Based on thrift store/garage sale prevalence, it seems like the Surfaris "Wipe Out/Surfer Joe" would be the top seller.

http://www.satanspilgrims.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Satans-Pilgrims/8210228553
https://satanspilgrims.bandcamp.com/
http://www.surfyindustries.com

spskins wrote:

Based on thrift store/garage sale prevalence, it seems
like the Surfaris "Wipe Out/Surfer Joe" would be the
top seller.

That is my gut feeling, too, though based on much less hands on experience. Still, even I have a (late) copy I bought somewhere back when LPs were the medium, and I only got Surf Beat recently, as a CD. Of course, the Wipe Out/Surfer Joe LP is the Dot LP, and so, except for those two cuts, this is also really a Challengers (Mark I) effort.

In assessing all of this you have to realize that under Dale Smallin's inexperienced guidence the Surfaris had sold both the composition rights to the two songs (Surfer Joe/Wipe Out) and the rights to the masters of their original recordings of them to Miraleste (Delvy) and Robin Hood Music (John Marascalco). In turn, these two had contracted national distribution rights to Dot and the Canadian and Commonwealth (etc.) distribution rights to Gil. When early reactions to the single were promising and Dot asked for additional cuts to make an LP, the equally inexperienced Delvy, always a go getter who believed that history was what he was writing, jumped on it using his own band.

At what point and to what extent Delvy (and his band) realized this had been a mistake I don't know. The moral issues are clear enough, but I am not entirely clear on the legal issues involved. Certainly using the name the Surfaris must have been one, even though the name was probably not registered in any way, and it was certainly also an issue, maybe the primary legal one at the time, that Dot used a picture of the Surfaris on the cover of the LP and also that this picture included Jim Pash, the saxophonist, who was underage (as were they all), and who was not in any of the songs on the Dot LP, having been absent the day of the recording session. (His dad needed him at the store.)

A clear error, too, at least tactically, was that the Surfaris were not under contract to Dot, Delvy (Princess and Miraleste) or anyone else. When they realized this, they signed with Decca using that name, and I think it was Decca which took steps to secure rights to the name when they quickly discovered those other Surfaris (the Customs aka the Surfaris aka the Original Surfaris) also using it. As far as it can be determined this was a coincidence. Their name change antedated any possible motivation of capitalizing on it.

I don't know if Decca noticed at the time the additional coincidence that the (Original) Surfaris had also recorded (and released) a song called Wipeout, the one that Merrel Fankhauser wrote, a nice song in its own right, but quite a different one.

The Decca action concerning the name Surfatis is sometimes identified as a suit, but it seems to have been settled by arbitration. The court of any suit and the arbitrator are not known and the decision is not in circulation. The essentials were that the Surfaris had rights to the unmodified name on the strength of having had hits under it, but the other band were allowed to call themselves the Original Surfaris because they had been around longer. I don't know if the arbitrator realized that this greater length of existence had been under the names the Vogues and then the Customs and that the relative order in which the two bands assumed the name Surfaris is much less secure. Apparently it was about the same time.

It is also not entirely clear what the absolute and relative chronology were of the Dot request to Delvy for an LP, Delvy's recording of the needed cuts with the Challengers (Mark I), his sending this material to Dot, his request to the Surfaris (Smallin) for the desired material, and the turning in of the Surfaris' material to Delvy. That material was apparently received so shortly before release of the LP that it was immediately obvious to everyone that it could never have been delivered to Dot in time to be used in the release. And, of course, it was obviously not the same material.

The Surfaris did eventually recover partial control of their composition and masters as I understand it. Incidentally, the Surfaris recordings for the Dot LP have never been discovered or recovered and their fate is unkown.

References: Dalley 1996 and a few internet sources, e.g., the dispute arising from the Gil contract is online. The month by month chronology of this is critical to understanding it and I have made a draft tabular version of that to consult.

Last edited: May 25, 2011 11:44:13

bigtikidude wrote:

Fernec,
The Bel-Airs after Eddie Left had a bass player.

Steve Lotto, whom Paul Johnson says was actually several years older than everyone else.

Randy Nauert says (Dalley 1996) that he played bass with the Bel-Airs on a few occasions - he showed up carrying his bass and looked interested until they invited him to sit in - and that Eddie taught him some bass lines for their pieces.

According to the RIAA website, a search for "Challengers" produced no results. A search for the "Beach Boys" produced 40something results.

http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=tblArtTal#

Radio Free Bakersfield--60 Minutes of TWANG, CRUNCH, OOMPH.
http://radiofreebakersfield.com
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Radio-Free-Bakersfield/172410279636
http://www.sandiegojoe.com/rfb.htm

Richard Delvy = Richard Delvecchio

two names, same guy

same as Dick Dale = Richard Monsour (Jr.)
and Jimmy Dale = James Monsour

Richard Delvy = Richard Delvecchio.
According to Richard, he was still under contract to Arvee Records as Richard Delvecchio, that is why he changed his last name for the Challengers recordings.
Bob Dalley

WhorehayRFB wrote:

According to the RIAA website, a search for
"Challengers" produced no results. A search for the
"Beach Boys" produced 40something results.

http://www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php?table=tblArtTal#

I don't get anything for Dick Dale, Surfaris, Chantays, or Ventures either. The LP sales records for the Challengers are local, in California, since Princess, their label at the time, was only distributed there.

I suspect there were other local markets in the US at the time and that the present unitary National market developed in the late 1960s. Even now things are not quite International. Some labels cannot distribute in some countries. Try to get a Treble Spankers release in the US. I had to order from the Netherlands and UK a couple of years ago.

I don't have access at the moment, but I can provide links to sites that list top 100 and/or California and other local radio play numbers. That's the level at which the surf music surge plays out. It was looking through these sites that made me realize things like that Wipeout and Louie, Louie (and other classic garage songs) were hits in the same year, within 6 months of each other, and the Rumblers, Dick Dale, and the Chantays were not much sooner before Wipe OPut in late 62 and early 63. Also, a lot of the "old chestnuts" that the surf bands were covering were, of course, "recent hit chestnuts" at the time they were covering them, just as the "old blues" the British Invasion was covering were "recent hit old blues" when they were covering them. "Old" has a relatively short time depth when you're a teenager.

In any event the time distance from now to then is far deeper than the time distance from then to the things being covered. Funny, I rememver WW II used to be ancient history to me as a child, though it ended less than a decade before I was born. The kids playing in the bands in 62 were born just about exactly as it ended.

The brief chronology of all this is what has made me suspect that the differences between surf music and garage music are largely in the filtering we apply to the output of the bands at the time, when we classify the songs, and to local market conditions affecting that, not to significant chronological stages or large differences in the bands.

Of course, there's the impact of the British Invasion on the whole structure, but it seems to me that surf music is just a certain early approach to American garage music that existed in parts of California and then was exploited by a few bands elsewhere and that disappeared (for a while) as other styles and then especially the British style of garage music took over the commercial distribution streams. At the time surf music was identified as a special thing there were already in California a body of what Paul Johnson has called r&b influenced bands that were not calling what they played surf music, though many of them did immediately start calling it that for sound commercial reasons. This explains how the first surf bands, Dick Dale & the Deltones and the Belairs, were not as old as some of the "later" surf bands to emerge.

A decade later the second wave picked out certain songs that they liked, some of them explicitly identified in 62-64 as surf music, and defined the genre we now know and love. But they also redefined it in terms of the guitar combo paradigm they knew and insisted on the instrumental nature of the genre even though at the time of the initial performances there were relatively few purely instrumental bands.

In the same way the garage second wave has identified and purified and redefined a body of garage(-punk) music which sounds rather different from surf music, even though some of it was contemporary with it and many bands in 62-64 were playing songs from both genres interchangeably at the same shows.

Some of the purification was part of the original surf music. I remember that the Centurions mention that they didn't bring the organ to record with Hilder because it was too bulky, or their vocalist, because they knew he wanted instrumentals. Most of the Hilder bands did not consider themselves surf bands initially or in some cases ever, or made surf recordings while performing more generalized or even quite different music live. The term they usually used for what they played was "r&b" which in the context of California surf music was "greaser" or "hodad" music. Car kid music. It sounded a lot like surf music or at least the differences were fairly subtle.

Last edited: May 25, 2011 19:28:34