Celebrity Drive: Singer/Songwriter Don McLean

Quick Stats: Don McLean, singer-songwriter
Daily Driver: 2008 Chrysler 300C (Don’s rating: 7 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: Hudson Valley to Colorado
Car he learned to drive in: 1961 VW Beetle
First car bought: 1965 VW Karmann Ghia

While Don McLean references a Chevy in his most famous song “American Pie,” signaling he’s probably a car guy, that hasn’t been one of the cars he has owned.

“I’ve never had a Chevy, but I always loved ‘57 Chevys and I loved the Chevy Impala, when they went to that different rear end, when it was low. I loved those cars,” he tells Motor Trend. “I never owned one, we were a Ford family. The Ford I always looked at when I see a Ford is the Ford Sunliner, with a retractable roof, the Fairlane 500 — those were the dream cars. I love cars. I really do. We have a thing up in Maine – the Owls Head Transportation Museum and they have the most extensive and beautiful car collection that you could ever imagine and also antique planes. It’s a great thing for me because every time I go there, I just love it.”

“American Pie,” the iconic song that mentions a Chevy, and other tunes have afforded McLean a life where he can buy any car. These days, that includes Cadillacs, Chryslers and Bentleys. In fact, McLean liked his Bentley Arnage so much, he has two – one for each coast.

He has a 2002 Bentley Arnage T he drives in California. “The Arnage T is the finest car that I own. It’s black with Palomino leather interior. The T is the fastest Arnage they made, I think it’s about 440 horsepower or something,” (Editor’s note: It’s 450 HP) he says, rating it a 9 on a scale of 10. “It’s a little English and a little unreliable sometimes, but as far as driving experience and fun, it’s a thrill to drive.”

Fiscally prudent though, McLean likes to buy some cars used and that includes both of his Bentleys. “I really liked the car and I found that I could get cars that have rather low mileage and cars that originally cost a quarter of a million dollars, you can get for $30,000 or $40,000 and they’ve hardly been used. You have to keep them up, of course,” he says. “The one in California, I drive all the time. I like old cars, that’s the thing.”

The only complaint he has with his Bentley T is the air conditioning, which isn’t always working as it should. “Most of the time it does,” he says. “But there’s very little that I dislike about it. It’s a great experience.”

2002 Bentley Arnage R

Rating: 7

The Arnage R is McLean’s Maine Bentley, and he gives it a lower rating than his Arnage T. “It’s a summer car,” he says. “It’s not as reliable as the one in California, but it is a beautiful blue. It’s got leather interior and it’s less horsepower (Editor: It has 400 HP) than the one in California, but it’s fun to drive in the summertime. I don’t go too far away, but I like driving it.”

Although McLean loves his Bentleys, he also has daily drivers on both coasts, which includes his 2008 Chrysler 300C.

2008 Chrysler 300C

Rating: 7

“When I’m in Maine, I drive a Chrysler 300C V8, Hemi engine, all wheel drive. It runs through the snow like a Hummer, nothing stops it,” McLean says. “It’s just been so damn reliable. That’s the thing I love about it. It’s comfortable, it’s reliable, it’s quick. It’s excellent.”

It’s not quite as powerful a car as McLean would like though. “It’s like 350 horsepower, but I like more than that. I like a little more weight, I like big cars with V8 engines. I don’t like getting horsepower from six cylinders and aluminum cars that go fast. I like the feeling of a lot of torque hauling a lot of weight fast,” McLean says. “Which is why I like the Bentley.”

2008 Cadillac STS

Rating: 9

“It’s really fast, it’s sporty, it’s got a V8 engine, all wheel drive, so it’s great in the snow for Maine,” McLean says. “It’s nimble and very quick and I like driving that one quite a bit.”

The only thing McLean doesn’t like on the Cadillac is the sound system, which can always be changed. “What I like about it and the subsequent models of Cadillacs are usually V6s and I like V8s. It’s got power, but it’s also very quick,” he says. “I bought the Chrysler new and I bought the Cadillac new, but that was eight or nine years ago. I really don’t buy new cars much, I like cool old cars. I’ve bought a lot of new cars – Mercedes, I used to buy Saabs a lot. In the ‘70s I used to give Saabs to people. It was my Elvis period — you know, give cars to people — in-laws, friends, girlfriends, whatever, I used to do it all the time. I would give cars to people and my favorite one to give away was Saabs because you’d have them for 20 years. It was the greatest car. I loved it.”

2004 Volkswagen Phaeton

Rating: “close to a 10”

“When I’m in California, I drive a 2004 VW Phaeton, which has a W12 engine in it and 420 horsepower,” McLean says. “The Phaeton is a very interesting car. The Phaeton was made in the early 2000s for only five model years in America. McLean said it had lots of technology in it and was expensive, but it still looked like a Passat. It was the brainchild of the outgoing head of Volkswagen who said to his engineers, ‘I want you to make a car that will go 180 miles all day in 120 degrees outside and keep the cabin temperature 72 degrees.’”

McLean says the car manual was about an inch thick, with seemingly endless pages. “You’d have to go to college to read this thing,” he says. “It’s so much technology in this car and nobody really hardly knows about them and it’s very sad. This group of cars made by Volkswagen, there was this run of Phaeton automobiles. They’re quite extraordinary.”

What made McLean buy the Phaeton was he liked its concept. “I was amazed you could get a V12, this is made on the same chassis as the Bentley Flying Spur because Volkswagen owns Bentley now,” he says. “This was an amazing interior, very big, but it looks very conservative, like a big Passat. But the thing is as fast as hell, you can go from 0 to 60 in 5 seconds or something.”

McLean paid $12,000 for the used Phaeton. “It’s got that W12 engine in it which is two V6’s put together,” he says. “You can get a V8 Phaeton with low mileage between $12,000 and $15,000. And it’s 10 times the car you’d buy at $30,000 or $40,000.”

Car he learned to drive in

“I was a terrible driver. I didn’t get my license until 19, I had my (learner’s) permit from the time I was 16 to 19,” McLean recalls. “The attempt was made to teach me to drive in a 1961 black Volkswagen bug, with manual shift. I could never concentrate on driving, I had too much music going on in my head, and people were always driving me everywhere. It was kind of funny. Finally, I did get my license.”

Although he’d died a year before, they had kept his dad’s Volkswagen. “We also had a Ford Custom, which was a new car, and that was sold, so my mother and I just used the Volkswagen, so I started to learn to drive on that,” he says. “The Ford Custom was two-toned with little fins and round red backup lights. It’s right up there with a ‘57 Chevy almost with collectability. We didn’t have that long at all, because after my father died, it was new, had no mileage on it and my mother sold it. But we had this black Volkswagen.”

McLean recalls the experience of having his mom as his instructor driving around on the streets of New Rochelle, New York, where he grew up. “She was afraid to be in the car with me, she gave up on me,” he says, laughing. “I think I took a wicked turn in that car on two wheels and my mom said, ‘I’m not driving with you in the Volkswagen.’ Other people would try to teach me. I forget how I finally passed the test, but it was a miracle. But I was reckless, I got into accidents.”

Later in the 1960s McLean had to go to remedial driving school. “I was going to lose my license because I always had speeding tickets and I saw some films of crashes, and I thought it’s time to slow down, so I changed my ways,” he says. “I almost lost my license.”

First car bought

McLean bought a white Volkswagen Karmann Ghia for $300 (another Karmann Ghia is shown above). “I think it was a ‘65. I bought it from a friend the first year of college, when I got my license finally. I had that thing for many years,” he says.

He had money from singing, as well as giving guitar lessons. “I was singing all the time, I was always making more money than everyone else,” he says. “I was making 100 bucks a week (Editor: about $750 in 2017 dollars adjusted for inflation) and I was doing concerts and other guys were working for 25 bucks a week. So I always had money from the get go, and I always found a way to make money with music. The other $300 I bought a Martin guitar with that and that was the beginning of my career really. Having a guitar I wanted. So yes $300 was a lot.”

The Karmann Ghia was McLean’s first gig car. “I used to go everywhere with it and I had it until the late ‘60s,” he recalls. “I gave it to somebody who needed a car and then I was making serious money because I was signed with a record contract and I was getting publishing income. I was working as an opening act and I was with William Morris, working every weekend with major acts like Steppenwolf, Three Dog Night, Blood Sweat and Tears. I was on the road with these guys and I was making $1000 a night, so I gave the car away to a couple that I knew who needed a car.”

McLean’s line “drove the Chevy to the levy…” in “American Pie” was more about its lyrical contribution to the song, although he liked 1957 Chevys back then. “I always loved Chevy. I love the car and I love the word, Chevy is a great word,” he says.

But it was a certain Ford that elicited a visceral response. “I remember seeing the first one come down the street, Holy Jesus, it was yellow and black, and woah! And this was in a very black and white world at that time – 1957-58 and the contrast between these cars and rock and roll, and what had been before, was so dramatic that you can’t imagine,” McLean says. “People still had cars they were driving from the late ‘40s with running boards on them in my neighborhood in 1957, that they had had since 1948. It was only 10 years and all of a sudden there’s a ‘57 Chevy. You can’t imagine the culture shock of these cars when compared with the ones that were still active and around. My father drove a 1950 Ford until 1959 when he got that Ford Custom, and the ’50 Ford was very round looking.”

McLean also had an emotional reaction to the Chevy Impala back then. “I remember being across the street and seeing a friend of mine, a girl who was older than I was, going out on a date with a guy and the guy pulled up with this beautiful brand new ‘59 Chevy Impala, and it was gorgeous,” he says.

He also liked the old Cadillacs as well. “I like heavy touring cars. I think if I were a regular guy and didn’t have any money and I wanted a dream car, I’d probably go for a ‘58 or ‘59 Cadillac, something that was really heavy and American and fixable, not all the computers and everything,” he says. “All ‘60s guys are really ‘50s guys because they came out with what they did in the ‘60s, but the mentality that caused that to be created was formed in the ‘50s.”

Splurge car after “American Pie

After giving away his Karmann Ghia, and having a hit album called “American Pie,” McLean went European when it came to cars at the time. “I was in the car a lot, that’s usually why I liked Saab, because I liked to sleep in the car. I wasn’t a flying guy too much. Later on, when I had the money, I was flying all over the place,” McLean says. “That’s the reason why a good Saab or a Volvo, or some kind of car that was way better than a normal American car was what I wanted, because it was really going to be put to the test.”

McLean was busy driving to gigs all through the 1960s and ‘70s and he bought a Saab because it was good in the snow. But it also had another major perk that would help him with road gigs. “I could sleep in it,” McLean says, “because I liked to play nightclubs and if I stayed up late, I had a sleeping bag in the back and fold it back down and picked a nice spot and slept there. It was the more modern looking car, it wasn’t the buggy looking one, the really ugly ones. It was a good looking car and I took that car everywhere.”

That was just the first Saab for McLean back then. “I kept using those cars. I would buy a different one every couple years right up through the ‘70s because no matter how famous I was, I would still always sleep in the car,” he says. “I loved to sleep in the car because I didn’t want to deal with hotels, and if I was really late or if I was driving somewhere, I’d just sleep in it. The sleeping bag back there was incredible, I don’t know what happened to it, it was great. I took the back seat down and the thing would be flat and it was great, it was like sleeping out in a tent. Beautiful.”

After the Saab, McLean graduated to a new Mercedes-Benz. “That was an interesting thing because around 1975 I bought a Mercedes Benz 450SEL. That Mercedes was ‘class’ with a capital ‘C.’ It was the biggest car they made,” he says. “It was electric blue with Palomino leather seats. And I just wanted to have the best damn car in the world and that was it. I think maybe the black Arnage T equals that car, but I’ve never found another car that came close to it.”

He kept it for a few years. “I didn’t garage it so the wiring was starting to get a little funky and around 1978 or 1979 or maybe even 1980, I hit a deer with it and it took out the whole front quarter of the car and it never was right after that,” he says.

McLean would go on to lease more Mercedes-Benzes and he also bought a 1986 Lincoln Town Car Signature Series, which he had for three years. “I had both the Lincoln and the Mercedes because I liked to drive to gigs and the Lincoln was a very cool car,” he says. “I had a lot of other little cars along the way too. I had a beautiful little MGB convertible I tooled around in sometimes. That was it the ‘70s also. That was a hot little car, it was fun to drive.”

But the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL was what McLean considers his first splurge car that he got, after his album “American Pie” made him a household name.

McLean rents a lot of cars when he’s on the road, from SUVs to all size and models of cars.

Favorite road trip

“My favorite road trip was taking the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL with a couple of friends of mine out to Colorado and going on a pack trip into the Rocky Mountains and then taking the car and driving it back home,” McLean says. “It was a great thing to take that car and really give it a workout, take it half way across the country.”

McLean drove the Mercedes from the Hudson Valley in Garrison, New York, where he lived at the time, to Silverton and Ouray, Colorado around 1977 or 1978.

“I found my way into show business through the folk world and through my connections with the Weevers and then I graduated up to the number one Weever, which was Pete Seeger,” he says. “He was doing this ecological event which was to raise money for this Hudson River Sloop. It became a floating educational tool. So I was involved with him and that caused me to move up to the Hudson Valley, and even Seeger ended up driving a Saab because he liked mine. He started out with a Volkswagen, but he could never get up his hill, he had a big hill to get up and when he went to the Saab, it had front wheel drive, and it used to go right up that hill.”

McLean drove around the country a lot gigging, but what made this particular road trip from the Hudson Valley out west stand out was the adventure of it. “Getting there was adventure, using the car was an adventure, seeing the country up to that point was an adventure. And then pack tripping into the Rocky Mountains,” he says.

What was fun was when a couple of cowboys led them around the mountain wilderness on horses. “This is not like a thing where you’re going to take horses and go around on a track somewhere. We were way up in those mountains and at one point got lost and they were worried we weren’t going to be able to get back,” he recalls. “It started to snow, but we found our way down. And we met strange characters in these woods. I shall never forget this guy – the guy had a girl like a pack mule, she was like a mule, with the tent, everything.”

Although there was that odd scene with a girl acting like a pack mule with items on her back, McLean says the whole cowboy part of the trip, which lasted a week, was like something out of “Lonesome Dove.”

“But also the gorgeous Rocky Mountains and the discovery for example up above 10,000 feet in the Rocky Mountains are these meadows, where elk and deer all play and cavort without worrying about hunters, and there are trails up there like a skyline trail,” he says. “I’m very interested in the West and I know a good bit about horses and I was always learning more about deer and the saddlery.”

At one point they got lost in the mountains. “We had to go straight up the side of the mountain on foot, there were no cell phones with the cowboys in those days. Everybody is all teched out now, but this is before that,” he says. “It was on the edge not being fun because they didn’t know where they were going, it was getting real cold, and it could have turned into one of those unpleasant experiences. We finally got down, and I remember we were sleeping that night and I could hear the cowboy saying, ‘I didn’t know where we were, my heart was going like a trip hammer.’”

“American Pie” Re-issued for 45^th Anniversary

In honor of its 45^th anniversary, “American Pie” has been reissued on vinyl in its original format.

“It’s important for people to remember that if you go buy, let’s say a Beach Boys album something like “Shut Down,” and you buy a brand new copy that wasn’t open but it was made in 1963, and you listen to that on your record player, that is the last word that Brian Wilson and the band and the engineers and everybody had on that project,” he says. “If you listen to “Shut Down” which is on CD, somebody has gone in there and screwed around with that, so it will not be the last word, it will be something thinking, ‘We can improve this.’ A lot of times, stuff like that ruin the record.”

McLean says the reissue of his album goes back to the master tapes. “As far as I know it’s just a perfect rendering of the original record as it was. Here is the album for real, it’s not been screwed around with for a CD,” he says. “It’s like taking a picture on your phone and you go and there’s these setting where you can enhance a whole variety of different things, the lights, the exposure, the color, the density. You can change that picture. Work on it, even though the picture is set, you can change it a lot.”

The reissued “American Pie” is also a chance for a newer generation discovering vinyl to hear it exactly as it was when it first came out in 1971. “I have an album called ‘Sinatra-Basie’ which is probably my favorite Frank Sinatra album. It’s magic, and it’s live almost, it’s a beautiful recording. They put out a CD of that and they screwed around with it somehow and I can’t even listen to it,” McLean says.

“American Pie” is a seminal song for not just McLean, but for generations who discovered it at some point in their own lives through the years, one that stood out for its imagery and references to the “day the music died” and Buddy Holly’s plane crash.

For those who’ve listened to the lyrics over and over again, it is in fact suppose to convey a dream. “Once you entered the song, it’s like going down the hole in Alice in Wonderland,” McLean says. “You’re in another world. It’s a dream and it’s not a dream with sounds so much, it’s a dream that’s coming from my mind and my use of language that’s creating this dream. But if I were to say, ‘This is a dream,’ that wouldn’t be what I wanted to do. What you need to do is create the scenario. People will cry on stage and think that that’s going to make people think that they feel something. If you tell a beautiful story and people will cry because they will be moved. It’s a very abstract idea that I had and it was a miracle that it ever got where it did, but that’s the story of my life.”

He gives examples of other abstract things that have happened to him musically. “I’ve had songs that I wrote because I heard someone’s music and then they would pick up the song and sing the song, like Fred Astair sang ‘Wonderful Baby’ which was one of the last songs he ever did on the last album he ever made,” he says. “And that song was written after I studied Fred Astaire’s music. He didn’t know that. He just heard the song and loved it and wanted to record it.”

Another hit from the album, “Vincent” came when McLean was singing at a school and living in the Berkshires and he read a book about the famous artist. “I always loved Van Gogh, everybody loves Van Gogh because he’s almost a caricature,” he says. “He’s so direct and powerful and yet so profound, so even when you’re young and you grow up with these paintings, you never forget them. I just put my first album out and read this book. What was interesting is that Van Gogh wasn’t crazy. He had an illness that his brother had also. For some reason that little piece of information sparked an idea in my head.”

McLean will be on tour, which includes Feb. 25 in Beverly Hills, in March in Indiana and he is in New York City and Virginia in April. For more information please visit don-mclean.com.

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