Switched on Pop - Switched on Summer: Getting Around with the Beach Boys

Episode Date: June 28, 2018

Our Switched on Summer throwback mini-series begins in the heart of the 1960s, with the Beach Boys' perennial school's-out jam "I Get Around." We explore how every aspect of Brian Wilson's two-minute-long masterpiece is perfectly calculated to literally "get around"—harmonically, melodically, and lyrically—creating that unbeatable feeling of cruising all over town with the top down on a hot summer's night.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Charlie Harding, do you read me? I hear you coming in loud and clear, bright and beautiful. Good, because I have a very important transmission for you. What do you have? Round, round, get around, I get around. That is not a hit from the Billboard Hot 100, Charlie. That is a blast from 1964.

It's the Beach Boys I Get Around. And it signals a mini-series, if you will, from Switched on Pop, are Throwback Summer. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I am your friend and songwriter Charlie Harding. And this is Throwback Summer installment one. And we are starting with a song that for me epitomizes Summer, Charlie, and has since I was a wee little boy. This is I Get Around by the Beach Boys. This might be the archetypal song of Summer.

I think you could take any Beach Boys track from, you know, Sur City to Sloop John V and give it that title. That is the Result Detra. Let's just say the Beach Boys. I mean, it's right there in their name. This is a band that knows how to make it sound like summer. So what are we going to do with it? Okay, I get around. Why does this song make you feel so good?

It's two minutes and 12 seconds are endlessly repeatable. The longest period of time that I've ever felt joy. What is it? It is. From minute one to minute 212, this song is packed with musical exhilaration. Okay? And it is the whole song, works as this beautiful metaphor for getting around.

And however you interpret that, yeah, yeah, driving around town in your thunderbird, you know, hanging with your crew. I mean, this is,

there's something very timeless about it, even as it's totally in that 1960s moment. Uh, yeah, also the 1960s moment of sexual revolution. So, you know, maybe there's a double entendre here of,

I get around. Ah, our singer, the beach boys will not be held down here. Okay, how do we get around, right? One good way to get around is via harmony. I was going to suggest the highway, but yes, harmony. Sure, the harmonic highway.

Perfect. Okay. And this song really covers some ground here, okay? Yeah, where's it taking us? Okay, we start in the stable home key of G major. Happy key. But very quickly, we are moving to bizarre harmonic territory. We are starting to get around.

Our next chord is a chromatic chord, a chord that does not belong in the key of G major. E major. Ooh, it keeps it bright and shiny, but there's a note in there that, yeah, doesn't belong. Yeah, okay, so it's like, ooh, okay, that's true to their word, the beach boys are getting around. Harmonically, we are already jumping to a new place, and then another new place, A minor. Hmm, pretty. And then a very surprising place to a chord that is nowhere near the key of G major, F major. Oh, my goodness.

Charlie is shocked by what's happening here. And then finally to D major. And then back to G major. Wait, these are some strange leaps that they're making. I don't even understand this from our 18th century classical total harmony that we took together. totally confused. So for me and all the other folks who might not be music theorists, what the heck is going on here? Absolutely. Let's go right to the first chorus to really understand how these chords get around. Work in context. Okay. Okay, so our first I get around, that's our G major

chord. And then the next line from town to town, that's that E7 chord, that chromatic chord. and then our next line, I'm a real cool head. That's our A minor line. And then I'm making real good bread. Takes us to F major. And then that's followed up by the D major and that brings us back to G.

Okay, so now hopefully we have at least a rough idea of how these chords move. I've got to say the head bread rhyme is a real stretch. But we're not talking about rhyme. We're talking about harmonies. I'll continue.

No, okay. Maybe we'll get to rhyme later, but now we're talking about harmony. Okay, so just in this chorus, we have gotten around. Like, let's hear the difference if we didn't include these chords that don't belong to the key of G major, okay? This will sound very different. It would sound like this.

I get around from town to town. I'm a real cool head. I'm making real good bread. Now, I've just simplified that chord progression to G, E minor, A minor, D. Those are all chords that belong in the key of G major. And you know what? It sounds very square when I play it like that.

You know, we're not going anywhere. We're just going around, yeah, the town square. We haven't gone very far. Right, but if you really want to get around, you do what Brian Wilson does in this song, and he sort of tweaks this perfectly diatonic progression. He pushes that E minor chord up to a, an E major chord from here to here, making it, as you said, brighter, kind of surprising.

The A minor chord stays the same. But then rather than go straight to D major, he throws in this other surprising chord in F, and then that takes us to the D. So if I might work with your metaphor for a second, you know, the diatonic chord progression, G major. Diatonic being the chords in the key. Yes, thank you. diatonic being the chords that belong properly to the key of G major. That's like, you know, making a circle, right, around your block or something.

Sure, right. But when we add in these chromatic chords, then we're really getting around town. We're taking the side streets. We're like, you know, going to the bad neighborhoods here. We are really, and you feel it. Whether or not you're aware of this as you're listening to the song, oh, he played a subtonic chord there. That's irrelevant.

We feel that. We feel this experience of harmonically getting around. And for other folks that may not be as familiar, right? So the chromatic chords, literally chroma, adding more color, adding notes that don't actually belong in the key of G. So, you know, for example, when you're playing, you go from G to E, all of a sudden it's really strange because you've added this sharp note that doesn't belong in the key of G major.

In fact, it's really dissonant to the key of G major. If you play the notes in the E major chord over a G major chord, They don't work that nicely. Ooh, no, not at all. Super dissonant. But when they are used as adeptly as they are here, we feel just a little bit of that chromatic tension, but not enough to put us off, just enough to give us that sort of like electric buzz, right? We're moving.

We're speeding, cutting people off on the highway. Except then we get to the verse, and things come screeching. to a halt, Charlie, harmonically speaking. And before we listen to the music, what's the lyric here? I'm getting bugged, driving up and down the same old strip. I got to find a new place where the kids are hip. All right, let's have a listen to the verse here. I'm getting bug driving up and down the same old strip.

I got to find a new place where the kids are hip. Oh, my goodness. Yeah. So all of the sudden, we go from getting around and travel. to all these crazy chromatic harmonies to going nowhere. We're just going back and forth from one chord to the next,

A chord to D chord, A to D, A to D. And we feel that sensation of being stuck. You know, I'm getting bug driving up and down the same old strip as the chords go back and forth, back and forth. It's kind of boring.

And rhythmically also, it's just kind of like, don't, don't, don't. It's not very compelling. Then after the boring thing happens, you get this really strange, like Gershwin-E-o-i-orchestral... D-da-d-d-d-d-d-d-dhap-a-kkat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat-a-kat.

We're looking for the hip kids, who are colorful and interesting and musically compelling. Oh, I like that. Okay, so that little instrumental interlude is the hip-kids. Cool. Yeah, it's looking for the hip kids. They get their little music. They get their theme.

Right, right. Okay. Okay, and then we're back to that sort of those oscillating kind of going nowhere chords. Yeah. My buddies and me are getting real well known. Bad guys know us and they leave us alone. And then back to getting around. All of the sudden, that sort of like stuck chord progression gives way to this moving, expansive, chromatic expression.

And again, we can feel we're getting around. We can feel that sense of motion once again. My buddies and me, you're getting real well known. Yeah. It's nice because it provides a contrast. If they had just stayed in the course, you're constantly driving fast. You kind of lose sense of the fact that you're moving really quickly. Like when you get going too fast on the highway and you don't really realize you're speeding

because you just get used to it. Instead, they have to like break us to that halt. And then you appreciate even more when they floor it. Exactly. Okay, great. And speaking of flooring it, there's one other way that harmonically this song gives us that feeling of freedom of getting around of like owning your town I guess

and it's a moment Charlie that happens at a very surprising junction here we skip forward to a guitar solo let's take a listen to that a guitar solo accompanied by the typically beach boy-esque vowels awo

something happens at the very end of that guitar solo do you hear Charles. This is your music theory test. It sounds as if our thunderbird has hydraulics and literally just lifted itself into the air and modulated it into another key. Indeed, good ears. Chuck, we go from G major, where the key that we've been living in for the first minute and six seconds of this song to now in the second half of the song, just jacking things up a half step to A-flat. So by the time we start the next verse here,

none of the guys go steady because it wouldn't be right to leave your best girl home on Saturday night. We are cranked up a whole half step from where we began. We always take my car because it's never been beat and we've never missed yet with the girls we meet. Betty because it wouldn't be right to leave your best girl home on a Saturday night. So before we were down here in G, and now we're up here in A flat. These chords on their own right next to each other are incredibly unpleasant.

Yes, but when we go subtly from one key to the next like that, it gives us this sensation that we've sort of ascended to a new place. So we have gotten around both within the verses themselves, the core progressions, and then sort of in the large scale architecture of the song, we get around too, going from G major up to A flat. Oh, my gosh. And the song's nearly over because it's moving like a fast thunderbird. It's like two minutes long.

It literally is getting around faster than we could possibly imagine. Oh, yeah. But even as we're flying through, there's more here, Charlie, that gives us this feeling of being on top of the world, in control, master of your domain. When we come back, we move from the world of harmony to the world of melody. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

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melodically. In order to do that, we have to go back to the very beginning. I want to keep getting around let's go round round get around i get around yeah get around round round round round round so let's just focus in on that a cappella vocal introduction this is one of those sounds that is so characteristically beach boys right part of the reason this band is like so iconic and unforgettable and i think like we were saying at the start you know those kind of harmonies sound now like summer to us totally absolutely You hear then you want to take your shirt. Like, why is that? Why does these kind of acapella harmonies make us feel that way?

I think it might have something to do with this very characteristic sound that Brian Wilson gets from the Beach Boys' voices, which represents this massive spread of ranges, ranging from the very low. You can hear that down at the bottom there. Let's listen to one more time and try and isolate the low. the lowest voice here. Round, round, get around, I get around. Yeah, get around, round, round, I get around. So we have very low down,

get around, round, round, round, I get around. That's low for Nate. That's low. So that's happening down way at the bottom of the vocal range. And then, way on top of the vocal range, we have this almost impossibly high falsetto line. Let's hear that one more time. Round, round, get around, I get around.

Yeah, get around, round, round, I get around. So that high, like, eerie vocal line is Brian Wilson at the very top. So in just the very first seconds of this song, we have this huge spread kind of filling the entire... I'll deploy a little clinical term here, the entire tessitura of the human vocal range. Tessitura being a very... fancy way to just say from the lowest note to the highest note that humans can really possibly sing

yes exactly so from the very first moment of this song we're kind of being hit by this like matrix of sound from low to high and it just feels almost like you're being bathed in sound

almost like it's an ocean wave of voices just like crashing over you I was going to say that it sounds actually bright and the brightness feels like the sun. So there's my metaphor for you. Okay, either way, I mean, we are hearing... Full spectrum.

Totally, no, totally. And there's so... Okay, and here's the other thing about the way the Beach Boys use their voices and, like, creating this huge stack of sound. You hear all these kind of individual notes at once, right? You hear each of the singers, and they're very distinctive voices from low to high.

But then they also all blend together so perfectly, so it wants the kind of individual and an indistinguishable group, right? Yeah. So that gives us maybe a feeling when we're listening of like this sense of, I don't know, commonality of like universalism, of being yourself, but also being one of many. And I think there's something kind of ecstatic about that feeling. Yeah, absolutely. there's other moments in the song that reinforce this.

If we go back to that very first verse, every time the verse comes around, there's this pattern. The first half of the verse is kind of stark, right? There's like not a lot happening instrumentally here. So let's just listen to the first half of the first verse. It's like the engine stalled out. Right, but it starts to rev up Because first, bugged driving up and down

The same old strip, there's not much going on there. The second half, I got to find a new place where the kids are hip, We start to add more like we add more guitar parts, But we also add this incredible texture, which is just a hand clap, a group of handclaps, actually, On every beat, right? And I love what that you said that, Because it is almost like the engine revving up,

but it's this feeling, again, of like, a collectivity and of just, like, literally one of the most sort of unbridled expressions of pleasure we can give, which is clapping your hands. It's so ubiquitous in pop music. I mean, it's really popular in hip-hop right now. But check it out. The Beach Boys are clapping along and getting everybody going, revving their engines. Whoa, that's a crazy connection that you just made.

Right, how the hand clap has migrated from. from 60s beach pop to the modern hip hop. That's interesting. Yeah. I mean, it's a great trick. Gets everybody clap and everybody moving, everyone feeling like they're part of a communal thing. It's especially well deployed at a concert.

It certainly does here. And I mean, this is a pretty funky moment in the song when those handclaps. It really makes me start nodding my head. Another moment of unbridled joy in this song is that same guitar solo. with its almost like howling wolf-esque, ahu vocals. Let's take another list of the back.

I mean, if that doesn't get you pumped up, I don't know what does, right? That is lyrically the feeling of driving with the top down and the wind blowing through your hair and you're just kind of shouting beyond words, right? Just sounds. A-oo! I have so much to say about this guitar solo. It's not just because I'm a guitarist, but because these sounds are from the strangest location,

they are not Southern California, despite having adopted that as its home. Okay, I'm intrigued. Tell me more. Where are these sounds come from then? Well, the surf rock guitar, which is so synonymous with the Beach Boys, really comes through the wonderful playing of Dick Dale.

And, you know, they covered his track, Miserlulau, which was made famous on the Pulp Fiction soundtrack, but it was, you know, also a very popular surf track of the time. You know the one I'm talking about? Oh, yeah. Dick Dale is really one of the greatest surf guitarists. So he's of Lebanese and Polish-Belarusian descent. No way. Yes. And Miserulow, in fact, is an old traditional song from the Middle East.

it comes either Some people think it comes from Egypt or Turkey I think its exact location has not been set But Dickdale intentionally drew From Middle Eastern scales And scales that came through Eastern Europe

And so when you listen to surf music Part of you is taken by that reverberated Twangy guitar but underneath it The notes that they're choosing are actually coming through the Middle Eastern Eastern Europe And somehow that has become the Southern California sound.

Okay, so you're saying that this guitar solo we're hearing here, like has that flavor of, you know, Southern California beach chill vibes. Via Turkey, Lebanon, and Belarus. But our association with that sound is actually much more complex than we might realize. Well, you know, Southern California is a major hub of people from all over the world of all different nations, so that might be appropriate. and that the song is literally getting around,

perhaps this is a nice sort of United Nations reference. No, I love that. And as much as the Beach Boys were a very patriotic band in many ways, it's a nice reminder that what may appear to be a certain kind of crew cut, white bread, square sound is actually still made up of these incredibly diverse influences that reflect the incredibly diverse place these band members came from. Hell yeah. Okay, Charles, there's one more way in which this song gets around, and that's in the lyrics.

Okay. Which are full of these wonderfully hip expressions from the early 1960s. You mean dated expressions? Well, put yourself in 1964. This is the beginning of counterculture, but still early on. And I don't think it's a given that people have necessarily heard phrases. is like, I'm a real cool head. I'm making real good bread.

Oh, so you were saying those lyrics were intentional. I was saying they sounded really dumb. I thought it was almost like, what rhymes with head? Bread. Oh, no, no. Oh, yeah, no, no, no. This is like, okay, so this is how the lyrics of the song get around because what they're reaching into here is a self-culture

that I think most people in 1964 wouldn't have been familiar with, the subculture of the beat generation. Okay, this is interesting, yeah, because, Of course, us having grown up in the internet generation with mass media and cable, and you could immediately access and find what things meant. But I certainly see how this could be really, truly countercultural for music to be using words that people literally don't know. There's a mystique to it.

Yes, definitely. And this probably was the opportunity for a lot of people who were interested in these subcultures to tap into them further. So, you know, if you're maybe an older person in 64, real cool head, real good bread, Like, what are they talking about? The kids these days, don't get it. But if you're younger, like, oh, like, okay, I want to know more about this. I want to dig into the work of Lawrence Ferland Getty and Alan Ginsberg

and discover, like, what this slang language is all about here. Oh, yeah. I love this stuff. So in another way, the Beach Boys are getting around in this song, harmonically, melodically, instrumentally, and now lyrically, they're going from, high to low, they're going from, you know, the beach to the urban underworld here in very subtle ways, but by having these lyrical references here, they're showing how they can get around through different sections of society as well. And literature referencing Ginsburg and

Karowak and these sorts of folks. Absolutely. So at this point, hopefully we can step back and see that this song, which seems like just a two-minute-and-12-second black. of teenage exhilaration is in fact carefully controlled and composed to the point of near madness. Every element here

is telegraphed to give you that feeling of breakneck speed and complete power over your surroundings. Oh, that's so brilliant. I absolutely love it. We have gone so far. We've gone to the Middle East

to Eastern Europe. We've gone to Southern California. We've explored multiple generations. We've used language. I still don't know what it means, but it sounds interesting. Tessatura, Charlie, come on. Tessitora. I was talking about the bread, but, yeah, Tessatura, that one's a little lost.

Well, Tessitora is harder to rhyme. Yeah, that is true. Good. I'm glad you think so, and this is my first offering for our summer throwback special. I can't wait to keep going. It's been so much fun. We have much. We have centuries of music, too.

to explore here. I didn't know that the Baroque era had great songs of summer, but I'm curious. Hello, Vivaldi's Four Seasons, Charlie. Come on, please. Tusha. Until then, I remain your co-host,

Nate Sloan, who produced this episode. And I am Charlie Harding. I just responded to everything he said, where our show is mixed, edited, and wondrous things are done to it by Bill Lance and our design is by Luke Harris. We are a proud number of the Panoply Network. You can reach us on Twitter at Switchdown Pop.

Email us, contact at Switchdownpop.com. Find our podcast on any podcast player, including Spotify. And if you listen on Apple, we would so appreciate it if you leave us a review. We'll be back again in two weeks. And until then, thanks for listening. Thanks for listening.