Songs I Like: "Brown Eyed Girl"

 

 

 

Welcome to a new Humor Me feature: "Songs I Like".

It will be about songs I like (duh) and will appear whenever. No set schedule.

One of the inspirations for this is the new book by Bob Dylan called "The Philosophy Of Modern Song".  Like most of Dylan's work, it is one part brilliant and one part "whut?".  It is sixty-six essays on sixty-six songs.  It contains no "philosophy," but all of the essays are united by the fact Dylan has heard the song or at least heard about it though with some of them it is hard to tell

The other inspiration is a little Facebook post I've been doing weekly for the past five years called The Lyric Challenge, in which I post six lyrics and ask people to name the song and the artist.  

It has been a fun little exercise where I implant earworms into people and they hear The Carpenter's version of "A Kind Of Hush" all day.

The first song: "Brown Eyed Girl" by Van Morrison.

 "Brown Eyed Girl" is probably the first Van Morrison song I have ever heard.  It is perhaps his most famous song. Of course, Van hates it.

Van wrote and recorded "BEG" after signing a contract with Bert Berns who owned a record label called BANG.  (Can you name the other big time singer on the BANG label?  The answer will be at the end of this post.)

Berns figured out a way to have someone write and sing a song without paying any royalties. Because Van did not make any money off the song, he didn't want to sing it.

So over the years, Van has refused to play "BEG".  However, he has loosened up in his later years, and now how finishes his concerts with "BEG", although it doesn't sound exactly like it does on the radio.

Supposedly, the song was supposed to be called "Brown Skinned Girl" and was about an interracial love affair.  I don't know if that's true. Van hasn't said.

To me, the song is about memory. "Do you remember when we used to sing?".  He lists everything he remembers: the waterfall, the transistor radio, and "making love in the green grass behind the stadium".

When I was coming along, kids would tell stories about running across boys and girls getting busy.   I mean, it was the 70s and clothes were just falling off people.  But I never ran across anybody doing it, and I lived across the street from a high school.

I guess that if you made love in the green grass behind the stadium, you would remember it when you saw your former lover just the other day

Van went from making no money with his most popular song to become a famous singer.  He made a string of albums, starting with "Astral Weeks",  that are total classics.

My wife and I saw Van in concert in Alpharetta last year.  He played the saxophone and sang for two hours, which is pretty good for a 77 year old man.

What makes "BEG" different from other Van Morrison songs  is that it almost sounds happy.  Morrison is known to be a bit of a grump. Don Imus used to say Van led a complicated life.  That may be correct, but Van wrote a great song about something simple: nostalgia.

 

*The other big time singer on the BANG record label was Neil Diamond.