Happy 69th, Van Morrison.

It was almost exactly forty seven years ago today that I, newly arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts for my first year of law school, was sitting with my newly made friend Tom McCoy in a little sandwich shop called Hazen's on one of the side streets near Harvard Square. I was biting into my roast beef on a bulkie roll (Boston's analogue to beef on weck, though not as good) when someone dropped a coin into the juke box and played "Brown Eyed Girl." Right then I knew it would be one of those songs, like "Believe Me" and "Uska Dara", that would be engraved on my memory. I didn't have to wait long to hear it again, though; it became a staple on WRKO, the Beantown top forty station to which I tuned my clock radio.

Van and I have come a long way since that day in 1967. He's made lots of splendid music, some of which I've posted here.

Photo by Jarvin via Wikimedia Commons.