The day the music died.

I derive too much pleasure from when things "click", when stray events and knowledge come together.

From Instapundit

Click to enlarge.

I have been a fan Don McClean's since the early-nineteen seventies, particularly his albums Tapestry, American Pie, and Homeless Brother. American Pie in particular was a wonderfully allegorical album with ballads, repurposed icons, laments, historical figures, songs protesting the tragedy of the Vietnam War, etc. An album for the mind as well as for the ears.

Being a young teen, it was the subject of much conversation among my music-loving peers as to what the individual songs and album meant. We knew there was more to it than the surface interpretation but as to exactly what that meaning was, we had no idea. We were young, the library was tiny and not up-to-date, and there was, of course, no internet for prompt answers.

I lived, at that time, in Stockholm, Sweden which had a reasonable population of American draft evaders welcomed by the studiously neutral and anti-war Swedes but eking out a very marginal existence in a cold land of refuge.

One cold winter evening, some friends and I had been out bowling or to a movie and were headed towards our bus on Sveavägen or Odengatan to go home. Probably around 8pm but in the winter and already dark as only a high-latitudes winter evening can be.

As we passed a bundled up fellow, he accosted us in broken Swedish, wanting to sell us his interpretation of American Pie on a mimeographed sheet. 5 Kronor. He was startled to find that we spoke English and had among us a couple of Americans. He explained his predicament as a non-Swedish speaking draft-dodging American, trying to make ends meet any way he could in a foreign land. We rustled up five kronor among us and moved on.

On the bus, we briefly discussed the mimeographed scholarship of the American Pie and then moved on to topics of greater appeal to fourteen-year-old boys - rivalries, girls, the movie we had just seen, our cold feet and other such topical things. I do not recall who ended up with the scholarship.

And all these years I have remained ignorant of the origin story of American Pie until the note above from Instapundit. It all makes sense now. Now for some googling on the rest of the lyrics.