The Seafaring 'Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)' by Looking Glass Came From... New Jersey?
- edgarstreetbooks
- Feb 16
- 2 min read
‘200 Greatest 70s Rock Songs Vol. 2’ Book Excerpt
Frank Mastropolo
The members of Looking Glass were students at Rutgers University in New Jersey when the band formed in 1969. Singer-guitarist Elliot Lurie told The College Crowd Digs Me how the band got its name.
“We were all sitting in my car trying to come up with a name for the group and we may have been slightly under the influence of something [laughs]. And we started looking at the rearview mirror in the car and we thought, ‘Well, we are sort of reflections of ordinary folks here, why don’t we call ourselves the Mirrors?’ But then we said, ’No, that’s no good.’
“It was the psychedelic days and we started talking about how a mirror is just a looking glass. And we all thought that was cool. We’ll do that. We’ll call ourselves Looking Glass.”
Lurie wrote and sang lead on “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” a №1 hit in 1972. “I wrote the song the way I usually do,” said Lurie. “I grab my acoustic guitar and play a chorus until I get a progression that I kinda like. And then I sort of free-associate nonsense lyrics over it.
“I had a girlfriend in high school named Randy. And I was just singing her name as the story came together. But then I thought, ’Well, Randy’s a problem because that could be a male or a female name. And the character in the song is a barmaid.’
“So I changed it to Brandy. I just wrote it up in my bedroom in New Jersey. The story just kinda came together from the first verse and I wrote it from there. But, you know, it’s a really very, very short story in three minutes.”
Looking Glass followed “Brandy” with “Jimmy Loves Mary-Anne.” “People think we’re a one-hit wonder, but technically we weren’t because that record did enter the Top 40,” Lurie explained. ”In certain cities, it was a big hit. In other cities, not so much.
“Since the charts were made up of the combination of airplay and sales, it lingered around on the charts from the airplay it was getting, but it didn’t get way up there because of the lack of sales, I guess.”
Frank Mastropolo is the author of 200 Greatest 70s Rock Songs Vol. 2, part of the Greatest Performances series. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.
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