Its hooks are mostly upbeat, especially the “Bye-bye, Miss American Pie” chorus, but the lyrics to “American Pie” are melancholic, even distraught. Viewing history from the bottom of a long and bumpy slide, the song is a catalog of death and destruction: from the shattered innocence of the 1950s through the political tumult of the ’60s and the blackening cultural mood at that decade’s end, when “Satan” is rising and the “Father, Son and Holy Ghost” have “caught the last train to the coast.” Among the awful events “American Pie” seems to reference—in the line “Helter Skelter in a summer swelter”—are the grisly Tate and LaBianca murders committed by Charles Manson’s followers in Los Angeles in August 1969. Cult leader and wannabe rock star Manson convinced his acolytes that he’d received coded directives from the 1968 album The Beatles (a.k.a. “The White Album”), in particular the song “Helter Skelter.” He claimed the lyrics instructed the group to kindle an apocalyptic race war through horrific crimes. Like the disastrous Altamont Free Concert, the Manson Family murders were emblematic of an era’s end, revealing the dark underside of hippiedom’s utopian vision of peace, love and rock and roll.
