Still offering a hefty slice of ‘American Pie’

At some point after Don McLean takes the stage in Manhattan or London or Sydney, he’ll croon those five little words that have sustained his pop-music career, made him wealthy and sparked countless sing-alongs:

“A long, long time ago. . . .”

The 62-year-old troubadour penned -- or perpetrated; it’s a matter of taste -- the anthemic “American Pie” almost four decades ago. The song is about the glorious 1950s and the darker 1960s, pivoting on “the day the music died” with a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959, that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson.

Released in October 1971, the 8 1/2 -minute song at first had trouble getting airplay because radio stations preferred three-minute tunes. Then it took off. It now ranks as one of the most played songs on U.S. radio, with an estimated 3 million-plus spins over the ensuing decades.

During his heady ascent into pop-music stardom, McLean doubted whether he deserved fame from the song, which took an arduous three months to write.

“I never thought I was really worthy of a lot of the stuff that happened to me,” McLean said from his home in Camden, Maine. “I always thought it must be some kind of mistake.”

Since the 1970s, McLean has quietly toured the world, selling a back catalog of recordings that includes more than 40 gold (sales of 500,000) or platinum (1 million) singles and albums.

McLean’s songs and lyrics became so ingrained in U.S. culture that he trademarked the phrases “American Pie,” “Starry, Starry Night” (for the song “Vincent,” inspired by the painter Vincent Van Gogh), “Bye, Bye, Miss American Pie” and even his own name.

He said he doesn’t cringe when the audience starts chanting for “American Pie.”

“I’ll do a version of ‘Pie’ that sounds very much like the original record,” he said.

The Recording Industry Assn. of America named “American Pie” the fifth-greatest song of the 20th century (after “This Land Is Your Land,” “Over the Rainbow,” “Respect” and “White Christmas”).

“Vincent,” released in 1972, also has many fans and was more popular in Europe than in the U.S. The Van Gogh Museum in The Hague, the Netherlands, plays the song daily and its sheet music is buried with some of the painter’s artifacts.

Perhaps the most unlikely form of flattery came when McLean learned that “Killing Me Softly With His Song” (written by Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel) was inspired by a poem that singer-songwriter Lori Lieberman wrote after seeing McLean perform at a Los Angeles club. A 1973 remake of Lieberman’s version by Roberta Flack rose to No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s Hot 100 chart and earned three Grammy Awards.

“I had no idea that it was about me,” McLean said about Flack’s song. “When I heard the song, it was so beautiful. I was a young man at the time.”

McLean won a folk-singing contest at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York and began listening to and playing with other folk-music artists such as Pete Seeger.

“American Pie” was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2003. A year later, McLean was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame along with Fox, Daryl Hall, John Oates and Al Green.

He has been touring steadily since his heyday in the 1970s. McLean says he could stay at his 175-acre estate in Maine but still can’t get enough of performing.

“I want to do touring until I can’t do it anymore -- and write an album if I can get a decent deal for it,” he said.