Everclear – Brown Eyed Girl (2001)
I’ll get to the cover in a sec, but let’s deal with the subject matter and its backstory.
This song rocket-launched the remarkable career of Sir George Ivan Morrison in 1967, and occupies the rare air of over 10 million radio plays and remains to this day the most played-plus-downloaded song of the 1960’s. That’s an awful lot of Beatles and Garfunkle & Simon songs to best. That’s an awful lot of fifty-year-olds who don’t know how to stream it for free.
So, whencefromth does Van the Kaniggit come to refer to his golden egg as a “throwaway song”, and “not one of my best… I’ve got about 300 songs that I think are better”?
[ed. Sir’s studio albums total 462 songs, putting the most-played song of the 60s in the 35th percentile of his oeuvre… according to Sir, that is.]
How many artists have ever shit-talked their own signature piece thus? Hint: rhymes with ‘hero’. Double-you tea eff?
Well back when Sir was Bloke, he signed a record contract – his first, know you – with Bang Records (b. 1965, d. 1982) that obligated him to all recording, production and other sunk costs and paid him the square root of [rhymes with ‘hero’] in royalties. Like, forever.
If that wasn’t bad enough, and as a result of that fiendish contract, Sir’s debut album Blowin’ Your Mind! was compiled and released without Sir’s benediction or input. It just appeared. That’s called being the spacebar on the RACI chart. Mystery solved.
Fast-forward the 8-track tape three decades and up the coast to Portland and we have our topic. Everclear was formed the very same year as Counting Crows. [ed. Legend has it that they’ve never been seen playing on the same stage together at the same time. Suspicious? Yeah, me too.] But that canny similarity notwithstanding, they forged their own path through nine studio albums and some modest broadcast success over two decades.
Art Alexakis‘ arrangement of Sir’s Throwaway is striking. A song that needed no re-inventing was re-invented as a phat, cheeky, almost satiric bit of fun that almost seems to rub it in to its maker’s resentment. It’s carried almost entirely by the rhythm section, which starts the song with a schleppy drumbeat and the song’s opening hook sitting in the bassline. The holyshitification is complete with some incredibly rich vocal harmonies (not just on the sha-la-la’s) and lovely, creative chord colours in the relatively understated guitars. And I don’t normally pay much attention to such matters, but I should mention that the (official) video is straight from the chucklehut.
When asked in a Time Magazine interview in 2009 if there are any current groups that excite him, Sir didn’t skip a beat: “No. Absolutely none. Nothing. It’s all been done.”
Good thing NARAS doesn’t have a ‘Cuddly Artist of the Year’ category.
[ed. thx to Suz for the tip]
