THE MUSIC DIDN'T REALLY DIE...

Well, since I'm thinking on music today (seeing as it is the 50th anniversary of the death of Charles Hardin Holley)...there are a couple of things I've been ignoring for a while.

Recently, I posted about an evening a few days back when me and The Mrs. sat and sang all 78 verses of American Pie (along with Don McLean on YouTube).

Walt said in the comments: "One of the highlights of my young life was sitting in an audience about 30 feet from Arlo Guthrie and listening to him sing the 40 or so minute version of Alice's Restaurant, along and between some of his dad Woodies stuff like City of New Orleans."

So, I've been thinking about long, long, long songs today. Marvin Gaye's 'live' performance of "I Heard It Through The Grapevine" is long...about 15 minutes I think. And then you've got "Stay," by Maurice Williams. Interestingly, "Stay" was the shortest song (about a minute and a half) to ever make it to number 1. But when Jackson Browne (and many other performers) got hold of it...it became a staple encore tune, sometimes lasting a half hour. (or until everybody got tired of staying)

Rarely do long, long songs become "hits." As Billy Joel noted, they get cut down to 3:05.

The music didn't really die when Buddy did, as Don proposed in his mega-hit. Don made some pretty good music himself as I recall.

So, here's a long one for Walt...and anybody else that's got 19 minutes to burn. This is a pretty good video of Arlo, along with clips from the film about Alice's Restaurant. I enjoyed it myself...