On/ Off: On the Amazon

Don McLean: On the Amazon

[purchase On the Amazon from Amazon]

I am not a big fan of Don McLean. He is an artist I know mainly for American Pie, and it has taken me many years to come to appreciate him for that. However, my wife was a big fan at one time. That is why I knew about the song On the Amazon. The song is a deep album track from McLean’s self titled 1972 release. It is best considered to be a novelty song, with the singer presenting a catalog of imaginary Amazonian denizens with some highly unlikely names, and the song is quite amusing. On the Amazon also presents us with a musical mystery. Unlike most of the material Don McLean recorded, On the Amazon is a cover, and a very unlikely one.

Bobby Howes: On the Amazon

[Not available for purchase]

The original version was recorded by Bobby Howes in 1929. It was written for the musical Mr Cinders, but was apparently left out of the London production that was mounted that year. Still, the song was considered to have enough merit to warrant a recording by Bobby Howes, who played Jim, the character who would have sung the song in the show. Mr Cinders is a gender reversed version of Cinderella. Jim goes to the ball disguised as a famous explorer, and On the Amazon supposedly boasts of his adventures in a place Jim has actually never visited.

The question I can not answer is, how did Don McLean come to hear the song? The show was a modest success in London, playing for about a year and a half. It made its way to Europe, where a translation into German was also successful. But the show never made it to Broadway. On the Amazon was not even the best known song from the show. That was Spread a Little Happiness, which did become something of a standard in England. So maybe McLean heard that song and wondered what else the songwriters had done. He would have had to do some research, at a time when there was no internet to help. It is clear to me as well that McLean didn’t just find the sheet music for On the Amazon. His performance includes some vocal mannerisms that are clearly from the Bobby Howes recording.

On the Amazon is still hardly a standard today. Spread a Little Hapiness and the show Mr Cinders have however seen some renewed interest. Sting had a minor hit with his recording of the song for the film Brimstone and Treacle. That may have led to a London revival of the show in 1983. The only record I could find of a US performance of Mr Cinders was a 1988 production that was mounted in Connecticut. There have been a number of covers of Spread a Little Happiness since then, although none have come near charting.

One final note: On the Amazon by New Riders of the Purple Sage is a completely different song.

Buddy Holly: American Pie

Don McLean: American Pie
[purchase]

Following up on Dave’s prior post, the plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, along with Ritchie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, and pilot Roger Peterson, is commonly known as “The Day the Music Died,” because of Don McLean’s “American Pie.” Even as a 10 year old in 1971 when it was released, I knew that the song was something special. Not just because it was 8 and a half minutes long, and you had to flip over the 45 record to hear the whole thing. I remember reading newspaper articles trying to decipher McLean’s imagery, and the debates over its interpretation. But there was never a debate that “The Day the Music Died,” referred to the death of those four men in a frozen field near Clear Lake, Iowa. If there was any question that this was the case, you can see in the photo above that McLean dedicated the album to Holly, although he generally has refused to comment on others’ interpretation of his lyrics.

I remember understanding that there was a wistfulness about the song, that McLean was bemoaning the loss of something. Although I probably couldn’t have described it well then, I think that I got the gist of his message that the decade between Holly’s death, at the beginning of the song, and the negative, anti-Woodstock violence of Altamont, at the end of the song, was a period in which dreams were smashed, hope was lost, and illusions were shattered. And this was even before Watergate. It was a very political time, and I guess I was kind of a precocious kid.

Dave is right—Holly’s brilliance is magnified by the fact that his career was so short, and it is hard to imagine that he would have been able to maintain that level of quality had he lived, but music definitely would be different had he been able to do so, much like it is hard to conceive what music would be like if The Beatles hadn’t broken up, or if Jimi Hendrix hadn’t died so young. Or if things would have been different if an Hispanic rock star crossed over to mass popularity, had Valens stayed on the bus. (I suspect that The Big Bopper, who was a songwriter and singer but was best known as a disc jockey, would not have been as influential, but he might have ended up as a power in the music industry like his contemporaries, Dick Clark and Casey Kasem).

Of course, we will never know. Holly’s music and death, though, have affected untold millions who have loved his music, been influenced by his sound, covered his songs, read the books, or seen the movies and plays and tribute shows. For Don McLean, it inspired him to write one of the great American songs, a song that brilliantly captured its era, and, yes, made it possible for McLean not to “ever work again,” as he flippantly remarked. For one 10 year old boy in suburban New York, “American Pie” showed that some songs needed to be analyzed and deconstructed and discussed. It only took another 40 years for that boy to start blogging.