What did these songs mean? Roughly a week after the Dylan interview was posted, the Library of Congress selected “American Pie” as one of the songs worthy of cultural preservation. It’s hard not to get away from the presence of Dylan throughout American popular music over the past 50 years, even his self-imposed relative exile from roughly 1969-1974, and the man doesn’t do himself any favors, staying defensive after all these years. I have to think he’s talking about somebody else. A jester? Sure, the Jester writes songs like ‘Masters of War,’ ‘a Hard Rain’s a-gonna Fall, ‘It’sĪlright, Ma”-some jester. Yeah, Don McLean, ‘American Pie,’ what a song that is. Dylan quickly and conclusively let his feelings be known about that 45-year-old song: Flanagan concluded (perhaps rashly) that Dylan was the Jester in “American Pie”. In the Flanagan interview, first posted on and meant primarily to promote his latest release of covers from the American songbook, the triple-CD set Triplicate, the name Don McLean came up. Dylan was settling scores in that speech, answering decades-old conclusions from critics and putting his music and creative process in proper historical context. In a wide-ranging March 2017 interview conducted by music writer Bill Flanagan, Bob Dylan displayed what seems to be another element of curmudgeonly old man bitterness that first saw fruit in his 2015 MusiCares Man of the Year speech.
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