Goodbye American Pie
By John D Bertucci
Don McLean is in the Hall of Fame, and he deserves to be there. American Pie is a classic, and it is a great song. I know what it is about, and I am not taking any of that away.
But here we are, fifty years later, and the song is too long.. It has not held up the way it could have if it was a shorter song. At nine minutes, it wears you down. It has the same chorus over and over. Bye-bye, Miss American Pie, drove my Chevy to the levee, but the levee was dry.
Think of Goodbye Yellow Brick Road by Elton John. It’s a beautiful song from the same era. It is in and out in about three minutes, it tells its story, the chorus lands, and it is gone before you get tired of it. I will never tune that one out, because I do not get tired of hearing it.
The radio rule in the seventies was three minutes. A pop, rock, country or folk song was supposed to be about three minutes, because that is what radio could play and what a listener could hold with their attention span.
American Pie broke the rule, yet it got played so much anyway. I know why, because I was there. In 1981 I was working as a DJ at a radio station, KAGY 1510 AM. When I needed a break, I would put three carts in the machine, the longest songs I could find. This was done so I could drive a mile away to the convenience store, buy myself something to eat, and get back just in time to play the next record.
American Pie was on one of those carts. It was my go-to take-a-break song. If I had to go to the bathroom, I spun American Pie. That is what the song was good for. It was long enough to give a disc jockey a needed break.
And here is the other side of the story: you had to play American Pie as soon as you came out of a break, because by the time the song was over, it was time for the next break. That is how long the song was.
I wonder if that is why many of the disc jockeys in America were doing the same thing. They played American Pie when they too needed a break. Maybe that is the real reason it got so much airplay. Not because listeners wanted to hear the song, but because disc jockeys needed a nine-minute break.
So yes, it is a classic. Yes, Don McLean deserves to be in the Rock Hall of Fame. But a song that wears you down with the same chorus six times, a song you tune out at verse two, three minutes in, has not held up like a shorter classic song holds up. Length was its gamble, and fifty years on, that gamble is showing.
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