A quick flashback to when I was 20 years old. I was still living with my parents, still attending U.C.L.A., still ignoring my studies there in order to write scripts for Gold Key Comics and I think still working on the weekends with Jack Kirby. My folks were away in Las Vegas for a few days…a trek they made often and one which I encouraged because it meant I had to the house to myself. When I did, I had a place to take some young lady I was dating. You may be able to guess why.
At the time, I was seeing a young lady named Leslie. I suggested to her that Friday night, we could go to dinner and a movie then go to my house for a bit. She suggested — she suggested, I didn't — that we skip the movie; just grab a pizza and go to my house for more than a bit. I was all for that. She asked though, did I have a copy of "Brandy" to which we could listen?
The number one record in the country that week was "Brandy" (subtitled "You're a Fine Girl") by a group called Looking Glass. I didn't have a copy of it but I said that by Friday night, I would. The first record store I went to was out of it but I bought the last 45 RPM copy of it at the second.
The evening went well up to a point. That point was when we started playing "Brandy."
I picked her up, we negotiated pizza toppings and then picked up such a pie and drove to where I lived. Much of the pizza was consumed, then we adjourned to my parents' bedroom, which is where the phonograph was located. "Brandy" went on the turntable. This story is not heading where you think it's heading and certainly not exactly where I was hoping it was heading.
Leslie and I began "making out" on my parents' bed. No apparel except for shoes came off. There were two obstacles to further disrobing, the first being that "Brandy" was three minutes and eight seconds long. That meant that every three minutes and eight seconds, one of us — usually me, sometimes her — had to interrupt the making-out, get up off the bed and move the tone arm on the phonograph from the end of the song back to the beginning so it could play again.
And again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. We were there for about ninety minutes so "Brandy" was played…let me do the math here…something like twenty-nine times. The obstacle to romance was not her desires. She wanted to do what I wanted to do but we had to kind of sneak up on it and she insisted on "Brandy" playing constantly.
Today, I could easily have my iPhone play it in an endless loop. Back in the stone age, one of us had to get up off the bed and walk over to the phonograph every three minutes. It's hard to get any momentum going for affection when you have to keep starting over every 183 seconds.
But that was only the problem for the first half-hour or so. Around the thirty-minute mark, we got to talking about the song and about the lyrics. They aren't the cheeriest or most romantic words. It's about loss and being alone and never seeing the person you love again…and Brandy is not the happiest person in it. Neither was Leslie as we discussed how, though she had never lost a love to the sea, she identified somehow with the fine girl.
She got more and more depressed so I got more and more depressed. Finally, we both realized nothing was going to happen so we stopped playing the record over and over and, as Leslie suggested, we put on our shoes and I took her home. Then I went back to my home and ate the rest of the pizza. Leslie and I somehow never went out again.
The lead singer on "Brandy" was a gent named Elliot Lurie. Recently, backed up by some new friends, he performed an a cappella rendition of it. It's a nice arrangement but it reminds me of what it reminds me of…