“Hitch a Ride” is the album’s hidden gem, tucked away in the middle of Side Two, away from the megahits up front and ensconced between the party anthem “Smokin’” and the album’s two amiable but unremarkable closers. It sits there quietly, waiting its turn, and takes on a dreamy veneer that lulls the listener at first; it then roars to life with out-of-the-blue Hammond and lead guitar solos back-to-back, before going sleepy again with a quiet final chorus that slips into the extended lead at the end, which rivals the second lead in Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” for Greatest Coda Lead in Rock History.
Writing
Originally titled “San Francisco Day”, the tune had been knocking around in Scholz’s song bag for years, played in various incarnations in his early bands, before being reworked into “Hitch a Ride”.
Its meaning has been debated for decades. At face value, it’s a song that restates the themes of “Peace of Mind” and “Long Time” - finding a better niche in the world and setting out on that path. When Brad Delp died in 2007, there was speculation that the song had been written with thoughts of suicide in mind; such an interpretation is possible, of course:
Gonna hitch a ride, head for the other side
Leave it all behind, never change my mind
Gonna sail away, sun lights another day
Freedom on my mind, carry me away for the last time...
The fact is that Delp had no input in the writing of the song; any subconscious meaning the song harbors would have come from Scholz, not Delp.
Recording
The song was recorded in B♭, but played as A – Scholz tuned all the guitars and bass up a half step. As with so many songs on Boston, Scholz plus Delp on vocals and Hashian on drums were the entire studio ensemble.
Scholz’s recording of the bass track stands out. The signal is heavily compressed, and Scholz plays with a pick, resulting in a bass sound that is fat, yet exceeding well-articulated. This matters a lot, because there are passages in the song wherein the bass is in lock-step with Hashian’s drumming, and both are much busier than one might expect is such a laid-back, dreamy song.
Also noteworthy is Scholz’s use of 12-string acoustic, employed in much the same fashion as it was in “More Than a Feeling”. Here, as there, he layers it with clean electric, to fatten the mid-range and clarify the sonic shape of the notes.
The song features a stunning organ solo, which Scholz recorded on his basement Hammond M3, and includes a pitch bend near the end – easily accomplished on a modern keyboard, but impossible to do on the instrument itself in 1976. Musicologist Rick Beato speculates that Scholz may have accomplished this pitch-bend in the mixing, by using a finger to slow the moving tape.
Breakdown
The structural simplicity of the song – standard pop ABABB – is offset by the departures of the leads (there are three altogether) and their deep complexity. Part of the breathtaking novelty of “Hitch a Ride” is that upon first hearing, you never know what will happen next.
The half-step up-tuning of the guitars and bass puts the song in B♭, and the opening finger-picked pattern on the 12-string, beautifully double-tracked, is all there is in the intro. This sequence is the entirety of the A section, and continues in the song’s two verses,
B♭5 - A♭5/B♭ - E♭/B♭ - B♭
Brad comes in, also beautifully double-tracked, at 0:08:
Day is night in New York City,
Smoke, like water, runs inside
Steel idle trees to pity
Every livin’ thing that’s died
It isn’t until the verse is complete that other instruments join the mix. Hashian gives a mild lead-in, then the bass joins in, and a clean electric guitar is tucked in lock-step underneath the acoustic (Rick Beato notes this in his terrific break-down of the song on his YouTube channel) to clarify it.
The chord progression [B] here takes the song to E♭ (the I to the A section’s V, as in “Rock and Roll Band”), and is slightly more complex, and opens space for some wonderful voicings on the guitar in the chorus’s second phrase. Here, Hashian gets a little busy, but Scholz’s bass line gets busier still, in McCartney-esque fashion.
E♭ - E♭sus4 - E♭, A♭ - E♭/G - Fm - E♭ - B♭,
A♭/C - B♭, Fm7 - B♭,
The vocals go to triad in the chorus (0:25, “Gonna hitch a ride”), with the melody on top, and in the second phrase Delp sings alone and lets his last word linger (on “Head for the other side”) as one of his other tracks continues, “Leave it all behind, never change my mind”). This vocal pattern is repeated in the chorus’s second half.
Four measures of guitar connect the chorus to the second verse (beginning at 0:46). Here, the A pattern protracted across four measures, with one chord to a measure. A clean electric guitar now takes precedence, and the acoustic 12-string is relegated to whole-note declaration of the chords. That clean electric carries the second verse, which Delp renders in a more emphatic, less-dreamy tone:
Life is like the coldest winter
People freeze the tears I cry
Words of hell their minds are into
I’ve got to crack this ice and fly
Hashian’s tom attack as the second chorus begins (at 1:10) foreshadow the surge of intensity to come, and Scholz’s bass line gets busier still. Delp’s second lines are now in triad, and they, too, begin conveying more intensity. As he gets to the final line of the chorus, “Carry me away for the last time”, the song explodes (at 1:26).
It modulates to G (a key shift worthy of Barry Manilow) as Hashian goes wild, attacking his cymbals with abandon and introducing rhythmic stutters, which the bass line rides with surgical precision:
G, F-F-F-F-C, G, F, C
This is the first half of the song’s first lead break, and the lead is Scholz going nuts on the Hammond M3. It is built on lightning-fast arpeggios, played with an abandon far afield of the almost robotic precision of his triplet work on “Foreplay”.
There are four passes of this pattern, ending in the organ pitch-bend (at 1:42), and the entire band levels out three take-a-breath measures, on C, B♭, F, then returning to the A pattern to set up the second lead. Scholz preambles this with a sharp B♭ power chord at 1:49, which he steadily whammies as it goes to feedback, diving at the end.
Hashian’s fill, going into that power chord, is extraordinary; it is protracted, not showy, and makes use of all the open space left after the F chord is played. And on the downbeat where Scholz hits his power chords, he plays a gong.
The guitar lead here (at 1:57) is brief, only two passes of the A pattern, but it is emphatic, its melody utterly memorable. As in so many of his leads, Scholz starts on III, tossing in a mordent, and peaks on V, heightening expectation.
And as he restates that last note, the final chorus begins and the song begins to calm down, Scholz throwing in guitar harmonies over Delp’s vocals on the second and sixth lines. And as Delp softly wraps the vocal on B♭, we’re back to a lone finger-picked 12-string, offering a new pattern [C]:
E♭ - D♭/E♭ - A♭/E♭ - E♭
This new guitar progression, played even more softly and gently than the intro phrase, includes added upper notes – a C on the D♭ and a E♭ on the A♭ - that give it a motion all its own, actually making it hummable. There’s a single pass to present this progression, with all the other instruments falling away.
Then, at 2:30, the lead begins, Scholz playing a brilliantly melodic line over the 12-string's C pattern. After a single pass of the chords, Hashian brings the rhythm back in with an unobtrusive low-tom roll. Those humanizing hand-claps return, as Scholz adds another line to his lead, peaking exuberantly and then pausing on III...
...and a second lead guitar appears. Where the first had been awash in echo, this new one is dry as dust, making the two as distinct as can be. Guitar 2 takes the next pass, staying in mid-register, building on tentative IIIs; a scrape triggers Pass 4, as both guitars play in unison – a stunning tonal effect – separating by a third to create harmony in the phrase’s second half.
Pass 5 is handled by Guitar 1, with a drop-in flatted third to distinctly minor the A♭ before handing off again to Guitar 2 on Pass 6. There’s a mordent-ridden explosion of notes from Guitar 2 as Guitar 1, hanging on its last note, goes to feedback, and with a spectacular scrape into Pass 7, Guitar 2 shifts to explosive power chords as Guitar 1 takes the baton.
Pass 8 puts the two guitars back into gorgeous unison, where they remain for two measures, back to strong melody, going to third harmony on the A♭ and climbing, still in harmony, a full octave for lead’s peak – a Pass 9 where both guitars go crazy, playing too fast to track, peaking with stratospheric squeals on the A♭ and hitting the E♭ cleanly and in harmony...
...then recapitulating the opening phrase of the lead in unison on Pass 10, peaking in harmony before settling together on the final A♭. With that, the 12-string offers a final pass of the chords, preceded by one last low-tom fill from Hashian and finished off with final strum, as the bass goes all the way to low D. Total elapsed time: 1:40.
Glorious...
Song structure
Intro [A]
Verse [A]
Chorus [B]
Verse [A]
Chorus [A]
Lead 1a (organ) [C]
Lead 1b (guitar) [A]
Chorus [B]
Lead 2 (two-guitar) [D]
Outro
What the world said
“This extraordinary, deeply spatial Byrds-in-Space-meets-Deep-Purple-playing-side-two-of-Abbey-Road quality is consistent throughout every single moment of Boston, and enlivens even a paper-thin song like ‘Hitch A Ride’; in fact, it’s on a (relatively) minor track like this that you can really, really appreciate what’s going on, as Scholz juggles wildly disparate elements (Floyd-ish arpeggios, creative guitar-panning, sudden excursions into heavy prog, and Beatle-esque handclaps) so masterfully that you feel like you are listening to the sonic equivalent of Cirque de Soleil.” ~Tim Sommer, www.observer.com
The Scrapes
2:56
3:21
Factoids
The running time is 4:10.
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