Elliot Lurie: From Brooklyn to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)”

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories, and we tell stories about everything here on this show: from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They’re some of our favorites. Also, we love bringing you stories about how songs are made. Also, we love telling you stories about musicians, and this time, we bring you both. Robbie brings us the story of a man who knew from a young age that a career in music was his future. Elliot Lurie is best known for writing and performing The Looking Glass’s hit song, “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” but his career in music began years earlier. Here’s Elliot to tell his story.

I was lucky to grow up at a really special time and place. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York, kind of came of age in the late fifties, early sixties, surrounded by great music. We were blessed in New York to have four great Top Forty radio stations and one R&B station that we used to be able to grab from New York, New Jersey, and I was hooked. I was that cliché kid who went to sleep with the transis to radio under his pillow, and for my twelfth birthday, my parents got me an old Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder, and I used to take the alligator clips and hook them up to the speaker of the radio, and when a song came on that I liked, I’d record it. At one point, an aunt of mine gave me a ukulele for a birthday present. I had never played an instrument, and I played it for a while, and I kind of liked it, and then by accident, I sat on it and I broke it, and I figured, “Well, a guitar only has two more strings, and that might be a little bit more fun.” So I got my mom to buy me a guitar, and shortly after that, I started lessons, and I always loved it. I had a very good teacher, taught me how to read music, taught me jazz stuff, all kinds of things like that, and I got into bands pretty early on. When I was fourteen or fifteen, I started playing in some local bands, and we’d do shows, we’d do dances. We even did some bar gigs where we had to lie about our age to get into the bar, and I kind of decided that that was really what I wanted to do—to be a musician—which did not go over really well with my mom and dad. So, yes, I was playing in a lot of bands locally. With one of the bands, when I was in high school, we got to do some demos over to Capitol Records to try to get a record contract, and I really liked it. I wanted to become a musician, but the Vietnam War was happening, and I was at draft age, and I didn’t want to go there, so I wound up going to Rutgers University in New Jersey. I went there for one semester, and I really wasn’t very happy there, and I thought, “You know what? I’m going to drop out of here, and I’ll take my chance with the draft board.” I’ve heard—I’ve heard—there are certain things that you can do for a couple of days before you go to the draft board which may make them inclined not to have you in the army. So I thought I would try that, and I got a job as a musician. So I found this guy who was looking for a backup musician. I played—I played bass for him. It was like a little folk trio, and we played really cool little places down in the Village. We played The Bitter End and, you know, all the old Village folky clubs down there. And he had a side project that was like a comedy group, and they made a novelty record, which was basically the song “Wild Thing,” done in the voice of the late Senator Bobby Kennedy. Of course, he wasn’t a-late then, he was still alive, and in New York, anyway, it became a big hit. It was a novelty hit. They were put on a show that the famous New York ‘this Shackie Murray, the K Murray, the K from WINS ten ten New York’ was the ‘hoindest of Shackie Incount,’ and he used to put on these review shows either at the Brooklyn Fox, to Brooklyn Paramount, the Ko. And in the past, I had gone to them as a kid, and they were like reviews of, you know, ten, twelve acts. I would see The Run that Stair, Little Stevie Wonder, Mitch Ryder—well, all the acts at the time—and it was great. They’d show a movie in between the shows. They’d be five shows a day. They’d throw in a movie, and you’d come in, and you’d stand online in the morning. At nine o’clock in the morning, you’d get in, and as each show was over, some kids would leave, and you’d move up, so if you were willing to sit through the movie five times, you would finally get to the front rows by the end of the day. This group, they were called The Hardly Worth It Players. They got on the show because they had this hit novelty ruth It, and I was the bass player. And this was just when the music was transitioning, I think, in nineteen sixty-eight, and Murray was kind of getting hip to the fact that, you know, there was a new kind of music coming around. He had The Who and Cream, which I think where their first appearance was, at least in New York, if not in the States. And the show went off for seven days right through Easter break, and these Hardly Worth It Players wound up sharing a dressing room with The Who for a week, and, you know, late at night after the shows were over, people would jam, and I remember one night Wilson people with playing bass and Al Kooper from The Blues Project was playing piano, and I didn’t really know who ever clapped. It was I had the balls to ask if I could use his guitar, and I was jamming on his guitar, the old SG that he had with the psychedelic painting. And if I wasn’t hooked before on being a musician, that really—that really cemented it for me. I said, “Okay, this—this is a great life. This is what I wanted to—this is a great life. This is what I want to do.” The parents weren’t thrilled, but sometimes parents aren’t thrilled with the choices their kids make, and sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. Those great radio stations in New York at the time. By the time he’d touched band life, playing dances and bars in his mid-teens, well, that was it too. When we come back, more of Elliot Lurie’s story, the writer of “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl,” a life’s tale worth telling. His story continues here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com.

And we continue with Our American Stories and Elliot Lurie’s story, and he’s best known for writing The Looking Glass’s hit song, “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl.” We left off at the end of Elliot’s high school career. After learning to play guitar and having played in local bands, he knew he wanted to pursue a career in music. Let’s return to Lurie and more of his story.

But then the draft board called, and I did all the things that I had been told would work, and I was classified 1-A, which meant they were going to call on me to go over there. So I hustled back to Rutgers University, and I was a little more comfortable at Rutgers. After a while, I met a couple of guys hanging out, and we formed a band there. The personnel changed over time. We used to rehearse in some of the student quarters that, when there were public rooms there, we would take over and play for a wantle. They kicked us out, and we started getting—we started getting lots of work. We worked a lot of fraternity parties at Rutgers and at the surrounding colleges. We would go down to Princeton, we would go all the way out to Pennsylvania, to Lehigh and a lot of local clubs, and we were a cover band, you know. We did four or five sets at night, everything from The Rolling Stones to Buffalo Springfield to The Young Rascals. But we started to get quite a little following around the area. We started writing some songs that we would sort of sneak into the sets, you know, and by the time we were ready to finish school, I would say, you know, sort of half of our performance was original songs and half of covers, and we were getting pretty good crowds, so we were doing pretty good. The personnel changed from time to time. The final personnel that became The Looking Glass that made the record was Larry Gonsky from Rutgers, played piano; Peter Sweevel from Rutgers, played bass; I played guitar, and we had a number of drummers. And the drummer who wound up being the drummer in the band that made the record was Jeff Grobe, also known as Joe X Dubi, and he went from a neighboring college, but he also had a band, so that worked out well. We thought that we could take a shot at doing something with the band. I said to my folks, who still lived back in Brooklyn, I said to them, “I want to try to give this a year before I get a real job. And I got the degree that you wanted me to get. It’ll be there, but I think we can maybe make something of this.” And they weren’t too pleased about it, but at that point, they kind of had to go along. We found a house to rent up in the northwest corner of New Jersey, an area called Hunterdon County, and it’s really beautiful. It’s near the Pennsylvania border. It’s, you know, trees and rivers. It’s, you know, it’s not like the Newark area or the Jersey Turnpike area that you’re used to. It’s really country out there. It had three bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs had a big old country kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace, and acres and acres behind it. We set up all the gear in the living room, and on the weekends we’d pack it up into Doobe’s van, and we’d go out and we’d play gigs on the weekends, and make enough to pay the rent and buy food and all. And then during the week, we would write and we would jam, and we had a little four-track Kiak records when we’d make demos and try to see if we could put together something that we could present to a record company. And, you know, we’d play the gigs on the weekends, and then during the week, we’d sleep late and then make music later in the day, at night. So it was—it was a very, very cool time of my life. And that house is where I wrote “Brandy.” I remember I was living in the upstairs bedroom, and I had just gotten a used Gibson J-200, which is a big, nice acoustic guitar. I think I picked it up at Manny’s Music Store on Forty-Eighth Street in New York, and I was just strumming it, and I was writing the way I usually do, which is, you know, I just kind of play around until I get a chord progression—and I kind of like—and, you know, start to repeat that over and over again. And I had a girl that I went out with in high school. Her name was Randy, and I just started singing over the chord changes, “Randy this, Randy that.” And then suddenly, the story started to come together in the verses. And, you know, I’ve often been asked, you know, “With I a sailor, you know, within the Merchant Marine?” “Where did the story come from?” And the truth is, it came out of thin air, you know. It’s one of those things that it hits you. And when I got the first verse in my head, I kind of knew where the story was going. And at that point, I said, “Well, I’ve got to change Randy, because, first of all, Randy is a weird name, and then it can be a boy or a girl.” And also, she’s going to be a barmaid, she should be Brandy. So I had that going, and I had the verse written on the guitar, and I was stuck for a while on it. And we had an upright piano downstairs in the living room where we rehearsed, and I can only play piano in the key of C. I went and I wrote the verse song on the guitar in the key of E. So I went down to the piano. I started playing around, and I found something that I kind of liked for the chorus, because the chorus is, it’s more of a piano thing, because it really is like a triad that stays on the top, and it’s the bass that moves that makes the chords change, which you can do on piano, but it’s not really that great on guitar. So I would—I would run up to the upstairs bedroom, where I played the verse for a while and get the hang of that, and then I’d run downstairs, and I’d get the chorus working on the piano, and then I had the chorus worked down on the piano, and then I worked a bridge hat on the piano. And then—and then finally I realized, “The idiot,” you know, I was just bringing the guitar downstairs. You don’t have to keep running up and down. The tune got started rather quickly. I think I got the story going and the idea of how the chorus would go, probably, in a couple of days, but completing it took quite a while. I remember it took me weeks to be able to get the story complete, and with the rhyme scheme, and to tell the entire story in approximately three minutes, which was as long as a pop wreck it could usually be in those days. So I finally got that done, and we added it to our repertoire in the group of stuff that we did for bar bands, and we put it on our little tact demo, and we moved forward. And a few months after that—and I tell you, “the chief,” I don’t really remember how we met him out there in New Jersey—but we met a fellow named Mike Gershman, who had been a big-time publicist in the music business in L.A., and he was looking for something to do. He wanted to move back East Coast, which is where he was from. And somehow or another, he came out to a show that we were doing, and he said, “You know, I think you guys are pretty good. I’d like to manage it. I’d like to try to get your record deal.” And, you know, he had done a couple of things, and he said, “Okay, cool, let’s see what that does.” And one thing led to another, and Mike got our demos to Clive Davis at CBS Records in New York, and Clive liked the demos well enough that he set up a showcase for us at the Café Au Go Go down in Greenwich Village. We opened for Buddy Guy, I believe, and he came down and heard us, and he liked it, and he offered us a deal, and we signed with Epic Records. We signed an album deal with them, I guess this is nineteen seventy and a half, maybe nineteen seventy-one, and signed us up to do an album. We still lived in Hunterdon County. It took us about an hour and fifteen minutes to drive into New York, and no traffic, but, you know, it was great. So we started to put the album plans in place. Clive said, “I think you guys should go down to Memphis, and Steve Cropper should produce you.” Steve Cropper, of course, from Bookati and EMGs, he wrote—co-wrote—all the ODIs reading hits, you know, fabulous music. So we were—we were thrilled we should be a magic grade, and we went down to Memphis. And as soon as we got down to Memphis, there were curfews put in place because there was a little, uh, a bit of racial stuff going on there, so they had shut down Memphis. So instead of being able to see the town and hang out, we were allowed to go from the holiday into the studio and back. And that was about it for the week or ten days that we spent in Memphis. We cut the four sides. We were real happy with him, and we went back and scheduled a meeting with Clive to listen back to the stuff, and we played it back in his office. He said—and we all agreed. He said, “Guys, these are really good recordings that sound like a really well-recorded bar band, which is what we were.” And that is not exactly what you want to hear from Clive Davis after spending a lot of label money going down to Memphis. You want to hear something original. When we come back, more of Elliot Lurie’s story. Here on Our American Stories. And we’re back with Our American Stories and the story of Elliot Lurie, the member of the band Looking Glass who wrote the hit song “Brandy, You’re a Fine Girl.” Despite the hit that the song was, before they recorded the final version, they were told that they sounded, well, like a well-rehearsed bar band. We returned to the rest of the recording of their hit song and the touring that came after.

“They don’t sound like hits,” he said. “And I think a couple of these can be hits.” “I think that song ‘Brandy’ can be a hit,” and he pointed to another, and said, “I think those can be hits, but they need hit production, and this isn’t it.” So we kind of agreed, weren’t we? We weren’t disappointed, and we were looking for a hit. I mean, you know, we wanted a hit record. That was our goal. So Clive put us with a guy named Sandy Linzer, and Sandy Linzer had been very involved with The Four Seasons. He co-wrote some of their hits. Uh, he’d been in the New York pop world, uh, and that he was firmly rooted in the New York Brill Building pop world, which I admired that. You know, I always loved that stuff. I mean, my idols were Carole King and the writers who came out of the Brill Building. So I was throwed with that. And Sandy came out to the house in Hunterdon County, uh, and we ran through it, and he really helped a great deal in putting the arrangements together. Uh, for instance, uh, when we—when we did “Brandy,” when we recorded with Steve Cropper, it started with the verse, a little instrumental piece of the verse, and that whole great intro that, you know, that hit record intro that you hear on the record—up the notes so much. I mean, we came up with that. But the idea of putting that at the front and doing that as a leading that was Sandy’s idea of a great, you know, a great pop New York producer who said, “You know, you’ve got to put the hook up front. I mean, you know, hit ’em with the hook.” And so Sandy helped us any—any producer—rhythm track, and we did a vocal, and we’re gonna—we’re gonna do the horns in string session, and he bought an arranger. It was a very reputable arranger, and Sandy wanted to put a ship’s bell on the intro and the arrangement that the guy had written. The guy started playing it, and we hated it. It was—it sounded like every other pop record that you’d hear in the early seventies. It was a little schlocky. We thought, “I’m not going to tell you the name of the arranger because…”