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Another early surf guitar player has passed


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I think the simplest explanation is that it was the sound that the Southern California surfers preferred in the early 60's. You can find info on the topic if you Google something like Surf Music Origins.

 

 

Yes. There's probably been books written about it. Just thought maybe someone who was there would have an easy answer for it. Obviously they preferred it, but there's usually some reason WHY a particular thing happens the way it did.

 

At some point, those songs started taking on surf titles. Like "Riptide". But the first ones probably did not? I know the music originated in Orange County, so maybe it was an early instrumental band who was popular in a local surf hotspot perhaps? I think it was Dick Dale who first gave the music its Mexican and Middle Eastern sounds, which have nothing really to do with surf culture. So that always seems a little odd to me as well.

 

 

 

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I was a pre-teen kid living outside of Philadelphia back then, but according to one of the first surf players, Paul Johnson (of the Belairs), after hearing his band, some surfer told him that his music was the sound he heard in his head when he was surfing. I believe I've heard Dick Dale tell the some story.

 

You're right about the early instrumentals not having surf names. A lot of those tunes predated surf music but were adopted by surf music crowd.

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Surf instrumentals were a bit before my time except to know as "oldies". But I've always wondered: how was it that that sort of instrumental music became associated with surf culture specifically?

 

Santa Ana and the surrounding areas (OC was just starting to fill in at beginning of the 1960s) were home to suburban kids who would drive the surf phenomenon -- as well as surfboard manufacturing, Hobie had a fibreglass fabrication shop south of Santa Ana. (I used to go there and cadge scrap balsa wood for carving model car prototypes [rather unsuccessfully but that was supposedly how the big guys did it then] and Hobart Alter, the main guy would be there. A nice guy who didn't freak out to see a 10 year old scrounging in his scrap bins.. It was a fairly small facility at the time.)

 

The Chantays went to the same high school as my mom, actually, though a decade and a half later. According to the OC Register article:

 

. “Pipeline” started out as a song called “44 Magnum,” and after the guys saw the Jimmy Stewart Western “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” they renamed it “Liberty’s Whip.”

I seem to recall having heard the second title ("Liberty's Whip") someplace along the line in the OC studio scene, an idle trivia question from someone, I think.

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Ah yes...."California Dreamin'".

 

Leisure and relative affluence were certainly a big part of it and the whole "Rock" scene as we know it. The concept of the American Teenager didn't really exist prior to WWII. And without the American Teenager, with plenty of time after school and on weekends and not needing to help support the family or work on the farm or such, and being able to pursuit such dreams as owning a car---would there ever have really been "rock n roll" at all?

 

As a musician who also has a deep interest in history and sociology, I've always been fascinated by the influence of culture and economy on popular music. It's something that even us musicians don't think about much, because we seem to just take for granted that the music just somehow exists within us, or has somehow always existed.

 

Proximity to movies certainly had a big part in spreading the California Dream across the country and around the world. The Beatles? They actually came along a bit later and, if anything, had the biggest influence in taking rock music beyond the simplistic trappings of the "surf" sounds. .

 

 

 

 

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Forgive the bias of my time line. I'm from the 50s but it wasn't till the 60s I first heard the Ventures and I recall the Beatles were right there with Wanna Hold Your Hand and whatever else they did in the Ed Sullivan era. It seems to me now that the surf movement got ramped to compete with the Brits.

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Forgive the bias of my time line. I'm from the 50s but it wasn't till the 60s I first heard the Ventures and I recall the Beatles were right there with Wanna Hold Your Hand and whatever else they did in the Ed Sullivan era. It seems to me now that the surf movement got ramped to compete with the Brits.

 

The Ventures predated the Beatles and, if anything, it was the Beatles and the British Invasion that killed the Surf movement. With the exception of the Hawaii Five-O theme a few years later (which was a hit for obvious reasons beyond surf culture) the Ventures had their last hits in 1964.

 

The post-Beatles ramping up of the surf sound you speak of was the Beach Boys/Jan and Dean thing which, of course, started prior to the Beatles hitting the shores in 1964 and, by adding vocals to it, was taking it into another direction where the focus wasn't really much on the guitar sounds at all. And, of course, the Beatles and the Brits were a big influence on pushing Brian Wilson out of the surf/car songs and, by '66, leaving acts like Jan and Dean in the proverbial dust.

 

Even by '65, I don't think the surf sound was ramping up nearly as much as it was just limping along.

 

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Dick Dale was (is still?) a surfer, and played a lot of gigs in venues where surfers congregated. As Jeff mentioned, he was trying to create a sound that he associated with what he heard in his head when he was surfing. I suspect that his popularity, coupled with his love of the lifestyle and sport probably had something to do with it...

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Surf and cars combined. The music was great for surfing or cruising. The feeling of coming off the line and shooting the curl are very similar. Surf Rock was before my time, but I got the bug in my ear years before my teens from my older sisters when they were teens. When I got to high school I got into cars and street racing... and was the only one at the time in my area blasting surf music from a car. I still have most of the original vinyl I bought, as well as some older stuff passed down to me by my sisters. Beach Boys, Venture, Jan and Dean, The Frogmen, etc. Fun days!

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Affluence' date=' proximity to the labels and movies, leisure, American dream, those damned Beatles, did I mention leisure?[/quote']

 

Spare time with nothing to do except the beach. When I grew up in OC (I came of age at the end of the 60s) there was zip nada for a kid to do except ride his bike around the suburbs or go down to the beach.

 

There was a very crowded Boys Club in Santa Ana where you could play pool or use a gym. There were also one or two family billiards joints that popped up. And bowling. But the latter were expensive. After a while the hobby shop in Santa Ana built a couple of slot tracks and guys started building slot cars to race on the scale drag strip or on the road course. (They expanded to build a bigger facility to hold a bigger road course... sadly, the fad was starting to sputter by then a bit and I think they folded a few years later.)

 

When we moved to a more affluent neighborhood toward the middle of the 60s (with a really crappy school district, perhaps ironically), there was really nothing to do. But it was a little closer to the hills and I would ride my bike up the long Chapman grade (it was much steeper in those days and, at least the first time or two, I walked much of the way) just to get out of the city (there was a little park up there with a boat pond and ducks and such, a bunch of trails; it was closed during the week, as I recall, but you could sneak in easy). A lot of kids took up drinking and drugs.

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I just remember I have a book on my shelf that I picked up years ago but never got around to reading called "The Nearest Faraway Place" that I think goes into a lot of the background of the culture of So Cal and how it related to the music. It's specifically about the Beach Boys and so is focused on their specific story and background and Hawthorne, CA, but I'm sure touches on a lot of other surf music stuff as well?

 

Not sure if it's any good or not, but I think I'll finally pick it up after 20 years. :lol:

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In the '80s, The Ventures had this odd resurgence, with a lot of punks showing up to shows and stage-diving and slam dancing. Does anyone else remember that?

 

Anyway, when we were in high school and would drive to the beach to go surfing, we got stuck on listening to Pretenders, so when I hear Chrissie Hynde's voice, I sometimes still think about going to Malibu or Zuma to surf or boogie board. Funny, these associations.

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In the '80s' date=' The Ventures had this odd resurgence, with a lot of punks showing up to shows and stage-diving and slam dancing. Does anyone else remember that?[/quote']

 

I remember reading somewhere at the time that the kids thought they were a new punk band. Really strange.

 

Getting back to Brian Carman, his obiturary appeared in the Los Angeles Times today:

http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-brian-carman-20150306-story.html

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I saw his obituary in the LA Times. We're among the twelve people who still get the Times delivered. :D

 

Maybe some kids thought that they were a new punk band, but certainly no one I knew. It was surreal to watch The Ventures playing "Wipeout" while guys in mohawks or skinheads were slam dancing and diving off the stage.

 

Wikipedia says this about them: "In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, a resurgence of interest in surf music led to some in the punk/new wave audience rediscovering the band. The Go-Go's wrote "Surfin' And Spyin'" and dedicated it to the Ventures. The Ventures recorded their own version and continue occasionally to perform the song. Their career again rejuvenated by Quentin Tarantino's use of the Lively Ones' version of Nokie Edwards' "Surf Rider" and several other classic surf songs in the soundtrack of the hit movie Pulp Fiction. The Ventures became one of the most popular groups worldwide thanks in large part to their instrumental approach—there were no language barriers to overcome."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ventures

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Wikipedia says this about them: "In the late 1970s and into the 1980s, a resurgence of interest in surf music led to some in the punk/new wave audience rediscovering the band. The Go-Go's wrote "Surfin' And Spyin'" and dedicated it to the Ventures. The Ventures recorded their own version and continue occasionally to perform the song.

 

I was too old to be interested in "punk", and I didn't follow the Go Go's, but I recorded Surfin' and Spyin' for the 2012 Surf Guitar 101 forum members compilation (and my web page): http://www.jeffreyleites.com/Tunes01Audio/Surfin%27AndSpyin%27.mp3

 

 

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