Long ago and far away
A msg today popped up on my FB msngr - to a group I rarely interact with anymore. They were once very central to my life - my surf life (98-2004?)
USENET's alt.surfing moved to various servers over the years, finally ending up on FB. Today one shared a moving piece about the suicide of one of us 20 years ago. https://medium.com/@lilyborgeson/alt-surfer-e46143a8c2cb
The conversation about this daughter's letter took me into Google group search ... and I found some of my posts that Will was also following. This one by me stood out for how tangential our conversations got:
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mama...@my-deja.com
unread,Feb 3, 2001, 1:05:05 AMtoGrey Wolf <greywo...@hotnospammail.com> wrote:
> I was reading an article about the worst pop music... there has been some
> truly bad music that sold millions. Oddly, no one mentioned any of those
> hideous early Beach Boy tunes.
Your post made me remember the first time I heard 'surf music'. I was 13
yrs old (1963?) living on Okinawa. It was a very odd time in history - we
were quite isolated from the US, got news late, only military approved
tv/zines, totally in our own little world ... even tho the VietNam war
was on our doorstep ... we saw all the guys shipping out, thousands of
them sometimes, assembled at the docks ... waiting ...
My teen life was strange. I was pretty naive. It was a bit like being
stuck in a bad 50's movie (I even wore those bunchy skirt dresses and the
poodle hairdos of disney film girls). That year my sister and I had a
birthday party with the skating club (outdoor rollar skating at the rink
every night was pretty much our social life). It was a family kind of
thing, but my parents always invited any of the GI's around - our house
seemed like a USO sometimes. (My parents were closet pacifists ... sad
... took dad another five years to finally get out.)
A few new guys showed up that night - and two very blond guys who really
looked different from the others. They sort of held themselves separate
from everyone - almost like they spoke a different language. I thought
they were a curious pair, but couldn't figure out how to relate to them.
Then, someone put on some music these guys had brought. I have no idea
now what it was; it was twangy and fast ... very different from the sappy
rock kind of stuff we were used to. Everyone else stopped dancing. The
two guys were 'stomping' like crazy - a whole new dance. I loved it ... I
jumped in and tried to copy them. They told me it was the 'surfer's
stomp'. It was a vigorous jerky, twisting dance ... left me breathless.
In the end the cultural lag was too much. These two aliens never found a
place in our little group. I never saw them again, and it was years
before I had a chance to see such 'testeroni' dancing again (my
daughters' friends introduced me to slam dancing - they dove off chairs
and careened off each other ... wahoo!!). I never forgot the surfers
stomp experience, but just never could get comfortable with the whole
socal culture/music/trend/jargon that blew through the country a few
years later ... it seemed so 'mcdonalds-polyplastic-neon colored' ...
... of course, seeing the beachboys play for Nixon didn't help ...
Sus
... musing on moshing ...
Sent via Deja.com
http://www.deja.com/
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Will Borgeson
unread,Feb 3, 2001, 8:04:04 AMto
"Grey Wolf" <greywo...@hotnospammail.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.14e5477b8...@news.earthlink.net...
> I was reading an article about the worst pop music... there has been some
> truly bad music that sold millions. Oddly, no one mentioned any of those
> hideous early Beach Boy tunes.
Matter of opinion Wolf, but to me the early Beach Boys tunes weren't exactly
hideous. Highly derivative (Chuck Berry), nasal (there used to be a South
Bay accent of sorts, that they typified), and amateurish as heck. But
"Surfin" worked for a lot of us who were just getting into it then, and to a
slightly lesser extent (because of its slightly more slick, commercial
sound) so did "Surfin Safari". But to me, "Surfin" had a garage sound that
their later stuff lacked...
[snipped ...]
What made the early lyric-based surf music work at all, to me, were the
vocal harmonies. Both the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean had pretty much the
same gimmick of using falsetto high harmonies; both started out building
many of their tunes on a Chuck Berry chassis; they (BB/J&D) were friends,
and backed each other up in recordings. Kind of interestingly - with the
exception of Dennis Wilson, who surfed a bit - as far as I know no one else
in either group rode the waves they wrote and sang about early in their
careers. So, one might say that they were exploiting the fad. But at their
best, with songs such as "Good Vibrations," the Beach Boys transcended the
surf fad and made some pretty good music. As well as some very dorky music,
especially the car-related stuff...
Mama Sus talked about dancing or at least witnessing the surfer's stomp, or
simply the stomp as we called it. For those of us who had danced the bop in
the fifties and early sixties, this was a real easy one to figure out as it
employed the same (rather awkward actually) toe-heel step that the bop did,
but without the structure of the touch-dancing or "partnering" aspect. I
think that in a lot of ways the stomp was the predecessor of what followed,
which is what I call "the mating dance" and is what rock 'n' roll dancing
became for most of us in the later Sixties and beyond. In other words, get
out there...usually at least marginally with a partner...and just do
whatever comes naturally.
Will