Making real good bread in Los Angeles in the 1960s


As someone who has a fascination with old expressions, I was thinking recently about the lyric from the 1964 Beach Boys song "I Get Around", which is a wonderful and cheerful tune, and includes the words:

"I'm makin' real good bread."

And it occurred to me that it probably makes no sense to people who weren't alive back then. I was, but just barely, and the term "bread" for money continued in common use, as I recall, through the 1970s. I wouldn't want to try to use it today! Even the old-timers would probably wonder what I was talking about, because nowadays bread means, well, bread. You know, the stuff you get a bakery, and make sandwiches out of.

When Brian Wilson and Mike Love wrote those lyrics, making good money, bread was a modern version of an older term for money, which was "dough". My casual research shows that using the word dough for money goes back at least until the 1940s. You can hear Ichabod Slipp asking Larry Fine in 1947, "Where's my dough, you crook!" And that makes it a logical thing for young people to turn dough into bread. In my mind's eye I can picture a hippie-like person saying, "I don't got no dough, man!" right up through the late '70s.

When I moved to Los Angeles, in 1983, the terms bread and dough would have still been used, but they would have shown that the person using it was no longer "with it", like saying "Far out!" and "Out of sight". What I heard at the time were expressions like "gag me with a spoon" and words like "gnarly". I didn't have much money in those days, and I really don't recall slang terms for it, and I've always been a little bit behind the times, so I may have used the terms dough or bread.

I'm gettin' bugged driving up and down the same old strip,
I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip.

 My buddies and me are getting real well known,
Yeah, the bad guys know us and they leave us alone.

 I get around,
From town to town.
I'm a real cool head,
I'm makin' real good bread.

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