Into The Blue Sparkle

This band calls themselves Slacktone and piqued my interest in instrumental surf back in 2000:

The Day The Muse Just Died*

Bobby Fuller idolized fellow Texan Buddy Holly and The Crickets and it really shows in his covers of "Love's Made A Fool Of You" and "I Fought The Law And The Law Won."

Fuller died at age 23 under mysterious circumstances. Here is a YouTube video dramatizing some of the unresolved details. link

Lesser known was Fuller's involvement in surf music in the early 1960's. Here are three songs he wrote and recorded, all of which appear to contain the same guitar riff which culminated in its purest form in "Our Favorite Martian" recorded and released in 1964.

First there is "The Chase" which I have not been able to date, but I put it first because I suspect it came first:

"Stringer" was recorded in 1963; listen at the 57 second mark for the same basic riff:

Finally, the whole riff was purified and distilled into my favorite, er, "Our Favorite Martian" from 1964:

Bobby Fuller's death was so ignominious, and so unseemly (no matter the motives) that the public barely remembers him; and if they do look they see him as a link backwards to Buddy Holly; I think he deserved a bit more respect than that.
_____________________________

Something I forgot which still upsets me:

I left this at Sissy Willis's blog:

7/29/10
Dick Dale briefly emerged from his latest bout with cancer and had something to say about this at the show I saw last Saturday. He gave up his beach life decades ago and has since lived alongside the USMC at Twentynine Palms. He dedicated the last song in what I pray is not his last show to the men and women fighting in Afghanistan. He derided what he called an insane policy of our soldiers not being able to fire back unless being fired upon with rockets. I don't recall his exact words but he said something along the lines of "These are our kids we're sacrificing-if I were there I'd want to shoot back." Then he launched into a free-style version "Amazing Grace." link

Summer's Almost Gone...



San Onofre Beach

Photo taken from the cliffs above San Onofre Beach.  The beach was immortalized by The Beach Boys in "Surfin' USA"

More Aqua Velvets

From their website:

A fascinating blend of spaghetti western, shimmering psychedelia, pristine surf, latin rhythms, mysterious faraway places, and a tongue-in-cheek dash of lounge. link

Here's a link to my all-time favorite Aqua Velvets song, Summer At Dreampoint

Guitar Noir

A favorite song from a favorite band I never saw, the Aqua Velvets:

I always thought those guys should write scores for movies.

Amazing Version Of "Amazing Grace"!

I'd love to see Dick Dale play the Super Bowl halftime show.

You Are My Medicine, Part II

Ron tweeted me this link yesterday which I didn't see until this morning. Ed Sullivan hosted Dick Dale in 1963:

I'm no expert on these things but wasn't Dick Dale kind of "hunky"?

I saw Dale play up in San Juan Capistrano last year in 2010 and I wrote about it here. It was a very emotional show and at the time it looked like it might be one of his last. But thankfully, rumors of his demise were greatly exaggerated.

Our Favorite Martian

I think of it as a sort of a year end clearance:

50 Years Of MyTunes: A $20 Reward...

...for the verified identity of this song. I want to buy it from iTunes or the like. I wouldn't be offering money if I knew what it was.

I'm working on a blog post about instrumental surf, and I want to include this. Here's what I know about it.  I recorded the song on WORT listener sponsored radio in about 1986 or 1987 in Madison, Wisconsin. I subsequently lost the original play list, and now have it only on a compilation. I think I mislabeled it as Link Ray.

Update: Jason made the right call: It's Sandy Nelson's And Then There Were Drums from 1962.

Update 2: Sandy Nelson sounds like an old-fashioned Gene Krupa schooled drummer.

Beats Me Man

Ron (@kngFish) tweeted me a video link the other day:

@chickelit This is stuck in my head...live, from 1938. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2S1I_ien6A.

His link goes to:



The drum track on that Benny Goodman song caught my ear. I was, for some reason, instantly reminded of the drums on this (still unidentified) instrumental surf track:

Are the two drum tracks separated at birth?

I think so. They share something. They share a common influence--the great jazz and bebop drummers of the 30's, 40's, 50's and 60's. I cannot recall the name of the surfer band in my YouTube link. I recorded it from the radio in Madison, WI in the late 80's. I initially marked it as Link Wray--however, I have since been unable to verify this nor match it to any Link Wray tune.

The drummers of that bygone era all learned their chops from the greats like Gene Krupa.

Jim Chapin (1919-2009) wrote a highly influential book called Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, first published in 1948 and which went through about 60-odd printings:

I bought a copy around 1976 at Ward-Brodt Music on Henry St. in Madison when I took lessons (briefly) from a local jazz drummer. I lost my original somewhere, but recently bought another copy.
It's a classic.

Three Accidents That Enriched The Guitar Driven Sound Of Rock n Roll:

1961: Dick Dale and Leo Fender invent the reverb surf guitar sound:

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 four thousand 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 fifteen 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! That is when Dale became the 'Father of Heavy Metal' as quoted from Guitar Player Magazine. Dale broke through the electronic barrier limitations of that era!

1964: Dave Davies of The Kinks invents grunge sound while recording "You Really Got Me":

The influential distortion sound of the guitar track was created after guitarist Dave Davies sliced the speaker cone of his guitar amplifier with a razor blade and poked it with a pin. The amplifier was affectionately called "little green," after the name of the amplifier made by the Elpico company, and purchased in Davies' neighbourhood music shop, slaved into a Vox AC-30. link

1965: Roger McGuinn accidently invents the "jingle-jangle" guitar sound of The Byrds:

While 'tracking' The Byrds' first single, 'Mr. Tambourine Man', at Columbia studios, McGuinn discovered an important component of his style. 'The 'Rick' [Rickenbacker guitar] by itself is kind of thuddy,' he notes. 'It doesn't ring. But if you add a compressor, you get that long sustain. To be honest, I found this by accident. The engineer, Ray Gerhardt, would run compressors on everything to protect his precious equipment from loud rock and roll. He compressed the heck out of my 12-string, and it sounded so great we decided to use two tube compressors [likely Teletronix LA-2As] in series, and then go directly into the board. That's how I got my 'jingle-jangle' tone. It's really squashed down, but it jumps out from the radio. With compression, I found I could hold a note for three or four seconds, and sound more like a wind instrument. Later, this led me to emulate John Coltrane's saxophone on 'Eight Miles High". Without compression, I couldn't have sustained the riff's first note.' link.

[added, a fourth]:
1966: Eric Clapton combines the Gibson Les Paul and the Marshall Amplifier: link

"You Are My Medicine"

A week ago my wife and I saw Dick Dale play a show at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano. I dropped a few emotional tweets about the show here, here,  here and here, and even wrote a comment over on Sissy Willis' blog here. I can't add much more. Dick Dale has his own long history and I feel very fortunate to have seen this latest show. According to this reporter, rumors of his imminent retirement are exaggerated. I hope so.

Dick Dale is 73 years old now and has been performing locally since 1955. When he first came onstage he gave a long spiel about fighting cancer and about having to cancel a bunch of upcoming shows, including a tour of Japan. He told the audience "No way could I cancel this show--you are my medicine."
 
He said that he was running a fever of 102. My wife, who has cared for a lot of cancer patients, could read between the lines and knew exactly what he was going through treatment-wise.  His weakness forced him to sit the entire show but it didn't matter--he played as well as he ever had. We were seated at a table across from a gentleman who has followed Dick Dale since 1961 and he was clearly enjoying this one as much as ever. I'm sorry I don't have a better photo of Dale. I felt drawn to him, wanting to get closer to him more and more as the show unfolded. But the very front was occupied by close friends and family and there just wasn't any way to politely intrude on their space and so I didn't.

What got me emotionally was the obvious bond between father and son onstage. Jimmy Dale, who just turned 18, has been playing onstage with his dad since he was little.  There were times when both father and son would be playing in unison and Dick would take his hands off the guitar as if to say "look no hands" while Jimmy just kept the riff going.  That's amazing.  Such obvious affection between the two.

Dick Dale has a reputation for eschewing drugs and alcohol. He says that he went through the treatments without pain meds. After the show his last words were again "You are my medicine!"  When he stood up after the show, he visibly grimaced in pain and he was helped offstage by his son and another man. We never saw him again.

After the show, Jimmy was hanging around the fans, posing for pictures and signing the usual autographs. I thought of a photo but it was too dark and I didn't have a flash. My wife took Jimmy's hand and told him: "You tell your Dad that he's a great inspiration for cancer patients." He said "I will."

Photo used with permission of Ron