Being born when I was, I was able to hear first generation surf music such as
Moon Dawg by the Gamblers (which has the designation as being the first surf instrumental recorded being waxed in 1959),
Pipeline by Downey's Chantays
http://www.thechantays.com/,
Underwater by the Frogmen when they were still new. Saw a few of them on KCOP Channel 13 or KHJ Channel 9 when they were really local.
Lloyd Thaxton,
19th Street West, and other local television shows were all that was
needed prior to the national dance show of American Bandstand. I don't
remember it until around 1966. Unless you were alive and aware of it,
the television scene for Los Angeles music, was very vibrant back then.
Even country and western music was shown and I had even heard of
Nashville yet.
Pipeline by
the Chantays was and is my favorite surf rock instrumental. It has no rivals. When I finally was able to meet
Brian Carmen and
Bob Spikard, who composed it as 11th graders, it was a thrill. Wipe-Out by the second
Surfaris http://thesurfaris.com/ was a major hit twice during the 1960s and maybe the Beach Boys music prevented it from doing even better!
Years
went by that I seldom heard surf music on the radio. I started haunting
second hand stores, garage sales, and record swap meets to quench or
satiate my rock instrumental hunger; pop music vocals were leaving me
cold as early as 1962. 40 years later I managed to see a few of the men
that were still boys when I first heard them. At the Gene Autry Museum
the Surfaris, with the late Jim Pash, played and I was there. Paul
Johnson
http://www.pjmoto.com/, a
founder of the surfing rock instrumental sound, also performed as did
the Lively Ones, and Eliminators and, of course, Dick Dale. Paul
Johnson's band,
The Bel-Aires also spawned the
Challengers and
Eddie and the Showmen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_%26_the_Showmen.
The Challengers outlived most of their contemporaries with the late
Richard Delvy http://www.discogs.com/artist/467531-Richard-Delvy as it's drummer and leader.
Why
did the surfing music cease to be played where it was born? The answers
are not easy nor terribly difficult to answer. We, in the States, has
post-national groups like our invisible government
The Council on Foreign Relations http://www.cfr.org/ that is very much tied to England and its Plutarch. Then the 'great', tax-exempt foundations, as
Norman Dodd,
exposed, also determine much that becomes the national or rather,
international memory of Americans away from our unique culture and its
value. To understand music by simply looking into books on it, misses
much. In 1962 true conservative
Dan Smoot and his Dan Smoot Report
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NvLsKeOlmY are still essential readings or seeing. What a man!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/953848/posts wrote the seminal book on this eastern establishment called
The Invisible Government https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQhnXm710ps, and even
Joseph McCarthy began to shine his probing light towards the eastern establishment elites too and became a #1 target!
Instrumental music, it should be recalled has an emphasis on the
MENTAL.
It is more like radio. A theater of the mind in which everyone
interprets the sounds differently, so a controlling consensus is much
more difficult to attain. Vocals, I believe, are akin to television.
Explicit. Leaving less to individual imagination. With the influx of UK
acts like
The Beatles, whom I still like, Mi6 and its
counterparts in the states, saw new opportunities for control and, in my
opinion, debauchery through the still young, rock and roll. This may
have been why
The Shadows of England, who nearly totally
instrumental, did not catch on: not the proper vehicle for use by
intelligence agencies. I know they impacted as I have spoken to rock
instrumentalists who got started in the 1950s or '60s, and all, without
exception knew of and admired the sounds of
The Shadows http://www.hank-marvin.dk/side2English.html. Led by Cliff Richard
http://www.cliffrichard.org/,
they were, in my opinion and many others, the best of the teen idol
bands. Unlike US acts, UK backing bands also got contracts. This allowed
them to earn wages even if the singer, say an Elvis, was busy making
movies or in the military, as an act in their own right.
Concurrent
with this music, I followed kustom car and hotrods. Read Cartoons,
followed Tony Nancy, Parnelli Jones, AJ Foyt, and Mickey Thompson as
well as Ed Roth, Barris custom cars, skateboarding and surfing. I knew
who
Miki Dora http://www.surfline.com/surfing-a-to-z/miki-dora-biography-and-photos_792/ and
Corky Carroll were before I knew who Bart Star, or Rosey Grier were.
Officially
surf music is designated as a form of California folk music, according
to Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore's excellent book:
Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom,
on surfing music and surfing culture over the last 100 plus years. If
you're interested in it, it a book you cannot do without.
http://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/1595800352/ref=acr_offerlistingpage_text?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1 I got my hardback copy of it before the price skyrocketed to over
$100.00!
