User Reviews

If you're reading this I have a sneaky feeling you already love American Pie. So I won't review the doc (it was really great. McLean she'd the light on a lot of things). What got me is Buddy Holly was a HUGE influence on Don McLean. They show archival footage but guess what they don't do? No Buddy Holly music is in the film...which leads me to think Holly's estate didn't give the filmmakers the rights to the music. They play "La Bamba" in the background...heck they even mention "That'll be the Day" but don't play it. For me that sucked.

American Pie is one of those songs that everyone "just seems to know". Despite it being 50+ years old at this point, its staying power is a tribute to its brilliance. The Day the Music Died tells that story.

There are basically two interwoven themes in this doc from director Mark Moormann:

First, the tragedy of the real "day the music died" in 1959--the plane crash that took the lives of Ritchie Valens, Buddy Holly, and the Big Bopper.

Secondly, how that tragic event touched the life of aspiring folk singer/song-writer Don McLean and ultimately produced American Pie.

Both of these angles are dispersed perfectly within each other. Not only did I learn a lot about that fateful day in Clear Lake, Iowa, but the notoriously cagey McLean finally reveals some definitive stories, thoughts, and explanations about the song's genesis and lyrics.

Along the way, other artists--big ones like Garth Brooks & Brian Wilson, to name just a couple--weigh in on the effect American Pie had on them as musicians.

The ending of The Day the Music Died brings everything full circle, with McLean back in the same ballroom that the "three men I admired most" performed their final concert. I did not expect to be so emotionally moved, but I certainly was by the time the credits rolled.

As such, I can easily give this music doc the highest marks for both informing me about the iconic song's history and doing so in an extremely emotionally engaging manner.

About 15-20 minutes of this tribute to a 1970s novelty song are spent providing background on the tragedy that produced it and explaining the highly personalized lyrics that resulted.

The rest mostly unleashes a barrage of other-worldly praise that at first caused me to react, "Me thinkith they doth praise too much" -- that the lavish, worshipful outpouring was both intended to convince the producers of the film that it had been worth financing and to convince the makers of the film themselves that they actually were telling a story about something special.

I mean, this was a curious, modest hit that faded into 70s Gold history with the rest of the songs on the Billboard pop chart. I doubt many have seen or heard anyone declare it anything close to a classic before this documentary.

But then, as I watched the smile on the face of Garth Brooks as he proclaims this ditty is "quite possibly the greatest song in music history," I concluded this must be a parody, something along the lines of "Spinal Tap" or the Ruttles.

That theory at least helped explain the laughable premise that the song is something great because thousands of people know the lyrics and sing along at concerts, even 50 years later.

As anyone who has attended rock concerts knows, singing along to tunes is just part of the whole scene. I've been to concerts by the late Tom Petty and the Beach Boys where just about the entire audience knew and sang along to EVERY SONG over the course of two to three hours.

Much less funny, though, is the film's attempt to tie the tragic death of three pop stars to actual world-shaking events - the Vietnam war and the assassinations of President Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy - to support statements about the song's importance to the United States of America.

Really, even the song's title is a gross exaggeration. Music most certainly did not die after Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper and Richie Valens perished in the 1959 plane crash. Rock 'n roll continued to flourish unabated in the early 1960s. It took the Kennedy assassination to crash the lingering "age of innocence" from the 1950s, and then came Beatlemania and a new explosion of rock ' roll into the dominant worldwide music force it is today.

I have no doubt that for Don McClean the music may have died. He took the deaths pretty hard and was still writing about it 10 years later.

And it's also true many important contributions to the music world by at least Holly would have been forthcoming had the crash not occurred. One only has to look at the hugely successful career of Waylon Jennings, a bandmate who narrowly missed being a passenger on the plane, to see what a bright future was possible for Holly and the others.

But any theory that the song based on the tragedy was anything more one person's sad reaction is a crazy overstatement.

And it's so crazy that this documentary really has to be at least partly a parody of documentaries that take their subject matter too seriously.