Side Two of Todd Rungren’s Initiation is a single track at 36:00.
Egad, saw the thread title and immediately thought Mountain Jam. Which the OP quickly cites. And then there’s follow up posts.
I didn’t think anybody else would remember this.
The longest LP track I’ve listened to more than once on purpose (I’m a Pop music girl-- 4 minutes or less!) is Rare Earth’s cover of Get Ready which clocks in at 21:30. To be honest, I think it’s the epitome of self-indulgence and just breaks down into random noises after 15 minutes or so. As a confessed pop music lover and modern jazz hater, my taste my be suspect.
The Other One from the Grateful Dead’s Hundred Year Hall is 36:29. This was a live performance. The Dead have played longer songs live but I’m not sure if any have made it to an album.
Dammit, Bo stole mine. I’ll go with “Rain” by Fauna. It’s 18 seconds shorter than “Dopesmoker”
Then there’s the aptly titled “Infinity” by Jesu. It’s 50 minutes.
The title song of Dream Theater’s Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence comes in at about 42 minutes. But unfortunately, it is indexed as eight tracks, even though they form a single song. I’m pretty sure that when this kind of thing happens, it is at the record company’s insistence. Anyway, they later released the live album Score, where the song is performed in its entirety, and properly indexed as a single track.
Transatlantic did something similar. Their third album The Whirlwind is just shy of 80 minutes. It consists of a single song, but is cut up into 12 tracks on the album. The band then released a live album, Whirld Tour 2010, with the song performed in its entirety, and IIRC they properly indexed it as a single 80 minute track. The reason I’m not sure about that is, when I rip songs that are improperly indexed like this, I rip them into the single track that they should be. I don’t currently have access to the CD, so I can’t confirm, but Wikipedia lists it as a single track.
when I worked in college radio in the early 80s to eat lunch I would put on live version of Green Grass and High tides by the outlaws , it was around 20 minutes.
I checked on discogs.com, and you’re right: the track is listed as 79:52. I think we have a winner.
I believe the longest album version of a billboard top 40 hit is Autobahn by Kraftwerk at 22:43. Second longest Get Ready by Rare Earth, 21:30.
Wasn’t “Autobahn” edited into a 4 minute radio and single version?
ETA: nevermind, I just saw that you wrote “the longest album version of a billoard top 40 hit”.
Sorry, yes, I meant longest album track to have its single edit chart top 40.
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No need to say sorry, it was my misunderstanding.
The Orb’s Blue Room charted in the UK at a length of 39:57 (the eligibility limit is 40 minutes for a single). The album version is quite a bit shorter, oddly enough.
Did it ever get any airplay? I bet John Peel would’ve played it, but I don’t know if he was still alive at the time.
There were a couple of radio edits made. Peel probably would have played the whole thing - he was quite keen on The Orb - but I don’t recall him doing so. (Blue Room was 1992, Peel died in 2004)
It was done when Mike was really pissed at Richard Branson (it has a coded message about this in the track) and wanted to be as non-commercial as possible. When I was on a Mike mailing list one of our members who worked for the Beeb interviewed him. Mike was really pleased that the list loved Amarok so much we named the list after it. Great album. Very funny too.
The guy asked Mike how many overdubs it took for the first guitar part, and Mike responded by picking up his guitar and playing it. Jaw drop,
I’ve never listened to it, but is there any reason to NOT think of R. Kelly’s Trapped in the Closet as one song? (91 minutes)
I skimmed the wiki: it’s a work divided into 33 “chapters” and released separately over various albums. That’s not what I had in mind, I was going for a single long track on one album.
Bell Witch’s latest album, Mirror Reaper, is a single1hr 23mins long song, and is pretty damn good if you like that sort of thing, that sort of thing being slow repetitive doom metal. It’s the longest thing I can think of that is definitely an album track rather than an art piece or classical composition.
Mike Oldfield has both of those beat with Tubular Bells. The album itself is a single composition of 48 minutes and 50 seconds, split over two sides of an LP. The single (which got to #7 in the US) edits this down to just 3 minutes and 18 seconds.