Fortunately Cole Porter didn’t toss his rejects into a waste basket. “I Get a Kick Out of You” was originally written for a 1931 Broadway show, Star Dust, which was never produced. The song made it into Cole’s Broadway show Anything Goes in 1934 where it was introduced by Ethel Merman. The show ran for 420 performances, opening in November, 1934, and closing in November, 1935. Musical theater historian Robert Kimball has called the show “the quintessential musical of the period.” It also produced the hits “All Through the Night,” “You’re the Top,” and, of course, “Anything Goes.”

Although “I Get a Kick Out of You” was not written specifically for Merman, Porter, as Charles Schwartz points out in Cole Porter: A Biography, was well aware of Merman’s special qualities as a performer. He tried to “...include in his lyrics for her words like ‘terrific’ (so prominent in the line, ‘that would bore me terrific’ly too’)...that allowed her to roll out the r’s with the force of a TNT charge.” Her lusty performance as an evangelist-turned-nightclub singer made the song one of the hits of the show.

The song charted three times:

• Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra (1934-35 Bob Lawrence, vocal, 11 weeks, topping at #3)
• Ethel Merman (1934-35, accompanied by the Johnny Green Orchestra, five weeks, topping at #12)
• Leo Reisman and His Orchestra (1935, Sally Singer, vocal, one week, topping at #20)

The speaker in the song is “fighting vainly the old ennui” and listing the things that no longer add spice to life. “I get no kick from champagne, Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all.” Furthermore, “Some get a kick from cocaine, I’m sure that if I took even one sniff, That would bore me terrific’ly too.” The only thing that provides a kick is “you”--a “you” that is no longer adoring. In his analysis of the song’s lyrics in The Poets of Tin Pan Alley: A History of America’s Great Lyricists, Philip Furia writes, “Thus the character who emerges from the lyric, far from being impervious to sensation, is hopelessly addicted to his lover’s ‘kick,’ an addiction all the more poignant given his facade of nonchalant sophistication.”

According to Gerald Mast in his book Can’t Help Singin’, the reference to cocaine ultimately caused problems. In the 1960s Merman substituted “some like that perfume from Spain,” the phrase also used by Sinatra. “In 1972, a published version of the song substituted, ‘Some like a bop-type refrain’.... Porter preferred to ravage the song with a jazz riff than a sniff of Spanish perfume.” Obviously the sophisticated lyricist knew that the best perfume came from France, and while perfume can be heady, it is not a stimulant such as drugs or alcohol and as such didn’t fit the idea of the song. Eventually Merman returned to the original lyrics in 1972 when it was no longer impolitic to mention cocaine.

Porter takes the “high” image literally in the final A section of the song. Furia goes on to say, “...[Porter] underscores the ascent with a series of rhymes on the progressively higher notes of the melody: ‘flying too high with some guy in the sky is my idea of nothing to do.’ Despite the imagistic shift, Porter laces his three ‘kickers’ together with rhyme: champagne, cocaine, plane.”

The song’s popularity is universal. In his book American Popular Song: The Great Innovators, 1900-1950, Alec Wilder says, “This is a very good, essentially simple song, in spite of its half note triplets, but, as is almost always the case with Porter songs, it is popular as much because of its lyric as its melody. This, however, is not true for jazz musicians who like it for its looseness, which provides ample room for improvisation. Needless to say, the half note triplets are, for the most part, ignored by them.”

Max Morath points out the popularity of “I Get a Kick Out of You” in his book The NPR Curious Listener’s Guide to Popular Standards, saying that it’s been recorded by almost everybody in the business. “Jazz musicians go for it--they love most anything of Porter’s--those long melody lines and the beat, often Latin-tinged, that is so often implicit in his theater songs. It’s had quite a movie career, too. Billy Daniels sang it in Sunny Side of the Street (1951); it was featured in the 1975 film At Long Last Love, and it is prominent on the soundtrack of Kenneth Branagh’s new look at William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (2000).”

Contemporary renditions of “I Get a Kick Out of You” include those by trumpeter Arturo Sandoval, pianist Adam Makowicz, and vocalists Tierney Sutton and Lisa Ekdahl.