The Beach Boys: "I Get Around"

June 29, 1964 (1 week)

Whether it's the very best, the utterly incompetent or all those charming groups somewhere in between, the vast majority of chart topping acts are represented fairly well by their biggest hits. No, not every Beatles' classic made it to number one but several did. The same goes for Elvis, Bee Gees, Michael Jackson and Madonna. But not quite everyone. Many of Elton John's number one hits disappoint compared to some of the brilliant songs he recorded at the same time — and the same goes for The Beach Boys.

If anything, it's their number twos that give a stronger impression of the quintet. "Surfin' USA" had been a chart runner up a year earlier and it would eventually be followed by "California Girls", "Barbara Ann", "Sloop John B" and "Good Vibrations". I know, "Barbara Ann" is a silly throwaway and there are many who think "Sloop John B" is a botch (they're wrong, by the way) but you can't tell me "California Girls" and "Good Vibrations" aren't among their finest moments. (That said, "Sail On, Sailor" is another of their remarkable singles and it limped to number seventy-three)

"I Get Around" might be the best of their trio of Canadian chart toppers but even it isn't quite at the level of their absolute best. And while you could chalk that up to a major improvement in the quality of their work over the next couple years, it shouldn't be forgotten that an arguably superior song ("Don't Worry Baby") was on its B side and that it had already appeared earlier in the year on their fifth album Shut Down Volume 2. (The front cover of the single sort of implies that "Don't Worry Baby" was meant to have more prominence; the CHUM chart has them marked as a double A side)

"Surfin' USA", "Surfin' Safari" and "Surfer Girl" established The Beach Boys as a group who sang a lot about, well, surfing. In spite of the best efforts of the Wilson brothers, it was a reputation they could never fully shake. Indeed, the subject of cars and transportation is even more apparent in their work, possibly because it was something they could all relate to. (Famously, Dennis Wilson was the only Beach Boy who actually surfed; on the other hand, it's a good bet they all possessed a drivers licence) Hits like "Little Deuce Coupe" and "Fun, Fun, Fun" got the ball rolling on this second phase, one that would carry forward on much of their silly but technically marvelous 1965 album Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!). While its predecessor, The Beach Boys Today!, tended towards the serious, tracks such as "The Girl from New York City", "Amusement Parks USA", "Salt Lake City" and the sublime "California Girls" painted a picture of a madcap road trip around the United States.

Burnout — something that Brian Wilson knows all too well — was the biggest drawback when it came to how astoundingly prolific everyone seemed to be in the mid-sixties. (Aside from The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Byrds, Bob Dylan, Otis Redding and The Rolling Stones all released two albums apiece in '65; "Only two?" asked members of The Supremes who put out four LPs that year) But another side effect was that it could result in a lot of thrown together projects. The idea of putting together a unified long playing disc had already been done in jazz and was obviously the foundation of cast recordings of musicals but it wasn't really a thing yet in pop. Thus, the aforementioned Summer Days (and Summer Nights!!) only toyed with the idea of being a travelogue (a topic they would explore more fully on their 1973 classic Holland) since it had to accommodate whatever else they had in the can. Had Wilson been given more time and had there not been such heavy demands placed on artists such as him, he might even have been able to find room for "I Get Around" on it. For that matter, the extra time he might have had could have been spent on making it shine even brighter.

What we got instead was a rushed affair that still manages to be a triumph — at least to an extent. I'm sure it would have been mighty impressive in the context of what they had been recording up until the midway point of 1964 but it's hard to hear it that way now. The group that made so many near-miss number ones in the years ahead blows their earlier work out of the water. I must confess I don't feel proud writing this. I hate it when people judge The Beatles the same way, as they somehow seem to feel that a late period song like "Let It Be" far outpaces, say, "Please Please Me" even though it's the other way around in my mind. Yet, I'm no different when it comes to The Beach Boys. Good as many of them are, songs like "I Get Around" is best kept to when they did surfing and hot rods but before they really began to blossom as artistes.

Score: 7

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C'Mon, Be a CHUM!

Introducing a new segment here on Old Familiar Tunes! Celebrating the CHUM number ones that didn't quite make it that high on the RPM chart. Jamaica's Millie Small took an obscure fifties record and transformed it into a ska-pop moment for the ages. A number two hit on both the British charts and the Hot 100, it fell similarly short on the RPM Top 40 as well. (It did, however, manage to go all the way to the top in Brazil, Ireland, Singapore, South Africa and Sweden; check out Aidan Curran's excellent review on his Irish Number Ones blog) Sounding girlish, charming and confident, Millie more than does it justice, she actually manages to make it seem like it's a far greater song than it is. Outstanding and a harbinger of things to come from Jamaica as well as being impactful in its own right over in the UK. It's great when something really influential also happens to be a lot of fun to listen to; you'd think the two would go hand-in-hand the majority of the time but that is not always the case. As Brian Eno once said, millions of people bought "My Boy Lollipop" and some formed bands — the rest just got on with their lives.