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

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

>Chuck Igo quoted the following:
>Van: Do you know that on the Bang album cut of "Brown-eyed Girl" the line
>"making love in the green grass" was blipped?
<snip>
        Thanks for this very interesting bit. Morrison gives few
interviews, then or now.
        But I must stand corrected for saying in an earlier post that the
original release was not censored. I'm still *almost* 150 percent sure the
original single was the uncensored version and it got played plenty on the
radio. At least, for now, that's my story and I'm stickin' to it. This
would explain how the censored version got started and carried over to
later greatest hits albums and such.
        I believe that Bang, which Morison loathes, basically repackaged
the original LP at least twice and re-released it as Morrison became bigger
in the early '70s. Sometime in the '80s or '90s, Morrison recorded a song
about his experience with Bang. Name and what CD it's on escape me now. It
has a repeating line about "big-time operators on the music business scene"
or something like that. It's vicious. It accuses them of trying to coerce
him by threatening to get him busted for drugs, etc.
        After the Bang sessions, and after Brown Eyed Girl was a hit,
Morrison had no record contract briefly. He would not work for Bang again.
He signed with Warner, put out Astral Weeks, and the rest is history. But
in 1968 he was living in the Boston area (Cambridge, I believe), and
basically down on his luck. That's why as a 16-year-old I got to see him
play a gig at a teen-age summer dance at the Scituate Yacht Club. I am not
making this up. Half the kids there, drunk, didn't notice the difference
between him and the local garage band that also played "Gloria" at every
gig, but I stood there, right in front, rooted like a tree, transfixed. You
gotta figure he didn't even want to be there, but he was great anyway.

------------------------------