Don McLean: The Folkworks Interview
Don McLean: The FolkWorks Interview
I happened to be at a roadside coffee stand yesterday where the radio was tuned to K-Earth 101; they were taking a commercial break to promote the station, and were playing two brief song excerpts to do so. The first was the Rolling Stones Satisfaction and the second was Don McLean’s American Pie. That’s all—no Beatles, no Madonna, no Elvis, no Rod Stewart, no Chuck Berry, and no Dylan; just the Stones and Don McLean. After the sound samples concluded the announcer breaks in and delivers the tag line: The greatest songs on earth—K-Earth 101. He doesn’t even bother to identify the artists or the songs, that’s how universally well-known they are. The Stones I got; but Don McLean? And then I connected the dots.
His most popular hit song American Pie is number 5 on the Recording Industry Association of America’s Top 365 list of the Greatest Songs of the Century—right behind Aretha Franklin’s Respect and Woody Guthrie’s This Land Is Your Land—which are right behind White Christmas and Over the Rainbow. And yet American Pie is not on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time—not even #500! How could this be, one wonders?
I’ll tell you how it could be. Don McLean, who wrote the greatest goddamn rock-and-roll tribute song of all time—the rhapsodic, rambling, profoundly metaphoric history of American rock from his self-proclaimed “Day the Music Died,” when Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper’s plane went down on February 3, 1959 after their fateful concert at the Winter Ballroom in Clearlake, Iowa—is the ultimate rock-and-roll outsider—to use the term that the late British writer Colin Wilson coined to describe such lonely, alienated, existential artists as Vincent Van Gogh—who by the way Don McLean also paid tribute to in his second most popular hit song Vincent.
Both of those landmark songs were on his second album American Pie—which came out in 1971, following his debut album Tapestry—which came out in 1970—one year before Carole King released her album of the same name—without crediting Don McLean as her title’s source, no thank you. Carole King is in the Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame; but the source of her own classic album has been sedulously ignored by its voters since he first became eligible in 1995—25 years after the original Tapestry was released, which included his third most popular hit song—And I Love You So. How could this be?
It so happens that on December 13, 2013—the night I saw Don McLean in concert at the Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills, recently reviewed in these pages—The New York Times reported the death of Colin Wilson, whose classic book of philosophy cum social portraiture The Outsider inaugurated the age of the Angry Young Men in Great Britain, written at only 24 and published in 1956 when Wilson was spending nights in his sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath and days in the Reading Room of the British Museum writing what turned out—after more than 100 subsequent books before he died at 84—to be his masterpiece. It includes portraits of a wide range of troubled artists, from Jean Paul Sartre to Hemingway to Van Gogh—a number of whom committed suicide, but thanks to folk rock songwriter Don McLean only Van Gogh has been featured in a major popular song. So is it any surprise that the author of the song Vincent should share some significant traits with its subject? Perhaps not.
After all, it used to go without saying that rock-and-roll was the musical expression—the voice, if you will, of the American angry young men (and women) of the 1950s and ’60s—those same rebels without a cause that McLean describes as wearing “a coat they borrowed from James Dean,” and, like Wilson, “practicing in the park” (Washington Square Park, I like to imagine—where a certain “quartet” (from the song) named The Weavers actually did practice.
Except the Weavers—unlike James Dean—and Elvis, and even Buddy Holly—were not “rebels without a cause.” They all had causes, left wing causes, from Pete Seeger to Lee Hays to Fred Hellerman to their great contralto Ronnie Gilbert. That’s why they were blacklisted in 1950, right after their recording of Leadbelly’s theme song Goodnight Irene shot to the top of the Hit Parade—and stayed there for 13 straight weeks, setting a record unsurpassed until the BeeGees entered the scene in 1975.
Don McLean celebrated all of these outsiders in his own masterpiece American Pie—little knowing that he was at the same time describing and defining his own role as an artist—The Outsider—the permanent rebel in his own right. That is certainly the portrait that shines through this interview I conducted via transcontinental phone call from Los Angeles to his home in Camden, Maine.
Another American rebel, Woody Guthrie inspired him to start writing songs—at the age of fourteen, when he was just learning to play guitar—a Harmony Jamboree model. He heard Roll On, Columbia and thought, “Maybe I can do that.” He soon realized that as simple as it seemed, there was genius beneath the simplicity. Thus, when I looked the other day for some of his albums in my local 2nd hand record haven, I wasn’t surprised to find they were all shelved in the Folk section, yet another reason The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame may have so far ignored him. As far as he has come in his meteoric career since penning one of the top five classic songs of the 20th Century—again, American Pie is ranked just behind Woody’s This Land Is Your Land—Don McLean has no problem in continuing to think of himself as a folk singer. He performs one of the time-honored roles of the folk singer—and that is to remember—and to help his audience remember.
More than any singer-songwriter of his generation he ranges far and wide to find his songs—both from other songwriters (such as the late great Tim Hardin, author of Black Sheep Boy) and traditional songs such as the Irish Mountains of Mourne—and this from a songwriter who is responsible for a number of the best-selling songs of all time. It is quite astonishing to hear from him that he gives equal weight to the first word in singer-songwriter. He feels that he is as much a singer as a songwriter—and a singer who makes a deliberate effort to embrace the entire scope of American song—from folk to rock to country and all the way back to turn-of-the-century Tin Pan Alley. His prolific recorded output of over forty albums covers the waterfront. Indeed, compared to him most “singer-songwriters” come across as entirely parochial and self-involved. If they didn’t write it, why should they bother to sing it?
That’s not Don McLean—and from the beginning it was not his concern if he didn’t write a song that he loved and wanted to share. Thus: Crying, by Roy Orbison and Joe Nelson became one of his biggest hits—in 1980. McLean not only felt it, he lived it he reported to me, and could not help singing it.
FolkWorks readers, you are in for a rare privilege and a treat—to spend some time with an American legend and folk music hero—a folk rock musician who was there at the beginning of the folk revival—1961 in Greenwich Village—the same year Dylan hit town and blew the lid off American popular music. But I don’t need to put words in Don McLean’s mouth. He has his own story to tell, and in the following pages he tells it warts and all. Thank you to Don McLean for giving us his time and the passion of his voice.
But before we begin, a few words about ground rules. There weren’t any. Not because I insisted on it; the subject never even came up. Nothing was off limits or off the record, and as you will soon discover, Mr. McLean—and I quote—calls them as he sees them—without fear or favor. He held nothing back, took nothing back and was remarkably forthcoming in his evolution of thought about folk music in general and America’s favorite folk singer (and the clueless Rolling Stone!) in particular. In a real sense I was listening to Don McLean thinking out loud, and grateful for his willingness to stand behind his words and like Van Gogh himself give us a real self-portrait. The author of Vincent, And I Love You So, Homeless Brother and American Pie is unafraid to speak truth to power—the hallmark of every great artist. Fasten your seatbelts—you are in for a wild ride with the man who once drove his Chevy to the levee. This time around, I was thrilled to go along for the ride.
Here is Part 1 of my FolkWorks interview with Don McLean.
Don McLean: The FolkWorks Interview
Part 1
In the following interview Don McLean has a few things to say about Pete Seeger that may raise some eyebrows, especially since the interview was conducted well before Pete passed away last January 27; so I want to preface it with this lovely tribute by Don McLean for Pete and what his loss meant to him; it is copied directly from his web site and shows how complex love can be.
Thank you, Don.
Pete Seeger
For about seven years from the late 1960s to the mid 1970s, I knew the Seegers (Pete and Toshi) about as well as anybody. I worked with Pete Seeger frequently. He was very generous and encouraging at a time in my life when it meant a great deal to me. However, there were some things he did and said that made me sore as hell. That’s the kind of thing that was bound to happen with somebody who was controversial. Throughout the following years we remained friends and though I criticized him sometimes it was always to his face and I think he appreciated that. I never lost my affection for him and the world will be a lonelier place, for me, without him.
I would like to pass on to any young performers a few things that he taught me:
Firstly, he taught me how to perform and make a living with a guitar when I had no money and only dreams.
Secondly, he taught me how to survive success, the most important thing he taught me of all. Because I learned from him that you have to love your music and audience and everything you do, big or small, moves you forward. Everything does not have to be important and major. All the little things add up.
Finally, he said to me once, ‘If you’re going to criticize the government [which I’ve done frequently] make sure you never even spit on the sidewalk.’
Pete will become a statue now, but I remember the living man who, with all his faults had a character that was finer than anyone I ever knew.
– Don McLean, February 3, 2014
RA: Hello. This is Ross Altman and I’m talking to ..?
DM: Don McLean.
RA: And this is, in fact, the Folk Works interview and we’re talking on Sunday morning, January 12, 2014, and I’m just delighted to be able to talk to Mr. McLean, one of America’s supreme recording artists and singer/songwriters, and what most engages me, a real folksinger. There are not many left. And that’s what has kept me involved in your work over these many years.
DM: Thank you.
RA: Very few singer/song writers sing anything but the songs they’ve written and in my experience, they don’t know many songs, if any.
DM: Oh really?
RA: Well, I might as well – I can always edit this out, but I heard a few years ago the very highly touted concert at UCLA that was based on the Harry Smith Anthology of American Folk Music, which I’m sure you’re familiar with . . .
DM: Sure.
RA: …and they had a lot of celebrities doing songs that they had never even heard before with the lyrics on music stands and that was what filled Royce Hall, including Tom Chapin, Harry’s brother, and at the end, they had Tom Chapin leading This Land Is Your Land and reading the lyrics, reading the lyrics to This Land Is Your Land, like it was the second time he had sung it.
DM: Something that I tell audiences and that is that everyone’s worried about the learning curve. What they need to worry about is the forgetting curve. We’re forgetting things a lot faster than we’re learning new things because we’re relying on technology knowing more and, of course, one form of technology becomes obsolete very quickly and there is, for example, no way of determining much of the information that came from the moon landing because they haven’t figured out how to access that information because it’s so antique.
RA: Oh really?
DM: There are parts to nuclear warheads that they don’t know how to fix because that information has gone the way of the dinosaur very quickly and so my son, for example, is a musicologist of sorts, and a poet and I told him, I said, “You’re doing the world a great service by learning all these obscure songs and knowing them.” He knows thousands of songs, from all genres.
RA: Really?
DM And so that’s – I said, “You know, you’re doing the world a favor because people are not going to. . .” but I didn’t realize it was at that level.
RA: Well, it’s been the job of a folksinger. I mean, the folksinger’s role is to remember.
DM: Well, you know, there you go. And so I . . .
RA: I mean, I’ve just been listening to Black Sheep Boy from Favorites and Rarities, and I’ll be honest. I assumed it was one of your songs and I wanted to double check, and I found out it’s an old Tim Hardin song and it is just beautiful and you do it with such feeling. You’ve made it your song.
DM: Well, I take songwriting and singing very – they call me a singer/songwriter. I take both of those categories seriously. But I’m primarily a singer and I’m what I call a songster, kind of like Lead Belly or Mance Lipscomb.
RA: Yeah, that’s exactly what Mance Lipscomb called himself.
DM: Yeah. they sang a lot of different things, you know, and they also wrote songs and they were – but they were tagged and put in a certain thing – area, but I’ve been able to have some fairly big records; that are in all different genres through the years, and so that’s been nice because it’s kind of confused the hell out of people and that’s basically why, when you say that you sing many different kinds of songs, I often tell that to the audience at the beginning of a show– I sing a lot of different things, I write in a lot of different styles. I think in the movie, The American Troubadour, I say that basically I’m a fusion artist. I fuse old fashioned popular music with folk music and with rock and roll that I could understand, you know. Country rock and roll, the kind of thing Elvis Presley did and Buddy Holly and stuff like that.
RA: So rockabilly.
DM: That’s what I do. And sometimes I do my own thing completely off the walls, and that I invent and that I hear coming in my head and I just turn my radio on and things come into my head on my radio station and I write them down. And sometimes they would fit into category of being a fusion artist, and then sometimes it’s completely in another place altogether. I don’t even know where it is.
RA: Well, I mean, that one tape that I have from 1992, it’s almost an encyclopedia of American music that has things – it has a traditional Irish song, Mountains of Mourn. I’m sure it’s a hundred years old, but all the way up to a modern bluegrass song. It’s got novelty tunes that sound like they could have been from the…
DM: Right. It’s a song called The Profiteering Blues which was supposed to be on an album of mine and a lot of that stuff I never thought I’d ever hear again. When I heard that package many years ago, I hadn’t heard that song in twenty years.
RA: Whose song is that?
DM: It’s a song sung originally by Billy Murray. And Billy Murray, at the turn of the century, had more hit records than almost anybody. All these amazing songs, Paddlin’ Madelyn Home, I’m Looking Over A Four-Leaf Clover.
RA: Oh, he wrote those.
DM: All these songs. He only – he never accepted royalties. He didn’t believe in them. He just got like $50 a side and Billy Murray – and the thing about that song is that it parodies a whole lot of other hit songs of that time period. Over There and When You and I Were Young, Maggie and all these other different songs, so we got in the great piano player, a guy named Dick Hyman and – an unusual and unfortunate name for the poor guy – but anyway, he knew all the parts and played the thing absolutely beautifully.
RA: Oh, the musicianship in your recordings is just all top…
DM: Well, I’ve always – I’m very good at…
RA: You’ve put a lot musicians to work…
DM: I don’t listen to them. Every now and then I grew this – The last package they put out with American Troubadour, there are a lot of recordings on there that I can actually listen to and enjoy. A lot of them were discovered in the last seven or eight years by me, because I’ve been doing a lot of my own archiving, just because nobody else cares that much.
RA: Yeah, I saw that in the long interview on your website.
DM: Pardon me?
RA: I saw that. You talked about your archiving.
DM: Yeah, photographs, videos, all kinds of things, mostly spurred by the wonderful late Joel Dorn who was a brilliant genius and a great producer and a lover of musicians and of songs, and who was a great friend of mine and produced the Homeless Brother, and I wish I’d made more records with him because he was the kind of guy I could really get along with.
RA: Uh huh. Well, what year was Homeless Brother? Was that, you said, the third album?
DM: About 1974 or 5.
RA: You sang that in the concert. It’s just a wonderful…
DM: Yeah, Homeless Brothers….
RA: Wonderful song.
DM: A lot of songs on there I don’t do, but it can be done with whatever.
RA: You did a song in the concert that was very stark and I didn’t mention it in the review. I hadn’t heard it before, but it was very moving, and that was I’ve Grown Old Missing You.
DM: Yeah, it’s called I Was Always Young, and that song…
RA: That’s the title. I Was Always Young.
DM: Yes, and the last record I made called Addicted to Black.
RA: Uh huh. Well, that’s just a great song.
DM: Well, thank you. And I want to say that I’m having a wonderful time right now getting to work with and to know Judy Collins, who is on a double bill with me around the country often. I’ve always loved her music, but I didn’t really ever get to know her and I’m a little standoffish when it comes to women singers a lot of times, but she has become a person that I always look forward to seeing and to hearing and she’s a lot like me. You know, she sings a lot of beautiful songs and with beautiful melodies and she sings them so well. I just wanted to mention that.
RA: I have a review of her show in Los Angeles.
DM: Yeah, she’s become a good friend of mine and we’ve worked together a lot, and we’ll be working together more, and we did Wolf Trap and Rivenia and all these big places last year, and we’ll be doing, I think a lot more of that in the coming year. So I just wanted to mention that. She’s very…
RA: Do you sing together at all in concerts?
DM: No, we don’t sing together. I haven’t found anything I can do with her because her sense of time is different than mine. I don’t know – I’m sort of a slammer, you know. I’m kind of a rock and roller in a certain way, but I also – I’m thinking about that, you know. I’ve been thinking about it. I haven’t worked out anything yet, but anyway I just wanted to say that. But I wanted to say something to you about how wonderful it was, and exciting it was for me back in the late 1950s and the early 1960s to discover folk music.
RA: I’m glad you brought it up.
DM: Well, I used to read a magazine called Caravan; I don’t know if you ever heard of it. It was kind of a Sing Out! magazine, but it was out of Chicago.
RA: Oh. I have a bunch of Come For to Sing magazines.
DM: Yeah. I know I have that one, but I have these Caravans and I love these magazines. And of course, I like Sing Out! magazine and the first place that ever published me was Broadside.
RA: Oh, really?
DM: Yeah. They put a couple of my songs in there. One called The Talking FBI Blues and the other one was a song called Mister Shadow and it was very exciting as a young teenager to get published for the first time.
RA: Did you meet Sis Cunningham at all?
DM: I think I did. I met all these people at one time or another. Millard Lampell and…
RA: Oh my God, for…
DM: …and I knew – but anyway, the person that got me started and helped me the most in those days was a banjo player named Mike Kropp.
RA: How do you spell the last name?
DM: K-R-O-P-P.
RA: K-R-O-P-P, okay.
DM: And he was, I lived in New Rochelle and I had a friend who I grew up with and his name was Peter Scheckman. He became a doctor and he was a classical musician. He used to play the cello, and I would pick anybody I could find and play music with them. So I’d go over to his house and ask him if he would play the cello like a bass. Like he’d know … [laughing] completely the wrong thing to tell a classical musician, but he actually would fool around with me sometimes.
RA: To back you up?
DM: And he knew a guy named Mike Kropp because he had gone to Horace Mann. He left the New Rochelle school system and high school and went to Horace Mann and there was this guy named Mike Kropp at Horace Mann. He introduced me to Mike Kropp and this guy, I mean, has got to be one of the greatest banjo players that ever lived.
RA: Wow.
DM: He was in a group called Northern Lights for a long time and you can see him on the internet. Anyway, I never could drive.
RA: Did he play folk style?
DM: He was a genius banjo player. He didn’t care about high school, he didn’t care about college. All he cared about was the banjo and he and I were really good friends and he had – he lived in a great big house. His father was very wealthy. His father was the guy that used to make Fisher cabinets for stereos, and so he’d invite me over to this gorgeous, big ranch house and he had copies of these different magazines and all these great records. I mean, Folkways records and Stinson records and he drove. I didn’t drive. We’re talking about 1961 now, you know.
RA: Oh really?
DM: I didn’t drive. I was a terrible driver. I kept failing my test. Everybody had to drive me everywhere, and so he drove me into the city one day and brought me to the Folklore Center.
RA: Izzy Young.
DM: And I met Israel Young and saw this amazing place. And this is the beginning really of . . .
RA: In 1961 you did this?
DM: Yeah.
RA: Okay, so that’s the year Dylan hit town.
DM: I saw Dylan when he first came to town at the Hootenanny at Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger.
RA: Wow.
DM: And by that time, he was already – he had his first album out on Columbia and he was causing quite a sensation that he still causes. He’s continued to do that without a break continually from that moment on. Now I saw him at Carnegie Hall and he came out and gave a beautiful performance. He sang a talking Bear Mountain Blues.
RA: Oh, yeah.
DM: Hard Rain’s A-Going to Fall and he had that incredible Gibson guitar that just rang out like a mother. And sang these amazing songs and so I became aware – a fan of his, and aware of him from that point on. But the point I’m making is that . . .
RA: And you were just 16 basically at the time.
DM: Yeah. And I was already calling Fred Hellerman on the telephone and the Weavers. I was calling them up. My father had died when I was 15 and my father would have killed me if he ever found out I was talking to Communists. He was a Republican. And my father died and I just went with my feelings, you know, and my mother was not in the picture because she really wasn’t a political person, and wasn’t around too much anyway.
RA: And you had known the Weavers from the 1955 recording The Weavers at Carnegie Hall.
DM: Yeah. I discovered them. I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie American Troubadour.
RA: I haven’t gotten to see it yet.
DM: You should see it.
RA: I’m planning to.
DM: Fred Hellerman’s in the picture. He talks about that, receiving phone calls from me when I was 16.
RA: You just called him out of the blue?
DM: I’d call him out of the blue, yeah. I was very – I was a lonely boy, you know. I didn’t have any brothers and sisters. I have a much older sister who left home long before, and I was by myself and it was little old me against the adult world really, and I would make up things to do. I would follow things much farther than normal kids would do, and so I would lock onto something and I would lock onto it, you know, into a subterranean level rather than just on the surface, and I fell in love with the harmonies and the warmth of the Weavers and those Vanguard records, especially At Home and Traveling On and to this day, I still listen to them.
RA: I have all of them.
DM: Oh, you have to.
RA: It was really Vanguard…
DM: They were so far and away superior to any other folk group was then or ever has been musically, period. They were all four of them were geniuses in their own way and…
RA: Vanguard really rescued them from the blacklist.
DM: Yeah. That’s right.
RA: They were there to record.
DM: Vanguard rescued – Vanguard and Elektra Records were set up really to – Josh went to Elektra Records and the Weavers went to Vanguard. And you had all these other acts and no one knows about them. Marais and Miranda, you know, and Cynthia Gooding and all of these artists that were well known at the time. Richard Dyer-Bennett.
RA: Oh God, he was my favorite folksinger. He was my ideal.
DM: You don’t hear about these people anymore, but they were all part of this universe.
RA: Yeah.
DM: You know, Brother John Sellers, many, many, many others, and the thing about it that was so wonderful is that it wasn’t as commercial. When the Kingston Trio came along, they made it sort of go above ground and everybody started to – and by the way, I love the Kingston Trio. The original Kingston Trio was a brilliant group…Dave Guard and those guys, because they were an organic natural group that got together. Peter, Paul and Mary were a formed group. They were formed by the management – Albert Grossman—and I never kind of felt the same way about them as I did about the Kingston Trio because the Kingston Trio were coming from Hawaii. I spoke to Dave Guard near the time that he died.
RA: Oh really?
DM: Yeah, and I was kind of helping him out a little bit and he said, you know, we were discovering America. Nick [Reynolds] was from Coronado and they were from Hawaii, so they really weren’t on the mainland and they suddenly were discovering America and they were having a ball, you know, until the music business got them, which happens a lot and they kind of hurt them quite a bit. But anyway, I just wanted to mention that. I’m not down on the Kingston Trio at all. I think they were a phenomenal group and that…one of the things about them that was very interesting is that they came along at the time when stereo came in. Because most records were mono and when you spray out – they had a – every great vocal group, the Kingston Trio, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, the Weavers, they have a sound. When they sing in unison, it’s almost like they’re still in harmony. That’s how the timbres of their voices work so that when they do go into harmony, the spread on their sound is enormous. More than just three normal people singing the same notes. And so when –the Kingston Trio were very popular, but when stereo came in and Capitol put those records out in stereo, they were huge. Huge in your living room.
RA: Speaking of harmony, let me ask you quickly, did you have any feeling for the Everly Brothers and for Phil’s passing?
DM: I shed a tear over that. I loved the Everly Brothers. When I was a little guy, we had a small house in New Rochelle and my room was about the size of my office, and I had a little single bed and at night, I would listen to the fabulous style of the Everly Brothers every night. And that’s what I went to sleep with, and I would sing the third part. I would make a trio out of it.
RA: Oh, my goodness.
DM: Till I Kissed You and all these songs, so I cried a little bit when Phil Everly died. I really did.
RA: Well Don was apparently – no Phil was a pallbearer for Buddy Holly and Don said he couldn’t even get out of bed to even go to the funeral he was so devastated.
DM: I’m sure Phil…
RA: It’s a direct link. So anyway, back to folk music. At 16, were you playing an instrument by then?
DM: I was playing an instrument at 14. I got a Harmony Sunburst F-hole guitar and I had a friend of mine, his name was Brad Bivens, and his father lived around the corner from me. His father and mother and his whole family. He lived around the corner, and his father was an announcer on the Tommy Dorsey television show.
RA: Okay.
DM: And he had a kinescope of Elvis Presley and he would run it, and I saw it many times in their living room in 1958, ‘59 and Brad Bivens was into a lot of guitar players. Josh White and Johnny Smith and Chet Atkins and a lot of rock and roll. He had a little rock and roll band. I was in a few of his rock and roll bands as a rhythm guitar player and we’d go around and do Ventures’ music and all the rock and roll electric guitar songs. You know, Pipeline, Wipe Out, all those songs.
RA: Is Bivens spelled B-I-V-E-N-S?
DM: I think so.
RA: So you started with a Harmony guitar.
DM: Yeah and I was in a rock and roll group.
RA: Before you got…
DM: Before that, I was really crazy about Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent and, but basically I’ve never let go of anything that I ever heard. Because that’s the difference. I followed a lot of people as I went along. For example, my producer, Ed Freeman on the America Pie album. He also did Playin’ Favorites and The Don McLean Album. Ed Freeman was a guy who was folk-based as well, but also was involved with the Beatles at some point and different things like that, but he was always worrying about whether what he liked was hip. And I thought that was really strange. I didn’t care about that. So he would hear a song and he would really love it and he would say, “I can’t record that. That’s not good enough. I can’t do it. I’ll get laughed at if I do that.” You know? But he would like something, but then, you know, he would think…“That’s not cool. I can’t do that.” So I never thought that way. That’s why I wrote a song like Vincent. I mean, who would write such a song? I had nothing telling me don’t do that, you know? I didn’t care how it looked. It was something I felt. It was something I loved. I follow things. I don’t care about where they lead.
RA: This was written when you were living in the Berkshires?
DM: Yeah. I was living in the home of Edie Sedgwick.
RA: Andy Warhol’s circle.
DM: Yeah, her. She ended up as one of the Brahman’s that dropped, kind of Pete Seeger in a way, you know? A Brahman that left, decided to go against his class and she did the same thing. There was a lot of that around.
RA: What else were you doing in the Berkshires at that time?
DM: I was singing in the school system.
RA: You were actually getting paid to sing in the schools?
DM: Yeah. I was living in their house and in this apartment in this gorgeous house, beautiful furniture. I still remember it very well and this wonderful woman who was – I just know her as Mrs. Sedgwick, but she was this very cute, little old lady who would always do Yoga in her part of the house, and I liked her a lot. And she would rent out this apartment in the house which was like six rooms or something, and two people that were – had something to do with the arts. What I was doing was something to do with the arts and in the Berkshires. I don’t remember exactly what it was, but she let Yo Yo Ma live there and some other people live there, when he was at Tanglewood.
RA: Wow, a personal artist in residence.
DM: Yeah, that kind of thing. And they paid her and the people that worked with me. But the thing I loved about the odyssey of my journey was that everywhere I went, I was appreciated. But in New Rochelle, I wasn’t. You know, nobody understood. I was a joke basically, you know, a kid who was playing guitar and not studying. A kid who would drop out of school. A kid who…
RA: When did you do that?
DM: I dropped out of college in 1963.
RA: And that was in New Rochelle?
DM: Correct.
RA: I see.
DM: That’s where I was brought up.
RA: And you dropped out to be a singer. Does that mean?
DM: I dropped out to sing in coffee houses and become – and try to make a living with singing.
RA: And that was one of the things that was most endearing to read on your website, that you had gotten some significant opportunities, a scholarship at Columbia.
DM: That was in college. After high school – right after I went to college, I quit and I spent a year trying to do something in music, and that’s when I met Howard Leventhal and a man named Charles Close, who worked with Howard Leventhal, and they worked with me for a year but didn’t – and I worked at a lot of places around the country, but I didn’t really – that’s how I first met Judy actually, when she was in her early twenties and I was a teenager. She was hanging out in Charles Close’s office at Harold Leventhal’s place.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: But Charles came to me and said, “You know, I think you should go back to school for a while. You’re a little too young,” and so I didn’t think I was getting anywhere, anyway, either. So I went back and I’d lost a year of school and I went back to Iona College at night, and then I graduated in 1968 and I went back into the music business at that point again. But during those years I was not taken very seriously. I was thought of as kind of a loser.
RA: But you turned – it said that you turned down a scholarship to Columbia.
DM: That’s correct. By the end of – by 1968, ‘67, I took an entrance exam to get a Master’s degree in business because I actually was good at this. I didn’t know I had this business acumen, but I did.
RA: [laughing]
DM: And it was a total surprise to me. I would go to the finance classes and man, I’m looking forward to this. This is interesting. I like it. And so someone said, “Why don’t you take the exam and see if you can get a Masters at Columbia.” So I did and I did very well, and they accepted me. But then I said, “No, I can’t give up what it is I’m put here to do. This is what I’m supposed to do and not to be in a bank somewhere.”
RA: So that was really your road not taken moment.
DM: Yeah, the second time, too.
RA: Well, sometimes it takes two.
End of Part One; in Part Two Don McLean talks about his father, and about Erik Darling and the banjo; in Part Three he talks about Pete Seeger and his time on the Clearwater.
Here is Part 2 of my FolkWorks interview with Don McLean.
Don McLean: The FolkWorks Interview
Part 2
July 14, 2014, Woody Guthrie’s 102nd birthday—a day to celebrate folk music.
RA: Let me ask you about your father. You said at some point in the interview that I read that you were being encouraged to quit music because you weren’t making enough or weren’t successful enough and then the way you looked at it was you were making more in a day than your father made in a week…
RA: Okay, so to repeat that you were making more in a day than your father was earning in a week, which was about $150, and so you couldn’t see the argument. So I wanted to ask you, what did your father do for a living? And what influence did he have in terms of values and the things that you saw around your home?
DM: My father was a district manager for Consolidated Edison, the utility.
RA: Oh, okay.
DM: And he sold gas heat to people. And I never knew one single thing about what he did. He never spoke about what he did. He never talked about himself too much at all. He was taciturn in some ways, but near the end of his life when we were together, he told me all about childhood which was very tough. And then he died when I was with him.
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: And my father…
RA: And what year was that?
DM: 1960.
RA: Okay, so you were still…
DM: He was 61. It was January 18, 1961. And my father prided himself on his – he didn’t pride himself, he just was an honest person. He wouldn’t like for somebody and he wouldn’t go along, you know, with things. He was – that’s the one thing that I think I wanted my life, and my children, I think are the same way, to look in the mirror and say, “I did the thing I really was put here to do” rather than let somebody else tell me what to do, or let a record company dictate or a manager dictate or whatever. So that’s caused me a lot of problems in my life, but in the end it happened because I have done things that I’m proud of and it means something to me rather than things just to make money. And to judge whether or not I was doing okay in the music business by the metric of my father’s income is a very pedestrian thing to say that even, but from people out there.
RA: I thought it was impressive. I didn’t think it was pedestrian at all.
DM: But, you know, to base it on money that your father made, but to me, it was why my father was so high in my esteem—because he paid for everything and took care of everything, and so when I said, “well, to be able to do that and do it quickly, much better and do something that I’m enjoying,” whereas his job killed him. It kills a lot of people. My father’s story really was the story of “Death of A Salesman”. He was a Willy Loman, exactly like him.
RA: Really? My God.
DM: But he wasn’t a braggart. There’s a difference between my father and Willy Loman. He just was devoted to the company; his job and his family, and it basically wore him right down.
RA: Probably like a…
DM: So one of the things I never wanted was to have a boss and a lot of times when you become successful, you put on golden handcuffs…
RA: What a great phrase.
DM: …like with a lot of bosses.
RA: Have you ever put that in a song?
DM: No.
RA: That’s a great phrase.
DM: But I never wanted that, so I would go – by the way, I wanted to mention one thing. Apropos of nothing, I saw an interview that you did with Peggy Seeger and I always liked her version of the Spring Hill Mine Disaster. It was on an old Vanguard record. I think at Newport that I had and I just wanted to mention that.
RA: Oh. Well, thank you. I really enjoyed talking to her. I talked to her because – the pretext was to talk about her brother when Michael died and then it got into other things. Let me ask you, at least for a few minutes, to talk about the banjo. Oh, for a long time, I really thought of you as much as a banjo player as a guitarist because of the banjo pieces that you did, in fact, I think you even did “Babylon”?
DM: Right.
RA: Arranged on a banjo. Just one of the most beautiful banjo arrangements of anything that I’ve heard. It was just glorious and…
DM: It’s such a wonderful instrument and I probably should go back to playing it. Actually, sometimes I go back to playing it now. I left it for many, many years and never even touched it, but lately, in the last few years, I’ve played it again. I have a whole different feeling about it now because I used to be kind of locked into the Pete Seeger-Earl Scruggs universe.
RA: And Erik Darling, too.
DM: Erik was locked into that universe, too. He was one of a bunch of players. Frank Hamilton, Billy Faier, you know.
RA: Yeah.?
DM: …who played that way, but I figured a way to get around it and – not that I don’t – you know. It’s all so wonderful and beautiful, you know, that you can’t do it better than the original people, but…
RA: Well, Erik Darling added some things to what Pete did.
DM: Well…
RA: Erik mastered – I think you mastered both.
DM: Erik Darling was a very unique person. He was not egotistical at all. In fact, at the end of his life, it’s interesting – I’ll tell you a little bit about him. When I was about 16 years old, I called him on the phone and rather than just putting up with me, he said, “If you ever come to New York, you can come to my house and we can play some music.”
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: And he invited me to his apartment which was up near Columbus Circle, and of course, I was not familiar with the city, so I took trains and brought my guitar, and I was like 16, I guess. And we sat there for the afternoon and he gave me some food and we played and talked and this and that. And then I remember the apartment very well. I remember the ceiling. I remember the smell of the place and the hallway.
RA: And this was about 1961 again?
DM: 1962, I guess.
RA: Okay, so that’s after he had joined the Weavers…
DM: And started the Rooftop Singers.
RA: Oh, okay.
DM: And shortly into that year, he had a number one record.
RA: He certainly did.
DM: And he was very busy, you know, with his group and the success that they had.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: And still, he always spoke to me the same way and whenever I wanted, he would invite me, if he had the time, when he was free, to the apartment to spend some time and play some music. That’s the kind of person he was.
RA: Did he have a 12 string at the time you met him?
DM: He had just ordered them. He had two 12 strings custom made by Gibson for this group. I saw those…
RA: Just to do “Walk Right In”?
DM: Before the group hit, so he made the records with those and he also had a new banjo made exactly like the old one from Vega, and he had a new – a couple of new 000-28’s made so he said to me, “Why don’t you take my old banjo? You can take it home.”
RA: Wow.
DM: So he gave me this banjo and I took it home. My mother – I lived with my mother in Larchmont in an apartment and I took it home. And first of all, I was crazy about this cover that he had with a stop sign and the banjo hanging on the stop sign. It was just called “Erik Darling”. It was the title of his album on Elektra Records.
RA: Elektra.
DM: I loved that photograph and that banjo was different from any other long neck because the fifth string peg was set back one fret from where the normal fifth string peg was if you bought a Vega banjo from Vega.
RA: Oh, my goodness. Was it set forward, or was it?
DM: Backwards. It was toward the rim. So there were eight frets – seven.
RA: I see.
DM: Before you reached the fifth string peg. And I eventually learned – and let me tell you a little story. So I took the banjo home and I took it all apart and I cleaned it all up and I fixed it all up and I put it all back together, and I made it sound really, really good in about two weeks—he never asked for it back. But I couldn’t keep it for more than that. I felt it wasn’t right, so I brought it back to him. And it was all shining and beautiful and everything. And I never forgot that and then Erik and I kept knowing each other. I performed –-I was a sideman on an album by Lisa Kindred.
RA: I’ve heard of her.
DM: That he produced for Vanguard and then around 1966, he was getting tired of, I guess, the Rooftop Singers and he wanted to form another group and so he brought me to his – he asked me to come to the apartment to audition to possibly sing with three other people. He – Eric and two other people – so it would be a four man group. And I sat around and listened to some of these songs he had written and they were doing all this – they say he’s sort of theatrical and dramatic, as well as musical, and it was quite off the walls and I was a little older now. And he called me up and he asked me what I thought, and I said I didn’t think the songs were very good and he got pretty mad at me.
RA: You told Erik Darling and these were songs he had written himself?
DM: Yeah, I didn’t like the songs.
RA: Oh, my God. That was some good stuff.
DM: So he said, “Well, I can’t work with you.” And I said, “That’s okay,” so we didn’t talk for a long time.
RA: Do you remember what the name of the group was going to be?
DM: I don’t remember the name of the group. But they wore masks.
RA: They wore masks? Oh, this has the sixties written all over it.
DM: Yeah. They had masks and it was a whole different…So anyway, he was just two years away from completely quitting music altogether.
RA: Uh huh. Well, he went into writing mysteries.
DM: Pardon me.
RA: When I met him once at McCabe’s in Los Angeles and got a chance to actually talk to him, and he was writing – he told me he was writing mysteries. He was living, I think, in Arizona and he had quit music and he was making a living writing books, writing mysteries.
DM: Well, he spent many, many, many years writing his biography which he finished just before he died, and all the Weavers’ photographs in that book came from me.
RA: Really?
DM: Erik didn’t have one single thing. I just want to tell you a little bit about him. He had a breakdown of some sort. He told me that he went to the top of a building and he wanted to jump off.
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: In ’68. But everything snapped.
RA: Did he say anything about why?
DM: He didn’t really know why, but he never – he gave lessons and he never wanted to make music anymore as far as being on stage or being involved with any of that. Then he fell in love with a police officer who was a woman and she went out to New Mexico and he followed her out there, and he lost his apartment which was rent controlled because he sublet it. So, he was out there with her and that fell apart and he ended up staying in New Mexico. And he was always close to Bill Spano and Bill Spano married his first wife, Joan Darling. And the three of them were very close.
RA: I see.
DM: And so they were all together out there in New Mexico, and then they moved…
RA: Yeah, that’s where it was.
DM: Yeah, New Mexico.
RA: So it was New Mexico.
DM: Anyhow, I’m going to cut to the chase here a little bit, so many years pass, like 40 years pass. This is ’66, ’76, ’86, ’96, 2006, 40 years passed and there was a book being written by my webmaster, Allen Howard, about me called, “Killing Us Softly With His Songs.”
RA: Okay.
DM: And I said, “You have to have a picture of Erik Darling in here because he was very important to me and so Allen reached out to him by the internet and found him. And he wrote a beautiful letter back about how much he remembered our relationship and how much he liked what I did, and all this good stuff. And so I talked to him. Now 40 years later, and we began to talk about, just like we did when I was 16 on the phone.
RA: Oh God, that’s beautiful.
DM: And I asked him all kinds of questions. I said, “What happened to you?” and he told me he had this breakdown and he was at a therapist for a while and he did all kinds of different things, but barely making it. And he was now in North Carolina, where his ex-wife and her husband, Bill Spano, lived, so the three of them lived down there. And I said, “Well, maybe if you ever get to Maine,” and he said, I guess his ex-wife and Bill Spano, I don’t know if they have money or something, but they had a house in Kennebunkport, Maine, and I said, “Well, if you’re ever up here I’d like to take you to dinner.” So they came up, the three of them…
RA: All three of them.
DM: …all three of them, and Erik is very old at that point and he looks like he looks in that last go-around with the Weavers that they put on YouTube with “Sinner Man” and stuff. They’re so old they can hardly stand up. They should never have done it, but he was there with the two others and my wife, and I took them to dinner at this restaurant in Kennebunkport and then we spoke and got to meet again. And so on, and that was that. We had a nice night together and then shortly after, I was told he died.
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: I had no indication that he was ill, but he did sit on a pillow. I guess he was having some kind of pain or something.
RA: Was he still playing music, even though he wasn’t performing?
DM: Oh yeah. He was playing more beautiful guitar than ever. He played – his guitar playing became more lyrical and cascading. I mean, you could hear some of those later albums that he made.
RA: Yeah, I have one of them.
DM: Unbelievable, his playing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXZQBxIj2ok
RA: He completely redid “Walk Right In” and made it a lyrical…
DM: Well, one of the problems that Erik had, and he told this to me, was he really couldn’t learn new songs and he couldn’t find new songs. He was always going back to the same stuff all the time. And that was kind of a shame because he needed somebody to help him find melodies. The problem that I had with the music that he was making for that group is that it was flat lining. It wasn’t really melodic and maybe it’s the Italian in me or something, but it didn’t speak to me. But I want to tell you one funny thing that I loved that banjo so much that I went ahead and ordered a banjo from Deering Banjos with the peg back one fret, in more or less a duplicate of his, and I was playing that and you can see me on the internet playing that when I was looking around through Mandolin Brothers, they sent me the catalog, and there was the goddamned banjo for sale, the real one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LUElCuk2JI
RA: Wow.
DM: And I bought it right away. And I have it.
RA: And what year was that?
DM: It’s the best, most amazing sounding instrument you could ever imagine. All those banjo records that you hear with him on Ed McCurdy and behind Jack Elliott and…that’s the banjo.
RA: I see.
DM: And all the Weavers’ records. The new banjo that he got, he played at the reunion concern in 1963, and it’s kind of plunky. It didn’t really have the sparkle of the original one.
RA: And it was still a Vega Banjo?
DM: Well, yeah. And actually that banjo, the banjo that I have which was his first banjo, was the first long-neck banjo ever made by Vega. The first one ever because he, rather than elongating the neck, which all those guys did, Seeger elongated that neck that he used in the Weavers at Carnegie Hall in 1955. Eric elongated the neck that he used on the banjo that he used with the Tarriers which had those block inlays.
RA: So they did the craftwork themselves.
DM: Basically he called and said, “I want you to make me one.”
RA: I see.
DM: That’s long-necked, it has the three extra frets, but they put the fifth string peg back one fret so it had eight frets where I can capo up instead of seven. And they did that and made it in a blond style and that is the first long-neck banjo ever made by Vega.
RA: Wow.
DM: After the Kingston Trio became famous, and around that time, they started making the regular Vega neck which Pete Seeger – is called the Pete Seeger model and I’m sure that Pete was the first person to elongate the neck.
RA: Oh, well, of course he was. Nobody else has ever claimed that.
DM: But Erik was the first person to have Vega make one.
RA: I see.
DM: That’s a long story.
RA: Oh, that’s the kind of story I was hoping to hear. Well, all right, did you – when you were starting out – might as well finish this section – when you were starting out, did you, like everybody else I knew, start out with Pete’s little red banjo book?
DM: Absolutely. I locked myself in – I swore I was going to play this goddamned banjo and you know there was no YouTube and there was no video, and there was no nothing.
RA: Yeah, of course not.
DM: You had to read these words and try to figure this out, and bump-titty, bump-titty made a lot of sense, you know? You know, bump was the pickup and lunk-thunk, so it had the sound of bump-tinny, bump-tinny. And so I bought this thing and all the banjo book was the same as all of the liner notes that were in these wonderful folk records, Folkways’ records. So much attention was paid to the lyrics and these little stores and pictures of drawings.
RA: Oh yeah. That’s – Moe Ash’s…
DM: I mean, these liner notes in Pete Seeger’s Folkways’ records were as interesting almost as the music, and the banjo followed the line. They got someone to do drawings of him or a guy who looked like him playing the banjo, and the thing that I loved about Pete Seeger was that he always seemed to have his face up towards the sun and he was playing his banjo and he had it all totally to himself. He didn’t need anyone else but his banjo and his guitar. And when he had them on his back and he would create a world like that. That’s what I wanted to do. And that’s what was my – but then the problem was, and it happened to Brian Wilson, it happened to a lot of people – they started making songs that you couldn’t do by yourself or that you couldn’t do alone and you’d start involving other things with it and you want it to have another sound. But I continued that thing all through the 1970s. You listen to the solo album on Universal.
RA: Yeah, that’s a beautiful album.
DM: When I finished that record, I said, well now I’m going to do something else, but I did that – in all the major halls of the world, many times I did that.
RA: Is “Ancient History” on that album?
DM: “Ancient History” is on “Playin’ Favorites.”
RA: “Playin’ Favorites.”
DM: And that’s an album, a song that I heard – a Johnny Cash song that his secretary wrote, or so he told me.
RA: “Ancient History”? Yeah, it wasn’t written by Johnny Cash.
DM: No, it was written by his secretary. You have to understand that I’m a loner, I’m an outsider. I’m really not – I don’t know a lot of people.
RA: I want to read the poem you wrote for Pete, and so it gets in the interview. It’s the last page of the wonderful Clearwater book that you edited. It’s called “For Pete”. And maybe you could say something afterwards:
He’s a sailor, a bumbling, crafty, thoughtful, dreaming, chopstick drummer.
A lover, a brightly colored creature, root that knuckles through the soil to reach you.
A sculptured banjo body setting humane thoughts on careless scraps of paper leaves,
a voice of fiber bark, tenderness and April bud. A raging, flaming, autumn fire.
Tall, strong, bending in the breeze, but growing natural as wood,
a shady place for all these children of the sun.
DM: That’s how I felt.
RA: It’s a beautiful poem.
DM: I don’t feel that way anymore unfortunately.
RA: I saw that on your – I certainly noticed that in the interview…
DM: I don’t feel that way anymore.
RA: I noticed that.
DM: And I’m sorry about that. I wish I did.
RA: Was there something that changed your attitude?
DM: Many things. By the mid-70s, I felt there was so much hatred around him toward America that I just didn’t want to hear it anymore I remember him saying on stage once, “If I were a black man, I would drown America in my babies.”
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: And I thought to myself, what is this guy thinking? And analyze that for a second. I would put out a lot of children that nobody wants so the system gets clogged up and breaks down? That’s what you want? You know? I mean, I heard that and I said to myself, it’s time for me to move on.
RA: And that was enough.
DM: And there’s much more I could tell you. I don’t want to do that.
RA: Yeah, I know.
DM: With this interview. I want to say that because of him, I found my way in to this business and found a way to express myself, and also I loved the time that I knew him, but I don’t agree with him. I never understood how someone who loves humanity can also love totalitarian government. I don’t understand that. And the ramifications of that are very, very large. And so…
End of Part Two; in Part Three Don McLean talks about Pete Seeger and his time on the Clearwater.
Don McLean and Judy Collins will appear in concert at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside on Friday, July 25. For further info and tickets see www.DonMcLean.com
Ross Atman will perform a tribute to Pete Seeger on Saturday, July 19 at 2:00pm at the Santa Monica Public Library; sponsored by the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest Free Family Concert Series; in the North Courtyard outside the library.
Saturday July 26, 8:00pm Ross Altman and Jill Fenimore perform at the UnUrban Coffeehouse Gallery Opening for an exhibition of the late Change-Links Editor John Johnson’s paintings; 3301 W. Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA. 90405; 310-315-0056; Jill will play Don McLean’s Vincent in honor of John.
On Thursday evening, July 31 Ross will appear with the Geer Family Singers and other performers at the Theatricum Botanicum Re-Pete concert for Pete Seeger. See their website for tickets.
Saturday afternoon August 9, at 2:00pm on the 69th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Ross performs Countdown: The Cold War Hit Parade at the Allendale Branch Library in Pasadena; 1130 South Marengo Ave. Pasadena, CA 91106 626-744-7260; it is sponsored by the library; free and open to the public.
Sunday morning August 31 at 10:30am Ross performs his annual Labor Day Sunday Program at the Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill Street in Santa Monica 90405; free and open to the public. 310-399-1631.
Ross Altman may be reached at greygoosemusic@aol.com
Here is Part 3 of my FolkWorks interview with Don McLean.
Don McLean: The FolkWorks Interview
Part 3
RA: How did you get acquainted with Pete?
DM: I got acquainted with him because, well I always loved his records, and loved that image which I felt was the perfect image for me, you know, because I was always kind of an outsider. I didn’t really want to work with people. I didn’t get along with people. I was always getting punished for things I was saying, you know, even at home. In school, at home, whatever, I would say something that was the truth, but it would get me in a lot of trouble and it kind of continued right on.
RA: Can you think of an example off the top of your head of that kind of thing?
DM: I can – wow, I mean, no. But I was always being impertinent, let’s say.
RA: Okay.
DM: The biggest example was American Pie, you know, where everybody sort of crucified me for – Rolling Stone crucified me for trying to take over the telling of the history of rock and roll.
RA: Oh, really? This I did not know.
DM: Oh, sure, absolutely. They just crucified me and then they finally left me alone when they realized that people liked it.
RA: It was bigger than either of you.
DM: They liked me and they liked the song and they stopped messing with me. But no, that’s just the biggest example. But there are thousands of others. And I was not – I was a person, you know, who…
RA: You think of yourself as an outsider.
DM: …Pete Seeger liked me a lot in the early ‘70s and then I became very successful and the Seeger’s were a little threatened by that because, you know, it wasn’t him now, it was me. And Pete’s got a big ego. He likes to be the center of attention.
RA: Yeah, I know.
DM: And suddenly I was. And so – but I made every effort. You know, I was with him when the FBI was there, and I was with him in anti-war rallies all over, way before Springsteen was around.
RA: When the FBI came to his log cabin?
DM: I was around.
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: Not when they came to the log cabin, but they were in the audience. There were government people that were salted into the whole original Clearwater Board.
RA: Oh really?
DM: Oh yeah. It was a big deal. The government was quite threatened by this kind of thing and they were always doing these things.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: So I was with him all the time and he seemed different then from the kind of guy he is now. Now he’s very anxious to accept awards and plaudits and he’s very anxious to come out of the political closet and whereas in those days, there was never – the image was that he had been wrongly accused and wrongly pilloried and persecuted for his political beliefs, but the political beliefs seemed to be very reasonable, that he was just for, you know, good things. And so I was 100% there behind him. But in any case, he did a lot of good things for me and I wish him well and not – I don’t want to…
RA: Well, when you’re 95.
DM: What’s that?
RA: When you’re 95, Ezra Pound said toward the end of his life, “I feel closer to my old enemies than to my new friends.”
DM: Well, I hope I’m not his enemy, but I have this problem where I do say things that I think.
RA: Yeah, I noticed that.
DM: It just comes out. I can’t help it and it breaks my heart to have to say these things, but that’s how it is. I’m not on anybody’s team. I call them like I see ‘em and so that’s the reason I left in the ‘70s and I went on and did other things. And I could say a lot more, but I’m not going to say anymore, but I will say that those records and the wonderful thing about him was that he attracted so many songwriters and recorded so many unusual songs like Newspaper Man and The Ballad of Sherman Wu and this wonderful song. I used to have a Stinson record of his. It was red plastic, I remember.
RA: I have those. American…
DM: There was one called Ariran, which was about Korea.
RA: Yeah, it’s a Korean song.
DM: And I went to Korea and I thought, “God, what a nice song to have in my head,” you know?
RA: It’s a beautiful tune. I notice on the front page or the title page of the Clearwater book there are some people that I know and I wonder if you might say a word about a couple of them.
DM: Okay.
RA: Gordon Bok, for one, who actually lives in Camden.
DM: Lives in Camden and he’s a legend, you know, and he writes these very wonderful songs. He’s written many, many, many songs about the sea and he performs.
RA: Do you know him at all?
DM: I know him a little bit. I wasn’t close to him. Okay, I wanted to say something about Frank Hamilton.
RA: Oh, thank you.
DM: I really, really want to say what a wonderful musician and person he is, and I want to say…
RA: Is he still alive?
DM: He’s still alive and I think he teaches still at the Chicago Old Town Folk Music – School of Folk Music, but…
RA: He also took a role in the Weavers at one point.
DM: That’s right.
RA: In the ’63 reunion concert.
DM: And Erik Darling told me that the Weavers were not too nice to him. And he was annoyed about that. He thought Frank was a wonderful person, and I frankly think…
RA: Not too nice to Frank Hamilton?
DM: Yeah. They didn’t particularly like his style or him or whatever. I don’t know what the problem was, but anyway, I was sort of sad to hear that because Frank sounded phenomenal with that group. I think that Frank Hamilton sounded better with the Weavers than Seeger or Erik.
RA: Wow.
DM: If you listen to Hineh Ma Tov and some of these songs, he was so perfect for this group and he has a wonderful voice. It’s a clear voice with a gorgeous vibrato. He’s knowledgeable, he’s very musical, and he’s so humble that he really – you never really hear about him much, but he was a guy I got to know a little bit and played some music with.
RA: Well, he’s…
DM: I just thought his recordings with the Weavers, there weren’t too many, they point over to the, I think it’s called the Python Temple or something like that where a lot of Buddy Holly records were made for Decca Records.
RA: Oh really?
DM: The Knights of Pythias Temple or something. It had an amazing sound. Vanguard Records used to use a church, you know? They used to get a real echo and go to places where it really was rather than this stupid technology, kind of phony echo that they get now.
RA: Yeah, of course.
DM: A chamber echo and echoes in really beautiful halls are what you really want. You can’t fake that. But they made a bunch of recordings there at this Pythias Temple or whatever the hell it’s called, for Decca Records used to have there.
RA: And that’s in New York City?
DM: Yeah, it’s in New York. And they recorded Hineh Ma Tov and Miner’s Life and a bunch of tunes in the studio which they then made to appear to be live recordings, which they’re not.
RA: I see.
DM: They put applause on it. So Weavers at Carnegie Hall, Volume 2 has all those recordings. Yerakina which actually Frank had done on an album, with a girl called Veluscia or something or other. He made an album on the Phillips Records where he did that song. But anyway, he also made a song – an album with Pete Seeger called Nonesuch which I love.
RA: I have that. It’s on Folkways.
DM: Yeah.
RA: It’s a great album.
DM: I love those records. I mean they just had a wonderful feeling to them and to this day, I will listen to Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry at Carnegie Hall and hear the way the banjo sounds in that hall when he plays that banjo. You know, he made that neck. That’s the neck that he made the original – the neck that he uses on his banjo now is made of lignum vitae.
RA: Yeah, I don’t know what that is, but I’ve seen the name.
DM: But the wood is a South African wood that sinks. It doesn’t float. It’s very heavy and what he did was he made it because it was as dense as ebony and he didn’t want to have a fingerboard. So if you look at The Weavers at Home, you will see him playing this banjo on the cover, and the fingerboard has a sort of a greenish brown kind of look to it. Well, he sent the banjo to – he used to send it – everyone used to send their instruments to the Village to D’Angelico, who had a shop where he made his great guitars, these masterpieces, but he also did repair work in the Village. And he sent this guitar there and D’Angelico planed down the neck and put a fingerboard on it, and Seeger wanted to murder him.
RA: You’re talking about his banjo now?
DM: Yeah.
RA: What do you mean? He didn’t want to have a fingerboard? You mean a fret lift?
DM: Well, a banjo neck itself is one piece, so he just set the frets.
RA: Oh, he didn’t want a separate piece for the fingerboard.
DM: Yeah.
RA: I see.
DM: But D’Angelico thought that wasn’t a good idea, so he planed the neck down and put a fingerboard on it.
RA: Oh, my God.
DM: And Seeger wanted to kill the guy.
RA: [laughing]
DM: And the interesting thing is the same thing happened with Gibson to Earl Scruggs. I know this because these people told me these stories. Earl Scruggs told me this. He said, “I sent my banjo to them and they…” and if you remember, he had like a hearts and flowers design on the banjo.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: And you can see that on the cover of the Foggy Mountain Jamboree. It’s a great cover on Columbia. Well, after he got it back, it had a fingerboard on it with bow tie inlays. But it still had the RB4 or whatever the name of the banjo was.
RA: I think that’s what it was. Yeah.
DM: So he was furious about that.
RA: Wow. Back to Frank Hamilton for one second. His name is one of the four names on We Shall Overcome.
DM: Zilphia Horton.
RA: Is it Zilphia Horton, Miles Horton’s wife, and Pete and Guy Carawan and Frank Hamilton.
DM: Correct.
RA: And to this day…
DM: The song was written by somebody else. His name isn’t even on there.
RA: Well, the song was a traditional song originally.
DM: Yeah.
RA: A white hymn from, I think from the – well I’m not sure it was a white hymn, but it’s from the Georgia Sea Islands. I’ll Be All Right Someday.
DM: Okay.
RA: And Guy Carawan is usually given credit for adding the – for slowing down the tempo and making it like an anthem. But I think Frank Hamilton added the chords that were used.
DM: Well, I don’t know who did what.
RA: I know why his name – I think that’s why his name is not…
DM: I don’t know who did what on that. I don’t. All I know is that a lot of people get a lot of money for stuff they didn’t do in folk music…
RA: All right. Let me ask you a couple other names here. Len Chandler. Did you know he was…?
DM: I knew Len Chandler. Len Chandler was an amazingly creative songwriter who was also a singer on this boat, and I think he’s still living.
RA: Yeah, he’s – we’re friends. I mean, he’s in Los Angeles.
DM: And he made a couple of albums for Columbia Records and I totally respected Len Chandler. I thought he was very fluid, you know?
RA: Uh huh.
DM: I was not. I was a guy who had to think things through a lot and I would have to really hammer things out. He would just come up with stuff. When we played, I was lucky enough to be in this group when we were taken by Seeger, we all felt honored to have been taken by him to the Newport Folk Festival, which he basically controlled with his wife and his manager and all the rest of it.
RA: What year was it?
DM: 1969.
RA: Okay.
DM: And that was the – while we were there, the man landed on the moon and you can’t imagine…
RA: While the festival was going on?
DM: While the festival, that weekend.
RA: Holy mackerel.
DM: And there were vans with PDs on the top and people were writing songs. It was the most amazing – it was like some sort of a solar eclipse or something. I don’t know what you could liken it to. The weird kind of energy that was around was nothing like I’ve ever experienced since, and I’ve done a lot of things.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: And everybody, a lot of people were making their debuts at – James Taylor, Van Morrison. I saw the Everly Brothers for the first time. Their father was there. Ike Everly. Muddy Waters was there doing like acoustic music. It was just an amazing thing. We were there. There were a lot more, a lot more. Buffy St. Marie, Joni Mitchell, all kinds of things. This was 1969. The man landed on the moon. Also introduced by Johnny Cash. Johnny Cash was there. Johnny Cash introduced the first time, Kris Kristofferson.
RA: So that was just the year before your first album.
DM: Yeah. That was when I was trying to get started on the first record, yeah. And Len Chandler was writing, like a song a minute about the man landing on the moon. The guy was normally very hyper, so I mean it was flying out of his ears. So I remember that very well.
RA: [laughing] He’ll be tickled to hear that.
DM: Oh, it’s true.
RA: That is so funny. Were you performing at that point?
DM: Well, we would sing together. We were like, and also we were like a group of sailors. I wasn’t a sailor, but Gordon Bok was a sailor.
RA: So you were performing from the Clearwater?
DM: No, no. We were on stage at Newport, but that was Pete’s brilliant way of talking about the boat.
RA: I see.
DM: What is the sloop? What is a Sloop Singer? Well, oh the sloop’s in Newport. Oh, I see.
RA: Okay, so you were part of the Sloop Singers?
DM: Yeah.
RA: Oh wow. That is wonderful.
DM: Yeah, I was the original crew.
RA: And did you know Fred, my friend Starner?
DM: Vaguely.
RA: He was also a banjo player. And how about Ramblin’ Jack? Did you have any?
DM: Ramblin’ Jack came and went, kind of. He wasn’t around. There were a lot of people that came and went who were around for a show or two and then weren’t around.
RA: All right, let me ask you…
DM: He was very good friends with the Seeger’s, so he would show up from time to time…
RA: What got you writing songs to start with? And do you remember anything about that?
DM: Yeah, Woody Guthrie. I heard a song, one of his songs, and I thought, “I can do that.” I heard, I think it was one of his tunes. I don’t remember. Roll On, Columbia or, you know, it was a simple thing. Maybe I’ll try to write a song like that with a little chorus and a verse.
RA: Wow. And this was – how old would you have been at that time?
DM: 14.
RA: That young, God. That is wonderful to have a vision.
DM: Well yeah, and that was the wonderful thing about folk music. Is that it made you think that you could do this. You couldn’t, of course. It was subtle. I mean, you didn’t realize how brilliant these people were, but they made it seem so easy. You know?
RA: And that’s just when you were learning to play basically.
DM: Yeah, that’s why it was perfect timing. I was a lucky fellow.
RA: Yes. I mean, to start out learning your instrument and immediately get the idea you could write a song. That’s amazing.
DM: You know, it was a lucky – but you know, even rock and roll was very simple. Don’t Be Cruel wasn’t hard. Peggy Sue wasn’t; once you start to play guitar, you could play all those songs, too.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: So everything was three chords. Once you learn those three chords, you were set free, man. I mean, you learn E, A, B7 and you were in business.
RA: Did your mother play any music? Did you get any…?
DM: My mother played a little piano and sometimes we’d go in the basement and we had this really beat up old piano. It has most of the, what do you call it, ivory keys were missing, you know, the ivory that covered the keys had fallen off. But there was a lot of music in the bench, that you’d open up and there’d be hundreds of songs, sheet music. And so now and then my mother would sing the theme from “Moulin Rouge” or she would sing, she would play on the piano some other song that was there, but that was the thing I remembered.
RA: Is she still alive or not?
DM: My mom? No, she died in 1984.
RA: ’84. Well, she got to see the wonderful success you’ve had.
DM: My mother received the benefits from my success.
RA: That’s beautiful.
DM: And I undid all of the damage that was done by my father’s death, so that was very satisfying.
RA: That is.
DM: Darling where is your heart… the theme from Moulin Rouge. [humming] A beautiful melody I remember that.
RA: So you learned some of the songs from…Actually from the piano?
DM: I knew hundreds of songs by the time I was ten years old.
RA: Wow.
DM: I was singing all the time without any accompaniment.
RA: You did a beautiful song without any accompaniment, speaking of that. The last lines were “to love somebody and…”
DM: Oh, that’s Nature Boy.
RA: That’s Nature Boy. Is that…
DM: That’s Nat King Cole’s hit.
RA: That’s Nat King Cole’s Nature Boy.
DM: Yeah, that was written by Eden Ahbez. Eden Ahbez, believe it or not, was one of Pete Seeger’s mother’s boyfriends.
RA: Oh, really?
DM: Really. Yeah. His mother was a…
RA: Not Ruth Crawford, but his own mother.
DM: Yeah. And this guy would walk around in sandals with long hair, back in the 1940s.
RA: Holy mackerel.
DM: And I think Seeger’s mother knew him.
RA: Wow. Well, I assume Nat King Cole does it with the piano.
DM: Well, he does it with fifty strings. It’s a gorgeous string arrangement.
RA: Because you do it a cappella and that is an extremely subtle tune to capture a cappella; I was quite taken just with that.
DM: It’s really not hard, but the thing about it is, I talk to people sometimes about guitar and Woody Guthrie played three chords, but he had all the music in his head. So where the guitar is a wonderful instrument because you can be very, very skilled on an instrument, any instrument, and yet have no real music in your head. And yet you can play a song that’s very simple, but you can tell the person has music in their heart, in their head.
RA: Well, the way you do Crying is a good example of that.
DM: Because I have this music in my head. I mean, it’s there.
RA: I’ve never heard anybody do that besides Roy Orbison until your concert. I wasn’t aware of the recording that you had done, and it is such an incredible vocal performance.
DM: Well, I lived that song, so I understood it. You know? A song a lot of times is a script for a performer. If you can’t feel that you lived it, then you shouldn’t sing it. That was the problem with the Folk era is that there were so many kids around singing songs that really they hadn’t lived that it was a silly time for music. You know? Some little group of college kids, if they sing The Midnight Special, I mean, it’s okay, but if Leadbelly sings it, you know, or somebody who’s been to jail, like Merle Haggard, that makes a difference. That’s folk. But you can’t know all these things in the beginning. You have to figure it out as you go along. It’s like figuring out what clothes suit you, you know? When you’re young, you might wear anything. But as you get older, you think, “Well this is more suitable to how I am,” and you know what garment is going to be you. And the same thing is like a song. A song has – you have to wear a song. A song is something that you wear and it either fits you properly or it doesn’t. And this is the reason why I couldn’t sing a lot of songs that were presented to me by different people who meant well and wanted me to have hit records because they liked my voice, but they weren’t a garment that I could wear.
RA: Well, when did you – I mean, when did you discover that you had a voice that could do a song like Crying? I mean that is – it’s like an opera.
DM: Well, I didn’t really talk to people too much, so one of the things that Erik did for me was he sent me to a music – a voice coach and he got my mind around the idea that if you work harder with the right people, you can improve. You can become something better than you are. I didn’t realize that you could do that. So people would say things and there would be realizations that I would have as a young person that were like astounding. So I went to this voice coach and he taught me some exercises and all of a sudden my voice box was clearing out of stuff that was in there and my voice became clearer and clearer. And I noticed it and I stopped smoking. I used to smoke. And it got better and better and as I got broader, it got more beautiful and I kept working on the thing and polishing it. And it got better and better and it’s all because of this voice coach, and I had one before that actually, because I wasn’t completely unaware of voice coaches.
RA: Well, you captured the Buddy Holly kind of hiccup in Everyday. It’s just beautiful. And a lot of these vocal flourishes that you just don’t hear from folksingers, you know?
DM: Well, you know, I’m not – the thing about the folk singing thing is that – I want to say this diplomatically and say it fairly because discovering folk music was probably one of the most fun things that ever happened to me. But really, it’s an artificial category because we’re not loggers, we’re not seamen, and we’re not cowboys and we don’t know what that way of life is like. So we’re – most of the people that started this, Carl Sandburg, the Lomax’s, the Seeger’s, were intellectuals that were also upper class, if you will. And we really, to be honest, have no business singing these songs, but Doris Ulmann, who photographed these people and John Jacob Niles would travel with us. These are all highly educated, sophisticated people and in a way, it was a kind of an odd thing because when the Lomax’s brought back Leadbelly off the prison farm, they dressed him in stripes and made a film with him and treated him kind of like a King Kong or something. Brought him to different schoolrooms and scared the shit out of people because he was different. And I don’t particularly like that.
RA: Yeah, I don’t either. Leadbelly didn’t either. I mean, he had a rupture with John Lomax.
DM: I can understand why and…
RA: He was basically treated like what he was. He was a chauffeur.
DM: He was a genius and I used to think that – I ordered some Leadbelly CDs recently and actually Pete Seeger showed me a movie of Leadbelly made by the Lomax’s once at his house. But I was as amazed at what Erik learned how to do on the 12 string and how to use his wrist, his whole forearm and his wrist to make those notes pop out of that 12 string on those bass strings. And I learned how to do that. I know how to do that. And I know all about where to play everything.
RA: Do you have a 12 string?
DM: Uh, I don’t play one, but I have it in the attic. I can play one. I can do all that stuff.
RA: Uh huh.
DM: But Leadbelly had a way of making those strings shoot out, making them – and he was very fast with the thing, like that. It’s impossible to do, I mean, to be as fast as he was with his thumb.
RA: There were some other things on your website that I really enjoyed. First of all, I got your guitar wrong—I thought it was a D45 because I’d never even heard of a D40.
DM: Well, that particular one is, I think, a D41 that I played that night, but there is…
RA: But you have your own signature model.
DM: I also use a D40DM which is a signature model.
RA: Yeah, I was reading about that.
DM: That particular one I used that night, I started to use some now is a D41 I’ve had for about 20 years. It just sounds extremely good.
RA: It was gorgeous. So your wife said that you were around for a couple of weeks. So you’re going back out on tour?
DM: Yeah, coming into January we’re going to be moving around.
RA: Uh huh. Well, I managed to avoid the subject, but since you brought it up, I’ll return to it. Even so, I still have the date here. How long do you think American Pie had been kind of gestating in you before you actually started to write it?
DM: Oh, I don’t know, maybe a year. Maybe a year or so. Like I’d take a long time for me to do these things.
RA: Really? So when you write songs, they’ve been working in your unconscious.
DM: Yeah. One of the problems I had was that when I started making records, after the first two or three records, there was always a demand for another album and I just didn’t have the – I just wanted time to do it and I was always so rushed. Some people can turn this stuff out.You know, they have a facility. I can’t. So it took about, I guess, about a year and oddly enough, what really pushed it over was meeting Phil Everly at the…
RA: Really?
DM: Yeah, in 1969 at that Newport show, I was so impressed with their show, it was so incredibly different and so professional, and very powerful, and they just showed everybody what it was all about. How to be a professional entertainer and performer. You know most everybody there were glorified amateurs. They may have been very successful, they may have written songs and stuff, but they really didn’t have the professional skill that these boys had. And they were just past masters and…
RA: Did they have a band at that time?
DM: Oh, did they have a band. They had a trio that just kicked ass. I mean, they were phenomenal. And so anyway, afterwards, the next day or someplace, they’re both hanging around and I went up to Phil. I said, “Did you know Buddy Holly?” because I was still thinking about this idea that I had and he said, “Oh yes, we knew Buddy.” Phil has said this, and then he said, “You know he died for dirty laundry.” And I said, “What do you mean by that?”
RA: Yeah, that’s the first thing that crossed my mind. What do you mean by that?
DM: He stayed behind to do his laundry and flew ahead to meet with the group. If he had just gone on the bus, he would have been alive. And that did it. Then I started really thinking about something. It made it real, it made it like I was there. It wasn’t this frozen…
RA: Oh, so he had to catch up with them.
DM: Picture on the front of an album now, it meant I was there and I understood it. And I was able to move on and started thinking about writing this song.
RA: I see.
DM: Well, that’s why I shed a tear because he was a sweet person, Phil Everly. So I think we’ve covered everything, haven’t we?
RA: Well, I wanted to say I stole your line for a program I did on Hank Williams. The 60th anniversary of his death was last year, January 1, and so I did a show and wrote a piece on him and it was called The Day the Music Died.
DM: Okay.
RA: But I thought it was the best way to, you know…
DM: Well, I’d like to end this interview by saying that I think Hank Williams III is one of the most talented people around.
RA: His grandson?
DM: Yeah.
RA: Yeah.
DM: He’s a remarkable talent.
RA: Did Hank Williams, Sr.’s music mean anything to you growing up?
DM: Oh, definitely. In fact, I recorded Love Sick Blues on the Playin’ Favorites album and I know most of Hank Williams’ stuff.
RA: Well, that’s a good note to end on.
DM: But his grandson is a remarkably talented person.
RA: Well, I will make sure to see him the next time he comes around here.
DM: And make sure you bring a gun, though.
RA: Why is that?
DM: He has tough country people come and see him.
RA: Oh, I see.
DM: Nice to talk to you, man.
RA: Thank you so much, Mr. McLean. I will send you a copy of this when it’s…
DM: I hope you don’t edit too much out.
RA: Thank you. I appreciate that. It can all be on the record.
DM: I’d like it.
RA: Okay.
DM: I enjoyed talking to you very much.
RA: Thank you again.
DM: All right then. Bye.
RA: Take care now.
END OF INTERVIEW
Don McLean and Judy Collins will appear in concert at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside on Friday, July 25. For further info and tickets see www.DonMcLean.com
Ross Altman will perform a solo acoustic tribute to Pete Seeger Saturday, July 19 at 2:00pm; Santa Monica Public Library; 601 Santa Monica Blvd Santa Monica CA 90401(outside, in the North Courtyard); sponsored by the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest Free Family Concert Series
Saturday July 26, 8:00pm Ross Altman and Jill Fenimore perform at the UnUrban Coffeehouse Gallery Opening for an exhibition of the late Change-Links Editor John Johnson’s paintings; 3301 W. Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA. 90405; 310-315-0056; Jill will play Don McLean’s Vincent in honor of John.
Ross Altman may be reached at greygoosemusic@aol.com
Don McLean and Judy Collins will appear in concert at the Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside on Friday, July 25. For further info and tickets see www.DonMcLean.com
Ross Atman will perform a tribute to Pete Seeger on Saturday, July 19 at 2:00pm at the Santa Monica Public Library; sponsored by the Topanga Banjo-Fiddle Contest Free Family Concert Series; on the patio outside the library.
Saturday July 26, 8:00pm Ross Altman and Jill Fenimore perform at the UnUrban Coffeehouse Gallery Opening for an exhibition of the late Change-Links Editor John Johnson’s paintings; 3301 W. Pico Blvd. Santa Monica, CA. 90405; 310-315-0056; Jill will play Don McLean’s Vincent in honor of John.
On Thursday evening, July 31 Ross will appear with the Geer Family Singers and other performers at the Theatricum Botanicum Re-Pete concert for Pete Seeger. See their website for tickets.
Saturday afternoon August 9, at 2:00pm on the 69th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Ross performs Countdown: The Cold War Hit Parade at the Allendale Branch Library in Pasadena; 1130 South Marengo Ave. Pasadena, CA 91106 626-744-7260; it is sponsored by the library; free and open to the public.
Sunday morning August 31 at 10:30 AM Ross performs his annual Labor Day Sunday Program at the Church in Ocean Park, 235 Hill Street in Santa Monica 90405; free and open to the public. 310-399-1631.
Ross Altman may be reached at greygoosemusic@aol.com