Don McLean's "American Pie" has ripped out of nowhere and taken the country by storm both in its album and truncated single versions. It took exactly two weeks to shoot to the top of the charts, everybody I know has been talking excitedly about it since first hearing, and, even more surprisingly, it has united listeners of musical persuasions as diverse as Black Sabbath and Phil Ochs in unbridled...

Don McLean, whose T.S. Eliot-influenced coda to Sixties rock culture, "American Pie," is an austere landmark of rock & roll history, has resurfaced with a hit version of Roy Orbison's "Crying." Like Chain Lightning's other oldies ("It Doesn't Matter Anymore," "Lotta Lovin'," "Since I Don't Have You," "Your Cheating Heart"), "Crying" is sung much slower than the original. It's grimly earnest rather...

At last Don McLean has made a thoroughly appealing album that properly showcases his impressive strengths — sincerity, good humor, a lovely naive romanticism—while allowing only brief exposure of those traits that have previously proved embarrassing: a self-congratulatory streak that can slip into paranoia and a starry-eyed word gushing that doesn't always parse. Homeless Brother...

Tortuous homilies, mealy-mouthed four-syllable rhymes and stilted diction—this is the kind of craftsmanship that Don McLean palms off as poetry. It's all here on his third album, just as it was on Tapesiry and American Pie, only more so and worse. The phenomenon of McLean has been as destructive to rock culture as any of the events he alluded to so coyly in "American Pie." "The day the music...