SURF MUSIC RETROSPECTIVE

Surf and jungle seem to go hand in hand for some reason, and not being a musician, it's not really something I wanna explore in much depth. There are similarities that can't be denied them however, and it's worth pointing out to anyone who ever said that jungle is a product of today's accelerated culture that there was music just as fast'n'wild nearly forty years previous. All I know is that both these styles make me move the same moves on the dancefloor; that a piece of reverb drenched staccato induces the same kind of frenzy that any deep'n'dark jungle sub-bass does.

In the face of this, it seems a real crime that surf music never got paid its dues. Not the nice'n'sunny doo-woppy Beach Boys stuff but the original US sixties teen wave of high school boys and girls picking up guitars and playing them faster and louder than any rock'n'roll before, drenching their Fenders with enough reverb and echo to put most of Kingston, Jamaica to shame, all striving for band competition trophies and, ultimately, an appearance on teevee's American Bandstand. These kids were the forefathers of punk, doing it for themselves and exploring the opportunities presented by emerging nationwide television and radio.

This first teen wave rode on previous work going back to the late fifties, when rock's infancy was being subverted by the likes of Bo Diddley, Link Wray, Duane Eddy, The Fireballs and The Ventures, all of whom started instrumental rock'n'roll and set the standards by which surf could take off. The innovation was radical to say the least. Bo Diddley and Link Wray would both slit their speaker cones with pocket knives to achieve exactly the right distortion and Fender-tester Dick Dale blew up forty amps before Leo Fender got his guitar right.

Surf music has never really been played by surfers of course. It seems that in the beginning a bunch of Brad's adopted instro music and called it their own, and the name stuck. Much of the live musical action took place at high school dances. The Trashmen played hundreds of these in their time and became surf legends when Surfin' Bird, their interpretation of the current dance craze The Bird, stormed out of the Minneapolis charts and into the national top ten in early '64. Chief players in the new craze were outfits like The Astronauts, The Surfaris, The Original Surfaris, The Belairs, Eddie and the Showmen and The Sentinals.

Unfortunately it didn't take long for surf to be crossed with pop music and mass marketted by the likes of the Beach Boys, which is how the masses got to hear of surf music. The grass roots of the style got eaten away by mass consumption, the genre twisted into something it wasn't, as one of the first ever manufactured pop scenes squeezed the life out of the music. What happened next is history: the manufactured surf craze had neither the edge nor the strength to hold its own against the British Invasion. With one notable exception, that of The Rolling Stones supporting The Trashmen, R'n'B kicked surf's arse into orbit, setting the style back decades.

The bulk of the grass roots instro bands are totally undocumented. Of all the high school wonders and battle of the bands winners who managed to beat off the studio bands to do one-off singles, there are so many releases that it's easier to go by label. Check Romulan, Satan and Crypt for the coolest, dirtiest caveman stompers, Del-Fi and Hot Rod Records for the clean'n twangy stuff.

And if you're the type to check in with Satan Himself at the end of the day, don't forget to say a prayer for those hard-working bootleggers who now trek around the bargain basements of America and can smell those wet'n'wild one-dime singles at a hundred paces. Their compilations are the best documents of an important era, and are surfacing with ever more regularity as the original singles, and there are thousands of them in tiny pressings, appear in garage sales and second hand stores across the US.

For all surf's many forms, Steve (Vertigo) managed to sum the total up as white man's jazz. From the rock'n'roll twang'n'thud to the cool and airy West Coast sound; the swingy handclapping latin beats to the northern soul hammond rhythms; the junglist friendly drumkit-down-the-stairs affairs to revved up hotrod and dragracing classics.

The latter style is, you might like to say, A-1!. Merge the instro surf sound with the Thrilling Sound of the Dragstrip overdubbed in the studio and you get a totally manufactured pop craze that lasted an even shorter time than regular chart surf. Drag racing, hotrods and slot-car racing bore the brunt of the action, and again it serves as a thorough historical document of what went on and how it got sold onto the masses with cultural add-ons and terminology all thrown in. Remember James Dean racing for pinkslips in Rebel Without a Cause? Or even John Travolta in Grease! The custom machines just had some kind of attraction. It's weird cos I hate cars personally but there's something nice about these. Maybe its taking the production line goods and cutting them up, lowering the chassis, chopping down the roof, streamlining the bodywork. The cars and the people actually looked good.

It did get picked up on by certain journalists at the time of course. Check the scene in Tom Wolfe's Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby where Dick Dale is judging a teen slot-racing championship in which the prize is that the winner gets to play Dick Dale, the King of Surf himself! Somehow today's Joe Blogg's residue, revving it up in their flourescent-underbellied, wheel spinning hatchbacks, pumping out adrenaline techno or blaring Nintendo out of insanely oversized in-car PA systems just don't seem to cut the must against nitro-burning gassers and fuelies-from-hell burnin' rubber and tearing up the asphalt! That said, it's pure adrenaline watching them down Brighton's Madeira Drive, spinning, swerving and accelerating through corridors of screaming and whistling teenagers and from the state of the ruined tyres left under the arches and the marks on the tarmac they definitely give it some welly! And it ain't in some fucking film either. It's here! Now! Just remember, Mr Council Man: it's nothing new, just like those whining pensioners you and The Evening Argus love so much!.

It's strange how surf and hotrod connect when they couldn't really be more worlds apart; crashing waves from Ol' Neptune's gut in one hand, scorched asphalt and roaring metal from General Motors in the other. Suffice it to say that surf music with power boats was not a hit with the kids! Gila Monster's Will reckons someone tried it on with waterskiing and surf music though, and there are definitely some skateboard surf records from when that craze started. The Chantays Go Sidewalk Surfing springs to mind...What a fucking cash in!

Anyway, now it's time to defy surf convention and commit instro blasphemy, because I put it to you that vocal surf sounds can definitely be sweet as hell too! Among the choicest musical cuts EVER put to vinyl is a version of the Beach Boys' Be True To Your School, sung by brother Ron Wilson in the smoothest, smarmiest tones ever (ie. pissing all over Brian), backed by the similarly beautiful harmonies of his then band, The Surfaris, complete with whistle-blowing and cheerleaders. This song is THE song, and has been embedded in my head from the very first time it started its loving relationship with my turntable. Susan Lynne playing Don't Drag No More is the other, and no, she ain't singing about Bogartin' no Joint, this is Drag Racing, remember! On a more garagy tip check out What A Way To Die! by The Pleasure Seekers, Suzie Quattro's first band, punk as fuck and totally unafraid to don those bikinis and blow all that bleached-barbie beach debris way out to sea. These women are the coolest, representing their scenes and proving that Be True To Your School is not so much a song title than a way of life.

This is all pre-British Invasion stuff though. Today the style is as strong as ever, and the UK particularly has a vibrant and healthy scene. Dead Man's Curve and The Surf Creatures are both doing big things, moving, swinging and playing live with the likes of Los Nachos, El Disco Volante, The Surfin' Lungs, Bustin' Bikini Beat, Bikini Island and Brighton's own Vibrasonic. On The UK Surf Scene web page it says this about Vertigo's favourite bhangra-billy beatmasters:

"The single most amazing surf based band in Europe is Vibrasonic. They merge surf guitar and melodies with super heavy phased psych guitars for an unimaginable grand and unique style, definitely surf, and yet unmistakably psych as well. Their CD is simply incredible, as are their singles. If the edge of the envelope calls to you, this band is the voice you hear!"

Shame they've split up! This review is the only web presence Vibrasonic had, which is a shame because the Internetting classes seem to be well hip to the surf phenomenom. Or maybe its that the surf bands are well hip to the fact that as the scene is small and global, the web is the best place to network with each other and build something that will be less easy to knock down than before. Whatever, there are some great sites, and the best are listed here. Go down the local cybercafe and spend an hour on them, cos it really is all here, more than anyone needs to know, mostly impeccibly designed and well linked up.

Were it not for the seething mass of unknown surf bands who never recorded, those who did one off singles and those who went on to become more famed musicians (Glen Campbell, Dick Dale, Link Wray, whatever...) we wouldn't be swigging away to the sounds of Gallon Drunk, The Cramps, The Blues Explosion or Gold Blade. St.John's Tavern would be a Kev'n'Trace bar and the Frat Shackers would be putting all that masturbatory energy into...well, just that. There would be no Babzotica, no garage scene, maybe even no punk! Who knows what evils could be lurking...

But one last thing is for sure. If you're in the UK this August bank holiday, get your arse on down to Brighton Beach, 'cos local punkers the Just One Life Collective are organising the second annual surf all-dayer down the beach. And apologies to anyone last year who went to the opening night of Ali Baba's Surf Shack afterwards and got turned away. The venue owners were assholes, turned the DJs out onto the street before anyone really got there and then demanded payment for hire of the club. Well, they never got paid so Ali Baba's never took off. Shame really, but that's the way things go sometimes. Too bad, but some day..........