Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 August 14 • Wednesday

Surf music is a favorite of mine. Slight obsessions with it come around cyclically, and I'm in the middle of one right now. Every time I focus on what's happening in surf music, there's something new and interesting. One such item is Kent Crowley's book Surf Beat.

While it could have benefited from both proofreading and copy editing, the book deserves credit for trying to compile a coherent history of such a poorly documented and fragmented musical subgenre. Crowley's main thesis is that surf music is an indigenous folk music, unique in both its relationship with technology—Leo Fender is as important as Dick Dale—and its creation by and for a narrow audience, namely Southern Californian teenagers.

Crowley also supports the view that surf music—and here we're talking about the instrumental kind, not the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean—laid the foundation for punk rock and heavy metal. Most intriguing is his account of the relationship between Dick Dale and Jimi Hendrix, something I didn't remember from the Hendrix biography I read twenty years ago. (Crowley points out that "Third Stone from the Sun" is basically a surf tune as a psychedelic Wes Montgomery might have played it. Of course the song features the famous line "You'll never hear surf music again".)

Another surprise is the role that Frank Zappa played in the burgeoning surf movement. That's his guitar amp used in the original recording of "Wipe Out"!