#4 – Don’t Worry Baby – The Beach Boys (Capitol)
I don’t know what it is about car songs. I’ve never been behind the wheel of any vehicle, never even ridden a bicycle, but I find the whole rock fixation with automobiles, from Chuck Berry to The Beach Boys to Springsteen, fascinating. It’s so detail-oriented, and poetic, and mythic. And emotional.
The language and the references mean nothing to me, but ‘No-Go Showboat,’ ‘Little Deuce Coupe,’ ‘Hey Little Cobra,’ ‘Shut Down,’ ‘Dead Man’s Curve,’ ‘You Can’t Catch Me,’ ‘Chevrolet Chevelle SS396,’ ‘Ballad of a Bonneville,’ ‘427 Super Stock,’ ‘‘Jaguar and Thunderbird,’ ‘Drag City,’ are filled with excitement. The singers go on with manic specificity about the features of these cars, bragging like rappers about what’s under the hood (or not: ‘No-Go Showboat’ is about a car that just sits there). And we get geographical information as well:
I flew past LaBrea, Schwab’s, and Crescent Heights
And all the Jag could see were my six taillights
He passed me at Doheny then I started to swerve
But I pulled her out and there we were
At Dead Man’s Curve
Where we went away for the summers, in my early adolescence, was a jukebox in what we called the ‘casino.’ Three songs for a quarter. In the summer of ’64, the girls played The Dixie Cups’ “People Say” a lot (and The Jelly Beans’ “I Wanna Love Him So Bad”).
I played The Rolling Stones’ “Tell Me,” and The Beatles’ ‘I Should’ve Known Better,’ and both sides of the hit single by The Beach Boys, “I Get Around” and “Don’t Worry Baby.” Everyone loved the A side. What was not to love, except maybe Mike’s cocky lead vocal? I gravitated towards the flip side, which seemed to me then, and still does, as incredibly romantic (I was crushing hard on the older girls, whose dancing in their two-piece bathing suits to ‘My Boy Lollipop’ and ‘Bread and Butter’ made me dizzy). It’s a song about a drag race.
“I guess I should’ve kept my mouth shut
When I start to brag about my car
But I can’t back down now
Because I pushed the other guys too far
She makes me come alive
And makes me wanna drive
When she says, ‘Don’t worry baby
Everything will turn out all right’”
An ordinary pop song called ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ would have the boy reassuring his girlfriend. Brian Wilson and Roger Christian turn it around, and Brian’s vulnerable falsetto makes it so touching: he has to go out there and race, and he’s scared, and she gives him confidence. And the music! It’s the first, to my mind, of Brian’s great ballads, the first that points to what would emerge in full on ‘Pet Sounds.’ Brian says in interviews sometimes that he offered it to The Ronettes, but Spector turned it down; I can’t fully buy that, but you can hear the Spector touch, especially in Hal Blaine’s drumming (he plays basically the same pattern he’d play on The Byrds’ ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’).
Later versions of ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ changed the lyric to eliminate the car race element, thinking perhaps that it’d be more universal that way. The Tokens, Bryan Ferry, and others sing it like that. But that’s just dumb. The race is the whole point, the metaphor for challenge, and self-doubt, and the healing power of sex and affection. It’s the ‘High Noon’ of pop, and who would remake ‘High Noon’ without the gunfight?
Springsteen understands this. In a Creem review long ago, I made a little joke about his obsession with cars, and how mytho-poetic he got every time he put the key in the ignition, what a major production every road trip was. ‘Doesn’t he ever get in the car just to get a pack of cigarettes?,’ I wondered. But I get it. I can trace the line from ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ to ‘Drive All Night’ and ‘Racing In the Streets,’ and I’m sure he can too.
