Some songs just make you feel good, relaxed, because of the music, but it’s nice when the lyrics also take hold. Sometimes, getting that hit requires a bit of luck.
Take for example “Brandy (You’re A Fine Girl)”. Coming from the debut, self-titled album by the band Looking Glass, it was the B-Side of a single they were trying to promote from the 1972 album. A DJ was encouraged to check out the B-Side, a story heard quite often in the days of vinyl records and disk jockeys who had to manually change records at the end of each song. He liked it, but more importantly the audience liked it, and the rest is history.
There’s not just good music attached to the album. While the music is relaxing and feel-good, you have to feel sorry for the title protagonist. It would be easier if the man she loved were happily married already because it would be a good reason. This isn’t one of the cheating songs. Unfortunately, our barmaid has a far larger problem: the man is married to his work, or rather where he works.
Imagine how hard that must be on the poor girl. Here are all these sailors telling her that she’s so beautiful she could pull a sailor out of the sailing life…except the one sailor she wants to keep with her. We don’t know how often he visits her. The song goes between past and present tense so sometimes it sounds like he’s dead or just doesn’t come around anymore and other times it seems like a meeting is happening right now. Still, it’s about a woman who loves the one sailor her eyes can’t compete with against the deep blue sea.
The song is written by Looking Glass’ lead singer, Elliot Lurie. Was he inspired by a barmaid he knew? Not exactly. There was a legend that it was based on a woman who died in the band’s hometown. From Vinyl Dialogues:
There was a theory floated in recent years that the inspiration for “Brandy” was actually a women named Mary Ellis, a spinster in New Brunswick, New Jersey, where Rutgers University is located and where Lurie went to college. Local legend has it that Ellis was seduced by a sea captain who vowed to return from his journeys to marry her. Ellis allegedly would look out over the Raritan River in New Brunswick awaiting his return, which never did happen.
But Ellis wasn’t the inspiration for the song, according to Lurie.
“No, that’s an incredible coincidence,” he said. “I write fiction.”
Which could be a possible setting anyway, since they came from there…except it’s not a seaport town. It also doesn’t say whether or not Mary worked at a seaport tavern in the past. There’s a river in New Brunswick, but the song specifically says that the bar Brandy works at (or she full out owns it, which is also not clear) is on a “port on the western bay”, and apparently a rather busy one. Sailors come in and swap sea stories, and Brandy’s love interest is a sailor who is drawn to the sea. American Songwriter brings us her true origins, because their reference is behind a paywall:
In actuality, songwriter and Looking Glass lead singer Elliot Lurie simply made up the story from scratch, as he explained in an interview with The Tennessean in 2016. “Brandy is a made-up individual,” he said. “The name was derived from a high school girlfriend I had whose name was Randy with an ‘R.’ Usually when I write — I still do it the same way I did back then — I strum some guitar and kind of sing along with the first things that come to mind. Her name came up. Then I started writing the rest of the song, and it was about a barmaid. I thought Randy was an unusual name for a girl, it could go either way, and (the song was about) a barmaid, so I changed it to Brandy.”
Oddly, Vinyl Dialogues has the spelling as “Randye”, and it can’t be a typo because they write that way more than once. The song might not have made it in another timeline. As mentioned, the single sent out to promote the album was not this one. This was the b-side so that the album would have two songs. (For you younger readers, small 33 or 45 inch records had two songs, one on each side. Full albums also used both sides, which is where the whole a-side/b-side terminology comes from.) The intended single was “Don’t It Make You Feel Good”.
As was often the case in those days, Harv Moore, a disc jockey at the Top 40 radio station WPGC-AM/FM in Washington, D.C., was urged by Robert Mandel, a promotions man at the record label, to listen to the “Brandy” track off a test pressing of the LP.
“The promotion man went in to hang out with Harv and he said, ‘Have you heard this Looking Glass thing?’ And Harv said, ‘Yeah, but it’s not really happening.’ And the promotion man said, ‘You really got to listen to the rest of the album, this group is pretty good.’ Back in those days, that could happen. A promotion man could have a relationship with a disc jockey and ask him to listen to something and he would,” Lurie says.
Moore liked “Brandy” a lot. And he played it a lot. A week later, the band members got a call from record company officials telling them that a disc jockey in Washington, D.C., had put “Brandy” in regular rotation on the station and the phones were ringing off the hook.
That was a shock to the record company but you can’t argue with success. The song has a number of different covers and was used in a bunch of movies, including a plot point in one of the Guardians Of The Galaxy movies. None of my research showed what inspired the song to be about a seaport barmaid pining for a sailor when so many others chat her up. Still, it looks like the DJ made the right move, and Brandy’s sad tale has topped sales charts quite often. I heard the other day. It’s good relaxing music, good driving music, and a good (if somewhat sad) tale.
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