Surf Music, 1960s: Dick Dale played music by surfers, for surfers. Armed with his trademark Fender Stratocaster, aka The Beast, Dale and the Del-Tones rocked coastal ballrooms and school gymnasiums. (Michael Ochs Archives.com/Capitol Records)
Surf Anthem, 1961 (Voyageur Press Archives)
When the sun set on the rolling surf, it was time for the music to rock. Teens throughout Southern California parked their boards and made a pilgrimage to a stately old oceanfront dancehall. Here, they did the Surfer Stomp to a band at the breakpoint of a new music that the surfers called their own.
The Rendezvous Ballroom looked out over the sea from the quiet town of Balboa. Opened in 1928, the dancehall spanned a full block between Palm and Washington streets, its twelve-thousand-square-foot dance floor easily hosting 1,500 couples with a sixty-four-foot-long soda fountain and a mezzanine of intimate couches and banquettes. In the 1930s, teenagers flocked to “Bal Week” during Easter vacation as the Rendezvous was a headquarters for swing, the big bands of Harry James, Benny Goodman, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, and more broadcasting by radio from the dancehall and across the nation. Now, at the dawn of the 1960s, there was a new sound at the Rendezvous.
Let’s go surfin’ now, Everybody’s learning how—Come on a safari with me!
— The Beach Boys, “Surfin’ Safari,” 1962
A guitarist named Dick Dale was rocking the Rendezvous with screaming licks backed by honking horns and tribal drumming from his Del-Tones band. And Dale played it loud.
The surf gang went crazy for the music—a cool blend of R&B, country western, and rock’n’roll. They stomped across the hardwood floor in their huaraches, lost themselves to the Frug, and filled the hall with primal energy.
It was the dawn of surf music.
Throughout the 1960s, surf music crested on several fronts. Dale was one of the best-known exponents of reverb-heavy instrumental rock—along with other bands like the Ventures, Belairs, Frogmen, Mar-Kets, Chantays, Surfaris, and many more. A vocal tradition also appeared, led by the doo-wop harmonizations of Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys. Much of the earliest surf music was made by surfers for surfers. But as the style caught a wave, others hopped on, lured by the hot new sounds, the surfing chic, or simply to cash in on the fad.
Dick Dale was a surfer, so he’s often credited as one of the founders of surf music. His bouncy tune “Let’s Go Trippin’” was a Southern California regional hit in 1961, a year after the Ventures’ nationwide success in 1960 with “Walk, Don’t Run.” The Ventures hailed from inland Tacoma, Washington; they had a big break in the music business, but wouldn’t have known what to do on even a small break at the beach. And although Dale was perhaps not the coolest cat on a hot foam board, he certainly played his music for an audience of wave-riders at the Rendezvous.
He was christened Richard Monsour at birth in 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of a Leba nese machinist father and Polish mother. As a youth, he taught himself to play Hank Williams songs on ukulele and guitar, but among his other influences was an uncle who played the oud, a Middle Eastern lute used to accompany belly dancers. Soon, the youngster could play anything that made noise.
Dick Dale and The Beast, 1960s: With his lefty Stratocaster, Dale picked out country tunes, R&B melodies, and his own original compositions that became known as “surf music.” The volume came courtesy of Leo Fender’s hot-rodded Showman amp; “wave” sounds were thanks to the Fender reverb unit. (Voyageur Press Archives)
“Surfer’s Choice” Advertisement, 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
When the family moved to El Segundo in the mid-1950s, Monsour started surfing along the South Bay beaches. He wrote country-western instrumentals, but like a lot of other guitar slingers—from Duane Eddy to Link Wray and Buddy Holly—he soon changed his tune to rock’n’roll, and in 1956 he won an Elvis Presley soundalike contest. He was Dick Dale and the Rhythm Wranglers on his debut album in 1958, but when he played his first concert at the Rendezvous in 1959, he was Dick Dale and the Del-Tones. As Dale said, this new music matched “the feeling I had while surfing; the vibration and pulsification, and the tremendous power.”
It was the summer of 1959, Gidget was on the big screen, and Californians were going surfing. With its perfect weather, warm water, and white sand beaches, the strip from Long Beach to San Clemente quickly became the epicenter of California surfers. This was the first big wave of teenage baby boomers, and they all needed somewhere to go and something to do. Balboa was smack in the middle of the beach scenes, so surfers, Valleys, greasers, hodads, and gremmies came to the Rendezvous to do the Surfer Stomp.
“Dick Dale was the surf guitar god and teen idol, and he was where it was at,” remembers Pat McGee, the original skateboarding “It” girl of the 1960s. McGee won the Women’s Division of the National Skateboard Championship in 1965 and appeared on the cover of Life magazine. A junior at San Diego’s Point Loma High, she was drawn north by the siren call of the Surfer Stomp. “We drove all the way up from San Diego in my 1950 Mercury, because the Rendezvous was the scene. It was a big deal for a bunch of girls to drive from San Diego to Newport Beach. Anybody who had gas money could go, and gas was 35 cents a gallon. There were more really cute surfer guys in one place than a young surfer girl could dream of. And the music filled your body and mind. Back in San Diego we did the Surfer Stomp at our high school dance that year and we made the gym floor ripple. The principal made the band change the music.”
Dale was riding a big wave. Because his Rendezvous gigs were attended by surfers, his sound was called “surf music.” Dale didn’t argue. He released “Let’s Go Trippin’”/“Del-Tone Rock” followed by “Jungle Fever”/“Shake N’Stomp” on his own Deltone label in 1961. His debut album, Surfer’s Choice, featured a photo of Dale surfing on the cover and quickly sold eighty thousand copies.
That LP included an exotic little track titled “Misirlou Twist” that opened with a ferocious guitar glissando like a breaking wall of water. The tune was part of Dale’s Lebanese heritage, a traditional Mediterranean folk dance now hot-rodded with an electric guitar turned to 11 and run through a reverb unit and the biggest, baddest amplifier yet made. The surfers loved it, and “Misirlou Twist” rocketed to number one on Hollywood’s KFWB.
In 1963, Dale appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show while Life hailed him with a two-page spread. He was picked up by Capitol Records and released four albums in quick succession—King of the Surf Guitar (featuring a stomp version of “Hava Nagila”) and Checkered Flag in 1963, Mr. Eliminator and Summer Surf in 1964. Parts in movies also came, including 1960’s Let’s Make Love, 1963’s A Swinging Affair, and two of the Frankie and Annette flicks, Beach Party and Muscle Beach Party. As goofy as those beach movies could be, they also had their moments, and one of the best was Dick Dale jamming with Little Stevie Wonder, then making his first appearance to the world. And it all began at the Rendezvous.
Taking It to 11
Dick Dale and Leo Fender Rock the World
During his ascent to surf-music god, Dick Dale became friends with electric-guitar maverick Leo Fender, and together they innovated a long string of guitar and amplifier innovations that would push rock’n’roll to 11.
Fender was in the right place at the right time with the right skills. He started in the guitar business in the 1940s and although he himself was a stalwart country music fan, his inventions drove the rock’n’roll rage. Born in Fullerton, California, in 1909, Fender repaired radios as a hobby in high school, later partnering with Clayton “Doc” Kauffman in a radio repair business, Fender’s Repair Service, which also sold and rented homemade PAs and musical instruments. During World War II, the market for Hawai’ian and western swing took off, so their K&F Manufacturing began making amplifiers and electric lap-steel guitars with a pickup designed by Fender. In 1946, Kauffman lost interest and Fender Electrical Instrument Co. emerged.
In 1950, Fender introduced his solid-body Esquire electric guitar, followed by the Broadcaster, which became the Telecaster due to trademark conflict. Fender followed with the electric Precision Bass and high-powered Bassman amp. In 1954, he introduced his Stratocaster, which remains the most popular electric guitar ever made. The increased power and sophistication of the Strat called for better amps, and Fender offered the Twin.
In the late 1950s, Fender and Dick Dale became friends and the inventor used the King of Surf Guitar to stress-test his new amps. As Dick Dale tells the tale (in the third person): “Leo Fender gave the Fender Stratocaster along with a Fender Amp to Dale and told him to beat it to death and tell him what he thought of it. Dale took the guitar and started to beat it to death, and he blew up Leo Fender’s amp and blew out the speaker. Dale proceeded to blow up 49 amps and speakers; they would actually catch on fire. Leo would say, ‘Dick, why do you have to play so loud?’ Dale would explain that he wanted to create the sound of Gene Krupa the famous jazz drummer that created the sounds of the native dancers in the jungles along with the roar of mother nature’s creatures and the roar of the ocean.
“Leo Fender kept giving Dale amps and Dale kept blowing them up! Till one night Leo and his right hand man Freddy T. went down to the Rendezvous Ballroom on the Balboa Peninsula in Balboa, California and stood in the middle of 4,000 screaming dancing Dick Dale fans and said to Freddy, I now know what Dick Dale is trying to tell me. Back to the drawing board. A special 85 watt output transformer was made that peaked 100 watts when Dale would pump up the volume of his amp; this transformer would create the sounds along with Dale’s style of playing, the kind of sounds that Dale dreamed of. But! They now needed a speaker that would handle the power and not burn up from the volume that would come from Dale’s guitar.
“Leo, Freddy and Dale went to the James B. Lansing speaker company, and they explained that they wanted a 15-inch speaker built to their specifications. That speaker would soon be known as the 15" JBL–D130 speaker. It made the complete package for Dale to play through and was named the Single Showman Amp. When Dale plugged his Fender Stratocaster guitar into the new Showman Amp and speaker cabinet, Dale became the first creature on earth to jump from the volume scale of a modest quiet guitar player on a scale of 4 to blasting up through the volume scale to TEN!”
With all that power at his fingertips, Dale unleashed classic surf music on the world.
Singing to the Surf in Old Hawai’i
“Aloha Oe” Sheet Music, 1920s (Voyageur Press Archives)
The first surf music was sung in ancient Polynesia on the islands of Tahiti and Hawai’i where the surf was as integral to life as air.
In ancient Hawai’i, the Islanders surfed for pleasure, for status, for gain and loss, surfers wagering lives, property, and freedom on wave-riding contests. The ali’i—the chiefs and royalty like Kamehameha I, Prince Jonah Kuhio, and Queen Emma—proved their royalty with their surfing ability.
Before Captain Cook’s arrival, Hawai’ians had gods for every occasion and their system of religious kapu ruled every aspect of daily life, from growing taro to riding waves. Kahuna were holy men, each of them with different skills: Some read the future, others blessed crops, and there were kahuna who specialized in the ocean and knew what the gods wanted to hear for bringing up the surf.
The Hawai’ians did not have a written language but some of their precontact chants survived long enough for haole scholars and missionaries to write them down. As Ben Finney and James D. Houston wrote in Surfing: A History of the Ancient Hawaiian Sport: “When the ocean was flat the Hawaiians took measures to address the return of rideable waves. If a group of surfers wanted to address the ocean, they might gather on the beach, find strands of pōhuehue (beach morning glory), swing them around their heads together and lash the surface of the water chanting in unison. One such surf chant has been recorded and translated as follows:
Kumai! Kumai! Ka nalu nui mai kahiki mai,
Alo poi pu! Ku mai ka pōhuehue,
Hu! Kaikoo Loa.
Arise! Arise, ye great surfs from Kahiki,
The powerful curling waves.
Arise with pōhuehue
Well up, long raging surf.”
Other chants had to do with famous surfing feats and days of waves. Every important chief kept a chanter in his retinue to glorify the chief’s bravery and skill on a board.
The Hawai’ian music we know today is an alchemy of those ancient chants combined with musical instruments introduced by the cultures that came to Hawai’i after Cook.
In the mid-1800s, sailors, missionaries, and other visitors arrived in Hawai’i, while Islanders who shipped out as able-bodied seamen began to see the world. Hawai’ians adapted and adopted outside musical influences into their own to create beautiful music. The ukulele, slack key guitar, and steel guitar all came from this mixing of Hawai’ian and haole culture.
One of the many stories tracing the ukulele’s history goes back to a specific date—August 23, 1879—when the ship Ravenscrag arrived in Honolulu carrying Portuguese immigrants from Madeira to work the sugar cane fields. To celebrate their arrival, a passenger named Joao Fernandes broke into song on a small, four-stringed guitar called a braguinha. Hawai’ians on the dock were impressed at the speed of this musician’s fingers as they danced across the fingerboard, and they called the instrument ukulele—“jumping flea.”
Early Mexican paniolo cowboys brought their guitars to Hawai’i and taught Islanders to play in the Spanish style. The Hawai’ians soon were retuning the strings by “slacking” them. Slack key allowed Islanders to play bass on the loosened bass strings while maintaining the melody on the treble, and their fingerpicking was adapted to match the movements and mood of hula dancing.
Adapting the guitar to suit their own musical styles, Hawai’ians also often used a steel bar to slide along the strings, producing a unique crying tone. The origins of the steel-guitar style and its technical inventor are widely debated, but three individuals—James Hoa, Gabriel Davion, and Joseph Kekuku—may have discovered the technique independently of one another and are credited as its inventors. The steel guitar is featured on some of the earliest known recordings of Hawai’ian music.
When modern surf music arrived at the hands of Dick Dale, the Belairs, the Ventures, and others, it had more to do with African rather than Polynesian roots, but some of surf music’s artists—particularly Don Wilson and Bob Bogle of the Ventures—were inspired by the slack key, ukulele, and steel guitar of Hawai’ian music. And here in the new century, Hawai’ian surfing-star-turned-pop-star Jack Johnson is as comfortable with a ukulele as he is with a traditional acoustic guitar.
What Hawai’ian music and surf music had in common is they were both inspired by the sound and feel of the ocean and waves.
Required Listening, Surfer Style, 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Kids called it “surf music”; I didn’t call it that. The kids called me “King of the Surf Guitar.” I surfed sun up to sun down. I don’t claim to be a musician, I didn’t go to Julliard. I’m into just chopping, chopping at 60 gauge, 50 gauge strings. That’s the sound, the sound of the waves chopping. The surfing sound is not the reverb…So when historians, so-called historians, say the reverb’s the surf sound…they don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s the heavy machine gun, staccato sound. The waves.
— Dick D, 1994
“I remember making the trek to the Rendezvous in the summer of ’61 to see what all the fuss was about over Dick Dale,” says Paul Johnson, guitarist for the Belairs who later had a classic surf hit with “Mr. Moto.” “It was a powerful experience; his music was incredibly dynamic, louder and more sophisticated than the Belairs, and the energy between the Del-Tones and all of those surfers stomping on the hardwood floor in their sandals was extremely intense. The tone of Dale’s guitar was bigger than any I had ever heard, and his blazing technique was something to behold.”
The band that took surf music national didn’t hail from Southern California—nor could its members even ride a board. Still, they knew how to play their guitars, and while the Ventures did not truly play “surf music,” they certainly inspired most every true surf band on the beach.
Don Wilson and Bob Bogle came from similar musical backgrounds, Wilson learning ukulele at twelve, Bogle picking up a slack-key guitar at the same age. In 1958, they bought instructional books and began to practice on pawn-shop guitars. Wilson and Bogle soon graduated to Fender electrics bought on time payments and played club dates while keeping their day jobs. Their sound influenced by Les Paul, Chet Atkins, and Duane Eddy, they called themselves the Versatones at first, then the Ventures.
In April 1960, Wilson and Bogle cut their composition “Walk, Don’t Run,” the second release on the Blue Horizon label owned by Wilson’s mother Josie. They proudly took their platter to Bob Reisdorff, who ran the local Dolton label. Reisdorff passed, but the Ventures had faith. They next brought the single to Pat O’Day, who had a show on Seattle’s KJR. O’Day played “Walk, Don’t Run” after each news bulletin, catching Reisdorff’s ear. Haggling with Josie Wilson, the band cut a deal naming Reisdorff and Wilson joint producers, but giving the Ventures and Blue Horizon artistic control. Released nationwide in August 1960 by Dolton, “Walk, Don’t Run” became the number-two record in the country, held from number one by Elvis’s “It’s Now or Never,” Brian Hyland’s “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini,” and Chubbie Checker’s “The Twist.”
Dolton was marketed nationally by Liberty Records, so the Ventures’ recording operations moved to LA and Liberty’s studios. Within a year after recording “Walk, Don’t Run” and shopping it around town, the band cut an eponymous debut LP consisting mostly of covers. It hit number eleven in January 1962.
And from there, the hits just kept on coming—a combination of great music and clever marketing. From 1961 to the twenty-first century, the Ventures wrote more than a thousand tunes and recorded three thousand, with fourteen songs making it into the Billboard Top 100. They released more than 250 albums and at one point had five LPs in the Top 100 at the same time. Their Play Guitar with the Ventures LPs were the first and only instructional albums to make the album charts. Countless young guitarists learned to play from these albums—as well as play along to Ventures tunes.
In May 1969, the Ventures recorded the theme song for TV’s Hawaii Five-0, which is a surf song, in a sense. The single hit number four and is probably their most recognized recording ever, even if most people don’t realize it was the Ventures. Purists color the band “surf exploitation music.”
Hot Nights, Hot Music
Surfer Gordon McClelland grew up in Southern California attending surfer stomps all over Orange County and observing the origin of surf music with a critical eye: “In about 1961 the instrumental rock music that Dick Dale and Paul Johnson played was the first to be called ‘surf music.’ If you check it out deep you’ll find it was the surfers at the dances in Newport, Anaheim, and Redondo Beach that came up with the idea of calling it surf music, not the players themselves, even if some of them claim otherwise.
“Dick Dale played mostly rhythm and blues, funky cowboy music, and just a bit of ‘surf music’ at the dances in Newport and Anaheim. The driving instrumentals were truly great and a real treat when he did play them, but they were few and far between in the early shows.
“The Belairs—Paul Johnson’s band—played a bit more of what was called ‘surf music,’ but they too mixed in a lot of other rhythm and blues music and popular dance music of the era.
“The truth is that many surfers were really into other bands like the Righteous Brothers. They were a top draw whenever they performed and played at many surf stomps. In fact, ‘Koko Joe’ was one of the most popular surf stomp tunes, even though I don’t think anyone called it ‘surf music.’
“The Rhythm Rockers from Santa Ana, the Beach Boys, and many others soon followed. Players like the Ventures, Duane Eddy, and even Al Casey that played similar rock instrumental guitar music—all before Dale and Johnson—jumped on the wagon and began putting surf titles on their instrumental music and marketing it as ‘surf music,’ in spite of the fact that they had nothing to do with the surf culture.”
Surfer Stomp Directions, 1960s: For surfing newcomers and hodads, Bruce Johnston and his Surf Stompers offered this handy step-by-step guide accompanying their 1960s Del-Fi single, “Do the Surfer Stomp.” (Voyageur Press Archives)
“You Won’t Part With Yours Either,” 1960s: Fender’s ad series for its new Jazzmaster guitar included this surfer who refused to set his axe aside when riding the waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, the Jazzmaster and its successor, the Jaguar became prized surf music guitars. (Voyageur Press Archives)
And they’re big in Japan. In fact, the Ventures invented Big in Japan. During the 1960s, the band’s version of surf music outsold the Beatles in Japan two to one. In 1970 and 1971, they were the number-one composers in Japan—writing songs with vocals recorded in Japanese. Five of their compositions hit number one on the Japanese charts, and after surpassing forty million in record sales there, the Ventures became the first foreign members of Japan’s Conservatory of Music.
As of 2004, the Ventures still hadn’t been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
While Dick Dale, the Ventures, and a long string of other instrumental bands were hammering out their Surfer Stomps, a new school of surf music was emerging. Jan Berry and Dean Torrence were surfers and singers. Together, they sounded good, harmonizing their doo-wop vocals on odes to teenage life—surfing, hot rods, and chicks. And they looked good, too. This was 1959, rock’n’roll was only a few years old, and Jan and Dean were on the cusp between the crew-cut, frat-pin look of the 1950s and something entirely new. Equally blond, tall, and handsome, they managed to be clean-cut and hip at the same time. They dressed nice, they could move onstage, and the surfer girls dug them.
Jan and Dean were native sons of the Golden West. At West Los Angeles’ University High, Jan was a talented athlete and good student. He was also a rebel—much like Gidget’s Moondoggie, torn between the square and hip life. “When I was young I had all the advantages,” Jan remembers. “My father worked for Howard Hughes, we lived in Bel Air. I went to the best schools, and got the best girls. My intelligence quotient was well above average; and yet I could be a rebellious, troublesome punk who brought more than a little anxiety to my parents. That sounds normal enough; but the truth is, nothing about my life has been ordinary.”
After high school football practice, the echoey acoustics in the shower room benefited the harmonizing of Jan and several of his fellow football players, including Dean. Soon they created a singing group called the Barons with grand plans to play the school talent show. From the shower room, they moved into the Berry’s garage, where Jan had a piano and state-of-the-art Ampex recorder, a present from his father. Jan became the arranger and producer, coaching his friends in multipart harmonies and capturing it all on tape.
The big day came, and with neighbor friends on piano and drums, the Barons belted out “Get a Job,” “Rock and Roll is Here to Stay,” and “Short Shorts” for the talent show crowd. The girls loved it. Jan and Dean were hot to put together new tunes, but the other Barons were hot for hot rods and had no time for music. Suddenly the band was a duet.
In the fifties, you couldn’t get a license to play in the high schools and junior highs—you could only dance to horn bands. They thought anybody who played guitar was evil. We said, “You want your kids out in the street or would you rather have them in one big place?” They said, “They gotta wear ties!” Who the hell ever heard of surfers wearing ties? They finally gave us a permit to reopen the Rendezvous Ballroom, which was a whole city block. Opening night we had 17 surfers in their bare feet—wearing ties. We had a box of ’em and handed ’em out to keep the city happy.
— Dick Dale, 1995
One night while Jan and Dean were struggling to write their own song to record, one of the old Barons members, Arnie Ginsberg, showed up with an idea for a song titled “Jenny Lee” inspired by a local stripper. The boys worked on their harmonies for weeks with plans to debut the tune at a big party at Jan’s house. And better yet, Jan wanted to show this song off with a demo record: He planned to take a finished tape to a recording studio to have a disc cut.
When they were finally ready to record, Jan rounded up his trio, but only Arnie was available as Dean was packing to leave for six months of Army Reserve duty. Jan and Arnie cut the song that night anyway, and the next day Jan took the tape to a Hollywood recording studio.
At the studio, an older man listened in as the engineers played Jan’s homemade tape. Impressed by the doo-wop, he introduced himself as Joe Lubin, record producer for Arwin Records, owned by Doris Day and her husband, golf star Marty Melcher. If Jan would allow him to add instruments to the vocals and release it on Arwin, Lubin promised he would make Jan and his high school buddy bigger than the Everly Brothers. So while Dean was suffering through basic training, “Jenny Lee” became a national Top 10 hit—for Jan and Arnie.
Dean remembers: “Two months later while cleaning my M-1 after a day at the firing range…a high school buddy of mine runs up to me all excited and holds up his portable radio and says, ‘Listen, “Jenny Lee” is on the radio!’ I’m stunned!…Jan and Arnie are on American Bandstand, flirting with all the Bandstand Babes, and I am crawling through the putrid-smelling mud at the infiltration course. I tried to accept the fact that I blew it, the opportunity had passed me by, so I went to the base Dairy Queen and drowned my sorrows in a vanilla malt.”
Meanwhile, Jan and Arnie were performing on the Dick Clark Show, then the Jack Benny Show. In August 1958, they were part of the first rock’n’roll concert at the Hollywood Bowl, alongside Bobby Darrin and the Champs. But “Jenny Lee” was the only hit for Jan and Arnie. Ginsburg lost interest and went off to study architecture. Dean now got a second chance.
“I finally completed active duty and returned home,” he remembers. “Jan asked me if I wanted to come up to his house to work on some music. I accepted the offer but I did inquire about Arnie. Jan said Arnie was no longer interested in the music business. I was very surprised: what was there not to like about making billions of dollars, performing on American Bandstand, rubbing elbows with Elvis, Frankie Avalon, Sam Cooke, flirting with Annette Funicello, buying a new sports car right off the showroom floor, having dinner at Dick Clark’s house and having chicks scream at you. What’s there not to like? I wanted to get started before Jan or Arnie changed their minds.”
From 1959 through 1962, Jan & Dean had hit after hit with singles and albums. They were essentially an R&B doo-wop band, and listeners who never saw them perform assumed they were African American.
In 1963, Jan & Dean heard the recordings of another Southern California harmonizing group called the Beach Boys who had a local hit with “Surfin’” followed by a national hit with “Surfin’ Safari.” Jan & Dean had just released a single called “Tennessee,” but the success of this new surf music caught their ears, and they began looking closer to home for inspiration.
Ventures Single and Album, 1960s: Since they didn’t actually surf, many aficionados never considered the Ventures sound surf music. Still, their recordings were all over the airwaves in the 1960s, influencing true surf bands. (Voyageur Press Archives)
The Surfin’ Bird is the Word
An Interview with Tony Andreason, Guitarist for the Trashmen
Is it such a shame to be a one-hit wonder when your one hit is so wonderful?
Surf music is all about having fun and getting crazy, and it’s unlikely any surf band got crazier or had more fun than the Trashmen when they cut “Surfin’ Bird.” This song is berserk. It rocks, it makes no sense, and it probably scared parents to death—which is the Triple Crown for surf music.
“Surfin’ Bird” hit the Top Five in 1964, and it was only the fresh emergence of the Beatles that kept this novelty song from taking the top slot.
“Surfin’ Bird” was the hare-brained idea of the Trashmen, a quartet from the surf capital of Minneapolis, Minnesota—the land of ten thousand lakes and a thousand dances. The Trashmen—Jim Thaxter, Dal Winslow, Steve Wahrer, Tom Diehl, and Tony Andreason—became enormously popular as a “surf” band in the land of ice and snow, playing to teen clubs.
“Surfin’ Bird” was a very strange song, a morphing of two other hits: the Rivingtons’ doo-wop nonsense classic “Papa Oom Mow Mow” and the dance it inspired, the Bird. It was a gag, but it resonated.
Four decades later, Tony Andreason, original guitarist for the Trashmen, explained their immortal party song.
The Ramones’ version of “Surfin’ Bird” rocked, but your original is better. Edgier. Weirder.
Well, thanks.
“Surfin’ Bird” is a truly strange song.
Yes.
But a great song, and it makes you wonder: What was going on in Minnesota in 1963 to produce it?
Well, we were playing gigs all around Minneapolis and the Midwest in the early Sixties…. We were playing college parties and roller rinks and Battles of the Bands against bands like the Underbeats. DJs for the radio stations would come up and do these shows too for money. They would throw records at the audience and have games and things like that between sets.
Where did the band name come from?
When I got out of the service, Steve Wahrer and I went over to Don Woody’s house. He had a huge record collection and one of them was a song called “Trashman’s Blues” by Tony Kiray. Steve thought that would be a great band name and we laughed about it, but then there it was on Steve’s bass drum, and we became The Trashmen.
How did you become a surf band in Minneapolis?
We had heard surf music on the radio and we were intrigued. It just sounded good and we wanted to learn more about it, so we went to California.
Do you remember the year?
It was summer 1963. We drove all the way out in a brand-new Bonneville with a four-speed stick. We had a portable record player in the car, listening to Dick Dale records—“Dick Dale Stomp” and “Let’s Go Trippin’.”
So it was kind of a pilgrimage?
I think the first place we stayed was in Malibu.
A nice start.
I had never seen the ocean.
Get out!
Nope.
How old were you?
I was 19. I had never seen the ocean and had no clue what it was about. We sat on the beach and watched the surf come in. We were transfixed on it. Mesmerized. I thought, “Those guys are really getting a kick out of this,” so I thought I would try it. I got a surfboard and went out and absolutely got washed into shore. I basically wiped out. I was picking myself up and some surfers asked where I was from. I was dead white and obviously not from California. We told them we were the Trashmen and we were from Minnesota and we wanted to learn about surf. They told us about the surfer’s life and playing music. They thought it was cool we had come all the way from Minnesota. They gave me a surfer medal to protect me in the surf.
You heard some music while you were out here?
We went to the Rendezvous Ballroom and heard the Chantays and Dick Dale. It was all a great experience and a unique experience and we wanted to take it back to our friends in Minnesota. We left California and drove straight back. It took us 32 hours.
Yikes.
Well, we had jobs. That is what they called them then—not gigs. We got back to Minnesota and learned as much surf music as we could. We did “Hava Nagila” and “Pipeline” and “Dick Dale Stomp.” The kids in Minnesota had never heard it either and they liked it. They were making up their own dances.
Did you guys wear band suits?
We always wore matching suits.
What kind of crowd would be at these shows?
Like a thousand kids.
Wow. A thousand wound-up Minnesota farmkids all jacked on hormones and Everclear. That would be some energy.
Exactly. We loved it. We were backstage at Chubb’s Ballroom in Minneapolis getting ready to go on and we were talking about “Papa Oom Mow Mow” and “The Bird is the Word” by the Rivingtons. Steve Wahrer said, “Maybe we could do it this way.” He came up with a strange voice and did that babababababa thing. The song had three chords and he said, “When I shake my head, that is when you change the chord.” We had never done the song before and I had never heard that strange voice, but we liked it. Just pulled “Surfin’ Bird” out of the air, so to speak.
So not only was he singing like a madman, he was shaking his head like a madman.
Yep.
People went berserk.
They did—and they started doing the Bird dance.
Can you describe?
Flop your arms and move your feet and you are doing the bird dance beat.
“Surfin’ Bird” Album, 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
So you made up “Surfin’ Bird” in the dressing room of a ballroom, played it that night, and the crowd went nuts.
Yes, and DJ Bill Diehl—the Wizard of the Wax, the Deacon of the Disc—was there and he heard it. He said, “What is that song? Did you see the crowd? That is a hit. You have to record it.”
When you guys first recorded “Surfin’ Bird” didn’t you think: “Man, this song is really strange?”
We thought it was weird, yes, but different. It sure was different.
How long from when you recorded it until it went to Number One? And how shocked were you?
We were shocked for sure. It went to Number One quickly. In just a few weeks.
Since then, “Surfin’ Bird” has been covered by a lot of different bands—the Cramps, the Ramones.
Yeah. We thought it was pretty cool when they covered the “Bird.”
You guys did it better.
Thanks.
Charlie don’t surf
And we think he should Charlie don’t surf
And you know that it ain’t no good
— The Clash, “Charlie Don’t Surf,” 1980
Jan & Dean Single and Albums, 1960s: Along with the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean launched the vocal style of doo-wop surf music. The duo’s single Surf City was the first song with the word surf in the title to hit number one. (Voyageur Press Archives)
“About the same time,” Dean recollects, “Jan and I were booked to do a concert in the South Bay area of Los Angeles at Hermosa Beach High School, not far from the beach town of Hawthorne. Since Jan & Dean didn’t have a live band (we used studio musicians to make all of our records), the promoter of the show had to hire a back-up band to play for us. For this one particular show, the promoter hired a local group who had just had their own hit record titled ‘Surfin’ Safari’—they called themselves the Beach Boys.”
Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys met for the first time in a school classroom temporarily converted into their dressing room. “The Beach Boys then went on stage to do their own opening set,” Dean says. “The crowd went crazy, they loved their hometown boys!” But after Jan & Dean performed their set, they still had to fill out their contracted time slot, so they joined forces on the Beach Boys’ two big hits: “The two groups launched into ‘Surfin” and ‘Surfin’ Safari’ and the audience flipped out, the guys on stage flipped out, and a lifelong friendship started on that high school stage, one warm California spring evening way back in 1963.”
A couple days later, Jan called head Beach Boy Brian Wilson to say that Jan & Dean had decided to try their hand at making surf music. The idea was to cover “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari” and incorporate them into an upcoming album also featuring their new single, “Linda”: the LP was to be retitled Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’. Brian not only gave his blessing, he offered to lend a hand in the studio.
In March 1963 at Hollywood’s Western Recording Studios, Jan & Dean and the Beach Boys joined forces again. After the session was over, Brian offered a preview of his next record, belting out “Surfin’ U.S.A.” Jan & Dean sought to record the song, but Brian Wilson instead offered them a similar but unfinished tune. The title was “Surf City.”
Jan & Dean collaborated with Brian Wilson in composing and recording “Surf City,” and three months later it hit number one on the Billboard national charts. Among aficionados there is ongoing debate over what defines surf music, who was the first true surf band, and what was the first surf song to top the charts. All agree, however, that Jan & Dean’s “Surf City” was the first song with the word “surf” in the title to reach number one.
Jan & Dean Take Linda Surfin’ was released soon after. On the cover, Jan and Dean were decked out in the uniform and weaponry of the West Coast: T-shirts, shorts, and purple and yellow surfboards, accessorized by a pretty young blonde. The West Coast now had a sound and a look—surfing was it.
Before they were the Beach Boys, they were Kenny and the Cadets, then Carl and the Passions, and finally the Pendletones. The musical push came from Brian Wilson, who was a fan of the Four Freshmen and Chuck Berry and who would later be declared a musical genius, which he most certainly was. Wilson shared a room with his brothers, Carl and Dennis, and late into the night coached them in the art of vocal harmonizing. Their cousin, Mike Love, sang along on Christmas carols and at birthday parties.
In 1959, Brian was supposed to pen a sonata for his Hawthorne High twelfth-grade piano composition class. He wrote a sweet melody that he called “Surfin’” and handed it in. Wilson earned a C for the semester.
In spring 1960, Brian and some friends performed the campaign song for student body president candidate Carol Hess. That led to further appearances, Brian singing alongside Carl and Mike. Carl had his doubts about the whole music thing, so Brian dubbed the combo Carl and the Passions. They cycled a number of friends and neighbors through the group, and their highlight was opening for the Four Preps at a high school assembly.
On Labor Day weekend 1961, their parents, Murray and Audree Wilson, vacationed in Mexico, leaving three hundred dollars in food money for their growing boys. The Wilson brothers instead went hungry and invested the money in band instruments. Then they began rehearsing Brian’s “Surfin’” sonata. When mom and dad returned, they found their sons had an act. They called themselves the Pendletones, a play on the popular shirt of the day.
Murray pitched his sons to a friend, Hite Morgan, owner of Guild Music. On September 15, the Pendletones performed “Surfin’” in the Morgan’s front room, and Brian and Mike signed a songwriting contract with Guild Music that same day.
The Pendletones recorded their first songs—“Surfin’,” “Luau,” and “Lavender”—at Los Angeles’ World Pacific Studios on October 3, 1961. The lineup included Brian on drums, Carl on guitar, and Al Jardine on acoustic bass; along with Dennis, they all shared vocal duties. Murray then took the demos to Herb Newman, owner of Candix and Era Records, and on December 8, the Pendletones were signed.
The name wasn’t quite right, though. Era promotions man Russ Regan suggested they change to the Beach Boys. Candix wanted the Surfers, but someone already had that name. Regan won out, and in December 1961, “Surfin’” by the Beach Boys was released as a promo issue on X Records and commercially on Candix. The platter went straight to number three in Southern California and as high as number seventy-five on the national charts. Despite the success, Jardine left to study dentistry.
On February 8, 1962, Brian, Dennis, and Val Poliuto of the Jaguars recorded six songs for Morgan’s Deck Records—“Surfin’,” “Surfin’ Safari,” “Karate,” “Little Surfin’ Girl,” “Luau,” and “Judy.” By May, Candix folded, and Murray was shopping their demos around Hollywood. Liberty, Dot, and Decca passed, but Capitol’s Nick Venet heard something he liked and signed the boys in June. With new member David Marks, the Beach Boys overdubbed an existing master of “Surfin’ Safari” and backed it with a hot rod song called “409.” Their surf anthem soared to number fourteen and the hot rodder’s ode raced to number seventy-six. Just like that, the Beach Boys were sitting on top of the world.
On New Year’s Eve 1962, the Beach Boys did their first big live gig, a memorial concert for Ritchie Valens who died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper. Performing at Long Beach Mu nicipal Stadium, they earned a whopping three hundred dollars. Jardine saw the light, dropped dental school, and returned to the band.
The Beach Boys’ next hit, “Surfin’ U.S.A,” was penned by Brian and Mike. But they may have allowed themselves to be a little too influenced by Chuck Berry, who threatened to sue as the melody was so close to Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen.” The threat was enough, and Berry got sole writing credit for the song. “Surfin’ U.S.A” went to number three in the United States, number thirty-two in England, and number nine in Australia.
The Beach Boys’ first album, Surfin’ Safari, was equally weighted between surfing and car songs, including “The Shift,” “Summertime Blues,” “Moon Dawg,” “Stoked,” “The Lonely Sea,” “Noble Surfer,” and covers of Dick Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’” and “Miserlou.” At the same time, they released a hot rod album called Little Deuce Coupe, including a tribute to James Dean and the soon-to-be classic “Fun, Fun, Fun.” The LP’s “I Get Around” scored the Beach Boys’ first number-one hit.
Brian Wilson’s legendary problems began in 1964, even while the hits kept on coming. The pace and stress were overwhelming him; he retreated into drugs and suffered nervous breakdowns. Brian liked writing and recording more than touring and performing, so while the Beach Boys were on the road, he was home experimenting with sophisticated production techniques to create new sounds. Brian hired platoons of studio musicians to work on what he planned as his masterpiece, 1966’s Pet Sounds, including “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Caroline No,” and “Sloop John B.” Yet while the LP was an artistic success, sales were poor.
Beach Boys Single and Albums, 1960s (Voyageur Press Archives)
Clean-Cut Beach Boys, 1960s: The Beach Boys were smooth, slick, and stylish and that applied to both their look and their music. (Voyageur Press Archives)
Disappointed but undaunted, Brian began working on the next Beach Boys album, Smile, which he declared would be nothing less than “a teenage symphony to God.” With this as his goal, it’s little wonder he faltered.
Smile was shelved, and Brian was off to fight his own personal and creative demons. Still, Capitol released a handful of tracks from the projected album—“Heroes and Villains” and Brian and Mike’s feel-good tour de force “Good Vibrations.” Brian spent six months recording “Good Vibrations” in four studios and seventeen sessions at the unprecedented cost of sixteen thousand dollars. The song is beautiful, complicated, and elaborate, and it went to number one.
Despite the success of “Good Vibrations,” Smile lay in the can for decades, and by 1967, Jimi Hendrix was prophesizing the end of surf music. Brian’s erratic behavior forced the Beach Boys to pull out of the Monterey International Pop Festival in June—the place where Jimi began his American reign.
Many surfers at the time rejected the Beach Boys and their music as fluff created by kuk outsiders. While they wrote songs about surfing, only Dennis Wilson actually surfed, and their sound was not the heavy-reverb, guitar-powered instrumentals to which the surfers loved to stomp. “I remember the first time we heard ‘Surfer Girl,’” surfing legend Mike Doyle says. “We started hissing and hooting because we thought it was so dumb.” Gordon McLelland agrees: “The surfers I knew in Orange County during the early 1960s were not hostile towards the Beach Boys, they just thought the music was corny and sort of wrote it off as commercial stuff for the hodad masses.”
Still, there’s no denying the genius of Brian Wilson and the music he created. Paul McCartney says the Beach Boys inspired Rubber Soul and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; he praised Pet Sounds as “perhaps the album of the century.” Rolling Stone magazine voted Pet Sounds number two on its Greatest Albums list; Sgt. Pepper’s was number one. Like the Beatles, the Beach Boys evolved from simple pop roots to more sophisticated music, becoming one of the most influential and successful American bands of all time.
Even among surfers, taste has changed over time. In 1972, surf movie makers Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman used new songs—“Sail On Sailor” and “Water”—from the Beach Boys as the soundtrack to their movie Five Summer Stories. Rodney Sumpter also used the Beach Boys in his 1974 surf film On Any Morning. As the years passed, even die-hard detractors came around: “None of us much liked the Beach Boys when they first came out,” says Surfer magazine founder John Severson in 1997. “Now I think their music is wonderful. Now I understand it and know why everyone thought they were so incredible.”
Catch a wave and you’re sitting on top of the world
— The Beach Boys, “Catch A Wave,” 1964
The Long, Happy Life of “Wipe Out!”
The song starts with a bizarre crackle and then an even-more-bizarre voice chuckling the title—“Wipe Out!” An instant hit, the song has since become perhaps the single best-known surf music tune.
“Wipe Out!” was written and recorded by the Surfaris, a surf band from Glendale, California. Jim Fuller—the Surfaris’ original guitarist and the surfer who cowrote the song—tells its story:
Happy Birthday to you and your hit song “Wipe Out!”
Thank you. Forty years. Eight million broadcasts.
Wow.
That is what I have been saying for forty years.
It wasn’t planned this way?
Not even close. It was a fluke. We needed a B side.
A B side to what?
“Surfer Joe.” It was a song that came to [Surfaris drummer] Ron Wilson in his sleep. We recorded it and it came out pretty good. We were so young and naïve we didn’t know we needed a B side.
Who were “we” and how young were “you”?
We were the Surfaris. I was 15 and the others were around there: Ron Wilson, Bob Berryhill, and Ron Connolly. We were all from the Glendale area and we were still in high school. Our parents were driving us to gigs.
What kind of gigs?
Skating rinks. Teen clubs. We were lucky if we’d earn $10 to $15 a night, each.
Fun.
It was fun. It was 1963. We were a surf band.
Did you guys surf?
Sure. We were all from Glendale but we spent as much time at the beach as possible.
Where did “Wipe Out!” come from?
We had a manager named Ron Smallen and he thought if we recorded a song we could buy a van for the band and some new instruments.
And maybe some new surfboards.
And some new surfboards. We all went to a recording studio in Cucamonga in December 1962 and recorded “Surfer Joe.” It came out okay, and then someone noted that we needed a song for the other side of the 45.
Traditionally, yes. Where did it come from?
Well, Ron Wilson was in the high school marching band and he had this drum cadence that he speeded up.
Where do the sound effects at the start come from?
That was our manager Ron Smallen. He broke a board covered with plaster and then cackled “wipe out!” into the mic.
Where did your guitar riff come from?
It was just something I had in my head. Something I had been working on for a couple of weeks.
And it all gelled there in the recording studio.
It came together rather nicely.
What was your axe?
I had a Fender DuoSonic with a lot of reverb that night. I really liked that guitar and I wish I had held onto it, but who was to know what was coming? When “Wipe Out!” became a hit, the Surfaris cut a deal with Fender. We did some ads in music magazines and they gave us a lot of equipment. I got a brand-new Dakota Red Stratocaster. I’ve been playing Strats ever since, but I do wish I still had that DuoSonic.
So you got your new equipment?
That and a lot more.
“Wipe Out!” has to be the simplest song ever written.
Simple, but effective. We rehearsed it in six takes and then we nailed it.
