Brady Bunch - American Pie : Why only Part 2?

Stumbled across the Brady Bunch cover of Don McLean's American Pie and it didn't strike me as unusual until it started with the Helter Skelter line.
Seems like an odd choice for The Bunch to cover only the second (and darker) half of the hit song.
Did anyone here actually have Brady Bunch records? Any ideas as to why they might do this?

 

Marcia insisted they do a short version.

 

Marcia, Marcia, Marcia

 

Interesting in that the Brady's were mostly a post-60s phenomena. If you look at the Manson murders, which Helter Skelter would have been closely associated with at that time, it really does put it context.

 

Because Robert Reed wasn't at all pleased about the glaring factual errors in part one. He sent Sherwood Schwartz a memo about it, cc: Don McLean.

 

Man that was pure evil!

 

I read somewhere (though I unfortunately can't remember where) that they did record the entire song, with the first half being just Barry Williams singing with piano accompaniment, and the second half being the entire group with full instrumentation. Then it was decided to edit it down upon release. Why? Presumably they concluded that 3.5 minutes was enough, and/or they decided 3.5 minutes of Barry Williams singing by himself was far too much. The story seems credible enough, since if you listen to the released track it does sound like it's starting in the middle of a performance, rather than being an arrangement that deliberately only included half the song.

 

Probably because the record label heard the whole song and decided that half of it was just about too much, god it's just terrible (and I like some of the BB songs)

 

I'm on Book IV of Albert Goldman's encyclopedic coverage of this watershed event, although quite frankly at this point, it's little more than a thinly-veiled attack piece on Ann B. Davis.

 

That was awesome.

 

I was going to post this in Steve's thread about what song you heard from your favorite bands, but I'll post it here instead.

The Brady Bunch- American Pie- I first heard it here at the forum, about 10 seconds ago, on my phone. This cover is a genre classic. The '70s game show arrangement doesn't take away from the heavy, heavy message.

10/10

 

I think it could of been a big hit if they would of just slapped the suite on Johnny Bravo and let him do it do it with accompaniment by just a guitar.

 

That was the original plan, but something suddenly came up.

 

I've never heard that before but clicked in because I was a sucker in the 80s for all those reruns. This was legitimately horrible. Jeez...

 

An act of mercy.

Either that or their target audience wouldn't remember the events chronicled in the first half of the song and wouldn't have a long enough attention span for a seven-minute opus.

 

I truly laugh whenever I hear this song. Those guys who wrote the Hollywood Hi-Fi book 20 years ago said it best:

"Hearing all those cracking adolescent voices attempting to negotiate the ascending note on "Eight
miles high and falling faaaaaaaaaaaast" is one of the great moments in inadvertent humor. The day this
was recorded was "the day the music died." It's too bad the producer rejected Susan Olsen's suggestion
that they cover "Satisfaction," since it would have fit Cindy Brady at least as well as it fit Phyllis Diller."

 

I'm playing it right now. People actually paid money to own a copy of this? People drove home from Monkey Ward's excited to listen to the Brady Bunch album they'd just purchased?

 

From Lisa Sutton's liner notes for the Meet The Brady Bunch CD:

Possibly the most talked-about track on Meet The Brady Bunch was Don McLean's "American Pie" as performed by the Bradys. Although an edited version appeared on the album, the entire song was actually recorded. Lost in the vaults at Paramount is a six-plus minute rendition of the pop epic featuring Barry Williams solo first and last verses. The song is remembered not only for its camp value due to the obvious difficulty the kids had handling the range, but also for the magic moment of all six Brady kids saying "Hell" at the same time — the closest the made-for-TV family would ever come to profanity.​

 

I did. But I felt positively goofy about it. I thought "What a dumbhead!" after I listened to it.

 

I have this on vinyl. When people bemoan the current prevalence of autotune, it is worth making them listen to this track from before that innovation.

 

And before everybody piles on and puts the album down, don't forget the one critic who gave it 5 stars. George. George Glass. In fact, I think he's calling me right now to remind me how the great the album was.

 

It's because of his unconditional love for Jan

 

More like the middle of the song.

 

American Pie is nothing... it comes from after Barry Williams took voice lessons. Check out how he sounded before voice lessons, starting at 40 seconds in:

 

Where's Part 1?