Well I hate to be too dogmatic, but I have a hard time calling Sandy Nelson's Casbah "jazz" because some clueless record store employee put "Let There Be Drums" in the jazz section.

Site dude - S3 Agent #202
Need help with the site? SG101 FAQ - Send me a private message - Email me

"It starts... when it begins" -- Ralf Kilauea

Brian

topsail
From Wiki - Beach music, also known as Carolina beach music, is a regional genre which developed from various musical styles of the forties, fifties and sixties. These styles ranged from big band swing instrumentals to the more raucous sounds of blues/jump blues, jazz, doo-wop, boogie, rhythm and blues, reggae, rockabilly and old-time rock and roll.

Sounds like 5 or 6 genres. The list of artists considered Beach Music on the wikipedia page is also quite diverse.

Having read the Wiki article and listened to the clips posted, I concur with Brian. Big band swing, reggae, rockabilly, music written in 4/4 time? I don't see how this constitutes a genre in the normally-used sense. More of a collective regional term used where various types of music fell together in a local scene.

Getting back to the original topic, I'm going to be the lone madman howling in the wilderness and state that although instrumental surf music has always fascinated me, my Beach Boys fling was brief indeed. Now I can't stand them. Linking the BB's sound with The Infrareds or MOAM seems to me like lumping Kenny Rogers in with instrumental bluegrass music. Maybe it's all 'country', but that convenient catch-all doesn't necessarily imply a defining technical/stylistic connection; still we tend to connect them, though. Synchro makes a good point about people making their own generic distinctions based on quite personal criteria.

So really they're a "surfing girl car band"

Danny Snyder

"With great reverb comes great responsibility" - Uncle Leo

Playing keys and guitar with Combo Tezeta

Formerly a guitarist in The TomorrowMen and Meshugga Beach Party

Latest surf project - Now That's What I Call SURF

I wanted to put that one (39-21-40 shape) on my post but couldn't find it - unfortunately I couldn't remember the exact series of numbers - tried several guesses but never would have come up with "40" for the last one......

I'd call the Beach Boys a "California Sound" band.

WhorehayRFB
We went to the Philly Pizza Company
And ordered some hot tea
The waitress said well no, we only have it iced
So we jumped up on the table and shouted anarchy
And someone played a Beach Boys song on the jukebox
It was "California Dreamin"
So we started screamin
On such a winter's day[/quote

this isn't a Dead Milkmen forum!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ThPN8ZY4I

mattshaffer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-ThPN8ZY4I

Touche'

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

Elray wrote:

Casey-where do you live?
Pawley's Island was my surf spot.
One of the songs you posted was Bill Deal and the Rondels. They never made it in SC. I always thought they they were a little pop-no soul.

I live in Richmond VA but spend a fair amount of time each year in Cape Hatteras. Grew up in Roanoke VA, most of the live music heard there was either soul or "Beach Music"

Tuck
I used to play a game when travelling which I call the Ice-o-gloss game, in which I order "tea" and wait to see if it comes hot or cold. Either way is OK. Then all of a sudden wait*s started asking which I wanted. I'm not sure if that's because all the cultural norms are breaking down, and the world is going to hell in a handbasket, or because I started asking with some inflectional turn that clues them in. The Ice-o-gloss isogloss seems to run approximately with I-70: iced south of that, hot north. Or it used to work that way.

About the same time all the McDonalds suddenly realized that nobody really likes HiC and started making sure if it was ice(d) tea or HiC you had ordered over the squawk box. Even the native speakers of Spanish, for whom a squawked ice-D sounds even more like 'iC.

This is a very interesting experiement you've devised. Iced vs. hot tea is the very tip of the tip of the iceberg. I lived my early years in Minnesota, spent 26 years in Denver and have been in Arizona for about 10 years. One thing that has struck me for years is the degree of cultural difference between the three locations I've called home.

One thing I've never been able to adapt to here is the fact that the person ringing you up at the checkout line will carry on a conversation with someone else while ringing up your groceries. In Minnesota or Colorado that would be a career-ending act. This is just one example I've observed.

To bring it back to the subject at hand, I suspect that the term "Surf Music" means something different to a Californian that to a Minnesotan, or for that matter a Coloradan, an Arizonan or probably almost anyone else. Anything I know about the Surf culture of California is second hand at best. I think it's only natural that my take on all of this is going to be quite different from someone with firsthand experience.

To this Minnesotan the Beach Boys are inseperable from Surf culture; I probably first heard the term Surfing in a Beach Boys sound. That having been said, I realize that there is a vast difference between their vocally oriented music and Dick Dale's contribution. Both of these examples were worlds away from the reality of life the northern Midwest. One can hardly imagine the Beach Boys struggling to get their car started on a sub-zero morning and Little Deuce Coupes were from a world where tire chains were unheard of. In my mind instrumental Surf Music was the music you'd hear at the beaches of So Cal but the Beach Boys were the artists that told us about So Cal in the first place.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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