RAMBLE ON: "Getcha Back" by The Beach Boys

I live in California now and it’s fucking great! Love it. So long, New York City!

So yeah, that’s what I was doing my month off. Time well spent! And to prepare for my move I spent most of my time listening to nothing but Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sublime, Snoop Dogg, Best Coast, Jon Daly’s “Abracadabralifornia” and of course the Beach Boys. I won’t be going to any beaches anytime soon but it put me in the right state of mind. And once again I find my thoughts preoccupied with Mike Love.

I was listening to Steven Hyden’s podcast “Rivals” for most of the trip, and in the intro to the Brian Wilson vs. Mike Love episode he and his co-host bluntly describe it as a pure “good vs. evil” matchup, but they do also make the case for the man as a genuine underappreciated talent. After all (as the pod points out), the Beach Boys’ entire mystique is tied up in the California Myth, their depiction of the Golden State as an idyllic land of girls and sunshine. If that’s true, then Mike Love, as the band’s most frequent lyricist, has to be considered the main architect of that mystique. People tend to credit the greatness of “California Girls” and “Good Vibrations” to Wilson’s brilliant composition, but those songs are, after all, credited to Wilson/Love. Without him, the Beach Boys are a very different band; perhaps they’re just an obscure, sad-bastard outfit with a few off-putting songs about vegetables.

But it’s hard to make the mental connection between those carefree classic tracks and the unlikable joyless man who penned their lyrics. Mike Love has always been politically conservative, obnoxiously straight-edge, and a consistent pusher for money over art; the prototypical asshole Boomer long before “Boomer” was a synonym for asshole. The fact that his hairline was already receding in his teens fits too well; Mike Love seems like he was born middle-aged. And so naturally the songs he wrote in his middle age are the ones that feel the most “his.”

After “Kokomo,” the Beach Boys’ biggest success in the Boomer nostalgia ‘80s was “Getcha Back,” a mediocre-charting song I first heard in the mediocre-grossing movie “Herbie: Fully Loaded,” an early warning sign in Lindsay Lohan’s fall from grace. The movie’s not very good, but it starts with a killer opening montage, where we see the little loveable underdog Love Bug rise to racing prominence in the late ‘60s, spending decades on top as the champion of wacky racing, before crashing into ruin and obscurity around the early ’80s. Someone decided that “Getcha Back” should soundtrack that scene, and that person deserves a raise; the song manages to evoke both the ‘60s and the ‘80s simultaneously while selling the warm nostalgia that the rest of the movie tries and fails to achieve.

No one’s ever said that Mike Love’s lyrics are very complex, but they’re not devoid of subtext. “Do It Again,” the Beach Boys’ last big hit of their golden age, was Mike transparently trying to revive the uncomplicated spirit of the pre-hippie ‘60s before the drugs and death and war and riots took over. “Getcha Back” isn’t that explicit but it’s attempting to do the same thing, deliberately evoking memories of the Beach Boys’ heyday, this time from a far greater distance. 

An old song reminds him of his high school sweetheart, he asks her if she wants to get together. Their relationship ended badly, with her crying because they had sex at a time when good girls didn’t. (There’s a darker interpretation for why she’s crying in the backseat but it definitely wasn’t intended and we’re not going to humor it.) Now they’re adults, married to different people; Mike suggests that they run away together anyway, which somehow seems deeply wrong and transgressive from a band as squeaky clean as the Beach Boys. 

Again, the subtext is hard to miss; you, the middle-aged listener with fond younger memories of the Beach Boys, are the person they’re trying to woo back. Brian was present for this track and does sing on it, but it feels very much a Mike joint. “Getcha Back” isn’t a great song; the production is a little too clean, a little too ‘80s, and I am two generations removed from the nostalgia it’s trying to evoke. But all be told, I like it a lot. I’m not sure I could articulate why until I listened to the rest of the album (simply titled “Beach Boys”; the late-career self-titled album a sure sign of desperation as always). It kind of sucks as a record, because the production is so irredeemably ‘80s. “Getcha Back” is the only song on the album that actually sounds like the Beach Boys did in their prime, and as such is far less dated than their attempts to adapt to this bright future we call the ‘80s.  Brian’s falsetto still shines, the harmonies still ring. “Kokomo” is a song I refuse to put down, but there’s no denying it evokes a fatter, lazier, more self-satisfied version of the band. “Getcha Back” is the band showing they still have some romance in them; for a second Mike Love has a soul. Maybe we will run away together to Kokomo after all.