E
thing strange happens — the music service’s algorithm veers off
course and hightails it for heavy
metal. (Dale’s second nickname?
“The Father of Heavy Metal.”)
Pandora — a music service that
plays songs of a certain genre based
on what artist the user selects — is
perhaps best channeled for aberrations like this: discovering the
weird trajectory of a genre like
surf music, one that has spawned
hundreds of local bands across the
world, with crossovers to punk,
heavy metal, ska and psychedelia.
That may really be why traditional surf music was unable to
survive The Beatles: It was too local. While acts like Jan and Dean
were enjoying national success preBeatles, instrumental surf remained
a Southern California phenomenon.
Blair describes the scene this
way: When The Beach Boys came to
local venues in SoCal, the kids literally threw vegetables at them.
“They thought they were
purveyors of something fake,”
Blair said. “They thought they
were putting something wrong on
the face of instrumental music.”
That’s not to say vocal surf
wasn’t a legitimate form of surf
music, or that the two camps
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can’t coexist. But the second
wave of surf that eventually
reemerged in the late 70s had
more in common with the first
stirrings of punk than it did
The Beach Boys.
“We were playing on the same
stage with punk bands, and we
were playing loud and we were
playing fast,” explains Blair,
whose band was one of the leaders of wave two. “The kids were
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surf bands
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We were playing on the
same stage with punk
bands, and we were playing
loud and we were playing fast.”
picking up on it because it was exciting, and not so dissimilar from
the new wave bands.”
The connection isn’t lost on the
beach partiers. In 1987, Funicello
and Avalon starred in a parody of
their own films, Back to the Beach.
The scene: Annette and Frankie are
settled down in Ohio and decide to
visit their daughter in California,
only to discover their beach has
been taken over — by a
punk rock surf gang.