IVIV surf music

[Bekah]

I was considering "surf music" to be music about surfing - but it may  
be the whole Beach Boys style,  I suppose, which did stay around much  
longer than the music with actual words about surfing.   I don't know  
- I was going by Wiki and my memory of what I listened to.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surf_music -  1961 - 1965,  mentions sax  
and

http://www.legendarysurfers.com/surf/legends/lsc212.html#surf_music_roots
(scroll down for a section called "Surf Music's Demise" - this is a  
snip)
*The year 1963 was the nadir of surf music.  "America's seemingly  
invincible youth were swept up in an exciting 'free' era punctuated by  
drugs, sex, rock 'n roll and politics," wrote Leonard Lueras.   
"Socially, most young people were sitting on a strange cusp --  
somewhere between a frat-rat/jock alcohol-based consciousness and the  
first stirrings of psychedelia, hippie-ness and what law enforcement  
officials liked to call 'a false sense of euphoria.'  All the above  
predated an unpopular war in Vietnam... In 1963, petrol cost 19 to 29  
cents a gallon at the neighborhood U-Save, so for five dollars split  
four ways you could check out every surf spot along a good 100 mile  
stretch of Pacific Coast Highway."*


But  I'm sure that surf music was still played in areas where surfing  
was popular - I don't know - I was mostly up near Bakersfield (in LA  
summer of '66 and SF summer of '67 - ages 18 and 19).

I heard some very interesting surf music on South Padre Island as late  
as 1980 - with a sax - gorgeous music but it was a local group and I  
don't remember the name.  "But Michael's gone to play and Jason's here  
to stay awhile,  two children of the sun,  children of the ????"     
The sax sounded like a seagull and there were two singers, a duet,  
winding their voices around each other.

And surf music is still out there:
http://www.surferjoemusic.com/

Bekah


On Oct 12, 2009, at 10:33 PM, Doug Millison wrote:

> I was 18 in 1970 graduating high school in Phoenix then at college  
> in Fort Worth, Texas, and surf music was everywhere.  On AM radio,  
> on sit-com TV, and the 60s beach movies were still recent. The Beach  
> Boys album "Sunflower" had come out in '69, I guess, I heard it  
> first in 1970 in a rather elevated state of mind where it has been  
> well-grooved ever since, "Surf's Up" came along in '71, thereabouts,  
> and it has a sad, downer feel that reflects the poisoned ocean &  
> etc. and their previous hits were still played regularly on Top 40  
> and also on the "underground" FM stations I listened to in Phoenix  
> in high school, then in Texas in '70-71.  I posted previously that  
> The Boards house seems to be the crazy Sunset Blvd. mansion where  
> Pynchon supposedly met Brian Wilson and smoked dope with in his  
> living room, which at the time I think I heard once was done up like  
> a beach with sand, maybe that was just a rumor though.  I also still  
> think IV has the feel of an underground comic book, that's one of  
> the only ways that I can make sense of some of the over the top, in- 
> your-face obsessions in IV.  R. Crumb has his fixations, so does IV.  
> Only in a comic book does it seem normal for a short hippie guy  
> private eye to smoke a joint and roll his hair up in some kind of  
> imitation 'fro, pass out, and wind up facing a Black Militant the  
> next day who openly stares at the hair.  The one really creepy thing  
> that Pynchon does in IV, and it makes the novel of a piece with his  
> earlier work, in my book at least:  the way he brings in Charlie  
> Manson, and the complexities of his police.  The police are evil as  
> shit and of course some of them are fine family men, and some are  
> straddling the bobwire, and meanwhile they are all also and always  
> it seems covering up political murders that serve the needs of the  
> powers-that-be, that feels right in a Pynchon novel.  Manson evokes  
> a freaky, bloody edge of the hippie scene in a way that gives this  
> novel a Pynchonian edge, for me at least. And I think the way that  
> the pot and LSD work in the novel is cartoonish yet also a  
> reasonable reflection of the way it worked then.  In college dorms  
> and off-campus apartments, in the Gulf oil field where I worked a  
> year before getting drafted into the US Army -- pot and acid were  
> everywhere, in the Army, too, there was always somebody getting hits  
> of Windowpane or Clear Light in a letter from back in the world, and  
> pot cost like $5/kilo in Seoul in '73, maybe $10 I don't remember  
> exactly but it was cheap enough we kept big Saltine cracker cans of  
> it sitting around the dayroom in our barracks at Camp Howze up there  
> on the Frontier of Freedom. Aabove all the early 70s "hippie" scene  
> was a hard-partying scene, lots of sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, just  
> like in Rolling Stone magazine where Pynchon's old roomie was a  
> journo, the one who took P to meet the Beach Boys and who knows,  
> maybe that's when Charlie Manson was still connected to the Beach  
> Boys? I don't know. But whatever the truth of those reports about  
> Pynchon might be,  I do think if you read IV as if it were a graphic  
> novel, let Pynchon's prose paint the pictures, and forget about  
> trying to make it into some great American novel, maybe it will be  
> more enjoyable?  Maybe not, and that's OK, too.

http://web.mac.com/bekker2/