Song Origins
C. Brown
JB:
Well, a friend of ours who was Mike's roommate in college, he wrote "C. Brown".
He introduced it in its raw form to us and we took it over... He was very willing to let us just manipulate the heck out of it.
And the way it started out, it was pretty much...
I think it was the sympathy for the Charlie Brown kind of character.
You know, he's not the jock, he's not the head of the class, but there are a lot of other people out there who are either like that or they're being treated like that so they *are* like that...
R&R:
Or they just feel that way...
JB:
Yeah, they feel that way sometimes, they don't *always* feel that way, so "Gimme a break and quit looking at me like that".
And that's what I read from him, and then when you start going into the lyrics and singing something night after night, and finishing out a tune, it'll...
You know, for me, while I'm singing, the image is coming up and I'm pretty much...
the words are a description of what's going on in my head.
R&R:
But do you see that description as Charles Schultz would draw it?
JB:
No, no, that's the bit.
All of a sudden I'm sitting there it and-- Oh!-- it switches.
It wasn't Charlie Brown anymore, it was Charles, Charles Schultz, as a little kid in school, and he's drawing this picture of Lucy on the chalkboard, as a kid.
So he's drawing a gun, he's drawing it.
As well as, you know, you can see this image as well, [motions as if pulling a gun from a holster] but the overall... when I examine the tune, the overall image is, he's drawing a gun in a square, he's made a frame on the chalkboard, and in a cloud of dust he erases it, and the whole image is gone.
I was tying it into, maybe Charles was telling us something about his childhood through the Charlie Brown character.
And even as a kid he might have had some, what you could interpret to be "violent tendancies" toweard snuffing Lucy out. But in the imagery it's just as, actually more feasible-- arguable—to say that you're just dealing with a kid who wrote a slightly violent image on the board and then erased it.
He acts differently: he felt one way and he manifested it so far as his drawing.
And as he gets older he's controlled that too.
You know, you don't have to snuff out Lucy.
She's gonna get hers in the end anyway. So that's about it on Charlie.
It started with somebody else, and we kinda embellished it.
And then it took a wierd twist five years ago or something, 'cause we hadn't visited the image...
All of the sudden instead of Charlie Brown it's Charles Schultz.
And all of the sudden it just popped up, and...
R&R:
In the middle of a peformance?
JB:
Oh yeah.
And all of the sudden, it was like, Wow, that's the way the song should be.
That's what's happening.
And that way, you don't really take credit for writing that.
It happened.
# of times played: 746
First time played: 02/13/86
Frequency: 3.5 shows
Longest drought: 41 shows (10/04/10 > 06/14/11)
Most common lead in: It Ain't No Use (38 times)
Most common lead out: Travelin' Light (30 times)
Most common set position: Set 1, song 3 (63 times) Co-written by: Jeff Riley