I’ve never been a cool car or funky gadget guy, so Facebook has become my adult toy of choice. Before Don McLean’s recent show at The Town Hall, I decided to let all my “friends” know I was in attendance. “Don McLean?” one of my buddies immediately commented, “I thought he was dead. I guess I was confusing him with Harry Chapin or Jim Croce. Had I known he was still alive, I would have shown up!”

“A long, long time ago,” we might have sung” bye, bye, Miss American Pie,” but the songwriter who penned those words is still very much alive and picking. At age 65 and almost 40 years since the release of his iconic pop-history song, McLean and his trusty acoustic guitar had an audience full of Baby Boomers bouncing and singing along to a 10-minute version of the epic that, for better or worse, has defined his career. The better because, as he readily acknowledged at the show, the song (most recently covered by Madonna) has made him so much money, he really wouldn’t have to work again. The worse because Don McLean is one of the most underrated pop-rock singer-songwriters of the 1960s and ’70s. You’d just never know it because only die-hard McLean fans know and appreciate the breadth of his songbook.

It’s likely that, at some point in his career, McLean went through the entertainer’s equivalent of the stages of grief when it came to “American Pie.” Like Leonard Nimoy’s love/hate relationship with the character of Mr. Spock from Star Trek, which ultimately led to acceptance, Don McLean has finally embraced the fact that he will be playing “American Pie” as his concert encore number the rest of his performing life.

McLean has often been mischaracterized as a folk singer, mainly because of his close association with Peter Seeger in the late ’60s. But as even he related during this show, McLean’s music has always been a fusion of folk, country, ’50s rock and ’60s pop. He’s not, as some people have considered him, a poor man’s Bob Dylan. “I wanted to sing like the people who could really sing great melodies,” McLean says.

While it would have been a treat to hear more than 12 McLean compositions during his 20-song set, he clearly loves playing and singing early rock and roll and classic country tunes. He may no longer be able to sustain some of those higher register notes, but his voice is still rich and strong, and his interpretations of songs such as Roy Orbison’s “Crying,” and Boudleaux Bryant’s “Love Hurts” (a hit for the Everly Brothers) sounded wonderful within the great acoustics of The Town Hall and with his four-piece Nashville-based band backing him up. And in a mini-Fred Astaire tribute (during which he sang the lovely and quirky lullaby “Wonderful Baby” that he wrote for Astaire), McLean put over a surprisingly moving “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (which Astaire danced to with Irene Dunne in the film Roberta). That’s another underrated aspect of Don McLean: when he decides to cover an old song, it’s truly given a new life.

The most solid section of McLean songs came during the second part of the set when the audience was reminded of his amazing facility with history-based stories and those achingly heartfelt ballads that led to the Lori Lieberman-inspired “Killing Me Softly with His Song” (Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox) based on the poem Lieberman wrote after she first heard McLean at the Troubadour 40 years ago. “Bronco Bill’s Lament,” the soliloquy of a washed-up old movie cowboy who “moved my lips to someone else’s voice,” was as strong as when it was first recorded decades ago. I’ve always felt his often-covered hit “And I Love You So” is one of his more pedestrian ballads, but it had more resonance at this show coming from an older, more worldly-wise perspective. And when the old troubadour followed that with the classic “Vincent” and the introspective “Crossroads,” it became a “starry, starry night” indeed.

So, my Facebook friend, neither Don McLean nor his music has died.

Stephen Hanks
Cabaret Scenes
March 25, 2011
www.cabaretscenes.org