April Birthdays 
I suppose in 1963 as now there were at least two critical factors in what makes a surf band possible: motivation and economics. Clearly things like the evolution of suitable musical gear and suitable musical forms are also important, and people have thought about that a lot. You need some talented musicians, too, but if the conditions are right those appear.
Motivation:
1) Clearly the band members have to love the sound and find it exciting to hear and produce.
2) They have to enjoy working with other musicians on a pretty labor intensive team project. This probably explains to some extent the strong male bias in the musical population, as young males seem to be more prone to collective activities of this sort (bands and other sorts of raiding parties) than young women.
3) They have to enjoy the attention or other rewards they get from playing it, and I suspect, given that the bands were mostly male, the attention they especially enjoyed was the attention of female audience members. So, although the attention of peers in general would have been a signficant factor, a major morivation was probably meeting girls. At this point we reach economics, because meeting members of the opposite sex is usually sufficient motivation to engage in financially and personally risky activities at any age. Generally a teenage boy who has met a girl or two does not consider the evening wasted even if he didn't make any money in the process. If he did get paid to spend his time doing this, so much the better, of course.
Venues:
In connection with item 3 here, it's clearly important that there be arenas where the music can be performed. Books on surf music point out the particular importance of two kinds of venues:
a) School dances and talent shows.
b) Teen clubs, in a number of cases developed by the bands themselves with the financial assistance of their families.
There are also fairly frequent reports of venues like
c) county fairs
d) halls operated by adult associations (VFW halls, church halls, teen activity clubs, etc.)
e) small venues like icecream stores, music stores, pizza parlors, etc.
Also mentioned, mostly later on:
f) entertainments organized for servicemen (also good ways to meet girls),
g) existing entertainment organizations (Disneyland, etc.), and
h) specially organized "battles of bands."
Not significant: bars and other places where liquor was sold. Hotels?
Money, expenditures:
No matter how much you enjoy something, if you can't afford to do it, you aren't going to be doing very much of it.
1) Gear: It appears to me that most of the initial musicians had fairly cheap mass market gear presented to them as gifts by parents (Sears Silvertones, etc.). I'm not sure what prices for gear of this sort were, typically. But with gear of this sort the major investment by the musicians was time, because it was usually received as a gift.
This sort of gear was usually rapidly replaced with better gear, self-purchased, or sponsored by associated adults, mostly parents. In most cases this gear was purchased on time and financed by playing gigs for pay. I've seen some references to the scale of weekly/monthly payments, and I imagine it would be possible to find out what the overall prices of various instruments would have been, too.
There are some references to time purchases being passed to other individuals or repossessed when the musical career ended.
In some particular cases better gear and replacements were funded by Fender (motivated by r&d needs and advertising potential) or by a commercial recording outfit. But you had to be a major personality for the first or have a contract for the second.
2) Not musical gear, but since bands in this period typically performed in something like a uniform outfit, usually a suit of some sort, it was sometimes an important factor to find a clothing store willing to provide these outfits in return for advertising and gigs played outside the store. (This is mentioned with the Original Surfaris.)
Money, income:
The major source of income was probably fees for live appearances. I believe that payments for appearances at school dances and at most of the commercial venues mentioned above were usually considered quite satisfactory by the musicians in question, and were usually more than sufficiently large and regular enough to support purchasing instruments on time, uniforms, transportation costs (cars, gasoline), and incidentals like travel food and dating. However, most of the musicians were actually being supported day to day (food, shelter, clothing, etc.) by their parents and parents may sometimes have subsidized transportation costs heavily, too, since some of the bands remember being driven about by their parents.
There are a numerous reports of how much was received for particular shows, though I don't have any of those handy right now, and I don't know what was typical. The amounts reported are usually small by present standards, but adequate to large by the standards of teenagers at the time.
However, these amounts were not actually sufficient to support the musician in most cases. As the young surf musicians got older, needing to make enough money to support themselves or a family, as opposed to band and personal entertainment activities only, was often a critical factor in causing a musician to leave music entirely. Those who remained musicians usually lived at something like the poverty level as itinerant musicians or worked as musicians only part time. They played whatever was currently fashionable, and they usually played in drinking establishments or dance halls catering to people of drinking age, having reached the age where they could legally play in such establishments.
3) I don't think most bands made anything at all from recording. In fact, they or their parents usually subsidized that, and in many cases they lost rights to their performances to individuals higher up the musical feeding chain. In fact, recordings were more useful as prestige items and advertising - 45s to hand out or sell and occasional airplay - than as a source of income. Nevertheless, the illusion that these could be a source of income persisted and persists, based mainly on a few unusual cases where bands got recording contracts and achieved mass market sales.
4) Bands picked up by larger organizations sometimes made more money this way, but with smaller organizations they generally received fairly small one-time "in lieu of" payments instead of royalties and even where songs have become and remained popular royalties have not been paid. The perception is that they were simply misappropriated, or at best that the persons to whom they were owed were lost track of, but I suspect in most cases the legal right to them had been also been ceded, perhaps without the musicians being quite aware of it.
5) Individuals who were able to retain or regain rights to their compositions have sometimes made some regular (but probably not usually large) amounts of money through fees for subsequent reproductions or recordings of their work. This probably had little bearing on "band economies" at the time.
Last edited: Oct 22, 2010 16:03:18
By the way, this is a very cool post.
) my singing and playing on "Louie, Louie"! I FINALLY got it!
