Brown Eyed Girl -- "Turn up the radio" (Was Re: Market Research)

[mwaters@mail.wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Kevin Vahey wrote:
<snip>
>One song that is WAY overplayed is Brown Eye Girl by Van Morrison, that was
>a so so hit in 1967 but not worthy of the airplay it gets 30 years later.
<snip>

         It is overplayed, but wasn't it more than a so-so hit? I think it
went pretty high on the chart (I'm too lazy to look it up). And today radio
is reflecting its popularity, IMO. Someone in the club DJ / karaoke
business told me a couple years ago that it's "officially" known in the
karaoke business as the most popular song people ask for, and that DJs
doing oldies get bombed with requests for it too. For whatever reasons,
it's a song that has built up more popularity than it had when it was
originally a hit. Morrison did a magazine interview in which he was
surprised/bemused that the song has become one of the most-played hits from
the '60s.

        Regarding the censoring edit: I don't remember ever hearing that on
the radio in Boston when the song was fresh, and I was already a huge Van
Morrison fan. I first found that edit on a German pressing of the "T.B.
Sheets" album that looked like it was from the mid or late 1970s. Not a
very good tape edit, either, at least on that album. The censor edit seems
to show up randomly now on some U.S. oldies station, so maybe it got loose
again on some CD. WDRC-FM in Hartford had that version coming up some of
the times they played the song for awhile, although I think it's gone now.
Does anyone know whether the censored version (which drops in a repeat of a
line from the first verse in place of the "offending" line in the last
verse) was made for U.S. radio in 1967?

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