I Read a Book: Happy For a While: "American Pie," 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now by Phil Dellio

Thinking about a song I've known without thinking about it

We all have our origin stories. Phil Dellio’s love affair with pop music started just about six months after mine did, though I was 13 and he was 10. I bought “American Pie” by Don McLean on the 45 release that had part 1 on the a-side and part 2 on the b-side, and I played the heck out of it at the same time Dellio was poring over the charts of his local Top 40 station, the brilliantly named CHUM in Toronto. All of the context he gives for his love of the record corresponds to my memories growing up in St. Louis and listening to KXOK and WIRL.

They say a good piece of music criticism makes the reader want to hear what’s being covered. After about 1973, I don’t think I’ve ever sat down and listened to “American Pie.” The song is indelibly recorded in my memory bank, and I don’t turn it off if I hear it come on the radio, but it doesn’t strike me as being as important as many of the records which were on the charts at the same time. Dellio didn’t succeed in making me want to play “American Pie” again, but he a) did make a great case for having me upgrade the song in my personal jukebox and more importantly, he b) made me want to hear all sorts of other songs from that time period, including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” by Roberta Flack, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” by Looking Glass (and he hipped me to the fact the singer of that band used to be in the Outcasts), and “Heart of Gold” by Neil Young.

The key to all good music criticism – to any criticism, I think – is to drop any pretense to being objective. We all have our reasons for loving a record, and those reasons can begin with the circumstances of how we discovered the song in the first place. One of Dellio’s arguments as to the reason “American Pie” resonated so strongly at the time it did was that it was released in the period when pop music was in between the dominance of the Beatles and the styles – mostly more “refined” – which would take over in 1973. Those two years at the start of the 1970s were vital to my personal love affair with music, and I find it interesting that my return to comic books as my chief passion coincided with what Dellio singles out as the end of a creative burst on the charts. I bought the occasional record, but after 1972, I didn’t spend much serious time with music until I first discovered the San Francisco late 60s scene and then the contemporary punk/New Wave scene in 1978.

Before going any further, I do want to emphasize that I think this book will resonate with people interested in pop music of all kinds even if its subject matter doesn’t strictly coincide with the experiences each reader may have personally had. Dellio is an exhilarating music writer, one who can describe a song simply and quickly, can make connections between lyrics and sonic expression, between broader culture and pop music culture, between trends and individual pieces. He’s got a great sense of humor, too, and the book just glides by as big ideas collide with little jokes and subjective asides. Don’t sleep on the footnotes, either – these aren’t scholarly so much as highly enjoyable extraneous comments. (My own footnote to his footnotes, though – because I just read the new Leon Russell book by Bill Janovitz, I couldn’t help but notice Dellio forgets to credit Russell as co-author of “Superstar” and that he points out Bob Dylan released no albums between 1970 and 1973 without mentioning the first Dylan song I knew, 1971’s single of “Watching the River Flow,” produced and shaped by Russell.)

Dellio being 10 and me being 13 when “American Pie” owned the pop charts, neither one of us connected hard with the lyrics in 1972. The whole metaphorical tale of rock music history which is generally considered to be the point of the song went right over our heads. Dellio did understand the nascent romanticism of the words – “I know that you’re in love with him / Because I saw you dancing in the gym,” with the key being that at ten, that romanticism is being shaped by seeing such experiences from the outside, not doing the dancing but being jealous of the dancer. I think that ran through my mind at a subconscious level, too. I can definitely remember “American Pie,” despite its exuberant musical and melodic feel, having a tinge to it that made me yearn for something I didn’t quite know yet. (I also had a Sunday School teacher at the time who spent a couple weeks on this song; I’m pretty sure he found a way to make the “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost” of the song be the actual Holy Trinity and nothing else.)

I had forgotten Madonna did a version of “American Pie” back in 2001. Madonna, Prince, Michael Jackson, and I were just a few months apart in age.  Dellio got a head start on us as far as feeling connected to pop music at an early age – well, maybe not Jackson, who was having his own hit records when he was 10 – but we were all “in that same general age range as Spike Lee, Matthew Weiner, and other artists whose work suggested that they looked upon 1972 as a central part of who they were and how they viewed themselves.” That to me is a key to this book and my personal connection with it – 1971 and 1972 were remarkable years in pop music, and being 12 and 13 are remarkable years in most people’s lives. The question is – do songs like “American Pie” resonate with us because we were that age, or because they are inherently full of truths? I would argue, and I think Dellio would agree, that the answer is “Yes.”

For 192 pages (well, the first ten pages of prose are a typically entertaining set of unexpected but important connections by Chuck Eddy), Dellio keeps the book on a light and breezy and not-quite-innocent but not treacherous field of musical discussion. Then he adds a long epilogue about “the awkward, confusing now” of the sub-title. When I watched the debut episode of Midnight Special, now available on youTube, about a week before I read this book, I was pleased to see Don McLean perform a song I didn’t know. (Like almost everybody who knows “American Pie,” and even those of us who also know “Vincent (Starry Starry Night),” I have no knowledge whatsoever about any other song McLean ever sang.) What a nice young man, I thought, who actually had pleasant music outside his hits.

Well – Dellio points out that McLean has been accused by his ex-wife of physical and mental abuse over the many years of their marriage. Which brings him to a long discussion of the current penchant for “cancel culture,” or at the very least the idea that our responses to art take into account our knowledge of the creator’s actions outside the piece itself. Dellio actually has one of the more interesting takes I’ve seen on this dichotomy between the art and the artist. It’s complicated. Me, I come closer to his (and by extension, Greil Marcus’s) take; individual responses vary. I can’t stand to watch Woody Allen movies any more. But I still listen to music by Michael Jackson. It’s not a matter of forgiving these people for their sins – it’s just that some art, for me, transcends the person who made it, and some does not.

Dellio’s arguments here – many of which are reshaped from arguments with real people he’s had online – are insightful and fascinating. They will probably not change anybody’s minds in even the way his arguments about “American Pie” itself might change minds. Political arguments – and that’s what the art vs. artist discussion is – do not respond to persuasion from example the way musical arguments can. I’m sure glad to have read a book on a subject I wouldn’t have chosen myself simply because it connects to a time in my life I can never forget.