American Pie .........the song (Don McClean)

The Grand Rapids LipDub (NEW WORLD RECORD)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPjjZCO67WI  (I really liked this till I saw an AMWAY ad at the end.)  ...cal

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk%3AApple_pie
Excerpt:
I would say the key part of the expression is "motherhood and apple pie" and that it means something like "back to basics" as icons of home and childhood. So when someone says "As American as motherhood and apple pie" (or the more common "As American as apple pie"), they're not claiming either motherhood or apple pie to be particularly American; rather, they are saying that the importance of home and family is a key American concept; that home and family are the basic social unit; and that whatever they are promoting that is like "motherhood and apple pie" should be regarded as a basic need -- a safe idea.

Matthew, Gunnar, and Sam Nelson "Garden Party"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShwSZtDdl3M&feature=related


Rick Nelson & The Stone Canyon Band Garden Party Live 1978
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uC_WgcqwdUc&feature=related


Tomorrow Show - Ricky & David Nelson Interview
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UBIJf6ueYk

Don McClean American Pie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAsV5-Hv-7U

http://understandingamericanpie.com/index.htm
Excerpt:
Introduction
In the autumn of 1971 Don McLean's elegiac American Pie entered the collective consciousness, and over thirty years later remains one of the most discussed, dissected and debated songs that popular music has ever produced. A cultural event at the peak of its popularity in 1972, it reached the top of the Billboard 100 charts in a matter of weeks, selling more than 3 million copies; and at eight and a half minutes long, this was no mean feat. But this was no ordinary song, either: boldly original and thematically ambitious, what set American Pie apart had a lot to do with the way we weren't entirely sure what the song was about, provoking endless debates over its epic cast of characters. And these controversies remain with us to this day. But however open to interpretation the lyrics may have been, the song's emotional resonance was unmistakable: McLean was clearly relating a defining moment in the American experience—something had been lost, and we knew it. Opening with the death of singer Buddy Holly and ending near the tragic concert at Altamont Motor Speedway, we are able to frame the span of years the song is covering—1959 to 1970—as the "10 years we've been on our own" of the third verse. It is across this decade that the American cultural landscape changed radically, passing from the relative optimism and conformity of the 1950s and early 1960s to the rejection of these values by the various political and social movements of the mid and late 1960s.

Coming as it did near the end of this turbulent era, American Pie seemed to be speaking to the precarious position we found ourselves in, as the grand social experiments of the 1960s began collapsing under the weight of their own unrealized utopian dreams, while the quieter, hopeful world we grew up in receded into memory. And as 1970 came to a close and the world this generation had envisioned no longer seemed viable, a sense of disillusion and loss fell over us; we weren't the people we once were. But we couldn't go home again either, having challenged the assumptions of that older order. The black and white days were over.
Bye bye, Miss American Pie.

•   •   • The 1950s are fondly remembered as a kind of golden age in American history, a charmed moment in time when the country seemed more confident and hopeful than it has ever been. A period of unprecedented economic prosperity, it was the era when the majority of Americans, freed from the constraints of the Great Depression and World War II, took some time off from the uncertainties of life to simply enjoy themselves; and in a long, giddy parade of marriages, babies, automobiles, suburban homes and kitchen appliances, celebrated their achievement of the American Dream. Never before had the wealth of a nation been so widely distributed. But American enthusiasms during these years were rooted in more than just the good things that money could buy. Allied victories in World War II had been great moral victories for the country as well, and as the United States rose to economic and political world dominance in the postwar years, national pride went soaring right along with it. Americans at mid-century were mighty impressed with America—and happy for awhile:

In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television. These—in conjunction with their sponsors' commercial goals—sought to shape their audience's aspirations. However, most Americans needed little coaching in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future.

From The 1950s by David Halberstam
Introduction, continued
The same cannot be said of the 1960s. Just as the fifties was an era of great optimism and consensus, the sixties became its antithesis, as the black and white values of the status quo embraced by the previous generation—the sense of the "essential goodness" of American society—no longer rang true. Emerging from the civil rights issues that had been simmering since World War II, and spurred on further by an unpopular war in Southeast Asia, this generation's dissatisfaction with American culture grew markedly more pronounced, as many of the assumptions about the society we were born into were called into question:
...the civil rights and antiwar and countercultural and woman's and the rest of that decade's movements forced upon us central issues for Western civilization—fundamental questions of value, fundamental divides of culture, fundamental debates about the nature of the good life.
From The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage by Todd Gitlin
The rules were changing. And so was the music. As American values were shifting through this period, a corresponding shift can be observed in rock 'n' roll, as it moved away from the exuberant simplicity of the 1950s to the more literate and politically charged subject matter of the 1960s. And as the music reflected these changes it also became symbolic of them, producing a defining musical figure at each major turning point: Bob Dylan at the more cerebral beginnings of the radical sixties, the Beatles during its more idealistic middle period, and the Rolling Stones closer to its anarchic end.
So even though American Pie appears to chronicle the course of rock 'n' roll, it is not, as is sometimes suggested, a mere catalogue of musical events. In using the cast of rock 'n' roll players from the 1960s and setting them against the backdrop of Buddy Holly's death, they become polarized—metaphors for the clash of values occurring in America at this time: Holly as the symbol of the happier innocence of the fifties, the rest as symbolic of the sixties growing unrest and fragmentation. And as each verse sums up chronological periods in time—the late 1950s, 1963-66, 1966-68, 1969, 1970—another blow against the happier innocence of another era is registered: another day the music dies.
•   •   •
The song can be divided into roughly 5 sections: the prologue (verse 1), which looks back from the early seventies and introduces the catalyst for the story about to unfold; Act 1 (verse 2), which, along with the chorus and verse 1, establishes the 1950s as the reference point for the rest of the song; Act II (verses 3 & 4), in which the story builds on the growing conflicts of the 1960s; Act III (verse 5), the apocalyptic climax of the story; and the epilogue (verse 6), the song's coda.


1968
From "1968 in America" by Charles Kaiser:
Nineteen sixty-eight was the pivotal year of the sixties: the moment when all of a nation's impulses toward violence, idealism, diversity, and disorder peaked to produce the greatest possible hope—and the worst imaginable despair. For many of us who came of age in that remarkable era, it has been twenty years since we have lived with such intensity. That is one of the main reasons why the sixties retain their extraordinary power over every one old enough to remember them. The sixties and the thirties were the only modern decades in which large numbers of Americans wondered out loud whether their country might disintegrate. From this distance the massive unemployment of the Depression looks like a bigger threat than the upheavals of the more recent period. But unlike the still puzzling moods of the sixties, the nature of American despair in the thirties was never mysterious: People were miserable because they were hungry, fearful because they weren't sure anyone would ever figure out how to put them back to work again.
...Thus, as 1968 began, these were some of the sources of the malaise gnawing away at many of the six million draft-age students in college, the largest group of undergraduates in American history: an absence of religious conviction; an unwanted intimacy with the nuclear void; an unexpected familiarity with political assassination—Malcolm X's in 1965, as well as John Kennedy's in 1963—and a yearning for the idealism that was the most evocative part of Kennedy's presidency. Together these disparate elements fed two seemingly contradictory but actually complementary impulses: the desire to create our own culture, a world of our own where we could retreat from the world of our parents; and the need to embrace causes larger than ourselves, crusades that would give us the chance to define ourselves as moral people.
...television news was bruising everyone's nerve endings nightly. In 1968 it brought the War in Vietnam and the war in the ghetto into every dorm room and living room with a power no other medium could match. The pictures Americans saw made millions of them intensely uncomfortable with themselves: pictures of the South Vietnamese national police chief shooting a suspected Vietcong in the head during Tet, of Martin Luther King's casket, and of Bobby Kennedy's bleeding body on a hotel kitchen floor; pictures of the uprisings all over America after King's death and the worst fires in the city of Washington since the War of 1812. Ghetto insurrections were followed by campus revolts, most dramatically at Columbia University. For the first time since their invention, televised pictures made the possibility of anarchy in America feel real.

Altamont The following excerpt is from Todd Gitlin's book "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage:"
The tale has been told many times of how, at Altamont, among three hundred thousand fans, the Hell's Angels, serving as semiofficial guards, killed a young fan, black, who had a white date and the temerity to offend the Angels (by getting too close to them, or their motorcycles, or the stage), and then, at some point, pulled a gun—all the while Mick Jagger was singing "Under My Thumb." I heard about the killing that night, on the radio, having left before the Stones took the stage. But by the time I left, in the late afternoon, Altamont already felt like death. Let it sound mystical, I wasn't the only one who felt oppressed by the general ambience; a leading Berkeley activist told me he had dropped acid at Altamont and had received the insight that "everyone was dead." It wasn't just the Angels, shoving people around on and near the stage, who were angels of death. Behind the stage, hordes of Aquarians were interfering with doctors trying to help people climb down from bad acid trips. On the remote hillside where I sat, stoned fans were crawling over one another to get a bit closer to the groovy music. Afterward everyone was appalled and filled with righteous indignation. But exactly who or what was at fault? On a practical plane, there were movie-rights squabbles; greed had played its part in preventing adequate preparations. But the effect was to burst the bubble of youth culture's illusions about itself. The Rolling Stones were scarcely the first countercultural heroes to grant cachet to the Hell's Angels. We had witnessed the famous collectivity of a generation cracking into thousands of shards. Center stage turned out to be another drug. The suburban fans who blithely blocked one another's views and turned their backs on the bad-trippers were no cultural revolutionaries. Who could any longer harbor the illusion that these hundreds of thousands of spoiled star-hungry children of the Lonely Crowd were the harbingers of a good society?

The Fifties The following is excerpted from the introduction to David Halberstam's book "The Fifties":
...the fifties appear to be an orderly era, one with a minimum of social dissent. Photographs from the period tend to show people who dressed carefully: men in suits, ties, and—when outdoors—hats; the women with their hair in modified page-boys, pert and upbeat. Young people seemed, more than anything else,"square" and largely accepting of the given social covenants. At the beginning of the decade their music was still slow and saccharine, mirroring the generally bland popular taste. In the years following the traumatic experiences of the Depression and World War II, the American Dream was to exercise personal freedom not in social and political terms, but rather in economic ones. Eager to be part of the burgeoning middle class, young men and women opted for material well-being, particularly if it came with some form of guaranteed employment. For the young, eager veteran just out of college (which he had attended courtesy of the G.I. Bill), security meant finding a good white-collar job with a large, benevolent company, getting married, having children, and buying a house in the suburbs.
In that era of general good will and expanding affluence, few Americans doubted the essential goodness of their society. After all, it was reflected back at them not only by contemporary books and magazines, but even more powerfully and with even greater influence in the new family sitcoms on television. These—in conjunction with their sponsors' commercial goals—sought to shape their audience's aspirations. However, most Americans needed little coaching in how they wanted to live. They were optimistic about the future. Young men who had spent three or four years fighting overseas were eager to get on with their lives; so, too, were the young women who had waited for them at home. The post-World War II rush to have children would later be described as the "baby boom" (everything else in the United States seemed to be booming, so why not the production of children as well?) It was a good time to be young and get on with family and career: Prices and inflation remained relatively low; and nearly everyone with a decent job could afford to own a home. Even if the specter of Communism lurked on the horizon—particularly as both superpowers developed nuclear weapons—Americans trusted their leaders to tell them the truth, to make sound decisions, and to keep them out of war.
For a while, the traditional system of authority held. The men (and not men and women) who presided in politics, business, and media had generally been born in the previous century. The advent of so strong a society, in which the nation's wealth was shared by so many, represented a prosperity beyond their wildest dreams. During the course of the fifties, as younger people and segments of society who did not believe they had a fair share became empowered, pressure inevitably began to build against the entrenched political and social hierarchy. But one did not lightly challenge a system that seemed, on the whole, to be working so well. Some social critics, irritated by the generally quiescent attitude and the boundless appetite for consumerism, described a "silent" generation. Others were made uneasy by the degree of conformity around them, as if the middle-class living standard had been delivered in an obvious trade-off for blind acceptance of the status quo. Nonetheless, the era was a much more interesting one than it appeared on the surface. Exciting new technologies were being developed that would soon enable a vast and surprisingly broad degree of dissidence, and many people were already beginning to question the purpose of their lives and whether that purpose had indeed become, almost involuntarily, too much about material things.

The Sixties  The following is an excerpt from the introduction to Jon Margolis' book, "The Last Innocent Year: America in 1964 (The Beginning of the Sixties)":
There never was an innocent year.
...But there was a time when the delusion of innocence was easy to believe, when the myth was at least as useful as it was deceiving. That time ended when 1964 did.
If the delusion of innocence ended in 1964, something else began: the Sixties. The calendar tells us decades begin when the next-to-last number of the year changes. We know better. When Americans at century's end hear that now-cliched term the Sixties, the hopeful and relatively placid years of John Kennedy's campaign and presidency do not come to mind. Their tumultuous aftermath does. If the tumult did not start in 1964, it blossomed then...
From every perspective except the calendar's, 1964 started forty days early, when John F. Kennedy was murdered in Dallas. The wonder is that the belief in American innocence was not murdered that day, too. In retrospect, perhaps it was, but because beliefs do not die as cleanly as people do, their deaths can escape recognition. America spent the months after John Kennedy's death in denial. A few clung to the idea of an ersatz resurrection by hoping that Kennedy's successor would choose Robert Kennedy as vice president. Almost everyone tried to tell him or herself that the assassination, for all its horror, was an aberration, that the country and its culture remained strong, healthy, and essentially unchanged. They were wrong. On January 1, 1964, the dourest observer of the passing scene could not foresee a country in which students would rise up against their elders, city dwellers would set fire to their neighborhoods, large numbers of privileged young people would openly flout the law, and women would begin to wonder whether the male sex was their oppressor. By year's end, the most optimistic observer of the passing scene would have wondered about all that—if an optimistic observer could be found. For 1964 was the first year since the end of World War II, if not in the twentieth century, in which events challenged, if they did not overwhelm, America's habitual optimism. Sure, there had always been naysayers and grouches—from Thoreau to Mark Twain to Ambrose Bierce—but these had been a minority even among the intellectuals. The prevailing ethos had been that although there were problems aplenty, they could all be solved thanks to democracy, freedom, the market economy, and plain old American know-how. That ethos was not destroyed in 1964, but it was shaken, and the shaking came from the American people themselves, who rose up—not as one, but as many diverse, disagreeing (and disagreeable) factions against the elites who had been governing them. For the first time, some even wondered whether America's problems should be solved. These uprisings destroyed the consensus.