no, i'm not joking

I've always loved this song. I think "Brandy" is a great record.

There were a great many bands of the early seventies who had a great single or two, but for whatever reason never had much else. To wit, the movie That Thing You Do was depicted a very usual phenomenon the rock era: the one hit wonders.

Each of us has his favorite one-hit wonder bands. My favorite was the Looking Glass, a band from the North Jersey shore whose only huge hit was this, despite a great follow-up single called "Jimmy Loves Marianne". Both songs were written by Elliot Lurie, who also sang greatlead. I think "Brandy" is a small masterpiece. The background vocal part is very good. "Midnight Train To Georgia" good.

Recently, Spanglish was on cable, and I saw the name "Elliot Lurie" in the end credits, for music supervision. I hadn't thought of his name in ages, despite playing "Brandy" every so often on a gig or even singing it at karoake now and again.

I grew up near a river, and often would see boats moored, or coming in, or going out of port along the Delaware River, usually while my family would be crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge. The lights of the bars along the South Philadelphia waterfront indicated a world by and for the people who worked on/for the boats. Stevedores, longshoremen, all those folks. I knew they existed, but my family didn't have friends in those trades. My father's friends were mostly transit workers he knew from his job, my mother's were largely women her own age from her church. We didn't really know anyone who left town for a living. I don't think I saw a real steamer trunk until I was in high school.

I knew South Philly's streets and neighborhoods pretty well, so it was easy for me to hear this song and picture Brandy walking home from work. As a kid, I would hear this song and think of her as a kind of worldly, beautiful hippie earth mother, with a braided leather chain around her neck, walking home down Two St from her job at a bar full of merchant marines and longshoremen.

Hearing it now, the whole memory -- the worldly fiction concocted by a ten year old boy -- comes back, as if on videotape.

(The Philadelphia waterfront as characterized by David Goodis in Cassidy's Girl is in there somewhere, too. Go figure.)

If I ever meet Mr Lurie, I have no idea what to say. But I will likely ask if there was a specific bar he had in mind. If not, I'll point out a couple to him where they could go back and shoot a video.