David D’Souza: When the Pie met the Eagle
Every few years, someone tries to decode American Pie and Hotel California. Then someone else declares both songs are about America’s fall from grace, moral decay, the death of innocence, or a particularly bad hangover after the 1960s. If you were a child of that decade, as I was, it wasn’t theory. It was the soundtrack of our growing up. As I lay on our building terrace, I didn’t “decode” American Pie. I sang it, trying to remember all eight minutes of it before the transistor batteries died. I didn’t “interpret” Hotel California; I hummed its guitar outro at parties and prayed someone knew the harmony. Don McLean’s American Pie (1971) was more than a song. It was a eulogy. Buddy Holly had died in a plane crash in 1959, “the day the music died,” but what McLean mourned was larger. He was writing about the loss of optimism, the way the jukebox America of Holly and Elvis gave way to the darker age of Vietnam, assassinations, and acid. His Jester was Bob Dylan, who “stole the thorny crown” from the King, Elvis Presley, and turned rock into protest. The marching band was The Beatles, trying to keep order as youth ran amok. The girl who sang the blues was Janis Joplin, and “Satan laughing with delight” could have been Jagger or simply the devil of commercialisation. McLean packed an era into a song. But like all good communicators, he never explained it. He let listeners find their own truth. And that’s the first big lesson American Pie offers to anyone in PR or communication: don’t tell them everything. Let your audience participate. The best messages are puzzles people enjoy solving. Hotel California, on the other hand, came from the other side of the dream. The Eagles released it in 1976, when America had traded revolution for lucre and flower power for power suits. It sounded smooth and elegant, but it was pure satire. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave” was the perfect line for a generation trapped in luxury and self-image. When I first played the song on my six-string, I didn’t think of the metaphors. I just loved that intro. Years later, in the world of PR and branding, I understood it better. Every brand, every influencer, every company that loses sight of purpose eventually builds its own Hotel California. There’s applause, there’s champagne on ice, but no one remembers why they checked in. If McLean wrote about the loss of innocence, the Eagles wrote about the loss of integrity. Both belong in the same moral trilogy as The Times They Are A-Changin’. Where Dylan preached and demanded, McLean reminisced, and the Eagles sneered. Together, they trace the journey of communication itself; from heartfelt to cynical, from campfire to boardroom. Sometimes, in our business, we become the Jester. We charm, we distract, we entertain. Other times, we are the Eagles’ guests, surrounded by mirrors of our own making. In both cases, we are still trying to sell a version of paradise. The smart ones among us know paradise always comes with a cost. I don’t know what my dear friend and former Khaleej Times colleague Mahir Ali (of The Australian, Sydney) and a Seeger-Dylan-Baez fan, and Narendra Kusnur, one of India’s finest music critics, will have to say about my effort to join the decoding brigade. Mahir will probably argue that the real power of both songs lies in their ambiguity. Narendra, I suspect, will remind me that neither McLean nor the Eagles were prophets; they were professionals with sharp instincts for what resonated. Both would be right. In a sense, American Pie and Hotel California are also lessons in message longevity. Each line invites interpretation because it doesn’t spoon-feed. They use symbols, not slogans. That’s what modern PR often forgets. We trade timeless ambiguity for trending hashtags. McLean gave us eight minutes of mystery that has lasted half a century. Most campaigns today don’t survive eight days on X. When I hear McLean sing “the three men I admire most, the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, they caught the last train for the coast,” I still get a lump in my throat. It isn’t religion. It’s resignation, that something sacred has gone. When I hear Don Felder’s solo fade out in Hotel California, I still feel that uneasy calm, the kind that comes when you realise the show must go on even if the soul has gone missing. Both songs belong to an era when music said what press releases cannot: that something in the human spirit had cracked, and we were trying to patch it up with poetry. Maybe that’s why they endure. They’re less about America than about us, children of bulky Bush radios, smoky rooms, and handwritten lyrics trying to make sense of the noise. S,o yes, the Pie and the Eagle are more than nostalgia. They’re reminders of why we communicate in the first place: to make meaning, not just messages. David D’Souza is a former senior journalist, current PR and Communications Consultant, Educator and full-time observer of human absurdity. He lives in Pune and writes for MxMIndia every other Thursday (and sometimes on other days as well) . His views here are personal.