her girlhood was that one LP, which had been his and was adorned with his name--as punched out on one of those old plastic label makers that had seemed Space Age in their ingenuity back then. (I owned one, too.)

This is verbatim, from the transcript, what Ostrowski said about the song “American Pie:

“We would listen to it as a family, me and my siblings, or I would put it on and play it myself. And it became kind of a conversation between me and my dad—a memory that never really happened, because we didn’t listen to it together, my father and I. I never saw him play it. I never heard him sing it. But I knew he liked it, because he bought it.”

Block mentioned the song’s complexity and all the parsing that has surrounded it over the years, and said she couldn’t imagine a little girl having been hooked by any of that. “Oh, no,” Ostrowski confirmed, “I just liked to dance to it.”

But later, she continued, she researched the song and came to appreciate it for much more than its merely its beat. It became, she said, no longer “just something that I liked to hear. It told a story, and I love stories. I memorized every lyric—all eight minutes of it—and it kind of became my anthem.”

But the song’s greatest gift to Ostrowski was to come. In spring 2011 she had a son named Owen. And wouldn’t you know, the one lullaby—what are lullabies, after all, but stories?—that would calm his nighttime tears and soothe him to sleep was his mother’s (presumably gentler and less rocking) rendition of Don McLean’s “American Pie.”

“It’s really nice to have this happy, peaceful memory, this uncomplicated gift I can give my son and say, ‘This is from me, and it came from my father’,” Ostrowski recounted. “And I still sing it to him all the time. … Even if he falls asleep, I finish it. Because the ending is so soft and sweet.”

Ostrowski then cried a little, before concluding the segment by softly singing that soft, sweet ending. Should you go to NPR’s site and listen to the entire piece without shedding a tear yourself, you’re a tougher soul than I. I was driving at the time, and I suddenly noticed the road getting a little blurry.

Here’s the thing, though. The pathos of Ostrowski’s story led me to consider for the first time my own parents’ record collection, and whether any song from it has “stayed with me”—that is, whether any single tune remains memorable to me in any way, for any reason. I had to conclude that the answer is no.

I think back on my parents’ record collection when I was growing up, and what strikes me first and foremost is how different middle age was then from how it is now. It’s in some ways startling to me to note that my dad didn’t turn 40 until 1968 and that my mother was only 38 when the 1960s ended, because their musical tastes reflected nothing of youth and everything of bland middle age. My parents’ record collection in the 1960s was not comprised of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, or even of the Buddy Hollys and Elvis Presleys of the previous decade. It was entirely a catalog of, to put it bluntly, elevator music. The Mantovani Orchestra. Percy Faith. Lawrence Welk—whose show we watched at my maternal grandparents’ house, to my mom and dad’s rapt enjoyment.

What could there possibly be for me to indelibly remember, to this day, about that ripple-less sea of snooze-inducing strings and banal “champagne music” that had all the life and vivacity of the famously autocratic Welk’s constrained definition of fun?

I guess I’m choosing to think of Mel Fisher Ostrowski’s father as having been not that much older than was I when he bought American Pie, because my thesis is that, while youth now has come to be considered a state of mind, in earlier generations it was more like catching lightning in a bottle: You bought Elvis records if you were a teenager at that time, but if you were older by then—even just 20-something—you already were past the age of adoption and adaptation. How else to explain the fact that all the great rock, folk, and soul acts of the 1960s—Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, James Brown—passed my parents’ notice with no more than a derisive sneer (I still remember my mom hooting in a vaguely racist way at Aretha Franklin’s “conniption-fit screaming”), if indeed those artists were noticed at all?

Why, I could no more have opened my parents’ record cabinet and found a disc comparable in musical interest and lyric complexity to “American Pie” than I could have found Ken Kesey on their bookshelf or sandwich bags of weed stashed deep in a dresser drawer. Now, I realize not all of my parents’ contemporaries were quite as square as were they. Somebody other than teenyboppers was buying all those hip jazz albums back then, for example. My boyhood friend Michael Newman’s father worked in the recording industry, and even possessed a drumstick that had been used by Ringo Starr. But my parents, predictably, found the Newmans impossibly bohemian, subversive and wholly unfit to reside on our suburban cul-de-sac. (I still was in elementary school when they apparently picked up on the neighborhood vibe and hightailed it to some hipper burg.)

Still, I do think the times must've had a lot to do with why, were I have to mulled NPR’s bait at the beginning of the summer, I’d quickly have given up on trying to identify a single song I associate with my parents that has stayed with me over the years. Unless we’re talking about those moments when I’m ascending an elevator, or have been placed on hold by a utility company or dentist’s office. At which times my parents’ entire record collection comes to mind, as I unsuccessfully stifle a yawn.