Fifty years after his iconic song "American Pie" reached No. 1 on the Billboard singles chart, Don McLean will take the stage at Oaklawn Racing Casino Resort's Event Center Saturday night as part of his anniversary tour.
The 50th-anniversary concert will begin at 7 p.m. with the doors opening at 6 p.m.
McLean, in an interview with The Sentinel-Record, said it is great to be back on the road again, meeting new people, and that it feels almost like normal. His band and his girlfriend, he said, are the closest thing to family he has.
"The band has been with me, in some cases, for over 35 years -- some of those guys. So we've had a lot of experiences together," the 76-year-old McLean said.
While he has never visited Hot Springs, he said he has read about its history and being a place notorious mobster Al Capone used to frequent. He said looks forward to checking out the Spa City.
Written as an ode to the late Buddy Holly, as well as the issues of the late 1960s and early '70s, his "American Pie" resides in the Library of Congress National Recording Registry, alongside Judy Garland's "Somewhere Over The Rainbow" and other such hits from Bing Crosby, Woodie Guthrie, and Aretha Franklin.
One of the New York native's four handwritten manuscripts to its lyrics, in 2015, fetched just over $1.2 million.
When asked if he finds it hard to comprehend just how extraordinarily influential the song has become, and if he can believe that it has been 50 years, he said he thinks it has somehow become even more famous over the past two or three years.
"The Home Free group (American country a cappella group) recorded it and it was the number one country video for eight weeks," he said. "I got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame," and "Finch," an AppleTV+ film featuring Tom Hanks, included the music. Along with a children's book, "American Pie: A Fable," McLean said, "it seems to be crescendoing in a funny way because, you know, it is an unusual song and it's written in a strange way, which I think gives people a lot of enjoyment."
"They like just getting drunk and singing it; They like thinking about it; Their kids like to go to sleep with it; So it serves a lot of purposes," McLean said.
"When I was younger, I loved the many uses of folk music. You know, lullabies, war songs, work songs, sea shanties, cowboy ballads, stories. There was no television back in the 1800s and the most wonderful thing that could happen to you would be to get a song written about you like Billy the Kid did. So I like the usefulness of the song," he said.
This storytelling process, he said, is not necessarily a hard thing, nor is it always meant to make people think. He cited the example of the "Ballad of George Floyd" from his latest album, "Botanical Gardens."
"I haven't heard anybody write about George Floyd, but I wrote a real nice song about the situation," he said. "So I think it's important about some things to write songs that make people think, but I think it's also important to just have fun and entertain people. You know, the Beatles could do 'A Day in the Life,' but they also could do 'Yellow Submarine,' that's just a fun, cute little song. So you really want to do all kinds of things."
When asked what it was like to write "American Pie," he gave a very modest, yet introspective, answer.
"Well, first of all, I tell the audience this: In all sincerity, I make this stuff up as I go along. I don't really know what I'm doing. I think I'm a good singer, and I think I'm a good songwriter sometimes, and I know I'm a good performer and good guitar player for my own purposes. But every now and then I have some sort of lightning strike, you know, and I know exactly what I want to do and I go and do it. And the rest of the time I have trouble putting one foot in front of the other."
He said it's not a matter of him being a "big creative guy" all the time because a lot of times he is not, although sometimes he is.
"I don't know what it is. As stuff comes in on my -- I say stuff that comes in on my radio -- and I just get a transmission of some kind. And I think Keith Richards is pretty smart -- said, 'If I can get two or three songs going, I can get an album.' And that is really true. Once I've got two or three songs, then I'm thinking of songwriting all the time," he said.
"You know, 'What's the next song going to be? What's the next song. I need a dozen of these. What am I going to do? What's the next one?' And I'm really looking around, you know, and all this stuff I've been thinking about for the year or two before starts to make sense. But that was a real good remark, I think he said that."
McLean said it is interesting because if during the last years America had really "gone green and saved the environment and done all this stuff," he does not think the song would have resonated as much today as it still does.
"Because, obviously, we're a day late and a dollar short with most of this stuff we're doing now," he said. "The forces, really, of the oil business are so entrenched that the idea of getting off onto electric. ... That's why this guy Elon Musk is such an amazing guy to do this because he's succeeding and it's very difficult to do anything like that -- to buck the major car companies -- especially with an electric car.
"I mean, come on, this guy's really something else. But it's still a token thing. I mean, everything should have been turned over in the '80s, you know, way ahead of things getting really bad. And we're not taking care of the homeless situation and, you know, we have plenty of food but we don't have an organization to get the food to people who need it. So, you know, you have people that are starving and they don't have to be."
When not focusing on music, McLean said he enjoys western stuff and rodeo and even designs his own clothes and furniture.