Rod Stewart playlist: His 20 best songs, from ‘Maggie May’ to ‘Hot Legs’ The quintessential American rock 'n' roll epic The fact that he and Everly were talking 10 years after Holly's death is why the lyrics say, 'For 10 years, we've been on our own.' That conversation brought the whole thing flooding back for McLean, who was a 13-year-old paperboy when Holly died. But he would have been in the bus all day if he hadn't taken the plane.' 'He was gonna have five or six hours when he got there and be able to get the laundry done,' McLean says. I thought, 'What?!''Īs Everly told the story, Holly even took some other people's dirty laundry on the plane. And now suddenly, there was this movement. Everything had been sort of etched in stone. The photographs, the notes on the back of the record covers, had all been static for all those years. 'That blew my mind right there,' McLean recalls. 'John Lennon got it': Micky Dolenz on the Monkees' proper place in music history How Phil Everly blew Don McLean's mind Getting back to 1969 at Newport, though, what Phil Everly told him was that Holly took the plane because he had to do his laundry.

This is before we started thinking of the date that plane went down - Feb. 3, 1959 - as 'the day the music died.'ĭon't miss out! Your guide to all the biggest concerts playing metro Phoenix in JulyĪt that point, McLean hadn't written those words in 'American Pie,' the nearly nine-minute epic whose 50th anniversary he's celebrating on a tour that makes its way to the Orpheum Theatre on July 9. 'The Big Bopper' Richardson were killed in a plane crash after playing the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, as part of the Winter Dance Party Tour. Lucky's and its joker sign became Arizona icons Buddy Holly and the day the music diedĮverly shared what he had come to understand of the events that happened 10 years earlier, when Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. 'I said, 'I know that you knew Buddy Holly.' And like a kid - I was just a kid - I said, 'What happened? Can you tell me what happened?' I wanted to know more than just, 'He got on the plane.'' In 1969, an aspiring singer-songwriter landed a spot in the annual Newport Folk Festival, where a conversation with rock 'n' roll legends the Everly Brothers changed his life in ways he never could've dreamed.Īs Don McLean recalls, 'The Everlys were there. And they had always been my favorite group. View Gallery: Don McLean and 'American Pie' through the years: Photos

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