Singer Tells Story of 1972 #1 Hit That Entices ALL Generations | Professor of Rock

up next the story behind one of the bonafide classic songs of the 1970s straight from the singer and songwriter including an acoustic performance this song has attracted every generation since its release it's also conquered pop culture through it's used in film and other medium you're not going to want to miss this one hey music junkies professor of rock always here to celebrate the greatest artist and the greatest songs of all time if you've ever sung to the top of your lungs you know whenever a certain song comes on the radio you're gonna love this channel subscribe below right now and make sure to click the bell so that you never miss out on our daily features also you can check us out on our patreon link it's our insider community and we're going to be releasing a new series there very soon not going to want to miss that that's time for another edition of revelations where iconic artists share the inside details behind their biggest songs and this is a special edition of this series because we have the in-depth story behind the 1972 yacht rock classic brandy you're a fine girl as told by looking glass lead singer and songwriter elliott lurie this is just one of the most interesting stories behind the song that i've experienced and he performs an acoustic version at the end as we go into this interview i want to thank our sponsor zeni iowa the glasses that i jam every day at zany.com you're able to shop according to the shape of your face which guarantees that you always have a variety of really exceptional and distinctive eyewear that will always look great on you shop at zeni.com today and here is elliot with the story brandy's one of the first songs i remember hearing as a little kid and that's one of the songs that got me into this crazy music thing but it's just one of those songs that sticks no matter how many times you hear it or how young you are what age you are it just is instant and i read that you didn't like jump up and down when you wrote it like oh this is a hit song no i mean when i wrote it it was you know it was written along with writing a lot of other things and i liked it a lot and i did find that whenever we played it for people whether i played it just on the guitar whether the band played it it always got a really positive reaction you know relative to the other material so we we definitely knew that it was you know one of the the good ones one of the keepers one of the greatest songs of the 70s and actually named the 11th greatest song of the 70s by cbs fm yeah yeah this is just last summer but that went to number one for one week and it was behind gilbert o'sullivan alone again naturally and then alone again came in number one again so you snuck in there for a week but of course it was such a massive song and spent 17 weeks on the charts and 12th biggest song in 1972 is number one in canada number 10 in australia the inspiration for the song tell me about that because i know that in that old farmhouse yeah you were playing along and uh the spirit moves yeah we would love to hear some of the chords this by the way is the same guitar that i wrote about i've watched guitar since 1967 i bought it used i don't really know what year it's from probably 63 or so but this i've still got still got it wow so the way i would write is you know i just kind of noodle on some chords on them you know i get the chord progression going and you start singing along with it so i had a high school girlfriend whose name was randy with an r and i'm just uh singing along with that and uh once i got the story going i said well randy's not gonna work because first of all it could be a boy or a girl and as the story started to come together about a barmaid i said well if it's a barmaid it's got to be brandy so that's what happened but when i wrote it so the verse which goes like this [Music] i wrote on the guitar and it's got it's got two changes every bar so it's kind of busy and i got to the chorus and i want it to be uh less better and i couldn't come up with a chorus on the guitar now i told you we had that upright piano downstairs and i was playing the guitar in my bedroom upstairs i went down to the piano for a while and i could only play the piano in the key of c and back then the pianos didn't have the little switches on them that they have now that you can change the key on them it was an acoustic piano so i started playing a riff that was a real piano kind of riff because it's got a triad on top and then the track kind of stays the same and it's just the base note that changes so so i'm playing in c which is that key but in the right key so it was like [Applause] [Music] but i didn't learn that i was playing a different key on the piano so i got the chorus going on the panel like i've gone brandy i'll find them and then i would go back upstairs and take the guitar and play the next verse and then i get to the chorus and i go back down to the other key in the piano until i finally said you know schmuck bring the guitar downstairs so you don't have to keep running up and down and i finally did it i you know i took the chords on the piano and put them up so really musically the the structure of the song is that the the verse is kind of written on guitar and is busy wise because there's two changes per bar and then the chorus is written on the piano and the bridge and it's uh you know it's much more open yeah but the story is a uh you know it's a made-up story i just borrowed her name but the story's made up yeah so as you started to go into the verse and putting it together writing the lyrics you were just trying to tell a story yeah i had uh in high school i had written a lot of short stories and in fact you know a couple of them won like little awards here and there i was pretty pretty good at it for for a high school student and i liked it you know i like that and i especially like the idea of trying to tell a whole story in like you know two minutes and 59 seconds because the single can't you know back then it couldn't be more than two minutes right right brandy is three minutes and four seconds but on the label it says 259 because the djs wouldn't play it if it was over three minutes so it's very challenging to try to bring a whole narrative rhyme it put it in song structure and do it in under three minutes so i like that well of course bar made brandy busy in the western seaports and serving hundreds of ships a day there's a girl in this harbor town and she works and then the sailors flirt with her but she's still holding out hope for that one right it couldn't stay it's just a great story and there was the urban legend that there was a coincidence of somebody who was from new brunswick that was you know i heard about that about five ten years ago and if that part of the story is true and i've seen it that you know it's historically documented it is one of the wildest coincidences i didn't know about it until i read about it i guess it came out about 10 years ago that show yeah and i have never heard it before mary ellis it was a spinster back in the 1700s or something like that that's a very uh interesting coincidence that is when you guys recorded brandy you actually recorded a couple of times is that true steve cropper it was an adventure first of all we did like two three different demos of it before we even got signed and then uh when we got signed to epic clive suggested that we go down to memphis and have steve cropper so we thought that was great we'd love steve cropper legendary cat and you know going to memphis so we went down there we cut four sides with him including brandy and we were quite happy with him and the experience was great and we came back to uh new york and we had a meeting schedule we're going to sit down with clive and the a r people we're gonna listen to the track decide what's up you know what how we go forward with the album we went to the club's office we put on the tracks and they sounded like really well recorded versions of a pretty good bar band uh they didn't sound like hit records i mean they were fine they sounded like we did in the barn they were well recorded and we played it in time and in tune and everything but they didn't sound like hit records and you know as much as cloud did we wanted a hit record so clive put us with a staff producer at epic named sandy lindser and sandy if you're out there and if you ever see this thank you you never got enough credit for that record but you had a real impact on it sandy was an old school new york pop guy he had worked with the four seasons he was a staff producer at cbs he knew how to make radio records so he came out to our farmhouse in hunterdon county and worked with us for a day kind of changed the arrangement we worked on the intro a little bit we massaged this we massaged that a little bit then he said to us he said you know it's great it's going to be a hit i'd like to bring in my best session players to play on the track and we were like what no no no wait we can do this and we actually had a fight a little bit with clive and with sandy but we wound up playing on the track and sandy uh produced a rhythm track but then he kind of took it too far he had an idea for a ship's bell at the opening a sound effect he had a string and horn arrangement that sounded really kind of late 60s new york pop you know which i liked late 60s new york pop but it was 1972 and we were a little different than that so about midway through the process we stopped working with sandy and we finished the record so we did the vocals the background vocals we brought in the harness string arrangement and all that kind of stuff and that's the bob bob lifton right bob lifter was an engineer bob lifton owned the studio on west 57th street in manhattan and he was a studio owner and a great engineer he went on to be the engineer for saturday night live for years and years and years passed away a few years ago but he owned the studio so it was kind of a hunt and peck kind of production bob was an engineer and he'd been around a lot of hit records our manager had a lot of input and then the band just kind of experimented let's try this let's try that let's try this and at the end of the day he came out donut make you feel good was the single that came out and then of course harv moore we've got to talk about that such a great story i love these kinds of stories where if one thing wouldn't have happened a certain way maybe things would be different yeah but unnoticed until hard more which is dj from washington dc yep and robert mandel epic records promotion manager received the test pressing and he took it around all the different stations washington dc baltimore wp gcc am and fm and that was one of the leading top 40 stations in the nation yeah there's a big top 40 station and what's interesting is i learned afterwards i didn't know it then but apparently i mean washington d.c was not a market that was known for breaking hit records philadelphia would be one or or you know houston or dallas but harvmoor was the dj there i never met harv moore to this day robert mandel who i do know and i still see occasionally went into hardmoor and he said uh you know he's pitching his records his promotion man he says have you heard this looking last thing he's got the test pressing on the album and harvard goes yeah he says you know we played that door to make you feel good a couple of times but i'm really not doing anything you know and robert said to have you heard the rest of the album harp said no so robert says i got a test pressing here there's one track i'd really like you to hear and he put some brands you know i've said yeah i like that so he takes the test pressing puts it on the radio right then and there and all of a sudden the phones are lit up like a christmas tree like as they say like a christmas tree the phones are ringing and requesting it and over and over again so he added it to the playlist back then this jackies could add it to their playlists and uh he said he'd never gotten a response like that from a song about 15 years all i could tell you three weeks later we went up to the epic records office on 52nd and broadway we met with a couple of the executives there and they said well you're gonna have a number one gold record and he only started playing it three weeks ago we said well how do you know that he said we know that when you get that kind of reaction in that market that's going to be a number one goal record his number one record immediately in washington dc but barry manilow actually changed the name of mandy because of course it was first written brandy because of the popularity of that song he changed it to me it was an interesting timing thing because those english fellows that had it hit with us with what became mandy in brandy in england before we came out with brandy we weren't aware of that and that that record didn't cross over outside of england [Music] we had brandy and then at that point when barry manila was going to do my class said well it can't be brandy because i just had a number one record with this other brand yeah well your vocal on it too is so distinct you have a voice that's unlike anybody else's it just got a certain timbre to it i want to ask you about the chorus 2 and singing and when you guys were recording because you recorded it many different times but coming up with the arrangement i love the chorus how you saying brandon littlefinger okay well here's the story i'm from brooklyn new york and at the time that we recorded brandy i really hadn't sung in the studio that often i mean we've done the demos but you know you know studio on a beautiful neumann u67 microphone you know with it i hadn't done it that often so i went in the studio to do the first take of the vocal and i start singing it you know and i'm getting used to the sound and the headphones and a little bit of the echo and feeling the timbre and my voice is still and i see how that works with the with the microphone and all of a sudden the playback button goes and it's our manager mike gershwin come in for me i said yeah he says it's sounding great man he says but you can't sing there's a port on a western bay you gotta lose that brooklyn accent it's not gonna work so i became very conscious of it so if you listen to the vocal there's a couple of interesting things going on there first of all it's a guy who's still kind of experimenting with a great microphone in a great studio number two it's a guy with a thick brooklyn accent overly accentuating his r's so that there's a porch on a western you know and i guess the natural tim of my voice you know a lot of people told me oh i thought you know i thought there was a black guy singing that or i thought that was a southern guy singing that or god you're such a little guy i thought it was like a 220 pound guy singing that um so i don't know maybe the voice doesn't fit the image but that that i think the combination of the timber of my voice the fact that i was still really learning and enthralled by the studio setting and most of all the addiction of trying to not sound brooklyn and make sure everybody could hear every word i think that kind of combined to make it a little unusual well then also the background vocals you guys just nailed those you got so much energy to it when you're the d it's one of those songs that there's only probably been 50 songs like this but it should be illegal to turn the radio station when that song comes on because it's just such a feel-good song you know like like i said we wanted to have a hit record making that record was like report as much stuff as we could on it and then we like sort of took some off you know it took some money but we loved that background but i mean that kind of background vocals they're part of the influence like i love the the impressions we listen to the rascals a lot [Music] and we had a nice blend uh larry the piano player sang peter had a beautiful tenor definitely a register and a half above mine so when you hear that those dudes it's larry on the bottom of the real voice then peter in the middle in real voice then me on the top and falsetto but we love that kind of stuff you know and the calling response to such a fast we worked that out not in the studio i mean we were that out in the house and we used to what we used to do in the clubs we did it that way and it's just such a sing-along the crowd wants to sing those parts and again we had so many different influences but that branding was influenced by that that kind of gene pool we had a whole nother side which is represented on that first album that was much more influenced by people like poco and we used to listen to that kind of stuff too so you know there were there were two at least two sides to looking glass maybe five sizes but this one was from that gene pool well of course it's been one of those songs that's been used in pop culture probably as much as any song from any decade lords of dog town say anything charlie's angels which that was like the perfect way how they use that my lady is the c [Applause] very brady sequel and lime life but also the wire that was probably pretty cool they used it in what they consider to be one of the greatest tv shows of all time well the thing that's interesting to me and and i i can't really put my finger on it but there certainly have been bigger hits from that same era that have not had the longevity right and as you say the uh the broad use in pop culture that brandy has now of course you know i feel very fortunate for that uh why that is i don't know maybe because story song maybe it's because of the vocal maybe it's because because of the hunt and peck production where you know when you listen to other things from 1972 okay this is an r b record this is a pop record this is a sort of folk rack record but the brandy is kind of partly because you know the hunting peck production it's like sort of falls in between you know it's not quite a grassroots record you know it's not quite a you know it's not quite blood sweat and tears or chicago but it's somewhere in there yeah it is yeah well it's how the production is so perfect it's great that you guys play the instruments because it really does sound like a wrecking crew or something like that well that's part of it too because some of those big pop records from the early 70s they were session guys and nothing against sessions i love my idol i'm just i'm a session guy groupie i love sessions right but not not on our own records we were a band and that also is part of it it's it's a little bit like a you know you could still hear that it's like a really well produced well-rehearsed garage band at the end of the day a barbie right at the end of the day and i think that's why people relate to it because it's like it's personality it's slick but it's still got enough organic stuff that you can tell these guys are really playing and singing and yeah the horn section is slick and the mix is great and everything is cool but there's still a bunch of guys playing and singing it and sincere too i mean the way that you sing it very very sincere and it's just again that energy but another cool thing is in a movie from the 80s it's getting a little bit more play now because uh ready player one that just came out it's a big box office thing but real genius the val kilmer movie from the 80s they did instrumental version i was the music supervisor on real genius oh i i should say i worked for the music supervisor yeah it was one of the most one of the first films i worked on when i came to hollywood and became a music supervisor was real genius and you know i mean uh they needed a little background thing and i you know i love that in there that's one of those little pop culture moments that you really have to be paying attention but you're here and you're like i got to check my statements i don't see that one come up i got to check that yeah it is but the simpsons yeah that was probably such an honor when i started you know i had a whole second career so the simpsons was part of that too you know and that was uh you know richard sakai and uh and the producers of uh of the simpsons they thought it would be fun to do that and marge's sisters sing my loving my lady is the sea poor brandy and then later in the simpsons family album a book that came out a couple of years ago marge is talking and character and saying that oh this is a song about our fraternal grandfather or something from his perspective and and so it was name check there but then doug sang it on king of queens and oh yeah that's a karaoke version [Music] that one i didn't super i didn't sneak that one in there and then i don't know if you ever heard about sarah borges who did the same old 45 she retells the story yeah you'll have to check that one out from her point of view and then paul stanley of kiss said that it inspired hard luck woman [Music] that i have heard uh often and i don't know paul um he actually said it in his book yeah we have a couple of mutual friends but i i heard that and that's cool hey man you know the great thing is especially since i grew up i was like an avid listener and fan before i came up a play i mean you know when you have something out there that influences other people to to go to you know to sort of borrow or whatever from that that's fine oh yeah because you guys were influenced by like what you just talked about all the you know especially in the i won't say the pop world but in the commercial i don't think there's anything totally new under the sun except maybe the beatles you know well guardians of the galaxy too if you could have picked the perfect way to use in a movie and how many times it was used and introducing it to a whole new generation my kids love this song and they heard me play it of course but when they saw in guardians of the galaxy vol 2 that took it to a whole other level it was just a great thing i you know because i worked in hollywood for a while so i'm a member of the academy and motion pictures people who vote on the oscars and every year they send out these video discs for you to watch so you love them and the year that i got the uh first guardians movie it's not the kind of movie that i would normally go see at the theater but i had heard such great things about it i said let me look at this i put i didn't really know about how they use the music or anything like that i just heard this is really great i put it on i'm loving it you know i'm loving it and then i'm loving the way they're using the 70s music in it and it honestly i i was a little jealous that they hadn't used brandy because they used all these other great you know they used come and get your love [Music] all these contemporaries so i was like damn i wish they so okay and then like you know when the next one comes around my publisher sends me this request for use in guardians 2 without any specifics as to how they want to use it i said absolutely by all means you know uh and then i spoke to james gunn as the director we connected by by email a couple of times and then he sent me script pages and i read the script pages i said well this is not just like a background use or even like a montage this is like part of the this is unbelievable part of the story brandy you're a fine girl what a good wife you would be emailed back and forth to james you know he said yeah yeah well this is a weird one i said okay you know and then the third step before the final movie came out is they sent me the clips of the movie to look at and i was sitting there with my wife and you know we got it on email we put it up in the thing and when we started seeing the way it was used in the movie it's like whoa you know uh brandy by looking glass you know that's great because i think james got fantastic his taste in music is great those movies are are groundbreaking i mean you know the first one was just oh yeah when you say there's nothing new under the sun that that first movie is just brand new it's just fresh as can be second movie was great too my song's in it i love it you know but he carried on very well what he'd established in the first movie which was just fresh as can be well what an honor too as you say to have the first movie come out and have that soundtrack be so massive and introduce young people to 70s music that maybe haven't heard or just heard it on the radio and things hooked on a feeling and then i'm feeling blue swede 1973 that song belongs to me and then of course fooled around and fell in love which was great [Music] and they have that in the stratosphere and then to follow that up and make the main song be brandy i mean yeah you know but the way he used it is so is so interesting and you know he's he's so smart and and so clever because the way he used it you know and this gets around to uh you know this may have been the end of the conversation for you so maybe jump with a gun but you know so when this character uh kurt russell's character ego is talking to the his son and uh you know he explains to me he says well it starts great his composition he says you know because because of the fact that you know the universe is you know he he explains it in this very metaphorical way right you know it's a giant metaphor you know peter you and i we're we're the sailor in that song and a little bit tongue-in-cheek too in fact i went to the premiere and would he utters that line could be earth's greatest composition there were a few giggles from the from the hollywood crowd you know so it's a little tug of cheap but that's that's yeah but what he says is great because he says one of earth's greatest musical compositions maybe it's greatest i love that you can't beat that i'm a big russell fan so you know everybody that was great one of earth's greatest musical compositions perhaps its very greatest yeah yes anyway my point being that you know he treats it as this as this great metaphor and in retrospect you know it kind of is and but when i wrote it if it was a metaphor it was subconscious it was just a story for me as i was writing it now in retrospect 50 45 years later there's probably something out there with the same kind of metaphorical intent that james gunn has in the movie which is you know whether it's ego wanting to control the universe or whether it's a sailor who's got to get back on his boat any male who is self-absorbed at the point where his trip whether it's the ocean or the universe or the music business or whatever it is they're not ready for a full-on romantic commitment because they're aware enough to know that they're fully absorbed with their own uh quest at that moment the ce calls the sailor back he loves the girl but that's not his place now did i think that when i wrote it at 21 years old not a bit was it in the background who knows now looking back on it though you can go but so many great covers of it too red hot chili peppers to have the red hot chili peppers cover it a couple times i mean they performed it live and and then kenny chesney there's a big difference between those two people there is but you know it's not it's not one of the most i mean it's not a a heavily covered song for a song that's been as pop i mean i know the guy who wrote you are so beautiful you are so beautiful you know when you look that up there's like a hundred artists to have covered that this may be like six yeah the syrup covered brandy the chili peppers version is great because it kind of sounds exactly the way we used to do it on a good night at a bar the kenny chesney version is cool because it's very faithful to the to the record but it's got just enough of the his beach vibe and his country vibe and he's a great singer the i really like i really like uh the kenny chad's of course ray conniff and his singers yeah we can't lose that yeah we without me bringing that one up my favorite version has become your acoustic version i love that you learn guitar it's actually a spotify oh yeah it is yeah yeah i put it up there i love it i did it i had that whole separate career in hollywood but now the last few years i've gotten back to playing and i do you know some shows where it's like singer songwriter shows so it's just me and guitar and i you know played a song and both yes i put it down one night and that's that's kind of the way i wrote it you know it's kind of with the car guitar once i learned the piano chords on the guitar yeah it's kind of wherever it brings new layers to it when you can play a song and you can sing it a little bit more methodically and just kind of bare bones it really brings new nooks and crannies to the song if that makes sense it just deepens it i just love that it's interesting because with all of the production things that made it such a popular record and maybe that that keep it hanging on and uh i mean i'm very proud of the record it was a very interesting pop record for its time different and obviously the the fact that it's uh you know stood the test in time stands for that but when i play on guitar you know it all it still works the vocal kind of works the chord changes work the story certainly works tells the whole story and well it used to be 2 59 at the tempo that i do it now it's about 3 45 but it still tells the story in a brief amount of time i don't mind singing it's my voice okay i mean the way the way i do it in the closet i use the electric it's like [Music] it's a little slower when i did this [Music] [Applause] there's a part adam western bay and it serves a hundred ships a day along the sailors pass the town away and tackled out there and there's a girl in this harvard town and she works laying what's good down they say brandon fetch another round my [Music] [Music] oh man i love that thank you so much for sharing that what a treat man that's amazing hey thanks for watching really under the weather right now but doing my best leave us a comment about this amazing song about this this the 70s classic what are your memories of the song and of these movies please share with us if you like our content we do invite you to be a permanent part of our community by subscribing below now to get this music on vinyl or cd click our links below and make sure to check us out on patreon for that new series help us keep the music alive until next time three chords and the truth my friends stay safe out there [Music]

Channel: Professor of Rock

Views: 306,528

Keywords: 1972, 70s, 1970s, 1973 music hits, 1972 #1 song, 1972 #1 hits, best hits 1972, 1972 hits, 1972 songs, brandy, elliot lurie, elliot lurie brandy, elliot lurie interview, story, music history, song breakdown, lyrics explained, lyrics meaning verified, verified, professor, of, rock, professor of rock, 70s vinyl, music community, vinyl community, yatch rock, soft rock, interview, album, song, music, singer, tells story, reaction to brandy, 2021, #1, music junkies, classic rock, yacht rock

Id: 3_PfjkEdmMQ

Length: 33min 38sec (2018 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 05 2021