Click images for desktop size: "Untitled" by Crestock Photos Talking about music yesterday I forgot to mention one of my favorite newer albums: "Right To Chews" is covers of old 60's pop tunes as done by some of the newer pop-punk bands.
Its surprising how many of these tracks the Ramones covered. Maybe that's one of the reason I always liked the Ramones. I've always liked pop.
For every pre fab group out there like The Spice Girls or Brittney Spears there's guys out there who love the music and really want to try and do something. What happens to their songs in the hands of the producers is a different thing. Like I hated Spears version of it, but when pop punk outfit Bowling for Soup cover "Hit Me Baby One More Time" I can hear something was in the song, something better that doesn't need adolescent hips and tits to get across.
Me First & The Gimmee Gimmees have done a great job of taking weak pop tunes and turning them into grinding grunge fests. When they get their musical mitts on a decent track like "Stand By Me" they light onto something special.
So with that part of my history in place you can understand why I think that "Right To Chews" is one of the best albums I've heard in a while. None of the tracks are anything less than interesting and some are outrageously hep.
The bands have cool pedigrees, there's the staunch Rubinos, The Mitch Easter Sound!, Cliff Hillis, The Wonderboys. Twenty four tracks of goodness. My fave at the moment is The Beagles doing "Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)" a sickly sweet tune by Edison Lighthouse that the Beagles keep fun and punchy and grindish.
As high as that album gets me there's a downer in music.
My bestest friend in the world (not my puppy) confessed that she doesn't like surf music . . .
That seems incomprehensible to me. Surf is the purest guitar music out there. Only in surf does the guitar get its own distinctive voice in pop. It skips and stutters around with a rage that a vocalist can only ponder and try to emulate.
Surf has the thrash, the stomp and the floor scuffing
Click images for desktop size: "For Men Only" by Anonymousdanceability that decrees instant greatness. "Too cool for words."
We were listening to a track. We were speculating on whether it was Joe Satriani or even Eric Johnson tuning down his sweet synthesized tone. It might even been Steve Vai turning down the frills and going for something pure. It was a guitar god for sure. It turned out it was The Hellbenders doing "Passion", a surf tune done by a surf band . . . Surf can be played by the beginner and then it pushes its practitioners to higher and higher levels. Eventually you have to move from side winder to over the top of the fretboard, pushing for steps and riffs that border on the classical and flamenco guitar steps of virtuosity. The riffs are meant to impress but also to entertain and most importantly they have to keep the groove on, keep the dane going, keep the dreams flitting through your head as you sweat and stomp your way to a world that sees rain storms as enemies while seeing rain storms as your best friend.
Dick Dale invented surf music. Flat out, he created a sound and a genre in his guitar shop in Balboa Beach. He perfected it at the Balboa Ballroom.
He played a Fender. He was left handed, like his eventual student Jimi Hendrix, he played a right handed Strat upside down. This makes it really hard to follow his hands and steal his riffs . . . he played through a Fender Music Man amp, a cool tube amp powered with AX7's to keep it creamy and crisp. But the real secret, the thing that made his super high speed double picking technique sound like a Vaseline Machine Gun was the Fender Tank Reverb.
Nothing has sounded like it before or since. Pure analogue, driven by a heavy coiled spring that bounced and rattled to the drive in it. To make it pure Dale wound his guitar with the heaviest strings he could, .14's and .58's!! Guitarists know that's heavier than most acoustic guitars.
It gave Dale a purity of tone and enough violent vibrations to send the tank to places it never was intended to go.
If you drop a tank reverb unit it makes a tres cool explosive sound, like an atom bomb. When Dale would play riffs on the bottom strings he took those little atom bombs and made them dance to his tunes.
We all know his classic always covered "Miserlou" but the defining rip of rage was originally called "Run For Life" but when Dale tried body surfing the notorious Wedge in Newport, a wave made by man, an unexpected effect of a Three C's project to stop erosion, it was a series of jetties that ended up pushing the waves back to sea. You can't control the sea. It just kept storing up the power, rejoicing in the juice until the Pacific would explode in a paroxysm of giant tubes that chewed up fiberglass and even wood boards as the walls pounded the shallow sand bottom and rolled over the valiant surfers who dared. Dick Dale's "The Wedge" tries to capture that fury in under two minutes.
I've never gotten how some people think that surf music sounds like the waves. "The Wedge" sort of justifies that specious claim.
Dale inspired countless guitarists. Their fingers weren't strong enough to emulate his heavy strings. Most weren't fast enough to duplicate his frenetic double picking style (even in the world of guitar gods and shredders their aren't that many who can hit 32nd notes at 200 bpm), but they call save up and get a tank reverb.
They came up with other sounds,
Click images for desktop size: "Fruit" other ways to sing their song. The Chantays in "Pipeline" came up with that impossible glissando to open their ode to the righteous coral reef tube in Hawaii. In "Baja" The Astronaughts, out of landlocked Denver, came up with palm muting and a fabulous staccato sound to touch the nerves and fray the soul. In Downey Paul Johnson formed The BelAirs to play "Mr Moto" and bring a new lyricism to the surf sound. Paul Johnson continues today playing surf music with insane virtuosity of acoustic guitars!
Surf was huge. Movies were co-opting it. Even MOR star Henry Mancini tried to write a surf tune (Banzai Pipeline!!) and then used the sound when he wrote the TV theme for "Peter Gunn".
When Ennio Morricone copped the sound for Sergio Leone's Spaghetti Western trilogy he took the surf sound to the dust and the plains but kept its under lying rage and cold passion intact. It led the way for The Sentinels "Latin'ia" to take the music to a universal place.
Surf never died. The record industry wanted it to be just a fad. It was hard to play and girls didn't like it. Girls like romance and words was the thinking. Cute crooners are easy to have a crush on then monstrous take no prisoner guitar players. So they stopped pushing the music.
It keeps erupting like the black sheep son who refuses to die. Its not just a memory, its a force, a purpose unto itself. Every guitar player has attempted surf music. Its a pinnacle, a goal. Even Stevie Ray Vaughn tried. His was good enough to release.
Their are still working surf bands out there. One of the best is out of CANADA!! Canadian surfers? They can play at least but I doubt they surf.
Huevos Rancheros go back to the roots, like in "Ace O' Spades" their amalgamation of Link Wray, Dick Dale, old school metal and early white noise punk. It works it rocks.
The ocean goes on forever. The surf will always be their. You can't conquer moving mountains of water. You can only learn to survive and exist with them.
Surf music will never die.
And she'll always be my bestest friend