It's not actually clear what "the levee was dry" means, but part of American Pie's charm is its ability to mash up phrases and keep going. As Wikipedia points out, US use of "levee" is pretty much restricted to the Midwest and Deep South, and "good ole boys" refines the location. He knows a bunch of "good ole boys" and drives to a levee. (This despite the fact that McLean himself went to prep school in New York.) He has a paper route, he drives a pickup, he goes to dances in the high school gym. The first verses of "American Pie", that is, the verses preceding the second chorus, place the singer as a high-school student in the US south. Except, perhaps, what he'd read in the magazines. Speaking as an American who is roughly contemporaneous with Don McLean, I'm afraid you were the victim of a British teacher who had no concept of 1950's US culture.
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