Spencer Proffer was a political science major in law school at UCLA when a song came on the car radio and made him pull over. It was 1971, and most singles on the radio ran three and a half minutes. This one ran eight minutes and 42 seconds. "I heard this eight minute saga that had social political overtones and things that made me question what was going on in America," he told BroadwayWorld decades later, "and it really touched my soul." He added: "I didn't know that 50 years later I would be the" one telling its story.
Proffer brings that story home. The producer, who spent part of his childhood in Albuquerque, will present his documentary "The Day the Music Died: The Story of Don McLean's 'American Pie'" at the historic Rio Grande Theatre in downtown Las Cruces, a special event tied to the Las Cruces International Film Festival. The film, which premiered on Paramount+ in July 2022, centers on Don McLean's 1971 hit and its long afterlife in American culture, and it includes a special recorded introduction from McLean himself, along with live music and appearances by the film's producers.
For Proffer, the return is personal in more ways than one. He was born in Munich, Germany, the son of Polish parents who survived Auschwitz, and came to the United States at age six. "I was a minority. I was beaten up on a regular basis, being a blonde haired kid who didn't speak English in Albuquerque, New Mexico during a period where there was a lot of prejudice in our country," he told At The Movies Online in 2018. That early experience, he said, drew him naturally to the civil rights movement and to stories of people who "want to make something of their lives and be heard." It is not a stretch to hear an echo of that in his description of the film's purpose. "I want to inspire the students to come to the festival, to the classes, and this film is a good source of inspiration and hope," he told KOAT. "When you go into the lyric of each verse (of 'American Pie'), the journey of the song is a lot deeper than just what you hear as a campfire song on the surface."
The song's surface is familiar to almost anyone who has turned on a radio in the last half century. Its starting point is Feb. 3, 1959, the frigid night a small plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. Richardson — the Big Bopper — went down in an Iowa cornfield, killing all three and the pilot. McLean, then a young paperboy in New York, later called it "the day the music died," and the phrase stuck to the crash ever since. Around that loss he built a sprawling, allusive parable about the end of an era — the jester, the king, the quartet practicing in the park — that critics and fans have argued over for generations. Madonna, Garth Brooks, Jon Bon Jovi and John Mayer have all covered it. Journalists, as The Guardian put it, have subjected the lyrics to "a Talmudic level of scrutiny" while McLean doled out only dribs and drabs of explanation.
Proffer's film is the first line-by-line deconstruction of the song, and the most detailed account to date of how it was made. Getting there took some persuading. "I told Don, 'It's time for you to reveal what 50 years of journalists have wanted to know,'" Proffer told The Guardian. "This film was a concerted effort to raise the curtain." McLean opens up in the documentary about the crash itself and its formative effect on him as a young songwriter. Proffer has said the material remains urgently current: "It's a song that spoke to its time," he told the Guardian, "but it's just as applicable now."
Proffer's own career is its own kind of American Pie-style tour through pop history. He is credited with producing the first heavy metal album to reach No. 1 on the Billboard charts, Quiet Riot's "Metal Health." He was executive producer of the 1978 UNICEF charity album, which featured Rod Stewart, the Bee Gees and Olivia Newton-John and sold more than a million copies, and of the "Staying Alive" soundtrack. He produced Tina Turner's "Acid Queen" album from "Tommy," playing guitar on it as well, and has worked with Stevie Wonder, B.B. King, Gladys Knight and Gregory Porter, among others. More recently he has become a filmmaker of music history, producing a documentary on John Coltrane and other projects through his company, Meteor 17. The "American Pie" story is not finished for him either: he has been developing a Broadway-bound musical based on the song with McLean, producer Corey Brunish and Russell Miller.
The Las Cruces stop has an academic side as well. Proffer will teach a special class at New Mexico State University on entrepreneurship, and he has plans to work with Ross Marks, director of NMSU's Creative Media Institute, on future projects. Marks founded the Las Cruces International Film Festival, which bills itself as the largest film festival in the country run by a university; NMSU students handle much of its operation, from marketing and ticketing to workshops and panels.
The venue fits the occasion. The Rio Grande Theatre opened in 1926 and is described by its operators as the only operating two-story adobe theater in the country; it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places and anchors downtown Las Cruces' Main Street. After decades as a movie house, it went dark in the 1990s before a community restoration brought it back as a performing arts center. On this night it hosts a film about a song that, more than fifty years on, still gets a room full of strangers to sing the chorus together — which may be exactly the point Proffer has been making all along.