Beach Boys – "I Get Around" (1964)

I’m a real cool head

I’m makin’ real good bread 

I vividly remember finding a copy of “I Get Around” in the street in front of my grandmother’s house in Joplin, Missouri, when I was 12 years old.

The Schwinn 2-speed bike I was riding
when I found “I Get Around”

The 45 had warped in the hot sun, so I couldn’t play it on the record player I had won in a local radio station’s spelling bee.  (That was a great disappointment.  I could afford to buy only a very few records when I was a kid, and getting a great one like “I Get Around” for free would have been musical manna from heaven.)

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Even though I’ve heard “I Get Around” hundreds of times since it became the Beach Boys first #1 hit single in 1964, I had never deciphered the lyrics from the chorus that are quoted at the beginning of this post. 

“I Get Around” was released only a few months after the Four Seasons’ “Rag Doll” – which is the oldest song in the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” HIT SINGLES HALL OF FAME.  Both songs are as innocent as can be – perfectly matched to my equally innocent 12-year-old sensibility circa 1964 – but they otherwise couldn’t be more different.  “I Get Around” marks a quantum leap forward in the growth and development of American pop music, foreshadowing the increasingly complex masterpieces that Brian Wilson would craft over the next few years.

“I Get Around” is the musical embodiment of mid-sixties Southern California car culture.  For the singer of the song, girls are great but cars are greater.  Saturday nights are for drag racing – not for dates with your steady girlfriend.

Click here to listen to “I Get Around.”

And click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: