WSJ Historically Speaking: American Pie’ and the History of Mysterious Rock Lyrics

Photo: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Photo: MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Earlier this month, one of the greatest mysteries in rock ’n’ roll was finally solved. The unnamed “king” and “jester on the sidelines” in Don McLean’s iconic 1971 song “American Pie” were revealed to be Elvis Presley and Bob Dylan, respectively.

The lyrics of “American Pie” are about “the day the music died”: Feb. 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson (aka “The Big Bopper”) went down in a plane crash in Iowa. Critics have long wanted to know whether the song referred only to the obvious tragedy for music or was also a general cry for a lost era of American innocence.

Mr. McLean himself says that trying to pin down the exact meaning of “American Pie” runs contrary to the song’s spirit. Understanding the lyrics “was not a parlor game,” Mr. McLean wrote in the auction catalog accompanying the recent sale of his original working manuscript at Christies. Nevertheless, he declared that the song was indeed a lament—“an indescribable photograph of America that I tried to capture in words and music.”

The history of “American Pie” highlights a fundamental conundrum in rock music: The intended meaning of lyrics has often turned out to be at odds with the ways they are received.

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The Sunday Times: America has laid a road to civil rights but is just as ready to dig it up

Photo: Anthony Delanoix

Photo: Anthony Delanoix

On March 9, 1961, a Siera Leonean diplomat, William Fitzjohn, was being driven along Maryland’s Route 40, when he stopped at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant to eat. The manager refused to serve him, informing the irate envoy that this restaurant, like all the roadside eateries on Route 40, was segregated.

On learning of the incident, the Kennedy administration immediately went into damage limitation mode. Fitzjohn was invited to dinner at the White House. The mayor of Hagerstown, Maryland, and Howard D Johnson, the founder of the restaurant chain, made public apologies.

Three months later, the new ambassador from Chad, Adam Malick Sow, was driving to Washington to present his credentials, when he, too, decided to stop at a restaurant along Route 40.

This time, on being informed by the ambassador’s interpreter that the full weight of US-Chadian relations hinged on a cup of coffee, the manageress of the Bonnie Brae Diner responded that Sow should “get his ass out” of the restaurant.

Such mistreatment of the African corps diplomatique did not go unnoticed by the anti-American press.

Throughout 1961, the Kennedy administration tried hard to persuade the governor of Maryland to end racial discrimination along Route 40 before a diplomatic embarrassment escalated into a Cold War incident.

It took three years and three attempts before Maryland grudgingly passed a partial desegregation law. At which point, the tide of history swept across the country, leaving behind the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: Mercy in Victory Is as Ancient as War

Photo: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/EVERETT COLLECTION

Photo: MARY EVANS PICTURE LIBRARY/EVERETT COLLECTION

All wars involve suffering and bloodshed, but not all defeats must lead to death or living hell. One reason why next week’s 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War invites national commemoration instead of civil unrest is that, from the outset, the chief Union protagonists consciously promoted the ideal of victorious restraint toward the vanquished South.

When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant met with Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee on April 9, 1865, the Union commander showed he understood that winning the peace would be as important as winning the war. His conditions for surrender included allowing Lee’s men to keep their sidearms for protection, as well as a horse or a mule for the spring harvest. For his part, Lee urged his men to accept their defeat with dignity and to return home for good.

In later years, for all the disappointments that followed during Reconstruction, Grant’s foresight at Appomattox remained a touchstone for peace and rapprochement, helping keep the spirit of unity alive.

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The Sunday Times: In pill-popping America even shyness is a medical condition

Photo: Martin Vorel

Photo: Martin Vorel

What’s the biggest difference between Americans and Britons? Is it the broad vowel sounds, the prevalence of guns, or the belief in God? No, it’s the number of healthy people who believe they have a medical issue.

Call it the medicalisation of life, or slick marketing, the fact is there is an entire industry in America dedicated to turning the human condition into a chronic disease.

The topic has resurfaced because the Supreme Court has been listening to arguments in King v Burwell — ostensibly a lawsuit about the legality of federal health insurance schemes, but in reality an attempt by rightwingers to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare. A ruling is expected in June.

If Obamacare is struck down, one consequence will be a resurgence in health costs. The ACA is problematic, but its limits on Medicare payments and emphasis on lower-cost preventative medicine over higher-priced chronic-disease care has had a beneficial effect; last year’s rate of growth in healthcare spending was the slowest since 1960.

No sane person would argue that medical innovation is bad, or that the relief of suffering is not a worthy end. Who doesn’t hope scientists will be able to prevent Alzheimer’s or cure cancer. But along with the miracle of modern medicine something else has been happening, something so insidious and pervasive to the concept of wellbeing that it took a while before anybody noticed.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: A Night at the Theater Often Used to Be a Riot

Photo: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Photo: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Before the era of sky-­‐high ticket prices, the theater functioned much like a public park: a communal space where all social classes could come together. The drama onstage was often just a backdrop for the public theater being enacted by the audience. Political venting, social protesting and even rioting were common occurrences—especially in springtime, when the warmer weather let open-­‐air theaters resume business.

The Nika riots in 6th-century Byzantium (so dubbed because the rioters chanted “Nika,” meaning “conquer” or “win”) remain the deadliest in theater history.

In 532 A.D., during the reign of Emperor Justinian, the two political factions—the aristocratic Blues and the plebeian Greens—unexpectedly united to protest against new taxes during a public spectacle at the Hippodrome. Using the storied arena as their base, the rioters managed to burn down more than half of Constantinople before Justinian had the Hippodrome surrounded and every exit blocked. His soldiers proceeded to slaughter everyone inside. Contemporary accounts claimed that the death toll exceeded 30,000. After that, public theater of any kind was strongly discouraged by the Byzantine authorities.

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The Sunday Times: Hillary’s emails honour the creed of hiding, twisting, leaking at the top

Photo: Pawel Kadysz

Photo: Pawel Kadysz

WHY DID Great Britain stay neutral during the American Civil War? Back when I was researching this question, one answer that seemed particularly intriguing was the claim — made at the time in America and by subsequent historians — that it was due to a severe wheat shortage.

Repeated crop failures in the early 1860s had led to a massive reliance on imports from America and Russia. Ergo, Britain intervening in the war between the states would have been an unaffordable risk.

I combed through four years of cabinet reports, memoranda, letters and diaries, looking for proof. Cotton, slavery, Canada, blockade running, the balance of power: these were frequent subjects of fretful debate, but never wheat. The paper record showed the theory to be an utter dud, thereby freeing me to find the true causes of British neutrality.

I tell this story because I don’t see any point in hiding the fact that I am entirely partisan in the debate about government transparency. I believe that everything should be maintained in its proper place. What is classified should remain so, what is public should be open, and all must be preserved for future scrutiny.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: Ancient Automatons, Modern Worries

Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION

Photo: EVERETT COLLECTION

Earlier this year, Stephen Hawking was among the scientific luminaries who signed an open letter warning that artificial intelligence offered great benefits to humanity but also posed great risks to our safety. Today, Google’s DeepMind computer is capable of teaching itself how to play new videogames, but what if—some tomorrows down the line—it unilaterally tried something new, such as a war game using real nuclear weapons.

Humans have been experimenting with automatons for centuries, but it is only we moderns who have worried about the consequences. The Greeks saw nothing to fear from artificial life. In their mythology, the god Hephaestus was responsible for the creation of mechanized beings—from the golden slaves he designed for his personal use to the bronze giant Talos, who guarded the island of Crete. Stopping one of these machines was as simple as removing the plug and letting the ichor (immortal blood) run out.

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The Sunday Times: Money, energy and cunning, the US’s new Cold War armoury

Photo: Blair Fraser

Photo: Blair Fraser

MORE THAN 5,000 people have died in Ukraine since the start of Russia’s annexation and despoilment campaign. It is not as though the EU and the US have looked the other way during this bloodshed; it’s just that every attempt to engage or contain Russia has so far ended in failure.

Does Russia’s dismantling of Ukraine mean that the Cold War has resumed after a 25-year hiatus? Or is it a new Cold War with America? Or a neo-Cold War against liberal democracies, or a frozen conflict with Nato, or just a regional conflict within the old Soviet bloc?

The reason the categorisation is so important is that the naming of the crisis brings with it a set of ideological and practical responses.

The term “Cold War” carries the unmistakeable baggage of an existential conflict between irreconcilable systems of government. It implies that democracy itself is once again on trial for its life. This is all rather unfortunate timing considering that the major democracies are still reeling from the financial crisis of 2007-8, and in many cases have yet to prove themselves capable of restoring public confidence or fiscal order.

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WSJ Historically Speaking: A Speedy History of Skiing

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Photo: GETTY IMAGES

Although Northern Europe once again dominated the medal table recently at the 2015 FIS World Alpine Ski Championships in Colorado, the list of competing countries also included such snow-­‐deprived countries as Haiti, Israel and Jamaica.

Not only has skiing grown popular in countries more usually associated with beach barbecues, historians of the sport have now discovered that its roots are far more diverse than originally imagined.

The earliest known ski fragment—unearthed near Lake Sindor, some 745 miles northeast of Moscow—dates roughly to 6,000 B.C. In Norway, Sweden and Finland, archaeologists have found rock carvings known as petroglyphs that depict hunters on skis chasing wild animals. One drawing found in 2001 in Nord-Trøndelag, Norway, often referred to as Bola Man, is thought to be about 5,500 years old.

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The Sunday Times: The right’s Mr Moderate goes down with a bad case of measles

Photo: Ryan McGuire

Photo: Ryan McGuire

Both political parties in America have their off-­‐message, loony wings. For my taste, the Republican side has the edge for sheer offensiveness with its claims about “legitimate” rape, equating gay marriage with bestiality and so on. It’s what gives the Republican presidential primaries their destructive feel as the absolute no-­‐hopers are allowed to smash the party’s centre ground with impunity.

Although they are still a year away, campaigning for the Republican primaries has begun in earnest and already we have the first winners and losers. The subject in the ring was the nationwide measles outbreak that started in California and has since spread to 13 other states.

Back in December the yet to be indentified “Patient Zero” went on an outing to Disneyland. Since then the measles virus has crossed the entire country, with more than 100 cases and counting.

On the face of it, measles is not a peculiarly Republican preoccupation. Nevertheless, both Chris Christie, the moderate governor of New Jersey, and Rand Paul, the maverick libertarian senator for Kentucky — two likely Republican contenders in 2016 — weighed in on the issue.

To the surprise of many Republicans — and the glee of the Democratic party — neither would endorse the establishment view that every child in America must be vaccinated.

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