I think that song was a little problematic for Rivers, because I think he wanted things to go in a certain direction. Ric Ocasek insisted that we put in on the album. It starts at ten, and goes up from there. In an interview with Billboard on the 25th anniversary of The Blue Album, Patrick Wilson shares his view on the song: We’d come into the studio in the morning and find little pieces of paper with doodles on them: WE WANT BUDDY HOLLY. Ric said we’d be stupid to leave it off the album. You did write it and it is a great song.’ Do it anyway, and if you don’t like it when it’s done, we won’t use it. I remember at one point he was hesitant to do ‘Buddy Holly,’ and I was like, ‘Rivers, we can talk about it. In the book River’s Edge: The Weezer Story, Ric Ocasek says that Rivers Cuomo was reluctant to include the song on the album: In 2007, Rivers Cuomo released a demo of the song as a part of his solo album Alone: The Home Recordings of Rivers Cuomo. Jonze digitally inserted the band playing at “Arnold’s” diner from the television show Happy Days, interspersed with footage from the show.
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The groundbreaking music video for “Buddy Holly” was filmed by Spike Jonze, later famous for directing films such as Being John Malkovich and Her. We’d come into the studio in the morning and find little pieces of paper with doodles on them: “WE WANT BUDDY HOLLY!” In 2011, Rolling Stone named “Buddy Holly” one of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.ĭespite its popular and critical success, songwriter Rivers Cuomo had little confidence in the song, and had to be prodded by producer Ric Ocasek to include it on the album.īassist Matt Sharp described how hard Ric pushed for the song: The song was an international hit, reaching #17 on the US pop charts, and #12 in the UK. The single was released on September 7 1994, on what would have been Buddy Holly’s 58th birthday. I wanted to write a song that was completely brand new in its perspective.“Buddy Holly” was the second single from the band’s 1994 debut album Weezer, popularly known as The Blue Album. And not a ‘This Land Is Your Land’ or ‘America, the Beautiful’ or something like that. “Buddy Holly’s death is what I used to try to write the biggest possible song I could write about America. “It’s about America,” McLean told the Des Moines Register. As McLean reveals in the documentary, his mention of the “marching band” actually refers to the military-industrial complex, while “sweet perfume” was his euphemism for tear gas.
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The burgeoning singer-songwriter carried on with his professional music aspirations, eventually channeling his pain and grief from both events into “American Pie” while working on his second album.īut the song goes far beyond those two moments, using “the day the music died” as a metaphor for “the loss of American innocence,” as Matthew Leimkuehler wrote for the Des Moines Register in 2019.
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It hurt me.”Īs a teen, McLean delivered newspapers he also suffered from bronchial asthma, which often kept him home from school and made him “a lonely teenage broncin’ buck,” per the song’s lyrics.Ī few years after the plane crash, McLean suffered another loss when his father died. “I was in absolute shock,” he says in the film. When the 1959 crash took the lives of some of his favorite musicians, McLean was 13 years old. “This film was a concerted effort to raise the curtain.” “I told Don, ‘It’s time for you to reveal what 50 years of journalists have wanted to know,’” says Spencer Proffer, the documentary’s producer, to the Guardian’s Jim Farber. It also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the at-times strained process of rehearsing and recording the song, which radio stations were initially reluctant to play because it was so long. The 90-minute film includes archival news clips, interviews with musicians like Garth Brooks and Brian Wilson, dramatizations by actors and footage of McLean visiting the last place Holly, Valens and Richardson played before the crash. The Day the Music Died, now streaming on Paramount+, offers a line-by-line breakdown of the song’s lyrics, which are packed with cultural references and phrases that are open to interpretation, while also exploring the broader cultural significance of the catchy, mysterious tune. Though fans and journalists have long tried to make sense of every word, McLean has mostly remained silent about the true meaning of the song or specific lyrics-until now.