Producer Ed Freeman was unimpressed with McLean’s clutch of songs and didn’t think McLean was up to playing rhythm guitar on “American Pie.” He eventually relented. The documentary reveals that recording the album was not exactly a smooth process. There are interviews with musicians - Garth Brooks, “Weird Al” Yankovich and Brian Wilson, among them - as well as Valens’ sister, Connie, and actor Peter Gallagher, whose character’s death on “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” promoted an onscreen performance of “American Pie.” The British singer Jade Bird, Cuban-born producer Rudy Perez and Spanish-language singer Jencarlos Canela speak to how the song has resonated far past America. Cameras capture McLean visiting the hallowed Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, the last place Holly and his fellow musicians played before their fatal flight in 1959. The 90-minute documentary incorporates news footage of the ’70s and uses actors in recreations. “I always feel a tug inside me whenever I think about Buddy.” I don’t know what it is, but it’s exactly what I’ve been wanting to try to get ahold of - that feeling about Buddy Holly - for all these years and that plane crash,” McLean tells the AP. It climaxed in the huge sing-along-chorus: “We were singin’, ‘Bye-bye, Miss American pie’/Drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry/Them good old boys were drinkin’ whiskey ‘n rye/And singin’, “This’ll be the day that I die.” He thought he “needed a big song about America.” The first verse and melody seemed to just tumble out.
He was creating his second album in 1971 while the nation was racked by assassinations, anti-war protests and civil right marches. Years later, McLean would plumb that pain in “American Pie,” baking in his own grief at his father’s passing and writing an eulogy for the American dream. I may have actually cried,” he says in the film. Young McLean was a paperboy - “every paper I’d deliver” - and adored Elvis, Gene Vincent, Bo Diddley but especially Holly, whose death deeply affected him.
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