With old groups going strong and new groups diving in, surf music may have found its endless summer.
By Parke Puterbaugh
There is a moment on Jimi Hendrix's 1967 debut album, "Are You Experienced?" when, waves of feedback washing over his disembodied voice, the king of psychedelic guitar mutters: "You will never hear surf music again." Hendrix may have been rock's greatest guitarist, but he was not much of a prognosticator: thirty years later, as sure as the sun sets over the Pacific Ocean, surf music is back. Between the first generation musicians who have reunited or never went away and contemporary acts who are building on its legacy in new and innovative ways, surf music is making waves all over again.
With its evocation of surf, sun, and good times on the beach, surf music never really lost its relevance. It did, however, lose its audience back in 1964, when it got swamped by the Beatles and other British Invasion bands. This time around, with nothing more daunting than techno, trance, and trip-hop on the musical horizon, there's no telling how long surf music's latest ride could last. According to surf music deejay and historian Phil Dirt, "What's happened in the 1990s is that musicians interested in using the old sound as a platform have started playing it. They didn't come merely to worship at the altar. They came to it with a combination of reverence and glee, and that's just created an infectious thing."
Today, surf bands play at surf bars the length of the California coast. Clubs like the Purple Onion and Paradise Lounge in San Francisco, the Doll Hut and Toad's Tavern in Los Angeles, and the Usual in San Jose have regular "surf nights." Contemporary surf groups have been moving up the music-business ranks from self-issued CDs to contracts with well established independent labels. Because of the prominent play given surf music on the wildly successful soundtrack to the 1994 film Pulp Fiction, even major record companies have begun sniffing around the genre again.
The allure of surf music is easy to explain. The sport of surfing has exploded from regional pastime to national contagion-these days even landlocked suburban malls have surf shops for weekend board bums and wannabes. For another, surf music is simply irresistible. To listeners who find themselves frustrated by popular music's drift toward cold electronic dance rhythms, surf music offers an appealingly upbeat, listener friendly oasis of organic sounds evoking exotic landscapes, breaking waves, setting suns, girls on the beach, and endless summer. "If the music is strong enough," says Mike Lindner, bass player for San Francisco's Aqua Velvets, "it can lead you through different textures and landscapes."
So just what is surf music? It's a simple question that has generated a lot of controversy over the years. To purists, surf music is only instrumental music, a definition that instantly disqualifies the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. Others would argue that it was exactly those two acts and their lengthy strings of hit records that were responsible for letting the rest of the country know what kids in California were up to on the beach-surfing, hanging out, and having fun.
Call over the life guards, because we're about to have a fight here.
One thing that everybody can agree on is that Dick Dale reigns across the decades as the undiputed "King of the Surf Guitar." Back in 1960, while the Beach Boys were still rehearsing in their bedrooms, Dale had begun playing "surf guitar" on weekend nights to 4,000 rocking, stomping surfers and surfer girls at the Rendevouz Ballroom in Balboa, California. By rallying the surfing community around a new sound, Dale is responsible for creating what surf-music historian John Blair has called "a cultural event of major proportions."
In the beginning Dale strummed instrumental versions of country songs, goosing them up with a "ruckytuck" (his word) rhythm to make them more lively. After his first show at the Rendevouz late in 1959, which drew all of 17 surfers, an audience member asked Dale if he could pick out a melody on the guitar. Unable to sleep that night, he began thinking about his Egyptian and Arabic heritage, and an ancient piece of music wafted through his mind. In a flash, the ageless Egyptian song "Miserlou," to which belly dancers had been grinding since time immemorial, got transformed by Dale into a hard-driving instrumental whose fiercely picked melody evoked the reckless feeling of flying toward shore inside the curling tunnel of a primevally powerful wave. For all the intents and purposes, surf music formally came into being with "Miserlou," released on Dale's own Del-Tone label in 1962. It marked the first use of a Fender Reverb Unit-an outboard effect for the guitar that created an echo-laden, underwater sound on a popular record. Fittingly, "Miserlou" helped sparked surf music's rebirth when director Quentin Tarantino employed it in the explosive opening scene of Pulp Fiction.
"He's a brilliant guitar player and truly a legend," says Phil Dirt, who has been hosting a three hour, Saturday-night radio show over KFJC (89.7 FM) in the San Francisco Bay area since 1982. "Without him-and, in particular, without 'Miserlou'-I don't think much of anything really would have happened."
Dick Dale has his own definition of surf music. "Real surfing music is instrumental," he says, "characterized by heavy staccato picking on a Fender Stratocaster guitar." If you're playing through a vintage Fender Showman amp, so much the better. The legendary Showman was built to specification for Dale by inventor Leo Fender at his Los Angeles workshop. Dale claims he blew up 48 prototype amplifiers onstage-"They would melt, they would short, they would just burst into flame"-before Fender finally designed a model that projected the fat, edgy sound Dale heard in his head at a volume adequate to cut through the din of a crowded concert hall.
Phil Dirt agrees that surf music is, by definition, instrumental in nature: "Any historian will tell you that real surf music is instrumental. The Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, and others basically invented surf pop, which from the purist point of view wasn't real surf music. That's pop music about surfing, which is different than the genre of surf music, which is an instrumental genre."
Mike Love, vocalist and founding member of the Beach Boys, begs to differ. "A whole way of speech, dress, behavior, and even music began to evolve around the surfing cult," Love recalls. "The social phenomenon of surfing grew up in Southern California, but there was no music, at least lyrically, to encapsulate the lifestyle of surfing. There were some surf bands around, but they were primarily instrumentalists. The Beach Boys were the first to come up with a song about surfing specifically."
That song was "Surfin'," a landmark single (first recorded in 1961) that became a regional hit and laid the groundwork for the Beach Boys' national breakthrough with "Surfin' U.S.A." "All we know is that there was a whole group of kids out there who had a certain attitude and lifestyle," says Love. "They were surfers. Yet there were no songs to extol the virtues and values of the surfing way of life." Until the Beach Boys stepped up to the mike, that is.
Surf music was regional in character and functional in nature, existing to provide music for dancing at beach and frat parties, amusement parks, and surfers' clubs. It was rowdy music for a ripping new culture emerging on California's youthful frontier at an affluent, optimistic moment in time. "I think surf bands were, in large part, the first generation of punk bands," says Phil Dirt. "It was the first time suburban kids formed bands in their garages, made a lot of noise, developed followings, and had their own culture."
Surf music left its mark on the national charts in 1963 with a pair of one-hit wonders: "Wipe Out" by the Surfaris (#2) and "Pipeline" by the Chantays (#4). Opening with hysterical laughter that gives way to a tumbling wave of tom-tom rolls and frenzied guitar breaks, "Wipe-Out" remains surfing's all-time biggest instrumental hit. Other surf bands that made ripples on the national scene were the Marketts ("Surfer's Stomp," "Balboa Blue"), the Pyramids ("Penetration"), and a group called the Sandals that wound up being heard-almost anonymously-by millions on the musical soundtrack for Endless Summer, Bruce Brown's classic 1966 documentary about a pair of surfers who roam the world in search of the perfect wave. Then there were the Lively Ones, a guitar-and-sax quintet with a prolific track record whose long-dormant profile improbably rose three decades later when an old number, "Surf Rider," served as the closing theme in Pulp Fiction.
The arrival of the Beach Boys signaled a flowering of California music in general and the nation's awareness of surfing in particular. With their earliest songs, the Beach Boys made a magical, intuitive leap, bridging Chuck Berry and the Four Freshman and adding their own libretto about surfing and the California way of life. Jan (Berry) and Dean (Torrence) were the other singing minstrels of surf: "Surf City," a song cowritten with the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson, became the nation's first number one surf hit in 1963. The city Jan and Dean had in mind was Huntington Beach, California, a wave-crazy metropolis that hosts the U.S. Open of Surfing each August and promotes itself to the world as "Surf City, USA," but before long surf music began turning up in unlikely places like Colorado (the instrumental Astronauts) and Minnesota (the singing Trashmen, whose wacky "Surfin' Bird" rose to #4 in 1963). Surf even crossed the Ocean: before he joined the Who, drummer keith Moon actually belonged to a British surf band called the Beachcombers.
"It was garage band meets Fender reverb amps," says Bruce Johnston, who has played both with Dick Dale (in a house band that backed up rocker Ritchie Valens, of "La Bamba" fame, around 1958) and the Beach Boys (which he joined in 1965, just in time for "California Girls"). "The surfers just stumbled into it. It was very wonderful and organic and dumb. It's just a wonderful sport that's got a little music to go with it. Did you ever see Animal House? That's what life was life back in the surf era: Animal House meets the beach."
Nearly 35 years later, surf instrumental music has gone eclectic: the punky, Animal House side is more like a room than the entire house these days. At the more cerebral extreme are the neo-psychedelic surf ounds of bands like San Francisco's Mermen and Aqua Velvets-the latter group pays homage to Dick Dale but also cites such far-ranging influences as the Shadows (Britain's answer to America's Ventures), Ennio Morricone (an Italian composer who's scored countless spaghetti Westerns) and Martin Denny (whose snazzy "space-age bachelor pad music" has been exhumed as an ironic curio by the Gen X crowd). The mix of influences, according to band member Michael Lindner, has given surf music room to grow in the 1990s. "There's different instruments and different rhythms happening, so it's all not so crashy and loud. It's brought more sophistication to the music."
Surf music's inherent limitations caused it to burn out quickly in the 1960s, but this time around the musicians' willingness to evolve has made for greater longevity. "One reason surf music died the first time was that it sort of got ingrown," says Phil Dirt. "The bands stabilized around a very typical lineup, and the songs started all being structured basically the same. Only a few bands were experimenting, so after a while it got tired. What has restarted it is the evolution." In addition to the venturesome sounds of the Aqua Velvets and the Mermen, today's surf-music scene runs the gamut from first generation bands that have gotten back together to cutting edge bands that have formed in such unlikely locales as Boston, Nashville, and-no kidding-Iceland. The Arctic Nation's contribution to the surf revival goes by the name Laika and the Cosmonauts. ("Laika" was the Soviets' famous space dog.). They specialize in a high-octane Euro-guitar sound that falls somewhere between the Shadows and surf music. More down-to-earth, though still off-the-wall, are Boston's Fatoms (whose "Fathomless" is hailed as a modern surf classic). Los Straitjackets, a Nashville instrumental combo whose sound falls somewhere between country twang and California surf.
Closer to surf music's Southern California roots are such groups as Jon & the Nightriders, the Halibuts, the Reventlos, and the California SurfKings. Jon & the Nightriders are credited with launching the first surf-music revival back in 1979. John Blair, the group's leader, is both a powerful surf guitarist and a consummate surf historian who annotated the exhaustive booklet that accompanies Rhino's "Cowabunga!" box set (see sidebar on p. 70). The SurfKings are a Trio with ties to the old wave, as guitarist Tom Stanton belonged to an early-1960s L.A. surf group called the Crossfires (which later evolved into the Turtles).
Not only is the surf up, but the tide keeps rising. Last year, Surfdog/Interscope Records released a high-profile album, "MOM" (Music for Our Mother Ocean), to benefit the activist Surfrider Foundation, a nonprofit group that's working to heal the polluted oceans. The disc features surf-music tracks from established acts like Pearl Jam, Everclear, and Soundgarden alongside up-and-coming bands like Common Sense and Pennywise. The ties that bind surfing, surf music, and the environmental movement are apparently stronger than ever.
Between old and new surf groups, it can be argued that there's more surf music around now than in any other year-even 1963, when the first wave of surf music reached its crest. Surf music may never again launch hit singles on the chart topping scale of "Wipeout," "Pipeline," "Surfin' U.S.A.," and "Surf City," but this time it appears that surf music is indeed here to stay.
To bring the story full circle, here's a never-before-told tale from Beach Boy Bruce Johnston.
"I'll tell you an interesting story. I knew Hendrix really well," Johnston says. "The last time I saw him, we were hanging out one night, driving around in his limo. This was around 1969 or '70, and he was red-hot. He said, 'Look, I just want to aplogize to you about the "You'll never hear surf music again." I was just kind of riffing on the whole thing. Just so you know, I didn't mean that.' "
Jimi Hendrix, you are forgiven. As for everyone else, you will hear surf music again.
Parke Puterbaugh writes about popular music for Rolling Stone, Stereo Review, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum. He has coauthored three travel books, including California Beaches: The Complete Guide to more than 400 Beaches and 1,200 miles of Coastline (Foghorn Press, 1996), which can be ordered by by calling 800-FOGHORN.
SIDEBARS
"Cowabunga!" is the cry of the fearless surfer as he makes the thrilling plunge down the sloping face of a breaking wave. It is also the title of a four-CD box set that stands as the definitive compendium of surf music. Released last year on Rhino Records, "Cowabunga!" is a work of art from its cover-a dripping wet surfboard, naturally-to its 82 tracks of primo, reverb-heavy surf music, which run the gamut from surfing's first wave to the present day. For ordering information call 800-432-0020.
For the ultimate cyberspace lowdown on the surf-music scene, log on to Phil Dirt's fantastically fun "Reverb Central" site at members.cruzio.com/~reverb/central.html
The Wax Museums
If you want to learn more about the sport of surfing-having now been bitten by the genre of music spawned in tribute to it-here's the lowdown on four surfing museums. All are located along the California coast within a Frisbee's toss of the ocean.
Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum
Located two blocks from the Huntington Beach Municipal Pier (site of the August surfing championships and other competitons), it's got a great collection of surfing memorabilia. Surf music and videos play in the background as you study such things as an Endless Summer displayand an exhibit on "Women in Surfing." (411 Olive Ave., 714-960-3483)
California Surf Museum
This shrine to longboards and wave riders occupies the site of what used to be a biker bar in the city of Oceanside. It celebrates not only surfing but surf culture, including music and clothing. Artifact of note: a paddle board that belonged to legendary Hawaiin surf pioneer Duke Kahanamoku. (308 N. Pacific St., 614-630-9313)
Santa Barbara Surfing Museum
The newest museum in the Golden State opened in August 1996. Surf guitars and old records join collectibles like Santa Barbara's first surfboard (ca. 1913) and "the Rincon Bell." (16 � Helena, St. 805-962-9048)
Santa Cruz Surfing Museum
A small but lovingly assembled and maintained collection of surfing memorabilia occupies this museum, located at the base of a lighthouse. It also makes a great perch to watch surfers brave a dangerous spot known as Steamer Lane. (Mark Abbot Memorial Lighthouse, W. Cliff Dr., 408-429-3429)
Surf Report
If you like surf music, you probably like to surf-after all, isn't that the point? To find out if the surf is up or down in California's best beach towns, call the following numbers for an up-to-date surf report:
� Del Mar: 619-259-8208
� Huntington Beach: 714-536-9303
� Laguna Beach: 714-497-4887
� Malibu: 310-457-9701
� Manhattan Beach: 310-379-8471
� Newport Beach: 714-673-3371
� Ocean Beach: 415-665-9473
� Pacific Beach/Mission Beach: 619-221-8884
� San Clemente: 714-492-1011
� San Diego: 619-289-1212
� Santa Cruz: 408-475-3003
� Seal Beach: 310-832-1130
� Stinson Beach: 415-868-1922