Elliot Lurie: From Brooklyn to "Brandy (You're a Fine Girl)"

This is Lee Habib and this is Our American Stories and we tell stories about everything here on this show. From the arts to sports and from business to history and everything in between. Including your stories.

Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. They're some of our favorites. And we love bringing you stories about how songs are made. Also we love telling you stories about musicians.

And this time we bring you both. Robby brings us the story of a man who knew from a young age that a career in music was his future. Elliot Lurie is best known for writing and performing the Looking Glasses hit song, Brandy, You're a Fine Girl. But his career in music began years earlier.

Here's Elliot. Tell his story. I was lucky to grow up at a real special time and place. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Kind of came of age in the late 50s, early 60s. Surrounded by great music. We were blessed in New York to have four great top 40 radio stations.

And one R&B station that we used to be able to grab from Newark, New Jersey. And I was hooked. I was that cliched kid who went to sleep with the transistor radio under his pillow. And I think for my 12th birthday, my parents got me an old Wollensak reel-to-reel tape recorder. And I used to take the alligator clips and hook them up to the speaker of the radio.

And when a song came on that I liked, I'd record it. At one point, an aunt of mine gave me a ukulele for a birthday present. I had never played an instrument.

And I played it for a while and I kind of liked it. And then by accident, I sat on it and I broke it. And I figured, well, a guitar only has two more strings and that might be a little bit more fun. So I got my mom to buy me a guitar and shortly after that I started lessons and I always loved it. I had a very good teacher, taught me how to read music, taught me jazz stuff, all kinds of things like that. And I got into bands pretty early on when I was 14 or 15. I started playing in some local bands. And we'd do shows, we'd do dances, we even did some bar gigs where we had to lie about our age to get into the bar. And kind of decided that that was really what I wanted to do, to be a musician, which did not go over real well with my mom and dad. So yes, I was playing in a lot of bands locally. One of the bands when I was in high school, we got to do some demos over at Capitol Records to try to get a record contract.

I really liked it. I wanted to become a musician. But the Vietnam War was happening and I was of draft age and I didn't want to go there. So I wound up going to Rutgers University in New Jersey. I went there for one semester and I really wasn't very happy there. And I thought, you know what, I'm going to drop out of here and I'll take my chances with the draft board.

I've heard there's certain things that you can do for a couple of days before you go to the draft board, which may make them inclined to not have you in the Army. So I thought I would try that. And I got a job as a musician. So I found this guy who was looking for a backup musician. I played bass for him. It was like a little folk trio. And we played really cool little places down in the village.

We played the Bitterand and all the old village folky clubs down there. And he had a side project that was like a comedy group. And they made a novelty record, which was basically the song Wild Thing done in the voice of late Senator Bobby Kennedy. Of course, he wasn't late then.

He was still alive. And in New York anyway, it became a big hit. It was a novelty hit. They were put on a show that the famous New York disc jockey Murray the K. Murray the K from Win's 1010 New York was the hottest disc jockey in town. And he used to put on these review shows, either with the Brooklyn Fox, the Brooklyn Paramount, the RKO.

And in the past, I had gone to them as a kid. And they were like reviews of, you know, 10, 12 acts. I would see the Ronettes there, little Stevie Wonder, Mitch Ryder, all the acts at the time.

And it was great. They show a movie in between the shows. There'd be five shows a day. They'd run a movie and you'd come in and you stand in line in the morning at nine o'clock in the morning to get in. And as each show was over, some kids would leave and you'd move up.

So if you were willing to sit through the movie five times, you would finally get to the front rows by the end of the day. This group, they were called the Hardly Worth It Players. They got on the show because they had this hit novelty record. And I was the bass player. And this was just when the music was transitioning.

I think it was 1968. And Murray was kind of getting hip to the fact that, you know, there was a new kind of music coming around. They had The Who and Cream, which I think were their first appearances, at least in New York, if not in the States. And the show went on for seven days right through Easter break.

And these Hardly Worth It Players wound up sharing a dressing room with The Who for a week. And, you know, late at night after the shows were over, people would jam. I remember one night Wilson Pickle was playing bass and Al Cooper from the Blues Project was playing piano. And I didn't really know who Eric Clapton was. I had the balls to ask if I could use his guitar.

And I was jamming on his guitar the old SG that he had with the psychedelic painting. And if I wasn't hooked before on being a musician, that really cemented it for me. I said, okay, this is a great life. This is what I want to do. This is a great life.

This is what I want to do. The parents weren't thrilled. But sometimes parents aren't thrilled with the choices their kids make, and sometimes that works out, and sometimes it doesn't. Those great radio stations in New York at the time, by the time he touched band life, playing dances in bars in his mid-teens, well, that was it too. When we come back, more of Elliot Lurie's story, the writer of Brandy, You're A Fine Girl, A Life's Tale Worth Telling. His story continues here on Our American Story. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell, and love America like we do, we're asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of $17.76 is fast for coming, a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now, and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming.

That's OurAmericanStories.com. And we continue with Our American Stories and Elliot Lurie's story, and he's best known for writing the Looking Glass hit song, Brandy, You're A Fine Girl. We left off at the end of Elliot's high school career. After learning to play guitar and having played in local bands, he knew he wanted to pursue a career in music.

Let's return to Lurie and more of his story. But then the draft board called, and I did all the things that I had been told would work, and I was classified 1A, which meant they were going to call on me to go over there. So I hustled back to Rutgers University, and I got a little more comfortable at Rutgers after a while. I met a couple of guys who started hanging out, and we formed a band there.

The personnel changed over time. We used to rehearse in some of the student quarters that when there were public rooms there, we would take over and play for a while until they kicked us out. And we started getting lots of work. We worked a lot of fraternity parties at Rutgers and at the surrounding colleges. We would go down to Princeton.

We would go all the way out to Pennsylvania to Lehigh. And a lot of local clubs, and we were a cover band. We did four or five sets a night, everything from Rolling Stones to Buffalo Springfield to Young Rascals. But we started to get quite a little following around the area. We started writing some songs that we would sort of sneak into the sets. By the time we were ready to finish school, I would say sort of half of our performance was original songs and half were covers. And we were getting pretty good crowds, so we were doing pretty good.

The personnel changed from time to time. The final personnel that became the looking last that made the record was Larry Gonski from Rutgers, played piano. Peter Sweevil from Rutgers played bass. I played guitar. And we had a number of drummers, and the drummer who wound up being the drummer in the band that made the record was Jeff Grove, also known as Joe X. Doobie. And he went from a neighboring college, but he also had a band, so that worked out well. We thought that we could take a shot at doing something with the band. I said to my folks who still live back in Brooklyn, I said to them, I want to try to give this a year before I get a real job. I got the degree that you wanted me to get. It'll be there. But I think we could maybe make something of this.

And they weren't too pleased about it, but at that point they kind of had to go along. We found a house to rent up in the northwest corner of New Jersey, an area called Hunterdon County. And it's real beautiful. It's near the Pennsylvania border. It's trees and rivers. It's not like the Newark area or the Jersey Turnpike area that you're used to.

It's really country out there. It had three bedrooms upstairs. Downstairs it had a big old country kitchen and a big living room with a fireplace.

And acres and acres behind it. We set up all the gear in the living room and on the weekends we'd pack it up into Doobie's van and we'd go out and we'd play gigs on the weekends and make enough to pay the rent and buy food and all. And then during the week we would write and we would jam and we had little four-track Tiaq recorders and we'd make demos and try to see if we could put together something that we could present to a record company. And we'd play the gigs on the weekends and then during the week we'd sleep late and then make music late into the night.

So it was a very cool time of my life. And that house is where I wrote Brandy. I remember I was living in the upstairs bedroom and I had just gotten a used Gibson J-200, which is a big nice acoustic guitar.

I think I'd picked it up at Manny's Music Store on 48th Street in New York. And I was just strumming it and I was writing the way I usually do, which is I just kind of play around until I get a chord progression that I kind of like and start to repeat that over and over again. And I had a girl that I went out with in high school. Her name was Brandy.

And I just started singing over the chord changes Brandy this, Brandy that. And then suddenly the story started to come together in the verses. I've often been asked, was I a sailor?

Was I a merchant marine? Where did the story come from? And the truth is it came out of thin air.

It's one of those things that it hits you. And when I got the first verse in my head, I kind of knew where the story was going. And at that point I said, well, I got to change Brandy because first of all, Brandy is a weird name and it can be a boy or a girl.

And also if she's going to be a barmaid, she should be Brandy. So I had that going and I had the verse written on the guitar and I was stuck for a while on it. And we had an upright piano downstairs in the living room where we rehearsed. And I can only play piano in the key of C. I went and I wrote the verse on the guitar in the key of E. So I went down to the piano. I started playing around and I found something that I kind of liked for the chorus, because the chorus is it's more of a piano thing because it really is like a triad that stays on the top.

And it's the bass that moves that makes the chords change, which you can do on piano, but it's not really that great on guitar. So I would I would run up to the to the upstairs bedroom and play the verse for a while and get the hang of that. And then I'd run downstairs and I'd get the chorus working on the piano. And then I had the chorus work down on the piano. And then I worked the bridge head on the piano. And then finally I realized, idiot, you know, I was just putting the guitar downstairs.

You don't have to keep running up and down. The tune got started rather quickly. I think I got the story going and the idea of how the chorus would go probably in a couple of days. But completing it took quite a while. I remember it took me weeks to be able to get the story complete. And with the rhyme scheme and to tell the entire story in approximately three minutes, which was as long as a pop record could usually be in those days.

So I finally got that done. And we added it to our repertoire in the group of stuff that we did for bar bands. And we put it on a little T-Act demo and we moved forward. And a few months after that, and I tell you the truth, I don't really remember how we met him out there in New Jersey, but we met a fellow named Mike Gershwin, who had been a big time publicist in the music business in L.A. And he was looking for something to do.

He wanted to move back East Coast, which is where he was from. And somehow or another, he came out to a show that we were doing and he said, you know, I think you guys are pretty good. I'd like to manage it. I'd like to try to get your record deal. And, you know, he had done a couple of things and we said, OK, cool.

Let's see what that does. And one thing led to another. And Mike got our demos to Clive Davis at CBS Records in New York. And Clive liked the demos well enough that he set up a showcase for us at the Cafe Agogo down in Greenwich Village. We opened for Buddy Guy, I believe. And he came down and heard us and he liked it. And he offered us a deal and we signed with Epic Records. We signed an album deal with them. I guess this is 1970 and a half, maybe 1971, and signed us up to do an album. We still looked at it in Huntington County.

It took us about an hour and 15 minutes to drive into New York with no traffic. But, you know, it was great. So we started to put the album plans in place. Clive said, I think you guys should go down to Memphis and Steve Cropper should produce you.

Steve Cropper, of course, from Booker T and the MGs, he wrote, co-wrote all the Otis Redding hits. You know, fabulous music. So we were thrilled. We said, you know, that's great. And we went down to Memphis and as soon as we got down to Memphis, there were curfews put in place because there was a little bit of racial stuff going on there. So they had shut down Memphis. So instead of being able to see the town and hang out, we were allowed to go from the Holiday Inn to the studio and back. And that was about it for the week or 10 days that we spent in Memphis.

We cut the four sides. We were real happy with them. And we went back and scheduled a meeting with Clive to listen back to the stuff. And we played it back in his office. He said, and we all agreed, he said, guys, these are real good recordings that sound like a really well recorded bar band, which is what we were.

And that is not exactly what you want to hear from Clive Davis. After spending a lot of label money going down to Memphis, you want to hear something original. When we come back, more of Elliot Lurie's story here on Our American Story. And we're back with Our American Stories and the story of Elliot Lurie, the member of the band Looking Glass who wrote the hit song Brandy, You're a Fine Girl. Despite the hit that the song was before they recorded the final version, they were told that they sounded, well, like a well-rehearsed bar band. We returned to the rest of the recording of their hit song and the touring that came after. They don't sound like hits, he said, and I think a couple of these can be hits.

I think that song Brandy can be a hit. And he pointed to another one. He said, I think those can be hits, but they need hit production and this isn't it. So we kind of agreed. We weren't disappointed and we were looking for a hit. I mean, you know, we wanted a hit record.

That was our goal. So Clive put us with a guy named Sandy Linzer. And Sandy Linzer had been very involved with the four seasons. He co-wrote some of their hits. He'd been in the New York pop world. And he was firmly rooted in that New York Brill Building pop world, which I admire. You know, I always loved that stuff. I mean, my idols were Carole King and the writers who came out of the Brill Building. So I was thrilled with that.

And Sandy came out to the house in Huntington County and we ran through it. And he really helped a great deal in putting the arrangements together. For instance, when we did Brandy, when we recorded with Steve Cropper, it started with the verse, a little instrumental piece of the verse. That whole great intro, that hit record intro that you hear on the record.

Not the notes so much. I mean, we came up with that. But the idea of putting that at the front and doing that as a lead-in, that was Sandy's idea of a great pop New York producer who said, you know, you've got to put the hook up front.

I mean, hit them with the hook. And so Sandy helped us and he produced a rhythm track. And we did a vocal and we were going to do the horns in string session. And he brought in an arranger, a very reputable arranger. And Sandy wanted to put a ship's bell on the intro. And the arrangement that the guy had written, the guy started playing it and we hated it.

It sounded like every other pop record that you'd hear in the early 70s. It was a little schlocky, we thought. I'm not going to tell you the name of the arranger because I don't want to offend him. But he was a very well-known arranger and we hated it.

And Mike, our manager, was with us. And we went up to Clive and said, Clive, this is taking the direction that we're not liking. It's really taking the bubblegum direction and we want hits, but we're not a bubblegum group. We don't want to sound like that.

He said, well, what do you want to do? I said, well, Sandy put together a nice rhythm track and stuff, but we're not really happy with the vocal. We've got some ideas for background vocals that may work and we hate the horn and string arrangement. So we'd like to go back to the rhythm track and maybe take it from there. He said, you guys want to do it? I said, yeah, yeah, we'll do it with the engineer from the studio. And incredibly, he said, okay.

Which a lot of people over the years have said that Clive can be very strong-willed about certain things, and he can, but in this instance, he said, yeah, go ahead. So we went back to finish the record. We stripped it down to the original rhythm track. We redid the lead vocal. We came up with all the background vocals.

We did those. We called in another arranger to do a horn chart. We didn't like that one either, so we wound up humming the horn parts that you hear on the record. We hummed those to the horn players, and they would jot them down on the note paper. It was a big horn section. It was like seven guys, and that's expensive.

The guy from the record label was tearing his hair out. We were sitting there humming horn parts to the guys, and they were jotting them down and playing them. So they got into a little overtime, but the end result was good. So the final record that you hear is that original rhythm track with all the new vocals that we did and the new horn arrangement that we did. And that's the record that came out and became the big hit that you still hear today. The Road was an interesting experience for us because on that one hit, we could sell out a large club or a small place, maybe four, five, six hundred people, but there weren't enough of those to really sustain a tour.

So we would open for much bigger shows. And sometimes, you know, the pairings worked out really well. I remember we did a couple of shows with Steely Dan, which was great. We opened for them.

It was all different combinations, and most of the time it worked out pretty well. Although I remember once we opened for Alice Cooper, and this was when Alice was doing the full-blown show with the guillotine and all that. And, you know, his audience didn't want to hear, Brandi, you're a fine girl. We got up there and we got off in a hurry.

They were like, bring on Alice, get off this stage. So the road had ups and downs, but it was great. I got to see a lot of the country that I had never been to, the Midwest and the South.

We got out to California. You know, it wasn't like first-class touring. It was definitely Holiday Inn and a lot of driving. You'd fly into a big town like Chicago.

You'd rent a van and you'd drive all through Illinois and Ohio and maybe sometimes, you know, over to Minnesota. And we spent a lot of time in Ohio. I remember that. We had fun. It was really good. We got along very well.

The guys didn't do that alone very well, so it was fun. And we didn't have any other hits from the first album. We went into the second album. And we had one song on there that I had written called Jimmy Loves Marianne and we thought that would be the single from the second album.

It came out and it did okay. It entered the top 40, which, you know, when people call us one of the great one-hit wonders, I've heard that technically, to be a one-hit wonder, you can only have one song that entered the top 40. So technically, we had two, although it was... It's quite apparent to me why we're known as a one-hit wonder because the one hit that we did at was so huge and Jimmy Loves Marianne just creeped into the charts. But it got some play in certain cities.

I think it was Top 10 in Chicago and in Philadelphia. But never had nearly the success that Brandy did. We were disappointed in that because we thought we did a real good album with The Reef and we thought that somewhere in there there might be a hit.

But it didn't happen. And at that point, we were kind of at an interesting juncture because the band always had kind of a split personality. Gene Sweevil, who played bass and also wrote some of the songs on there, but with quite a different style than my writing and singing style. So when you go back and you listen to a looking last album, or if you came to see us in person back in those days, if you came to hear and see Brandy, you were a little disappointed because, you know, half of the stuff kind of sounded in that vein.

So it's pretty eclectic kind of stuff and it didn't really have an image either sound-wise or visually that you could wrap his arms around. And you're listening to Elliot Lurie tell the story of a very brief brush with pop stardom and music stardom and like so many bands that have a hit maybe a second. It's a rare thing and it's a good thing. But what happens after? That's the question. And we love pursuing that question here on this show. We've talked to any number of folks involved in hit TV shows, hit records and the like, and then have to live the rest of their lives because it just doesn't happen again.

What do they do? How do they live the rest of their lives and how do they deal with all of it? When we come back, more of Elliot Lurie's story here on Our American Story. And we're back with Our American Stories and the conclusion of Elliot Lurie's story, the man who wrote and performed the musical The who wrote and performed Looking Glasses hit Brandy You're a Fine Girl. The band realized that they weren't going to get much traction beyond Brandy. Here's Elliott to finish telling his story. And it became apparent also that anybody who thought of Looking Glass by then thought of Brandy. And that was the sound that they were looking for. So, you know, I kind of said to the other guys, listen.

I said, you know, this band has always been a democratic band. Pete writes half the stuff. I write half the stuff. It's not like we divide it up, you know, on a piece of paper.

You get five, I get five. It's just the way it came out. But, you know, everybody thinks Looking Glass is Brandy.

So maybe this is not going to really work. So I went off on my own. They continued, cracked the charts a bit.

I think. And I went out and did a solo album for Epic. Clive sent me out to L.A. to work with an L.A. producer.

Worked with some of the best session cats in L.A. The band was like half Toto and half the Jazz Crusaders. But the album, I find most of it unlistenable now when I go back to it. There were a couple of tracks on it that I like.

But it's one of those albums where, you know, if you're looking for a hit single and you do like ten tracks and like eight of them are near-miss hit singles, then it's a real crap album. By that point, I had moved into Manhattan. I was living in an apartment on the west side of Manhattan.

I was kind of drifting a little bit, didn't know what I was going to do. And it was the late 70s and I had fallen in with a group that wasn't a great group of people. You know, in the late 70s in New York, I was probably doing a little bit more stuff than I should have been doing.

And I finally said, this isn't working. We got to get out of here. So a friend of mine had moved to L.A. He was a TV producer, a kid I knew, I grew up with. We went to grade school together.

Still my best friend today. He said, I know an actor who's doing a play in New York and he's looking for an apartment in New York. He's willing to do a switch with you. He says, he'll be comfortable there. He's got a house over here.

You can take his house. So you do a switch like that. So I said, okay. The girl I was living with then, who turned out to be my first wife, we moved out to L.A. And at that point, you know, I was around 30. I hadn't had a hit since, you know, in seven or eight years.

Nobody was knocking down my doors to record me. So I really didn't know what I was going to do. And I was about to take a job at Radio Shack, just as a salesman at Radio Shack. I answered, man. And my friend, Stan, who had set up the apartment spot for me, he said, you can't do that, man. He said, that's not for you.

You can't do that. So he set me up with an agent at CAA, the kind of music agent who booked composers and things like that. So I went to see him and he said, well, he said, you know, would you want to try to write music for movies? He said, well, you know, I can read and write music. I said, but, you know, I can't do that kind of writing.

I'm not going to compete with, like, Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams. I can't do that kind of stuff. He said to me, well, maybe you'd like to be a music supervisor with your record business background. And I said, what is that? I didn't know what that was. He said, well, music supervision, it's kind of a new field in Hollywood.

And there are only a couple of people who are doing it successfully right now. He said, one of them is Gary LaMel, whose name at that time I didn't know. And he said, and the other one is this woman, Becky Shargo. I said, Becky Shargo? I said, is that the Becky Shargo who used to work for Epic Records out here in L.A.? He said, yeah. He said, she just supervised the music for two soundtracks. She did Urban Cowboy and Footloose.

I said, well, those were pretty good, pretty big. So I called her up, and I told her, I said, Becky, I'm out here in L.A. I'm looking for something to do. I heard you're doing this stuff. Do you need any help? So I'll work for you for nothing if you teach me the business. And she said, you know, I really could use some help.

I can't pay a lot of money, but, you know, if what you said is true, you work for a little money, I'll be happy to have you help me out and show you what it is. So I moved out there with my wife. We rented an apartment, and sure enough, I learned the business. I sat across the desk from her.

We had those old-fashioned telephones with the lights that blink, and they'd light up, and you'd hit the line. And I would just listen to her and do her stuff, and I started to get the hang of it. You know, music supervision is different from movie to movie. In those days, when I was working with Becky, a lot of it had to do with getting the soundtrack out and together to try to sell albums, but more importantly, from the movie's point of view, to try to promote the movie. And then these agents who represented Becky, there were two openings at two of the studios in town for a head of music, you know, a staff position at the studio, being the head of the music department at the studio.

One was Universal Pictures, and one was 20th Century Fox. So I went to each of the interviews, and I was actually offered a job at both studios, at Universal and Fox, and I chose Fox, and suddenly I was the executive in charge of music at 20th Century Fox. I was succeeding the legendary Lionel Newman of the Newman family, which included Alfred and Lionel's nephews, or Randy Newman, and Tom Newman, and David Newman, the great music composers. I mean, it's a legendary music family, and I'm supposed to step into this guy's shoes. But I didn't know anything much about orchestral recording and scoring and things like that.

I mean, Lionel, who I succeeded at Fox, he used to be able to get up on the stand and conduct a 60-p ghost reader, and did, often. But all of the studios were changing that job because you didn't have to actually compose the music, but if you'd get them a couple of head of soundtrack albums, that was a cool thing. So I did that, and I went to work for Fox. So basically, my first real job, outside of being a musician, I like to say, was being a senior executive at a multinational media corporation, because that's what I was. I was hired as a VP, and I was there for 10 years. When I left, I was an executive at VP.

I loved it. And then after that, I went back, after I left Fox, I went back to independent music supervision, and did that for about another 10 years, and worked on hundreds of movies and TV shows. If you were a 12-year-old girl back in 2000, you remember a show called Lizzie McGuire.

I wrote the theme song to the Lizzie McGuire show. But when the record business changed, the soundtrack business changed, when it all went to digital first, to downloads, and then to streaming. The soundtrack business became a lot more difficult because a lot of the soundtracks we used to make would be compilation albums. And you'd go to the movie, and you'd see the movie, and you'd want to go out and get the album, because you liked all the songs. Well, now with iTunes, you could just go on iTunes and buy the songs that you liked, and you'd have to buy the whole soundtrack album. So the business changed completely.

Once again, I didn't know what I was going to do, but now I was in my 60s, and frankly, between working at Fox and Brandy, getting used and for some reason hanging in there as well as it had, you know, I wasn't rich, but I could probably relax a little bit and not worry about how to feed myself and my family. And I got a call from a band in Atlanta called the Yacht Rock Revue. A young guy named Peter Olson got me on the phone. He said, we're Yacht Rock Revue, and we play yacht rock music. And I said, what is that? And he explained to me that yacht rock was this sub-genre of music that is like this very well-produced pop music, Hall & Oates, Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald. That's the pantheon of yacht rock.

Christopher Cross. The name comes from what kind of music would you listen to if you were on a yacht in 1985. And apparently, they had found this niche, and they were becoming really successful. It was basically a cover band, but a great cover band. And they were doing so well that they were beginning to invite some of the original vocalists from the records that they covered to join them in concert. And they asked me if I would come to Atlanta, if I would play a show with them. I said, sure. You know, I hadn't played a show in ages.

But I took my guitar out, I started singing, I got my chops up. I was ready to go down there. I went down there, and it was fantastic. They had like 4,000 people, and they weren't people my age. They were people in their 20s, 30s, early 40s, and having a fantastic time listening to songs like Brandy, and my friend Peter Beckett is on a lot of shows.

Baby Come Back was their tune, and they had Robby Dupree, Steal Away. And they started calling me from time to time, and I got back into doing some performing. And then once I got into it, I started doing some singer-songwriter shows in small clubs.

I started doing other review shows. But, you know, I do enough of those to keep busy. I still write, and I'm a happy, lucky 71-year-old guy at this point. And it's something we can all hope to say about ourselves.

I'm a happy, lucky 71-year-old guy at this point. And that's what life's about, is finding that spot where you can say something like that in your life and mean it. And great job, as always, to Robby on the production of the piece and finding it. Elliot Lurie's story here on Our American Story. Petraeus D.H.