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| I don't know who plays what instrument. Not from that photo. |
This post marks another rare occasion where the band in question – The Surfaris – really had just the one hit. They came, they recorded “Wipe Out,” and pretty much folded after that. It is, obviously, a monster fucking hit, a song that just about anyone in the Western world (and god knows how far beyond) can hum after hearing only a few bars. They left a genre-perfect standard – even as they had some questions about their genre.
In one of those perfect pop culture twists, The Surfaris recorded “Wipe Out” as an afterthought. They’d recorded “Surfer Joe,” aka, a powerful case that they should stick to instrumentals, when their small-shop producer, Dale Smallin, explained to a very green band that, because a 45 has two sides to it, they needed something for a B-side. The last active member of The Surfaris, Bob Berryhill, relived the moment in an oral history for the National Association of Music Merchants: the band’s drummer, Ron Wilson, laid down the famous (and rightly revered) drumming (“cadence,” he calls it), and the rest of the band started to play over it; you can see Berryhill, who makes frequent, mildly uncanny nods to heavy metal, age backwards as he relives the recording of “Wipe Out.” Someone’s dad (think it was Berryhill’s dad) broke a board to open the track – this was to replicate the sound of a surfboard cracking – and Smallin suggested the maniacal laughter as a smart follow-up.
Catching up on the The Surfaris’ afterlife means listening to Berryhill repeat the same stories with remarkable consistency. In all of the three pieces I read (start with this history), he jokes about Wilson as the “old man” of The Surfaris at age 17. Everyone else in the band – Berryhill (rhythm guitar), Jim Fuller (lead guitar), and Pat Connolly (bass guitar) – was just 15 years old when they recorded “Wipe Out.” They recorded it fast too; in a separate interview from classicbands.com, Berryhill guessed that the studio recording was either the second or third take of the three they recorded. One passage in that interview gives an impression of having gotten away with something:
In one of those perfect pop culture twists, The Surfaris recorded “Wipe Out” as an afterthought. They’d recorded “Surfer Joe,” aka, a powerful case that they should stick to instrumentals, when their small-shop producer, Dale Smallin, explained to a very green band that, because a 45 has two sides to it, they needed something for a B-side. The last active member of The Surfaris, Bob Berryhill, relived the moment in an oral history for the National Association of Music Merchants: the band’s drummer, Ron Wilson, laid down the famous (and rightly revered) drumming (“cadence,” he calls it), and the rest of the band started to play over it; you can see Berryhill, who makes frequent, mildly uncanny nods to heavy metal, age backwards as he relives the recording of “Wipe Out.” Someone’s dad (think it was Berryhill’s dad) broke a board to open the track – this was to replicate the sound of a surfboard cracking – and Smallin suggested the maniacal laughter as a smart follow-up.
Catching up on the The Surfaris’ afterlife means listening to Berryhill repeat the same stories with remarkable consistency. In all of the three pieces I read (start with this history), he jokes about Wilson as the “old man” of The Surfaris at age 17. Everyone else in the band – Berryhill (rhythm guitar), Jim Fuller (lead guitar), and Pat Connolly (bass guitar) – was just 15 years old when they recorded “Wipe Out.” They recorded it fast too; in a separate interview from classicbands.com, Berryhill guessed that the studio recording was either the second or third take of the three they recorded. One passage in that interview gives an impression of having gotten away with something:
“I mean, how many groups today would show up in a recording studio with one song? Can you think of that? (laughs) That's the concept. Here you are: four ignorant little boys who know nothing about the recording industry, nothing about recording other than a Wollensak tape recorder in your house and hadn't ever done that as a band. We'd never recorded anything.”
Berryhill credits Wilson for “Wipe Out” (he calls him “the talent of the band”), and it took off like a rocket. The song dropped in 1963, a time that, as Berryhill points out (in that oral history), gave them a handful of months before the Kennedy assassination, and almost a whole year before The Beatles stole large chunks of the American popular musical audience, to hog the pop music limelight. The oral history tells the tale of how it started in two California markets, Fresno and San Bernardino, in February, but it would tear through the LA market and in short order (again, months) it launched The Surfaris to no-kidding international fame.
The end came swiftly. Connolly dropped out of the band ahead of its 1965 Japanese tour (he was replaced by Ken Forrsi, later of Love, who I’ll get to later). The whole band folded in 1966 – i.e., when everyone but Wilson reached the ripe old age of 18. A couple fitful solo projects followed - Fuller in an act called Jim Fuller and the Beatnik (just one?), and Wilson put out one project as a solo artist, the aptly-named Lost in the Surf, which, per Wikipedia, he recorded only on a handful of cassettes. Connolly is still among the living, but both Wilson (1989, age 44) and Fuller (2017, age 69) passed. With Connolly uninterested, Berryhill tours on The Surfaris archive with his actual family – even for the 50th anniversary of the release of “Wipe Out.” I’m not judging that choice on any level, but…with this project in mind, it’s not the story I want to hear, especially not the part that wants to believe that every person famous for a one-hit wonder had more they wanted to say to the world or play for it.
The Surfaris recorded more than their one famous song, of course, and they sure as hell did better than “Surfer Joe.” When digging into what else they did, I listened to a collection called The Best of the Surfaris, which Spotify tells me was released in 2008 (it wasn’t). The entire album – even when they make the unfortunate choice of singing (e.g., the Beach Boys-pinching “Hot Rod High,” the fronting-heavy “Boss Barracuda,” and the delightfully dated “Karen”) – will come off as “surf music” to just about anyone who listens to it, but I’ve also come around to respecting Berryhill’s soft rejection of that label. In his own words:
“I think we need to come up with a new word. Somebody said ‘Instro Surf’ one time. To us, it's hard driving guitar music. It's guitar music without guitars getting in the way.”
That idea comes off in rawer, purer tracks like “Point Panic,” “Scatter Shield,” and even the subtler, mellower “Beat 65” (which gets nice and woolly in the late-middle section). I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth, but I also think that quote tells me where Berryhill’s heart was at least. Whatever you call what The Surfaris played, it’s not an expansive genre; one can only get so much variety out of that sound. It really was a moon-shot for this bunch, and hats off to Berryhill for making the most of it.
Berryhill credits Wilson for “Wipe Out” (he calls him “the talent of the band”), and it took off like a rocket. The song dropped in 1963, a time that, as Berryhill points out (in that oral history), gave them a handful of months before the Kennedy assassination, and almost a whole year before The Beatles stole large chunks of the American popular musical audience, to hog the pop music limelight. The oral history tells the tale of how it started in two California markets, Fresno and San Bernardino, in February, but it would tear through the LA market and in short order (again, months) it launched The Surfaris to no-kidding international fame.
The end came swiftly. Connolly dropped out of the band ahead of its 1965 Japanese tour (he was replaced by Ken Forrsi, later of Love, who I’ll get to later). The whole band folded in 1966 – i.e., when everyone but Wilson reached the ripe old age of 18. A couple fitful solo projects followed - Fuller in an act called Jim Fuller and the Beatnik (just one?), and Wilson put out one project as a solo artist, the aptly-named Lost in the Surf, which, per Wikipedia, he recorded only on a handful of cassettes. Connolly is still among the living, but both Wilson (1989, age 44) and Fuller (2017, age 69) passed. With Connolly uninterested, Berryhill tours on The Surfaris archive with his actual family – even for the 50th anniversary of the release of “Wipe Out.” I’m not judging that choice on any level, but…with this project in mind, it’s not the story I want to hear, especially not the part that wants to believe that every person famous for a one-hit wonder had more they wanted to say to the world or play for it.
The Surfaris recorded more than their one famous song, of course, and they sure as hell did better than “Surfer Joe.” When digging into what else they did, I listened to a collection called The Best of the Surfaris, which Spotify tells me was released in 2008 (it wasn’t). The entire album – even when they make the unfortunate choice of singing (e.g., the Beach Boys-pinching “Hot Rod High,” the fronting-heavy “Boss Barracuda,” and the delightfully dated “Karen”) – will come off as “surf music” to just about anyone who listens to it, but I’ve also come around to respecting Berryhill’s soft rejection of that label. In his own words:
“I think we need to come up with a new word. Somebody said ‘Instro Surf’ one time. To us, it's hard driving guitar music. It's guitar music without guitars getting in the way.”
That idea comes off in rawer, purer tracks like “Point Panic,” “Scatter Shield,” and even the subtler, mellower “Beat 65” (which gets nice and woolly in the late-middle section). I don’t want to put words into anyone’s mouth, but I also think that quote tells me where Berryhill’s heart was at least. Whatever you call what The Surfaris played, it’s not an expansive genre; one can only get so much variety out of that sound. It really was a moon-shot for this bunch, and hats off to Berryhill for making the most of it.
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