The gate of ijtahad have open wide enough only to allow ISIS war chant non-instrumental surf. It used to include surftaliban but that is so passe.

CreepBeat wrote:

Oh great, THANKS JOBeast. Now we get to hear Electronic Christian Disco Glockenspiel Surf.

Squink Out!

ArtS wrote:

Today, if a kid plays an instrument, everyone is so happy. So maybe part of the reason why 60s surf was so progressive and in a way, tonally innovative is because they was being some "bad, bad boys"...

Not sure about that bad-boy thing. Much of the reading I've done indicates, especially for those still in high-school (and younger) their parents were often quite $upportive and were the reason you see HS Juniors on-stage with Bandmasters, Jags, Strats P-Basses etc. (after they went through their initial Silvertone phase to see if they were serious). The family station wagon was the tour bus; pre- soccer mom/hockey-dad type stuff. Most kids I grew up with back then, while not backing down if defending themselves or a friend, were generally pretty solid kids and didn't get into alot of trouble.

Now, if the adults started understanding the connotations of song-titles like "Beaver Patrol" etc., that was an issue on a different level.

Wes
SoCal ex-pat with a snow shovel

DISCLAIMER: The above is opinion/suggestion only & should not be used for mission planning/navigation, tweaking of instruments, beverage selection, or wardrobe choices.

I think it's a very veiled reference to Secret Chiefs 3.

ArtS wrote:

CreepBeat wrote:

Oh great, THANKS JOBeast. Now we get to hear Electronic Christian Disco Glockenspiel Surf.

Not sure I get the "Christian" reference, so I won't get offended.

Squink Out!

I was imagining the most awful combination of things construed into "surf" and the band Stryper came to mind. I apologize for poor form on my behalf. At least I hope we can all agree that Stryper is indeed terrible.

JObeast wrote:

I think it's a very veiled reference to Secret Chiefs 3.

ArtS wrote:

CreepBeat wrote:

Oh great, THANKS JOBeast. Now we get to hear Electronic Christian Disco Glockenspiel Surf.

Not sure I get the "Christian" reference, so I won't get offended.

Skins for The Delstroyers

To Boldly go where no Tiki has gone before...

For truly, objectively awful music check out Russian artists Komar & Melamid's 1997 records, based on listener polls

"The Most Unwanted Song" is a song created by artists Komar and Melamid and composer Dave Soldier in 1997. The song was designed to incorporate lyrical and musical elements that were annoying to most people. These elements included bagpipes, cowboy music, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir that urged listeners to go shopping at Wal-Mart.

For The People's Choice: Music CD, "The Most Unwanted Song" was paired with "The Most Wanted Song," which incorporated musical elements that were "wanted" by listeners, again as determined by a public opinion survey. Instruments such as guitar, bass, piano and drums, and lyrics about love were "most wanted" by the survey respondents, and are included in the song, which has been described as "Celine Dion-esque".

The vocals for "The Most Wanted Song" are provided by Ada Dyer and Ronnie Gent; Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid is featured on guitar.

Squink Out!

Last edited: Mar 22, 2016 23:18:24

Or maybe new tunes with different chords structures/arrangements with slightly tweaked or updated sounds/tones.

Surfcat

2023 SG101 Compilation - Tribute to Noel
The Journey Home - Agent Octopus (Our SG101 Comp download)

From Atlantis with Love - Released - July 2023
Agent Octopus-Spotify
Christmas on the Beach - NEW SINGLE Dec 2023!!
Reverb Galaxy - Angle of Attack CD - BANDCAMP

Surf, the most dangerous of all musical genres...

CrazyAces wrote:

we just create music that we're inspired to that has a basis or influence in the original material but is not trying to sound like the old stuff, but I also think we pay a price for it in that we're nowhere near as popular as more mainstream Surf/Instro
A myopic view for sure but one I feel is true.

I think it a lot depends on the personality and vision of the band. When we wanted to get gigs we played more early stuff like Wipeout, Pipeline, etc... After a while we found the gigs were nice but Jim and I were both songwriters by nature, and so it became a bit unfulfilling. So we started working on our own spin on surf with Reverb Galaxy and now Agent Octopus. We are much happier playing the music with less gigs. But some people are more technician oriented and entertainment oriented, while I think we like to create and innovate a bit more. I'm sure there are bands at both extremes and a lot in the middle. I really think trying to pigeon hole surf into traditional vs. modern is a bit difficult especially when you listen to some of the original material that people post and link on SG101. To be honest, I like a variety of surf; just depends on my mood and where I am.

Surfcat

2023 SG101 Compilation - Tribute to Noel
The Journey Home - Agent Octopus (Our SG101 Comp download)

From Atlantis with Love - Released - July 2023
Agent Octopus-Spotify
Christmas on the Beach - NEW SINGLE Dec 2023!!
Reverb Galaxy - Angle of Attack CD - BANDCAMP

Surf, the most dangerous of all musical genres...

Last edited: Jul 13, 2021 07:17:03

rfcii wrote:

Time for a 5 year check-in?

Why not?

While I was an active member when this thread was running, I apparently missed it in 2010.

The good news is, we’re still here as a community and Surf is still being played. If anyone is waiting for another Pulp Fiction to come along and give Surf a huge boost, that may be hard to come by. I think that bolt of lightning will only strike but once. I hope I’m wrong about this.

Surf hasn’t died, by any means, but we’re not where we were at the time I joined this site. The questions asked in this thread remain valid, and perhaps vital. You can have the finest retail store on earth, but without customers, it’s a losing proposition. Likewise, the best Surf band still needs to attract an audience, or it will be all but impossible to keep it intact as a band. So one question becomes; how do we accomplish this?

Defining Surf is like nailing Jell-O to a wall. If there was a way to quantify the opinions of everyone on this forum, as to what is Surf, and what is not, there would be a bell-curve which would reflect absolute purists on the right and persons with few boundaries on the left, while the majority of us would fall somewhere closer to the middle of the curve.

I would probably be to the left of center with my definition of Surf. I was a child when Surf first hit, but I was listening and I was aware of the genre at the time. I see Surf as part of a continuum from at least Duane Eddy, to when other sounds started to emerge in instrumentals, such as Beck’s Bolero. I’m not saying that all of that is Surf, but I would venture that Duane Eddy was a major influence on what became Surf, and that the instrumental rock, since that time, was influenced by Surf. One could even draw a line back to Billy Butler’s guitar part on Honky Tonk, as an inflection point. That was an instrumental R&B tune, recorded in 1956, which I have heard referred to as the “Big Bang of Rock n’ Roll guitar”. It has pretty much every lick and cliché of early Rock guitar, and it probably inspired much of what followed.

If Surf is defined in the narrowest of terms, a musical phenomenon from the beaches of LA, it could be said that we’ve strayed from that path. But if we zoom the lens out to include a broader scene, which we’d have to do just to include the Astronauts, then there’s a lot more room for diversity. My personal view is that the Surf Music phenomenon of the early sixties was an intersection of factors; the development of Instrumental Rock reaching back to Duane Eddy and even Honky Tonk, the development of portable reverb (such as the 6G15) and the social phenomenon of Surfing as a “lifestyle” of sorts.

That last point is broad, because it relies upon social perception. The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean sang about surfing and hot cars. If you were a kid in the Midwest, it would be easy to imagine that every dude in SoCal had Dodge with a 413 or a 409 Chevy and spent their days hanging out at the beach, listening to music, surfing and fighting off the mobs of girls in bikinis that were competing for their attention. For most of us, the only things we knew about that world came from songs, television and perhaps an occasional magazine article, all of which can be slanted to present a very inaccurate picture. No one wrote drudgerous songs about working long hours to pay for all of this, and such a song would probably not have charted all that well.

I was listening to Paul Johnson’s 1986 album with the Packards, last night, High Energy. It is labeled as Surf Style Rock Instrumentals. The sound is overdriven, but not anywhere close to Heavy Metal levels of distortion. Actually, were I to hear a snippet from many of the songs with no other contextual information, I would probably have guessed that they were obscure cuts from an Allman Brothers album. In any event, I like it a lot. It doesn’t claim to be straight ahead Surf, and in fact a number of the songs are adapted from the Praise and Worship genre, but to my tastes, it’s quite in keeping with the traditions of Surf music, which is to say an innovative instrumental treatment of good melodies.

To my sensibilities, this album demonstrates a vital point; nothing stays the same forever. Music had changed in the years between Mr. Moto and the recording of High Energy. Guitars had changed, amps had changed, effects had changed; the world had changed. Music changes and always will, because life changes. A teenager today wouldn’t feel the same emotional connection to a song about a 413 Dodge as a teenager in 1962 would have. People tend to make hits of songs that either relate to their lives, or songs which are essentially fantasy or novelty. Nostalgia plays well, but only if people in the present can relate to it. Nostalgia loses meaning if there is no connection to the present.

One factor of nostalgia is that people sometimes long for a past that never actually existed. I’ve seen this in rockabilly, where people dress up as they imagine people in the ‘50s to have dressed, cop some “rockabilly attitude” and walk around pretending that they are living a scene from some period movie. The problem is, that “scene” is a micro-thin slice of civilization at that time. If you displayed “rockabilly attitude” in the fifties, chances are you would have lost your minimum wage job in a filling station and ended up living under your parent’s roof and your parent’s rules. In the ‘60s, kids might have surfed all day during summer break from school, but most of them got jobs when they graduated and surfing was forced into the realm of recreation. The crowded weekend beaches, came to replace the relatively open beaches of the weekdays. With the rare exceptions of the ultra rich, the everlasting summer usually ended soon after graduating high school.

Going forward, the real enemy is time. There will come a time, somewhere in the future, when the Surf culture of the ‘60s could become all but meaningless. The songs of Stephen Foster were highly relevant in the mid 19th century, but they are all but forgotten in our day. We don’t hear a lot of Charlestons being played these days and even Big Band music remains as little more than a curiosity. There’s nothing wrong with any of these three examples, except that time marches on, and drags society along with it.

However, I think that the distinctive sound of a Fender guitar playing through a 6G15 and into a Dual Showman will long resonate with the tastes of at least some people. It’s a great sound and I find it hard to imagine that there would ever come a time when no one would appreciate the emotional impact of that sound.

Do we change with the times, or stick to our guns? I would say BOTH. Both approaches will be necessary in order to survive in a changing world. I think that we need to be able to give a good accounting of Surf music, as it was played back in the day, and I think that we need to apply what we’ve learned from the past towards innovations which will attract a new audience, and possibly help that new audience to appreciate the roots of Surf music. Our only hope of keeping Surf alive is completely dependent upon continuing to attract an audience, and just as importantly, find a way to appeal to a new audience. If we continue to rely on the same audience, attrition will doom our efforts.

What I feel we don’t need is bands that become an exaggerated caricature of Surf, with painful levels of reverb, playing too loud and too fast, imagining that they are at the Rendezvous Ballroom and that they can somehow turn back the hands of time if only they can achieve enough drip.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

There are a lot of things floating in the vast wasteland of my brain, after reading your post.

The first thought is that music is a continuum, from the first time one of our distant ancestors created a simple instrument and began working to make repeatable sounds, to the most complex and modern music imaginable, it is all interrelated in some way.

Instrumental Rock, such as Duane Eddy, and the Surf Music that followed it were products of the electric guitar’s stage of development in the ‘50s and ‘60s, but I think that it is entirely valid to draw a connection between that music and Flamenco Guitar, which didn’t rely upon amplification. Both tend to be minor key songs with a bit of dramatic flair and lots of energy.

I have noticed that Surf music seems to be of interest, not just to North Americans who may feel some connection to the SoCal surf scene, but also in places where minor key music is common in the indigenous music, such as Russia and the Balkans. The Andalusian Cadence upon which Walk, Don’t Run, and countless other Surf songs are based, traces its roots deep into middle eastern history and may well have originated in ancient Israel. I’ve also hear Hungarian minor scales used in modern Surf songs coming from bands in the Balkans. Personally, I find this to be amazingly cool, that various musical traditions are finding a voice as Surf Music. In an interesting parallel, I’ve heard some very clever modern polkas coming out of Scandinavian countries. Polka or Surf, I take pleasure in the fact that traditional music of various ethnicities has not been forgotten.

So, in some nearly imponderable future, perhaps electric guitars and reverb will be forgotten, but I can’t imagine that there will not be someone, somewhere, playing strong minor key melodies on a plectrum instrument and delighting an audience.

I’ve always loved the sound of a clean guitar, and when fuzz was all the rage, I never converted my tastes. I have an appreciation for overdriven guitar, in some genres, but the fundamentally clean sounds of Surf Guitar have appealed to me since the days when it was Top 40 material, next to Jan & Dean and The Beach Boys.

In my earliest years as a guitar player, I wanted to be Chet Atkins, and still play a fair amount of that material. Soon thereafter, I learned about Jazz guitar and love those mellow, clean sounds. I still do. A few years before I picked up the guitar, Surf was at its apex, with regard to airplay, and I would listen to WDGY in Minneapolis all day, hoping to hear Pipeline or maybe Walk, Don’t Run. There may have been 2 or 3 Surf tunes on a good day, but that clean sound with reverb grabbed me, and many others as well. A lot of ears perked up when the instrumentals came on the radio.

Heavy overdrive adds a lot in the way of power and sustain, but it can reduce the level of detail that comes out of the speaker. In order to play clean, good right hand technique is essential. Classical guitar instructors have been known to assign a student to practice only striking open strings with their fingers, slowly, in order to imprint the procedural memory needed to get a good sound, consistently. This can also be done on a steel string, plectrum guitar, playing Major and minor scales, very slowly and precisely, concentrating on LH fingering and solid, even strokes with the pick, in order to imprint the procedural memory for both even pressure on the LH and even stokes of the pick, both for downstrokes and upstrokes. Such attention to detail would probably not survive a trip through heavy overdrive, but would stand out nicely through a clean Showman with a 6G15 up front. If you listen to Johnny Smith’s original recording of Walk, Don’t Run, from the early fifties, you’ll hear that sort of attention to detail. It’s also played at a very fast tempo.

The phenomenon you describe seems all to familiar. The Jazz scene in Denver, during the ‘90s, did pretty well, but you saw the same faces at pretty much every gig, no matter who was playing, and it’s safe to assume that a substantial portion of the audience would have been musicians, of one stripe or another. Actually, I think that the halcyon days of live music have been gone for a long time. Lavish night clubs with bands of full time musicians have been in decline for decades.

It’s not so easy to make a living from music these days and, frankly, I’m glad to be out of it as a business, while still playing a handful of events, mostly benefits. As has long been the case, if you want to work steadily as a musician, plan on being on the road. In my locale, a bespoke Surf gig would be a rarity. It may be different closer to the ocean, but if you are a hardcore surfer, Tucson would be a frustrating place to live.

This brings me back to an earlier comment about nostalgia for a history which never actually existed. With the exception of a limited time (early ‘60s) and place (the beaches of SoCal) I don’t think that there was ever a time when Surf Music dominated or when the Surfer lifestyle intersected with the reality of most people’s lives. Even in Huntington Beach, most people had to work for a living making a living playing in a Surf band was an occupation which supported only a relative few musicians.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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