Don McLean had a snappy response when asked, a few decades ago, to explain the meaning of "American Pie," his enduring 1972 hit about lost innocence, fading ideals ad the tarnished glory of rock 'n' roll.

"It means," he said, "I'll never have to work again."

McLean is continuing to work. His latest concert tour includes shows on March 14 at The Cave in Big Bear Lake and March 17 at McCallum Theatre in Palm Desert.

But he may be seeking to pad his nest egg by auctioning off the original lyrics to "American Pie," whose often enigmatic lyrics continue to intrigue pop-music fans around the world.

Don McLean, "American Pie"

Moreover, he's not just auctioning off the lyrics, but a 16-page manuscript that includes the words to his most famous song in handwritten and typed form. The manuscript to the song, which he wrote in 1971, also contains deleted lines and informal footnotes that help to explain exactly what the song is all about. (When he performed it at the 2014 Stagecoach festival in Indio, thousands of fans enthusiastically sang along with McLean, even though a good number of them were not born until years after "American Pie" was a hit in 1972.)

"I wanted to capture, probably before it was ever formulated, a rock’ n’ roll American dream," McLean told The Guardian newspaper. "The writing and the lyrics will divulge everything there is to divulge."

The "American Pie" package being auctioned contains 237 lines of manuscript and 26 lines of typed text. It will be auctioned off April 7 by Christie's and is expected to fetch around $1.5 million. That's not as much as the record $2 million that was bid last year for Bob Dylan's handwritten lyrics to "Like a Rolling Stone," but it's close.

"I'm going to be 70 this year," McLean told Rolling Stone. "I have two children and a wife, and none of them seem to have the mercantile instinct. I want to get the best deal that I can for them. It's time."

McLean has previously acknowledged that the beginning of his 8-minute-long song is about the death of Buddy Holly, who died in a 1959 plane crash. But he has been less forthcoming about what the rest of "American Pie" is about. Its six verses capture the tone of the social and political change that roiled America and the world in the late 1960s.

But, even knowing that, it's hard to parse the precise meaning of such apparently partially Rolling Stones-inspired couplets as: Oh, and there we were all in one place / A generation lost in space / With no time left to start again / So come on, Jack be nimble, Jack be quick / Jack Flash sat on a candlestick / 'Cause fire is the devil's only friend

The meaning of "American Pie" even inspired a line-by-line analysis by the Harvard/Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

But it appears that only McLean knows what McLean really meant.

"Over the years I've dealt with all these stupid questions of 'Who's that?' and 'Who's that?' " he told Rolling Stone. "These are things I never had in my head for a second when I wrote the song. I was trying to capture something very ephemeral and I did, but it took a long time."