Cowabunga, it's surf music!

 Summer's here and the time is right for waxing down our surfboards. I guess...  Never ever surfed, but I did own a pair of baggies once! Still, I listen to way more surf music than my wife can stand. Best overall collection is the "Cowabunga" box set, from which I burned off a sampling, from "Mr. Moto" by the Belairs to more contemporary tracks like "Killer Dana" by the Chantays and the smokin' live track "Honeybomb" by the Mermen.

 

   "Back to the Beach" had a fun soundtrack, with Annette updating "Jamaica Ska" with Fishbone, and an astounding version of "Pipeline" with Stevie Ray Vaughan and the Father of the Surf Guitar, Dick Dale. What was amazing about their version for me was that the howling, shrieking guitar was Dale's, not Stevie Ray. (Their appearance in the movie is criminally brief.)  

 

"Get A Board" is a collection of nobody you've ever heard of, but that's common in many surf collections. They're full of bands that never made it out of their local scene but still managed to put out great music (before radio became conglomerized and homogenized). Same with soul and R&B -- there's a wonderful show Saturday afternoons on KSER (The Dusties Show) that regularly features a Top 30 Countdown from a radio station in say, Chicago, from the early '60s -- and two-thirds of it is music you've never heard of because radio hadn't yet been sanitized so that you'd hear the same thing from coast to coast.

The 2 "Surf & Drag" comps are cool, and feature way better sound than "Get A Board" or "Pebbles", which are mostly compiled from scratchy 45s. "S&D" features many of the usual suspects (Boyce & Hart, Gary Usher, Roger Christian, future Beach Boy Bruce Johnston) because they were all over each other's records, and Brian Wilson might pop in to lend a background vocal or two. It didn't seem like a rivalry, just everyone pitching in to bang out as much product possible to sell. And you gotta love the Rat Fink covers!

One of the more interesting tracks on "Pebbles" --beside Dave Edmund's version of "New York's A Lonely Town", retitled "London's a Lonely Town (When You're the Only Surfer Boy Around") -- is the Gambler's "LSD-25". The liner notes suggest that way before the hippies discovered acid, surfers were regularly dosing themselves with LSD. Don't know how true that is, but it sounds like some historian has their work cut out for them!

"Summer Beach Party" was disappointing for me, because I was hoping for more of the songs that Annette would sing as she walked along the 'beach' (the set) with the 'moon' (lighting) illuminating her as she wondered why love was so confusing. I actually liked those songs! Still, we do get Nancy Sinatra singing "Geronimo" (and that sound you're hearing is Frank Sinatra turning in his grave.)