wooza
Having discovered surf music myself entirely independently of surfing or said culture I've never made that connection, and I usually actively disregard all that "fluff" that I perceive around the genre.

Actually, I lived at the beach long after I started listening to surf/instro music. I grew up in Pennsylvania, listening to my dad's old Ventures albums. And the first time I heard Mr. Moto, Misirlou and Pipeline, the guitar was played by Mike Palm rather than Paul, Dick and Brian, respectively. But living at the beach, at least for me, pulled together both the music and the surf culture.

Sean

zak
No one seems to mind the fact that the Ventures didn't really travel to space...

LOOOOOL!!!

El Bluesky
El Ray
El Ray on Bandcamp
El Twang on YouTube

CaptainSensible
But what you lament is true of most things. That is, people's perceptions of how things were is often far different from reality. But those perceptions often dominate what a majority of people think, perhaps because they like the former better than the latter. It is pure romanticism. Early sixties surf music certainly has its own set of myths as do many other musical moments in time. Sometimes the myth is more appealing than the truth.

That's true, In the '90's I was heavy into what was called "Exotica" . It wasn't really primitive music from remote locations of the globe. It was really what many people would imagine that kind of music to be as they sipped a cocktail and took their mind off of their troubles. The myth was Martin Denny and the reality was natives beating log drums and blowing pennywhistles.

donsdad
That's true, In the '90's I was heavy into what was called "Exotica" . It wasn't really primitive music from remote locations of the globe. It was really what many people would imagine that kind of music to be as they sipped a cocktail and took their mind off of their troubles. The myth was Martin Denny and the reality was natives beating log drums and blowing pennywhistles.

Have you ever seen those Ultra Lounge CDs? They cover different musical stylings from the 50s and 60s, including the Exotica you reference. They definitely play up the myths of the time period, but I love them for it.

Sean

To me the whole idea of "living" a lifestyle, whether related to music, motorcycles, cars or whatever is a bit preposterous. Frankly, I'm not even sure that the concept of a lifestyle is anything more than a foolish construct of the media in their desperate search to find anything to talk about.

I will concede, however, that most of us are affected by the trends that were dominant when we were growing up. My sister is 8 1/2 older than I am so when she started driving I was 7 years old. A car radio tuned to either KWEB or WDGY was part of every trip I took with her and during that time period we heard a lot of Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Ventures and numerous "Surf" bands. (In many ways I prefer the term Instrumental Rock but for clarity I'll use the term "Surf".) It was part of what I grew up with and the teens of that era did tend to identify strongly with that sort of music and the beach. Growing up in Southern Minnesota there were few monster waves to ride and no curls to shoot but they made do with out 10,000+ plus lakes, many of which had great swimming beaches. The point is, that in the early '60s there was a lot of surf oriented music being played on Top 40 radio, although the vocal-based songs greatly outnumbered the pure instrumentals.

My own coming of age took place during what was squarely the Country Rock age. From the time I started driving until my mid 20s much of the music I heard on the Top 40 stations was at least influenced by Country Rock but there was plenty of non-country Rock as well. Perhaps some of this was geographic, while my sister spent her high school years in Minnesota I spent mine in Colorado. A lot of young people dressed in blue jeans and western-cut shirts and I dress like that to this day. It's not because I'm trying to "live" some mythic lifestyle. It's because I like the fashions I grew up with.

The idea of a "Surf" lifestyle seems to me to be based on a concept that reality can never live up to. I'm certain that there were some young people in California during the early '60s that went to the beach every day, surfed and listened to the popular music of the time but I'm even more certain that most young people in California at that time were as constrained by the realities of life as any of us are. Except for a relative handful of very privileged youngsters I'm certain that plenty of kids from the "Surf" era sacked groceries, flipped burgers, pumped gas and mopped floors, just like the rest of us . . . even in Southern California. I'm certain that there were plenty of woodies, hot rods and performance cars around but very few people had the means to do nothing with their life except surf all day. (As an aside, Tom Hanks surfs at Malibu on a fairly regular basis but then again he has a job that allows him some flexibility and he lives in Pacific Pallisades.)

If the "Surf Scene" was an influence in Minnesota which has no surf whatsoever I'm certain that it was known in other places as well, places that are landlocked and don't even have swimming beaches still had AM radio stations pumping out "Surf" music during the early '60s. I sincerel doubt that the kids listening to this music in Oklahoma, Nebraska or Wyoming had any pretensions of somehow being surfers just because they listened to Jan & Dean sing about surfing.

As was mentioned earlier in this thread, Rockabilly and Blues both have adherents that feel there is a lifestyle associated with their music to which I say BUNK! I have no interest in dressing like a parody of a '50s Rockabilly musician to play that music nor do I have any interest in living a hard, terrible life in order to make my Blues more "authentic". (One thing that galls me is the concept that you have to be of a certain race to play Blues. That is absolute nonsense in my book.) Jazz, to, had its "lifestyle" in the eyes of some and just because a handful of noted Jazz musicians used heroin there were sycphants that decided to purposely get hooked just to be more like their heroes. The obvious folly of this is beyond any excuse. One of my favorite Jazz musicians was a piamo player named Bill Evans. He got sucked into this sort of thinking and ended up dying in his fifties, a wasted heroin addict on Methadone and a practicing cocaine user, he finally starved himself to death.

Now I do understand that many musical acts dress unusually as part of their act. I don't have a problem with this in and of itself. It's nothing new to our time and as long as people remember it's a costume I don't see much to complain about. I'm sure that many of the Surf bands dressed the part when their music became inextricably linked to surfing in the minds of the music buying public. Undoubtedly Dick Dale was a source of some of this stereotype. He actually did surf even if he was not a great surfer, played instrumental rock and sang about surfing, it's hard to find a more valuable spokesman for Surf music than that.

Still, I think that the correlation between the instrumental Rock of the early '60s and surfing is not absolute. As I mentioned earlier, Dick Dale brought at least some degree of Surf credibility to his music and Murray Wilson realized that surfing was an emerging trend and he worked hard to connect the music his sons were making to that image when, in fact, only one of his sons was into surfing. I still think that twangy, reverb-drenched instrumental Rock would have happened with or without the help of the beach culture. It was a natural outgrowth of what was being listened to in the late '50s. The progession from Duane Eddy to Dick Dale to the Ventures seems pretty logical to me. Had the social trend of the time been cowboys what we hear as Surf music now could have just as easily been thought of as cowboy music.

Spy music is a perfect example of this. Movies from the early '60s used twangy guitar sounds with lots of reverb and because there were more than a few Spy movies at the time this sound became almost synonymous with Spy movies. Western movies frequently used twangy guitars and reverb to try to enhance the effect of wide open spaces in the American west. I won't argue that these two example s are exactly the same thing as Surf music, but I think that there are some very real parallels and all of these came along at roughly the same time.

In any event, it'll be a cold day in Hades before I try to assume some "lifestyle" just to play a certain kind of music. As it is I enjoy playing Classic Rock, Jazz, Surf, Rockabilly, Country, Country-Rock, Spy music and even a bit of Classical music and I wear the same thing for any of them; nice jeans and a western-cut shirt.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

When Surf Guitar is outlawed only outlaws will play Surf Guitar.

Brian

Klas
Yeah, it would definitely be great if more bands today actually "lived it" a little bit more besides just playing the music, but I can understand it's not for everyone.

What do you mean by "lived it"?

Simply that one should be able to tell that a band is playing surf music without hearing the music. However, note that I said "more bands" as this is obviously not for everyone.

T H E ✠ S U R F I T E S

This post has been removed by the author.

Last edited: Sep 27, 2009 23:38:42

Well, Klas did say it wasn't for everyone. I do have to admit it is pretty cool seeing a record cover like the Finks with their vintage gear and outfits. Many, many other bands play dress up to some degree: Satan's Pilgrims, Ghastly Ones, Bomboras, etc., if nothing more than wearing matching outfits. We've had dozens of page threads on stage wear before, and it does work for many bands.

I wouldn't necessarily say dressing up for a gig or record cover photo shoot means "living the lifestyle", and maybe this is the the source of the confusion/friction in this thread.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
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"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

Great music is great music regardless of who is playing it. Period. However, you have to discover the music first. I know I am less likely to check out a band that clearly looks like a surf band. I avoid these bands because they normally just have a cookie cutter sound which honestly just doesn't do it for me. That is a problem with myspace, you see them before you hear them.

The only way I plan on living it is Surfing, which I've wanted to do, which I wanted to do before I was interested in Surf, and playing it, otherwise, I don't dress up, don't use the lingo, unless I'm kidding, or act like it.

Sonichris
I also like to think that all early 60's fender equipment is happy to be playing surf music again. After all, its the music it was meant to play.