Time once again to revisit the Whiteland, Indiana living room of cousins Sally Perkins and Samia Battin Cote, where 50 years ago we spun this record again and again, and I, at 8 years old, was schooled in the potential joys of teenagerhood. Fifty years ago today The Beach Boys I Get Around hit No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100. Two weeks later, on July 4, appropriately enough, the song hit No. 1—the first No. 1 hit for The Beach Boys—where it stayed for two weeks. Unlike the bands previous hit, Fun Fun Fun, which tells a story about a girl and her Daddys T-Bird, I Get Around simply describes a state of being, where our narrator, a real cool head who is making real cool bread, and his friends are getting bugged driving up and down the same old strip, and so they have to find a new place where the kids are hip. Whereas half a year later Petula Clark would sing of the joys of Downtown, The Beach Boys in this song were all about going from town to town. The towns, we presume, were pretty much all the same; the joy was in getting around to all of them, in a car thats never been beat. It is mainly for that reason, we presume, that the boys have never missed yet with the girls they meet. The crew is affable or formidable enough that the bad guys know them, and leave them alone. The song, written by Brian Wilson and Mike Love, simply soars, in unusual fashion, moving in the first line of the chorus from G to E7, the sixth dominant seven, and spending the verses shuttling between A and D. Halfway through it modulates up to Ab. Also unusually, it starts with the chorus, sung by Brian, with Mike taking the lead vocals in the verses. Ten years later the song was a standout track on The Beach Boys double album Endless Summer, which became a huge bestseller, riding on a wave of nostalgia and allowing a new generation to discover The Beach Boys. I remember my sister Maryanne Woods and her early-teen friends putting the album on Endless Replay as they ran in and out of the house. Herewith this classic: https://youtube/watch?v=KnPL5OXSBNE
Posted on: Sat, 21 Jun 2014 01:30:35 +0000