UA 5535
Producer: Ed Freeman
Track listing: American Pie / Till Tomorrow / Vincent / Crossroads / Winterwood / Empty Chairs / Everybody Loves Me, Baby / Sister Fatima / The Grave / Babylon
January 22, 1972
7 weeks
By 1971, the career of singer-songwriter Don McLean was looking up. In 1968, he had fallen approximately $20,000 in debt, largely because he refused to sign away his publishing royalties to prospective record labels. Finally, a fledging filmmaker, who wanted to make a movie about the young singer-songwriter, hooked McLean up with a company called Mediarts. The film project was scrapped, but the label funded the recording of his debut album, Tapestry. Although the album, released in April 1970, initially failed to chart, Mediarts allowed McLean to go to work on a second album.
“Everyone thought they had this sweet-singing young man who writes these pretty tunes,” McLean says. “Then I came up with this nine-minute rock ‘n’ roll thing. They actually fought it a little bit. They said, ‘We don’t want to put that out as a single, let’s put out a slow ballad.”‘
The song in question was “American Pie,” a tune chronicling McLean’s days as a paperboy and the history of rock ‘n’ roll. The epic track stretched from “the day the music died” (February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper died in an airplane crash) to references to the Beatles, Mick Jagger, and Bob Dylan.
Yet there was a time when “American Pie” almost didn’t see the light of day at all. “We were about halfway through making the record and one day [Mediarts executive] Ed Freeman came to me and said, ‘I’ve got bad news for you, the record company is going to fold.’ I thought, ‘Great, here we go again.”‘ Fortunately for McLean, the label was purchased by United Artists. Executives at UA, unlike the powers-that-be at Mediarts, loved “American Pie.” There was just one problem: They thought the song was too long to be released in its entirety as a single. So the label put out an edited version as a single. “It got a lot of airplay, but radio stations began to get a lot of phone calls from people who had bought the album, who said that they wanted to hear the whole song,” McLean says.
To help remedy the situation, UA issued another version of the since time it included the entire song with one part on each side of the 45. Still, the hardcore fans wouldn’t accept the single and went out and bought the uninterrupted album version.
On January 15, 1972, “American Pie” hit the top of the Hot 100. A week later, the album, dedicated to Buddy Holly, joined the single at Number One. Although American Pie featured other memorable tracks, such as “Vincent, a tribute to Van Gogh, and “Babylon,” a traditional tune that was taught to McLean by the Weavers’ Lee Hays, they were all overshadowed by “American Pie.” Says McLean of his signature song, “The first job I ever had was as a paperboy. That’s my story.”
THE TOP FIVE
Week of January 22, 1972
1. American Pie, Don McLean
2. Concert for Bangla Desh, George Harrison & Friends
3. Music, Carole King
4. Chicago at Carnegie Hall, Chicago
5. Led Zeppelin, Led Zeppelin