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What does it say about me that I could go with either interpretation?

(Actually what it says is simply that I am part of the unfortunate demographic group labeled Generation X. Neither Boomer nor Millennial, we enjoyed a brief but superficial flirtation with the marketers and journalists back in the early ’90s, but we soon lost our sparkle when those damn all-digital kids who are going to inherit the 21st Century started doing… whatever it is that they do. The folks my age are trapped between The Summer of Love and Hannah Montana, doomed to see our influence limited by dint of the overwhelming numbers of those who preceded us and those who follow.

But maybe I’m just feeling testy at the news that yet another classic film from my younger days, Predator, has been added to the remake/reboot/reimagine/screw-you-Gen-X-kids-because-your-stuff-wasn’t-as-cool-as-you-always-thought list. Bastards.)

Following up on something in the previous entry, the Don McLean song that gave us the expression “the day the music died” is, of course, “American Pie,” an eight-minute-long anthem that debuted in 1971 and has been a staple of rock radio ever since. It’s a beautiful piece of songwriting, simple, catchy, and haunting, in no small part because the lyrics are so bloody mysterious. I have no doubt that generations of college freshmen sat up half the night trying to decode this song. I didn’t have to myself, because right around the time I was in my oldies fandom phase, I started hearing a version of “American Pie” where some guy’s voice had been dubbed over the top of the song, explaining what all of the symbolic lines were actually supposed to be referring to. I don’t know the provenance of this version, or how much the explanations actually jibe with Don McLean’s intentions, but based on what I know of the historical and musical milestones of the 1960s, it all seemed plausible.

Here’s a video clip that repeats much of the information from “American Pie: The Overdub” (or whatever it was called) in visual form. Again, I make no claim on the accuracy of any of this. But it is interesting, and you get to see some great vintage pictures of Buddy Holly, among others, and hear one of the enduring classics of the rock era:

You wouldn’t know it based on the type of music I usually talk about around this place, but I went through a phase in my late-high-school/early-college years when I was simply mad for the stuff that’s usually categorized under the catch-all term “oldies,” i.e., the early rock-n-roll artists of the 1950s, the girl groups of the mid-1960s, and the Motown sound and blues-influenced hard rock of the later ’60s. For a while, it was like I was trying to make myself into an honorary Baby Boomer or something.

Oldies music was somewhat resurgent at the time, turning up in popular movies like Back to the Future and Dirty Dancing, and on television shows such as The Wonder Years and some others you probably don’t remember, and of course it was used in all kinds of commercials that were cynically targeted to our nostalgic parents (just like the commercials of the last decade have been leveraging the Awesome ’80s to lure we thirtysomethings into Burger King or whatever). But for me, the appeal of this genre was the same things that drew some of my peers to punk or obscure college-radio alternative bands: it was refreshingly different from the stagnating pop scene of the late ’80s, and it was sufficiently esoteric that liking it was an easy way of declaring my individuality. It was also a vast, unknown territory with an intricate and interconnected history that I could explore and lose myself in and become insufferably opinionated about, which are, of course, the fundamental elements of any fannish concern. It didn’t hurt that my old Ford Galaxie, my beloved Cruising Vessel, had a stock, AM-only radio and oldies were about the only kind of music you could find with that thing. And of course a lot of that music is just plain good. There’s a reason why songs by The Four Tops and Roy Orbison are still heard in movie soundtracks 40 years after they were recorded, and it’s the same reason why certain tunes by Sinatra and the Glenn Miller Band live on, too. Because they managed to express something so perfectly that they continue to work for us, despite the passage of time. I hope we never change so much as a culture or a species that they cease working.

Anyway, there were a lot of artists I enjoyed and admired during my oldies fanboy phase — Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, The Supremes, The Platters, The Drifters, Chuck Berry, the aforementioned Orbison — but my favorite was a guy who’s possibly more famous for his untimely death than for anything he did while he was living, which is one of the great shames of music history. I’m talking about a skinny kid from Texas named Buddy Holly, who died in a plane crash 50 years ago today.

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