Don McLean

When you have roommates, how badly you have to shit is in direct proportion to the odds of one of them being in the bathroom, times the length of their visit. Exempla gratia: my growing a small tail* = someone in there slowly clipping their toenails, performing their pre-shower toilette while singing all the words to American Pie. - XMASTIME

Interesting bit HERE about the Day the Music Died:

The phrase “The day the music died” is familiar to us today as shorthand for the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson. But when Don McLean coined it in his epic pop song, it was new. So was the idea of nostalgia for the musical past as subject matter for a song.

“Buddy Holly didn’t matter to anyone when I wrote the song,” McLean told me in 1995. “He was long dead and forgotten.” McLean saw Holly’s death as a means to frame his ideas about what had happened to America during the 1960s. Rather than spelling it out clearly, McLean laced his lyric with cryptic, evocative imagery. “I was trying to create a rock ‘n’ roll dream sequence,” he said. “But it was more than rock ‘n’ roll. I was trying to create this American song which connected the parts of America that mattered to me, starting with Buddy Holly.”

* copyright Op, 2000