"We all got up to dance, Oh, but we never got the chance, 'cause the players tried to take the field, the marching band refused to yield" - The huge numbers of young people who went to Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention, and who thought they would be part of the process ("the players tried to take the field"), only to receive a violently rude awakening by the Chicago Police Department nightsticks (the commissions who studied the violence after-the-fact would later term the Chicago PD as "conducting a full-scale police riot") or as McLean calls the police "the marching band." "Helter Skelter in a summer swelter" - The Manson Family's attack on Sharon Tate and others in California.
"And we sang dirges in the dark, the day the music died" - The '60s peace marches. "The quartet practiced in the park" - The Beatles performing at Shea Stadium. Also, the words, "You know a rolling stone don't gather no moss" appear in the Buddy Holly song "Early in the Morning," which is about his ex missing him early in the morning when he's gone. "And moss grows fat on our rolling stone" - Mick Jagger's appearance at a concert in skin-tight outfits, displaying a roll of fat, unusual for the skinny Stones frontman. I mean, I went to school and mentioned it and they said, 'So what?' So I carried this yearning and longing, if you will, this weird sadness that would overtake me when I would look at this album, The Buddy Holly Story, because that was my last Buddy record before he passed away." As a child, I had no idea that nobody else felt that way much. Buddy Holly's death to me was a personal tragedy. It is from all these fantasies, all these memories that I made personal. And basically, all I had to do was speed up the slow verse with the chorus and then slow down the last verse so it was like the first verse, and then tell the story, which was a dream. Because I realized what it was, I knew what I had. And then one time about a month later I just woke up and wrote the other five verses.
I came up with this chorus, crazy chorus. And then I thought, I can't have another slow song on this record. And I said, Oh, that is such a great idea. I thought, Whoa, what's that? And then the day the music died, it just came out. "As I was fiddling around, I started singing this thing about the Buddy Holly crash, the thing that came out (singing), 'Long, long time ago, I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.' "For some reason I wanted to write a big song about America and about politics, but I wanted to do it in a different way," he said. When he was a guest on the UK show Songbook, McLean talked about how he composed this song.
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