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Originally Posted by troutman
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I think the meaning of the song is far from clear (I have a friend who wrote a master's thesis in music on it from a spiritual standpoint), but a main gist I get is how the crash that killed the three 50's rock 'n' rollers signalled a change in popular music, that there was a loss of innocence of sorts.
Keep in mind when the song was written there had only really been two decades of rock, the 50's and 60's, and they were very different.
There are a lot of sly references to 60's rockers ("Lenin read a book on Marx" is clearly a pun... obviously V.I. Lenin historically followed the teachings of Marx, but John Lennon's peace activism was also very antiestablishment and progressive; "Helter Skelter in a summer swelter" seems to recall Charles Manson's adoption of the Beatles song during his terror in LA; "and the birds flew of from a fallout shelter, eight miles high and falling fast" obviously refers to the Byrds, who sang 'Eight Miles High', a very psychedelic (read: drug-induced) song; "I met a girl who sang the blues" = Janis Joplin?). Et cetera...
Who knows, but it is a fun song and one of my favourites.