My Obsession:

Van Morrison's "Brown Eyed Girl"

I’m not here to argue that “Brown Eyed Girl” is a great song—you probably know that. It rocks, it’s catchy as hell, Van Morrison wails throughout. It covers four subjects—youthful innocence, teen lust, young adult alienation, and nostalgia – marvelously, in about three minutes

I’m also not here to argue that the lyrics are pure sparkling evocative poetry: the innocence of “skipping and - jumping,” “slipping and a-sliding,” the emerging lust of “playing a new game”, and (one of my favorite lines of all time) “in the misty morning fog, oh, with our hearts a-thumping” are shimmering specimens of vivid imagery that bring his long-lost world to life. (Bob Seger’s “working on mysteries without any clues” is also a great evocation of that stage of life.)

I’m not even here to argue how influential “BEG” is, even though Seger’s “Night Moves” is basically a rewrite, brilliant as it is, and for that matter, Kiddie Rock’s “All Summer Long” is basically a rewrite of that.

I am here to pull on a particular thread of my obsession with the Belfast Cowboy, so let me start by noting that, after the new games and the thumping hearts, in addition to the sunlight and the rainbow and the waterfall, the second verse adds a transistor radio to the mix, and we’re on our way. A radio appears in many of Van’s songs, and perhaps you’re already nodding your head and thinking “Turn it up!” (“Caravan”) or “Hey Mr. DJ . . .” (“Domino”). We know they aren’t listening to the news or a ball game. The chorus of BEG asks “Do you remember,” which is one of Van’s favorite themes, leading to another, “when we used to sing?” They’re singing along to the radio! Turn it up some more!

In future installments of My Obsession, I’ll look at how the radio appears in “Caravan,” “Domino,” “Wavelength,” “Real Real Gone,” and other great songs. In “Domino,” of course he name-checks a musician directly, as he also does in various tunes, not to mention the more subtle references to music and musicians that flow through his work in “Moondance,” “Tupelo Honey,” and elsewhere.

Here, in “Brown Eyed Girl,” we have a song about singing, written and sung by a fantabulous singer. It’s a song about love and lust and nostalgia, of course, but the chorus focuses on the singing.

And what are they singing? Here’s where it gets fun. “Sha la la” is what Van sings, and those syllables can be pure nonsense scat sounds, or they could signify, through their lack of denoted meaning, a youthful freedom from care. Blah, blah, blah. Something like that.

But “Sha la la” are the lyrical contents of a song or two as well, and that makes some sense, given that in BEG they’re singing along to the radio. One of those songs, The Grass Roots’ “Sha La La La (Live for Today) “ suggests that same youthful freedom (“We were never meant to worry the way that others do”), and Morrison could be referencing it, except it came out the year after BEG .

There is another song, called “The Sha La La Song,” which although recorded by Manfred Mann as a cover, was first released by the Shirelles in 1964. Stylistically, it doesn’t seem to be something Van would want to claim as an influence, but thematically, it’s interesting. The title of the song has “Song” in it’s title. It’s about young love, of course, but it’s also about singing a song: “Baby you made me feel alright /So this is the song that I sang all night. Sha la la . . .”

So in his song about love and singing a song, he could be referencing a song about love and singing a song. I think that’s pretty cool. I know, you’re saying, maybe he didn’t mean it, maybe it was an accident. We don’t think of Van Morrison as a postmodern, self-referential meta-musicmaker. Sure. Maybe.

But, this isn’t actually the first time Morrison did this sort of thing, and it’s definitely not the last. Throughout his long and glorious (or Gloria-ous) career, he’s referenced other songs time after time, sometimes less obviously than others. “Gloria,” the garage classic he wrote with Them, lifts its title from the hymn “Gloria in Excelcis Deo,” and “Jackie Wilson Said” directly quotes one of his influences and makes it obvious from the get go. I’m not sure how important it is that it be deliberate all the time, but my obsession, or one of them at least, is not why but how he does it. Next up: Two songs from Moondance.