DrakeSequation wrote:

nismosurf wrote:

No vocals. At all. Therefore, The Beach Boys ain’t surf.

J

When I talk about surf music, everyone over 50 says, “Like The Beach Boys”? My answer is always that The Beach Boys are pop music that use surf iconography. They are awesome, but not surf.

Keeping in mind that I lived through the era, I don’t recall ever hearing the term Surf Music, at the time. That may have been different in SoCal, but in the Midwest, we probably would have called Pipeline, or Wipeout Instrumental music. If someone had mentioned Surf Music, that would have brought to mind The Beach Boys, or Jan and Dean, because their songs were about the SoCal culture, and we knew what surfing was, and that happened in California.

DrakeSequation wrote:

synchro wrote:

Playing Blues doesn’t make one a sharecropper, playing Jazz doesn’t make one a resident of Greenwich Village, playing Country doesn’t make one a resident of Tennessee and playing Surf doesn’t make one a SoCal surfer.

I was born and raised in Southern California. My father had moved to California from the Midwest largely to surf, but growing up I had no direct exposure to surf culture other than my location. I was always into instrumental guitar music, but did not discover surf music until I was in my late teens and, ironically, living in the Midwest. I like that I do have a surf pedigree but that my love for surf grew not out of proximity, but finding my needle in a haystack.

We remember the Astronauts for Baja and their Surf, but before that, they were the average ‘50s Rock n’ Roll band and had vocals. We remember bands for their notable songs, but most bands had much more to offer than their biggest hits.

I recently tracked down The Astronauts complete box set and was very, very pleasantly surprised by their non-surf output, which is everything except Baja.

They were a pretty decent band, with or without Baja, and dating back to the mid ‘50s. That’s where it gets tricky, because they were famous for a Surf tune, and it is an all-time great, but that is not representative of everything they did. The hype machine makes it easy to pigeon hole a band.

When I saw album covers, back in the day, I tended to think of them as representing fact. When I saw The Beach Boys standing next to a painted up Model A pickup, I figured that was theirs. Likewise, the Surf band album covers were pretty convincing, and when I saw Dick Dale in a crash helmet, and sitting in a dragster, I figured that he must’ve been a drag racer, which was about the coolest thing I could imagine at the time. I never would have imagined that Brian Wilson drove luxury sedans and that these guys were businessmen, as much as they were musicians.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

nismosurf wrote:

No vocals. At all. Therefore, The Beach Boys ain’t surf.

J

Dick Dale had vocal tunes)

Waikiki Makaki surf-rock band from Ukraine

https://linktr.ee/waikikimakaki

Lost Diver

https://lostdiver.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/vitaly-yakushin

darrenk wrote:

Surfalbumcovers wrote:

What parameters do you use to decide what falls under the Surf Music umbrella?

What are you trying to use the label for? I use such phrases as surf instrumental as more adjectives for the music when trying to describe it to others. How a song or band is labeled does not change how I feel about them. The music is what matters to me.

-Darren

Hear hear! At times attributed to Louie Armstrong, Duke Ellington or [fill in the blank] respected musician from the past, ‘there are two kinds of music, good and bad’. Genres are no more useful than their definition. I see Surf as a subset of Instrumental Rock, and apparently, so do others. How many Surf bands have covered Walk, Don’t Run, Apache, or Secret Agent Man? The thing that sets Surf apart, at least in some minds, is the tie to SoCal Surf culture, which affords visual imagery tied to surfing, which is particularly stirring if you happen to be buried under six feet of snow in some land locked midwestern town.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

Surf Music Timeline

Here is a first wave timeline thread posted by SilverFlash a few years ago.

-John

"...enjoy every sandwich." -Warren Zevon

Fender Stratocaster American Pro II
Fender '65 Deluxe Reverb Reissue

IceratzSurf wrote:

synchro wrote:

The Beach Boys were a fantastic band, and even as a small child, I knew I was hearing something special. They popularized SoCal culture, probably as well as anyone could have. They definitely brought surfing to the attention of many people who were nowhere near LA. I would agree that they helped the cause of Surf guitar, just by bringing the surf culture to the attention of more people.<<

Exactly. They were important to the entire scene of Surf.
At the time of music release during the 60s. did anyone even begin to catagorize the genre? Maybe a bit, like "these guys are a Surf band"
It was all 'pop' music, an overall generic term to describe what was popular, as in what was played on airwaves.
Soon the Beatles would become 'pop'
And only later by a few years mid 60s would it become "The British Invasion". (which is what killed the initial surf wave, thanks to Jimi H for famously saying it)
Going back hundreds years, did Beetoven know his music was " classical" at the time? No.
So my point is, our perception of music is not defined at the time of itsrelease as much as it is then a definition of history.
And here we are, trying to define what is "Surf" as it has gone through many evolutions and continues.
I wonder if someone here could put together a graphical portrayal of Surf evolution to where we are today.

Well stated. In the Top 40 Radio era, music was frequently the “Jelly of the Month Club”, many songs charted for a few weeks, and were then forgotten. How many people listen to Junk Food Junkie or Disco Duck on a regular basis? Yet, they charted at #9 and #1, respectively.

The classical masters, such as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven were forging new paths, musically, but so were many others, who died in obscurity, and are forgotten. To the best of my knowledge, Bach was obscure, in his day, and was discovered after his death by means of his manuscripts. That’s a stunning thought, because we very easily could have never had his influence, and that would have been truly tragic. But at the time, these were just musicians who wrote and were trying to survive. They played gigs, and probably put up with the ancestors of the sweaty drunks I used to encounter at bar gigs.

I was watching the Beatles, on the Sullivan show, and I lived through Beatlemania, as it played out in the US, and on the airwaves. I see it as a one-two punch. The nation had the wind knocked out of it when Kennedy was assassinated, and the Beatles appeared on Sullivan the next spring, to an audience waiting for something … anything, to latch onto.

Kennedy was a pop culture phenomenon; young, with a beautiful wife, and young children. There was a comedy album called The First Family, and one song from it was My Daddy’s the President, sung from the perspective of Caroline Kennedy, and that song got airplay. After 1963/11/22, that album immediately ceased to be funny. Kennedy was loved in pop culture, and his passing left a hole, that needed to be filled. Four mop-topped guys who were funny, and just happened to be great musicians were a lightning strike to the sensibilities of the culture, and probably the point where many adults first began to take Rock n’ Roll seriously. Up to that point, Rock n’ Roll was treated as “teen-aged music”, to quote my dad, and once a person became an adult, they were more likely listen to Country or middle of the road pop that still had one foot planted in the Big Band era, or the Great American Songbook Standards.

Surf seemed like yesterday’s news, once we had heard Yesterday, and had read today’s news. (I couldn’t resist.) The Beatles, for the good, or for the bad, changed everything, and it was about 20 years before the aftershocks truly began to subside. But Surf has endured quite well. Here we are, talking about it, 60 years later.

Surf didn’t die in 1964, but it dissipated into the broader culture. Similar twangy guitar sounds were used in Westerns, Spy movies, and Country. Interestingly, one of the Surfiest sounds I can remember hitting the charts was the guitar work in Riders On the Storm, which used tremolo and sounded very old school by the standards of 1971, but the song was a spiritual descendant of Ghost Riders In the Sky, and that old school sound worked perfectly.

In the same time period, the Ventures got a lot of mileage out of clean guitars and prominent reverb, playing a wide variety of musical styles. They weren’t topping the charts, but they were selling a lot of albums, and would occasionally crop up on what, in today’s terminology, would be thought of as Adult Contemporary. Put another way, if I wanted to hear an instrumental with twangy guitar and reverb in the early ‘60s, I would have listened to the Top 40 station my older sister listened to, but in the late ‘60s, I would be more likely to hear that on the station my parents listened to.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

Last edited: Jan 26, 2024 09:22:43

Huh? ALL Dick Dale's surf and hot rod vocals are great!

T H E ✠ S U R F I T E S

bigtikidude wrote:

The problem is all the non surf n hot rod vocals he did.

ooooooof!

As much as I enjoy his vocal stuff, I have to admit ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘If I Never Get To Heaven’ from King of the Surf Guitar are pretty awful

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Last edited: Jan 26, 2024 14:46:08

Surfalbumcovers wrote:

As much as I enjoy his vocal stuff, I have to admit ‘You Are My Sunshine’ and ‘If I Never Get To Heaven’ from King of the Surf Guitar are pretty awful

Yeah, those are pretty bad for his standards. "Greenback Dollar" from the same album is really great though.

T H E ✠ S U R F I T E S

I really liked Summertime Blues and Greenback Dollar.

Recordings usually had a lot of influence from producers who called most of the shots. If A&R says to sing You Are My Sunshine, the artist will probably start singing, if they want to stay employed.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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

For the sake of saving space on the page, I won’t quote you, Electric Limnology, but that is a well-reasoned approach.

I think that there is a degree of linkage to Blues, but Surf is not structured on a 12 Bar (Major) Blues very often. Elements of minor key Blues show up, especially the VI-V, turnaround, which is ubiquitous in minor blues and shows up in a fair number of Surf pieces. But even in the cases where there are harmonic similarities to Blues, the feel is entirely different.

The Andalusian Cadence shows up in a lot of Surf, or at least modifications of the Andalusian Cadence. Mr. Moto is a good example, starting on D min, skipping the C Maj altogether, then doing the VI-V with Bb to A. The bridge ends with a VI-V in a new tone center, A minor which just sort of naturally finds its way back to D minor, after 16 bars. It’s a brilliant composition, and utilizes the Andalusian Cadence as a concept, but it doesn’t adhere to it so strictly that it risks sounding like a reheated version of Walk, Don’t Run.

The artist formerly known as: Synchro

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