Was he singing about Mick Jagger and The Beatles? And who was the jester? To this day, McLean has remained tight-lipped. But it was the riddles in the lyrics that turned it into a water-cooler sensation. And still we had a 100,000 returns on forty-fives, because the needle did skip! Oh my god, it was a fucking nightmare.”īut none of that stopped the rollicking tune from becoming a monster hit. Even so, I spent weeks in the mastering lab, looking at every groove under a microscope to see if we were actually getting the song on there so the needle wouldn’t skip. “There was just no way to physically put an eight-minute song on one side of a forty-five,” Freeman explains. More problematic was how to press it on a seven-inch vinyl record. An edit for AM radio cut it to four minutes, while FM insisted on playing the full version. That was my job.”Īt a time when most radio hits clocked in at around three minutes, American Pie’s length posed a challenge. The whole record was about balancing that innocence and naiveté, which is really important, with a professional-sounding record. But in a way that’s what makes it so good. “He wasn’t comfortable with overdubbing, and me splicing his vocals two hundred times. “Well, Don was pretty green in the studio,” Freeman says. In a 2020 interview, McLean lamented that he “hadn’t learned to relax in the studio yet”, and wished that he’d been looser during the sessions. We knew we had something on our hands that was pretty special.” “When everybody came in the booth to listen to the track, it was magic. “Then I added pianist Paul Griffin and guitarist David Spinozza, and it got very exciting,” Freeman recalls. With McLean on acoustic guitar, accompanied by bassist Bob Rothstein and drummer Roy Markowitz, they nailed a rhythm track for the main body of the song in one confident take. In May 1971, after two weeks of rehearsal, they entered the Record Plant in NYC. They’d be able to approach Don on the same level.” So instead of getting in a bunch of seasoned studio musicians who could knock it out in five minutes, I deliberately got musicians who were good, but weren’t slick, burned-out superstar players. “Don had not really had any experience playing with other people, and he was very leery about it. “To me, that’s the most crucial thing I did for that whole record,” Freeman says.
Initially McLean wanted to record American Pie with just acoustic guitar, but Freeman “leaned on him” to use a rhythm section.
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