article_snippet.sent: That was the easy part, of course, for anyone of my and his generation who learned about the death in a plane crash in 1959 of one of the first great singer-songwriters of rock, Buddy Holly, when we read about it in the morning newspaper.
article_snippet.sent: As McLean sings, it was truly 'The day the music died'.
article_snippet.sent: especially the first half, which was the section mainly played on the radio because the record was far too long to be played in full — was just a misty-eyed lament for an untroubled Mom and Apple Pie American youth.
article_snippet.sent: Was the reference to The Byrds' record Eight Miles High a comment on the carpet-bombing by U.S. jets in Vietnam?
article_snippet.sent: And metaphor, Only McLean might have added, as, in my interpretation of the lyrics, a game of American football becomes a student demonstration, probably at Kent State University, over America's military extension of the Vietnam war to Cambodia, to the music of The Beatles' Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album.
article_snippet.sent: But there is confusion because it isn't The Beatles' famous last U.S. show at Candlestick Park, San Francisco, that Only McLean is singing about, but The Rolling Stones' performance at nearby Altamont in 1969.
article_snippet.sent: The day the music died.'
article_snippet.sent: I'd far rather them had been bought by an university so students of U.S. literature and social history could spend another 40-odd years poring over them, and discussing what can be done with a popular song, and how America was, as it says in the lyrics, a 'long, long time ago'.