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The Hit
If you didn’t know “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” before you saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, you knew it before the final credits rolled, if only because you heard it twice by then. The guy who wrote the song, Elliot Lurie, liked how the song fit both times and, while I thought I read somewhere that Kurt Russell (who starred in the movie as Ego) called it the best song ever, it was his character (again, Ego) who made that call. Still, that’s high praise from a god. Or a planet. Or whatever.
That said, Lurie mentioned one particular thing he appreciated to the Hollywood Reporter:
“It was a story song, and the band I was with, Looking Glass, we were hoping and praying for a hit record that people would play in their convertibles with the tops down.”
The way James Gunn (right?) used the song doesn’t stray so far from the original story/intent of it. Lurie borrowed the name of a high school sweetheart named Randye when he started writing it, but he thought the name too gender-neutral for a lyric. Once the inspiration hit to make it a song about a barmaid who poured drinks for and captured the hearts of lonely sailors, “Brandy” struck him as a natural fit. And, just like in the movie, it’s a tale of heartbreak:
“’Brandy,’ as Lurie noted, was basically the tale of a barmaid in a busy seaport town. As in so many songs before and since, she longs for her true love, but for him, nothing could match the lure of the wide-open sea."
A couple of tales attach to “Brandy,” one true - the timing of its release forced Barry Manilow to change the name of a famous hit to “Mandy” - the other, the one about a “spinster” named Mary Ellis, not true. A New Jersey legend claims that, at the end of “a very hot romance,” a sailor promised Mary Ellis that he’d come back to marry her. Her never returned, of course, and poor Mary left nothing behind but the tombstone with her name on it. Lurie knew nothing about that legend when he wrote the song at the age of 20 and, as he explained to The Tennessean in 2016, he had a pretty simple songwriting process of playing some chords and free associating from there.
The Rest of the Story
Lurie called his band, Looking Glass, “schizophrenic” in that same conversation with The Tennessean, and that could be my favorite unfinished thought about them (schizophrenic....how?!).
Looking Glass formed in 1969 among some students at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, but only two members - Lurie and keyboardist, Larry Gonsky - stuck with it after graduation. After recruiting two more members - Jeff Grob on drums and Pieter Sweval on bass (and everyone but Grob sang) - they became regulars on the Rutgers/Princeton/Lehigh University frat ‘n’ college bar circuit. They played mostly covers - Lurie mentions only The Rolling Stones - but, when the reliable gigs kept coming, they worked up the courage to slip in some originals. As he told Vinyl Dialogues in a 2017 interview, audiences mostly “tolerated” those numbers.
That shift to original material announced an intention to make it as musicians - a decision that strained the patience of some or all of their parents, who’d paid good money to educate their kids. They’d already come up with the name, and the way they come up with “Looking Glass” has a certain stoned innocence to it. The name came to one of them as he looked into a rearview mirror after “imbibing” some unmentioned something (from the Vinyl Dialogues interview):
“What we liked about the name was that we were kind of like ordinary guys and we thought we were sort of a reflection of whoever may be listening to us.”
After begging their parents to give them a year to make a living out of music, the members of Looking Glass rented a New Jersey farmhouse and set to working up more material and sharpening up the act with practice and more time on their old circuit. They had the spirit of a “real band,” with Lurie splitting songwriting and lead singing duties with Sweval. A demo came out of that time that bounced around until it landed on the desk of Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, who, if nothing else, thought enough of “Brandy” to arrange an audition. He set the stakes pretty high too, when he booked them at Manhattan’s Café au Go go as an opening act for Buddy Guy. They delivered on the audition and Davis signed them the same night…after which things stalled for a while.
When asked about which single they wanted to lead with, the band served up “Don’t It Make You Feel Good.” The band chose…poorly. Fortunately, someone on Columbia’s promotion team, a guy named Robert Mandel, knew a Washington, D.C. DJ named Harv Moore and Moore really liked “Brandy.” After Moore put it on the air - a lot, according to Vinyl Dialogues - the head of promotions called with a simple message/correction to Plan A (e.g., “Don’t It Make You Feel Good," and this is from The Tennesseean):
“The phones are lighting up like a Christmas tree in Washington. You’ve got a hit record here. We’ve got to press this single and get it ready.”
“Brandy” topped the Billboard Top 100 for the week of August 1972, but stuck on the charts for 16 more weeks. The single sold one million copies and went gold and…well, that’s pretty much it.
Looking Glass did score another Top 40 single called “Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne,” which 1) led their 1973 follow-up LP, Subway Serenade, and 2) officially takes them out of one-hit wonder status in my book, but, fits and starts aside, the original iteration of Looking Glass broke up, checked out, and moved on: after Lurie left in 1974 to try his luck as a solo artist, the band (or the label) replaced him with Michael Lee Smith, formerly of a band called Georgia; between then and the time Gonsky checked out, the band added two more guitarists and changed its name to Fallen Angels; they changed the name again in late 1975 to Starz, but nothing happened from that point to the present besides Sweval (tragically) dying of AIDS in 1990 and Lurie reforming the band with its original name and new members in 2003. For anyone interested in catching up on that, I came across an interview with one of new members, a guy named Jeff Lehman.
About the Sampler
To their credit, they had a pretty clear sense of what they wanted to accomplish. Getting “Brandy” right required a couple attempts and as many locations and mostly because they had a fairly clear sense of what they wanted. The label first connected them with Steve Cropper (who recorded Booker T & the MGs), but they didn’t like that because it “sounded like a bar band.” They tried adding a horn section next, thinking they’d like something that sounded like Blood Sweat & Tears or Chicago, only to decide “it sounded like a Grass Roots record” (a thought respectfully preceded by, “not to take anything away from The Grass Roots”). In other words, what you hear when you listen to Looking Glass is all Looking Glass.
Looking Glass isn’t a bad band for the right people - e.g., fans of a smooth 70s sound - and they’ve got…decent variety besides. To show it off, I included a rocker - e.g., “Sweet Jeremiah” - and some pop numbers - e.g., “Jenny-Lynne” (the lead single on their debut) - but they mostly specialized in smooth (i.e., produced) mid-tempo numbers. It also turns out they had a couple lyrical crutches - e.g., “sweet” (see, the delicate, jazzy “Sweet Somethin’”) and “rainbow” (see, the twangy rambler “Golden Rainbow”) - but even those play to a similar pitch. Apart from the songs named higher in the post, I rounded out the sampler with a couple ballads, from the cheesy “Who’s Gonna Sing My Rock ‘N’ Roll Song,” to the brooding “From Stanton Station,” to what I’d call their opus, “Catherine Street.”
For what it’s worth, I am the right kind of person for Looking Glass. It’s not brilliant or anything, but it gets more than a couple steps into my personal wheelhouse. Moreover, it’s pretty damn solid material for a band that never had a lot of time.
Oops, one more thing: I don’t know about the rest of them, but Elliot Lurie continued working in music. By the mid-1980s, he’d worked his way up to head of the music department at 20th Century Fox, where he produced soundtracks for a number of movies, starting with the John Travotla/Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle Perfect, then moving on to…an eclectic collection of movies including Alien 3, A Night at the Roxbury, and Spanglish. By way of honoring that and Lurie’s later solo work, I dropped two songs into the sampler, 1975’s funky “Blue Lady” and something (I believe) fairly recent titled, “Get There.”
If you didn’t know “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” before you saw Guardians of the Galaxy 2, you knew it before the final credits rolled, if only because you heard it twice by then. The guy who wrote the song, Elliot Lurie, liked how the song fit both times and, while I thought I read somewhere that Kurt Russell (who starred in the movie as Ego) called it the best song ever, it was his character (again, Ego) who made that call. Still, that’s high praise from a god. Or a planet. Or whatever.
That said, Lurie mentioned one particular thing he appreciated to the Hollywood Reporter:
“It was a story song, and the band I was with, Looking Glass, we were hoping and praying for a hit record that people would play in their convertibles with the tops down.”
The way James Gunn (right?) used the song doesn’t stray so far from the original story/intent of it. Lurie borrowed the name of a high school sweetheart named Randye when he started writing it, but he thought the name too gender-neutral for a lyric. Once the inspiration hit to make it a song about a barmaid who poured drinks for and captured the hearts of lonely sailors, “Brandy” struck him as a natural fit. And, just like in the movie, it’s a tale of heartbreak:
“’Brandy,’ as Lurie noted, was basically the tale of a barmaid in a busy seaport town. As in so many songs before and since, she longs for her true love, but for him, nothing could match the lure of the wide-open sea."
A couple of tales attach to “Brandy,” one true - the timing of its release forced Barry Manilow to change the name of a famous hit to “Mandy” - the other, the one about a “spinster” named Mary Ellis, not true. A New Jersey legend claims that, at the end of “a very hot romance,” a sailor promised Mary Ellis that he’d come back to marry her. Her never returned, of course, and poor Mary left nothing behind but the tombstone with her name on it. Lurie knew nothing about that legend when he wrote the song at the age of 20 and, as he explained to The Tennessean in 2016, he had a pretty simple songwriting process of playing some chords and free associating from there.
The Rest of the Story
Lurie called his band, Looking Glass, “schizophrenic” in that same conversation with The Tennessean, and that could be my favorite unfinished thought about them (schizophrenic....how?!).
Looking Glass formed in 1969 among some students at New Jersey’s Rutgers University, but only two members - Lurie and keyboardist, Larry Gonsky - stuck with it after graduation. After recruiting two more members - Jeff Grob on drums and Pieter Sweval on bass (and everyone but Grob sang) - they became regulars on the Rutgers/Princeton/Lehigh University frat ‘n’ college bar circuit. They played mostly covers - Lurie mentions only The Rolling Stones - but, when the reliable gigs kept coming, they worked up the courage to slip in some originals. As he told Vinyl Dialogues in a 2017 interview, audiences mostly “tolerated” those numbers.
That shift to original material announced an intention to make it as musicians - a decision that strained the patience of some or all of their parents, who’d paid good money to educate their kids. They’d already come up with the name, and the way they come up with “Looking Glass” has a certain stoned innocence to it. The name came to one of them as he looked into a rearview mirror after “imbibing” some unmentioned something (from the Vinyl Dialogues interview):
“What we liked about the name was that we were kind of like ordinary guys and we thought we were sort of a reflection of whoever may be listening to us.”
After begging their parents to give them a year to make a living out of music, the members of Looking Glass rented a New Jersey farmhouse and set to working up more material and sharpening up the act with practice and more time on their old circuit. They had the spirit of a “real band,” with Lurie splitting songwriting and lead singing duties with Sweval. A demo came out of that time that bounced around until it landed on the desk of Clive Davis, the president of Columbia Records, who, if nothing else, thought enough of “Brandy” to arrange an audition. He set the stakes pretty high too, when he booked them at Manhattan’s Café au Go go as an opening act for Buddy Guy. They delivered on the audition and Davis signed them the same night…after which things stalled for a while.
When asked about which single they wanted to lead with, the band served up “Don’t It Make You Feel Good.” The band chose…poorly. Fortunately, someone on Columbia’s promotion team, a guy named Robert Mandel, knew a Washington, D.C. DJ named Harv Moore and Moore really liked “Brandy.” After Moore put it on the air - a lot, according to Vinyl Dialogues - the head of promotions called with a simple message/correction to Plan A (e.g., “Don’t It Make You Feel Good," and this is from The Tennesseean):
“The phones are lighting up like a Christmas tree in Washington. You’ve got a hit record here. We’ve got to press this single and get it ready.”
“Brandy” topped the Billboard Top 100 for the week of August 1972, but stuck on the charts for 16 more weeks. The single sold one million copies and went gold and…well, that’s pretty much it.
Looking Glass did score another Top 40 single called “Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne,” which 1) led their 1973 follow-up LP, Subway Serenade, and 2) officially takes them out of one-hit wonder status in my book, but, fits and starts aside, the original iteration of Looking Glass broke up, checked out, and moved on: after Lurie left in 1974 to try his luck as a solo artist, the band (or the label) replaced him with Michael Lee Smith, formerly of a band called Georgia; between then and the time Gonsky checked out, the band added two more guitarists and changed its name to Fallen Angels; they changed the name again in late 1975 to Starz, but nothing happened from that point to the present besides Sweval (tragically) dying of AIDS in 1990 and Lurie reforming the band with its original name and new members in 2003. For anyone interested in catching up on that, I came across an interview with one of new members, a guy named Jeff Lehman.
About the Sampler
To their credit, they had a pretty clear sense of what they wanted to accomplish. Getting “Brandy” right required a couple attempts and as many locations and mostly because they had a fairly clear sense of what they wanted. The label first connected them with Steve Cropper (who recorded Booker T & the MGs), but they didn’t like that because it “sounded like a bar band.” They tried adding a horn section next, thinking they’d like something that sounded like Blood Sweat & Tears or Chicago, only to decide “it sounded like a Grass Roots record” (a thought respectfully preceded by, “not to take anything away from The Grass Roots”). In other words, what you hear when you listen to Looking Glass is all Looking Glass.
Looking Glass isn’t a bad band for the right people - e.g., fans of a smooth 70s sound - and they’ve got…decent variety besides. To show it off, I included a rocker - e.g., “Sweet Jeremiah” - and some pop numbers - e.g., “Jenny-Lynne” (the lead single on their debut) - but they mostly specialized in smooth (i.e., produced) mid-tempo numbers. It also turns out they had a couple lyrical crutches - e.g., “sweet” (see, the delicate, jazzy “Sweet Somethin’”) and “rainbow” (see, the twangy rambler “Golden Rainbow”) - but even those play to a similar pitch. Apart from the songs named higher in the post, I rounded out the sampler with a couple ballads, from the cheesy “Who’s Gonna Sing My Rock ‘N’ Roll Song,” to the brooding “From Stanton Station,” to what I’d call their opus, “Catherine Street.”
For what it’s worth, I am the right kind of person for Looking Glass. It’s not brilliant or anything, but it gets more than a couple steps into my personal wheelhouse. Moreover, it’s pretty damn solid material for a band that never had a lot of time.
Oops, one more thing: I don’t know about the rest of them, but Elliot Lurie continued working in music. By the mid-1980s, he’d worked his way up to head of the music department at 20th Century Fox, where he produced soundtracks for a number of movies, starting with the John Travotla/Jamie Lee Curtis vehicle Perfect, then moving on to…an eclectic collection of movies including Alien 3, A Night at the Roxbury, and Spanglish. By way of honoring that and Lurie’s later solo work, I dropped two songs into the sampler, 1975’s funky “Blue Lady” and something (I believe) fairly recent titled, “Get There.”
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