Die, die, miss “American Pie”

Killdozer’s masterful cover of a godawful “classic” endures.

Don McLean never really went after Killdozer for covering “American Pie” on the 1989 covers album For Ladies Only. Touch And Go Records initially issued the album as a box set of five 7″ singles. The Madison-formed trio scored a modest college-radio hit with its rendition of “American Pie,” breaking McLean’s song over the rack of vocalist/bassist Michael Gerald’s terminally smart-assed growl. Drummer Dan Hobson speeds things up from the band’s usual grisly drag-and-churn rhythms. Guitarist Bill Hobson accents the song with mock-reverent acoustic strums. 

It’s as beloved as any of the original songs Killdozer released on a run of albums across the 1980s and ’90s. “American Pie” works seamlessly as one of Killdozer’s demented dispatches from the underbelly of everyday life. It works terribly as McLean’s attempt to mourn the 1959 plane crash that killed Buddy Holly, The Big Bopper, and Richie Valens. Plus, the combination of aviation and brilliant young musicians is a sore subject around the Madison area. Maybe that lends the cover some extra pathos, or maybe it just makes it even more of a sick joke.

“The reason that we really wanted ‘American Pie’ was because we wanted a single that you had to turn over to hear both sides, because it’s so long,” Dan Hobson recalls in a recent in-person interview with Tone Madison. “But it ended up being a pretty good song, and right at Killdozer’s height, our record label in England flew us to England one weekend, like on the Fourth of July, to play it. We played it on a TV show.” Hobson’s still playing in bands including Bent Antenna, Shakey, and The Yarnells, and is part of the music booking team for the annual Orton Park Festival. His daughter, Jane Hobson, is a gifted singer-songwriter.

But there was, at long last, bad news on the doorstep. Apparently someone out there with control over the rights to “American Pie” couldn’t take one more step and allow the cover to be used in a movie. Specifically the 2003 buddy comedy Old School, in which three grown-up men (Will Ferrell, Luke Wilson, and Vince Vaughn) try to relive their debauched frat-boy days. 

“This is right after we had put out 12 Point Buck and For Ladies Only, and supposedly the director [Todd Phillips] is a Killdozer fan,” Dan Hobson says. “We were excited about it, and so they offered 10 grand…and we ended up splitting it in thirds, and we agreed to it, and I had no idea what song they wanted. They paid us the cash. And then we found out that they were gonna take ‘Good Lovin’ Gone Bad’ by Bad Company, the one that we had covered,” Hobson continues. “I think we split the money with [Bad Company guitarist Mick Ralphs] because he was the songwriter, and then we got the other half, and it was enough to buy a refrigerator, which was good at the time. We still have the refrigerator.”

Phillips also wanted to use Killdozer’s “American Pie” cover. The initial plan was to use it during a scene in which Will Ferrell’s character shoots himself in the neck with a tranquilizer gun during a child’s birthday party, falls into the pool, and begins hallucinating. 

“Maybe I wouldn’t be a nurse right now, who knows? Because it would have got such decent publicity,” Hobson says. And for all these years, Hobson thought that “the reason that they didn’t bite on it was because Don McLean objected.” Killdozer might have carried a grudge about all this. Even 22 years later, Hobson still sounds a bit incredulous that McLean or someone in his camp would have bothered. “Never met him, never talked to him,” Hobson says when asked about the reasoning behind the decision. He adds, jokingly: “and that’s what the good journalists have to find out.”

But McLean denies that he interfered at all. Reached through his publicist on April 24, McLean writes via email: “As to this story, I never heard of this band or this story. I never heard their version of my song or of the movie it was supposed to be in. I can say that I’m always happy when someone records a song of mine and I almost always say yes to an inclusion in a movie. Sometimes movie people change their minds based on many factors and they go a different direction. It has happened to me for sure. In any case I was not part of this. Publishers often make these decisions based on money.”

I passed this on to Hobson, who responded: “This is interesting. Well, I told you my take. Makes me appreciate Don McLean—musicians are usually not the enemies.” Who knows what actually happened in the byzantine guts of the music business, but perhaps a long-standing wound has been healed. 

“I will be able to rock out to ‘American Pie’ without gritting my teeth from here on out,” Hobson adds.

Eventually, the filmmakers went with Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sound Of Silence” for the tranquilizer scene. It’s not as funny, but points for the nod to The Graduate (1967). Killdozer’s cover of “Good Lovin’ Gone Bad” is indeed in Old School. “Very last song on the credits,” Hobson says. “You’ve got to sit through the whole movie, and then it’s like, ‘no, there it is.'”

Even with this setback, the members of Killdozer proved that they could make those people dance, and maybe they’d be happy for a while. In fact, the more you loathe “American Pie” itself (like yours truly), the more you enjoy Killdozer’s version. The song has aged terribly. The nostalgic worldview it expressed has aged worse still. In fact, I was surprised that McLean responded at all to my query for this story at all, and rather graciously at that, because his public profile has only become more unsavory of late. McLean claimed in a 2024 interview that when he wrote the song more than 50 years ago, he somehow captured an omen of “all this woke bullshit.” So, in addition to being the song that plays in your head when you look up “maudlin” in the dictionary, it’s also maybe about how we all have to do pronouns now. Good lord, it’s grating.

McLean’s now-ex-wife, Patrisha McLean, and his daughter have both in recent years accused him of abuse, and in 2016 he pled guilty to domestic violence charges. Under the terms of the plea agreement, some of the charges were dismissed in 2017. Don McLean has continued to profess his innocence, called Patricia McLean a “MeToo hustler,” and in 2019 had his attorney threaten a Maine newspaper over its coverage of the story. Patricia McLean went on to start a Maine-based nonprofit that supports domestic-violence survivors, and in 2024 she criticized then-President Joe Biden for inviting Don to a state dinner at the White House. 

Oh, and that isn’t even the only weird “American Pie”-related thing that happened in Biden’s White House. At another state dinner in 2023, Yoon Suk Yeol, the since-ousted right-wing president of South Korea, regaled Biden and other assembled dignitaries with his rendition of the song’s first verse. McLean was not in attendance that time, but Biden did present Yoon with an acoustic guitar signed by McLean. 

Killdozer offers a release for all the hostility that “American Pie” has stirred in us over the years, the rage that simmers for all those eight-minute increments of life we’ll never get back. 

In what reviews and appreciations I could find recently of Killdozer’s cover, few writers can resist describing the cover in terms of physical violence. Veteran music journalist Ned Raggett’s Allmusic review of For Ladies Only refers to the cover as a “demolition.” Raggett goes on to write: “Every last overwrought metaphor and obnoxious singalong from the full version of the original comes under the gun, and by the time Gerald and company grunt out the final chorus, the have-a-nice-day decade is finally dynamited to smithereens. About time too.” Edwin Pouncey wrote in his 1989 review for New Musical Express that Killdozer’s “full assault is kept till last however, for that high priest of pap Don McLean!” and “manages to trash it into the ground.” A Canadian writer named George Perry wrote in a 2024 blog post that “Killdozer attacks ‘American Pie’ like they attack all songs they cover” and “gets all Dr. Frankenstein on the song and gives it a soul.” In a 2017 piece for The Vinyl District, Michael H. Little applies that sort of language to some of the other covers on For Ladies Only. But when it comes to “American Pie,” Little offers a subtler bit of praise for Gerald’s vocal performance: “Never have I heard the song delivered with such earnest dishonesty.”

Personally I’ve always thought of it as Killdozer gutting “American Pie” with a rusty hacksaw. But let us not quibble over tactics. We can all instinctively feel that Killdozer is dealing out long-overdue injury and insult, on behalf of all who have endured that tedious fucking song too many times. We cheer it on as an act of revenge, which grows all the sweeter as we realize it’s giving us a way to actually enjoy the song for once. Like a really annoying jerk turned into a shambling zombie, “American Pie” emerges from its desecration much improved. 

This isn’t so far off from Killdozer’s intent, but the band still wants to keep you guessing.

“I guess we had a punk-rock attitude and we hated it. But at the same time, you can never really tell if you love it or hate something,” Hobson says. “We all grew up during [a time when] classic rock [was] the only thing out there…so much punk rock came out of that sort of hostility against classic rock, the music that we heard all the damn time. We thought it would be sort of fun, sort of a piss take. But at the same time, you sort of push in such a direction—we try to make people wonder, ‘Did they like it or not?'”

It’s important not to take the hostility for granted, because a warped cover can still come from a place of genuine affection. The Body and Thou, two brilliant bands on the fringes of doom metal, demonstrated this beautifully when they covered Vic Chesnutt’s “Coward” on their 2015 collaborative album You, Whom I Have Always Hated. The original version opens Chesnutt’s 2009 album At The Cut, released just two months before Chesnutt died by suicide. Chesnutt raises his vocals to a wail, and haunting orchestration engulfs his sparse acoustic guitar figures. The Body and Thou push this already bold performance through the red and into the wastelands beyond. When The Body’s Chip King delivers the first verse, I can barely make out the words—because King’s voice always sounds like a desperate shriek all but lost in a gale—and cannot question that King understands the abject despair Chesnutt felt when he gazed into the abyss of self. Then Brian Funck of Thou comes in with his (relatively intelligible) slavering scream—always handy when you need to experience a deep sense of spiritual corrosion. The filth and vocal extremes make for a moving interpretation.

The obvious difference between Don McLean and Vic Chesnutt—other than one overstaying his welcome while one died far too young—is that Chesnutt’s songs have great bones that can support the creative risks of others. His material has attracted covers and collaborations from a wild variety of artists who count him among the greatest songwriters of all time. (To name two extremes, he played with Widespread Panic but also collaborated with Fugazi’s Guy Piccioto and members of A Silver Mt. Zion on At The Cut and 2007’s North Star Deserter.) Sweet Relief II: Gravity Of The Situation, a fundraiser compilation released in 1996, comprises 14 Chesnutt covers from artists including R.E.M., Sparklehorse, and the head-scratching collab of Smashing Pumpkins with Red Red Meat. Nanci Griffith teams up with Hootie And The Blowfish on the title track, and Joe Henry joins Madonna for “Guilty By Association.” 

To bring this tangent full-circle, Sweet Relief II kicks off with the Madison-formed Garbage covering “Kick My Ass.” Garbage has been covering the song live for a long time, along with at least one other Chesnutt track, “Supernatural.” Garbage vocalist Shirley Manson’s previous band, Angelfish, was touring the U.S. with Chesnutt in 1994 when she met the other members of Garbage. And of course, Garbage co-founders Butch Vig and Steve Marker produced most of Killdozer’s discography, including For Ladies Only.

As Hobson mentioned earlier in this story, Killdozer performed the cover for the UK TV program Club X in 1989. Apparently this happened on July 4, a good day to taunt the British with the most annoyingly American shit you can think of.

“The embarrassing thing about that…Michael thought it was a very funny idea [to have] a Confederate flag with a picture of Elvis in the middle of it,” Hobson says. “We spread it over the drum kit. And at the time, this was before everything had been so Trumped out and transgressive. We thought that kind of thing was funny, and it was kind of funny because it was so incredibly ridiculous.”

The Pogues were also playing Club X that day, Hobson recalls. “Maybe Spider Stacy or Shane McGowan was like, ‘We’re not going on after a band that has a Confederate flag,'” he says. “But they did.” (I have no way of confirming this but it’s not surprising.)

Looking back at the incident, Hobson reflects on these sorts of wilful provocations in a way that echoes the evolution of his late contemporary Steve Albini. “We’re not fucking racist assholes…there’s no fucking way I’d do that now,” Hobson says.

There is learning and growth in all this. And perhaps Killdozer’s feud with Don McLean was one-sided and based on a misunderstanding all along. But we all know who won, through a combination of grace and artistic brutality. The jesters in Killdozer stole McLean’s thorny crown. The courtroom was adjourned.