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I've kept quiet through all the recent discussion, but
I wanna sound off a little here. I've always listened
to surf. My earliest memories pertaining to music are
of sitting in front of my parents record player and
spinning all of my dad's surf albums and compilation
cassettes. He didn't have very many, but those were
my favorites. My mom and dad between them had a
pretty large collection of popular music spanning
about 20 years, but when I got my own turntable in
high school, the only albums I stole were my dad's
surf albums.
I love the beach, love to body board (I live on the
east coast, we do what we can) and will never forget
the fun that I've had doing it, the smell and feel of
just being there, etc. In some loose way I can make
the "spiritual" connection with the sensation of wave
riding to the music, but to be honest with you the
only things correlating the two in my mind are the
images that've been fed to me. As far as I'm
concerned, "surf" is a buzzword latched onto by record
labels and such as a way to market the music because
of it's origin, etc, as has been noted by others here.
You might smack me down for that, but to me it's as
arbitrary as "punk" or "country", etc. It's a way of
denoting the genre or "type" of music it is (the lines
of all of which are blurred on a very regular basis by
numerous musicians), and I say that surf rock called
by any other name would sound just as sweet.
I put away the surf albums for a while and got into
radio music, then punk, and one day while traveling
with a buddy of mine that was in a psychobilly band he
asked, "So do you listen to anything besides punk?" I
thought of all the crap that I'd gone through in my
Top 40 listenin' days that I never touched anymore,
stuff that literally had dust on it, and the few
"nonpunk" albums I still dragged out from the old
days, and the only thing I could honestly say to him
was, "Yeah, surf." Well this guy immediately popped
in a Man or Astroman tape and said, "We've played some
shows with these guys..." and I was floored. People
still played it. I couldn't believe it. That started
the ball rolling and it's been great ever since,
picking up on all this great stuff that's out there,
and unlike a lot of other music scenes, everybody that
does it is doing it because they love it. It's
honest, and I see that in every cool person I meet
online and at shows that actually likes to talk shop
about surf music and guitars, as opposed to other
shows I've been at where there are just a bunch of
assholes glomming onto a "scene" that are generally
real exclusionary, pretentious and unapproachable.
So for me it runs pretty deep. I've only actually
surfed once, and only make it to the beach once a year
if I'm lucky, and even though I can't play worth a
shit (I'm not being modest. I can't play worth a
shit.) I still get off on it like nothing else. I've
loved it since I was barely tall enough to reach up
and drop the vinyl on the turntable myself.
So viva...our rock! Hah.
Richard
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