Brown Eyed Girl, In The Backyard July 24, 2007
Van Morrison moved back home, to a small terraced house with his parents, to where he had grown up, having already tasted some musical stardom abroad.
As a boy and as a teenager, perhaps outside of his musical beliefs and loves – and certainly all the time leading up to his going abroad, he was not so sure of himself.
The fact that he was back, perhaps he was not so sure of himself – again. Still, during this ‘second’ stay I like to imagine Van The almost Man got the vision a second time, committed to paper and to verse and to song – and to a song sung a million times by countless semi-drunks and romantics… the vision of the Brown Eyed Girl.
In fact the hit of a song we hear on the radio was his second stab at it. The more successful version.
Anyway, whilst I was tracking down George Best (footballer) growing up in Northern Ireland, a short walk across Belfast’s south-east side from Van’s street (they were also born within months of one another in 1945), I visualized what Van saw in summonsing up “Brown Eyed Girl”. He recalled, indeed summonsed up again all those first-time feelings when love and first kisses and glances – and before that even being in the presence of a girl with some shape and look in her cheeks (and eyes) – was new.
Twenty something he strolled through Orangefield past the school gates and “the stadium” (an enclosed oval bicycle track with banking at either end), saw the thickets of trees where schoolchildren had lay, had cut through; the graffiti and messages on the benches and on the circular metal railings protecting sapling trees. He saw school uniforms and uniforms pulled slightly to one side, off centre. He saw the mist of an early morning and damp everywhere – this was Belfast. There beside the school was the Redwood Tree with its comforting arms (he later wrote about). And over up there, above all these trees, on the incline, near Reverend Paisley’s house of thunder, tree-tops signifying Cypress Avenue.
All songs of “Astral Weeks”, the album that shot him to fame, and so too Brown Eyed Girl, are borne of these overlays of childhood feelings and adult rationale (power to verse) – like feelings drawn from the man and boy both.
And George Best, whose genius is also mused upon by just about everyone, not in the least the many women who have waited on him, cited “Brown Eyed Girl” as his favourite ever song.
I won’t need to direct you to a download site for it. It’s there in the human jukebox, yours and mine, start humming.
