One Hit No More, No. 10: The Chantays Shoot the "Pipeline" (to Nowhere)

These were men either in, or just after, high school. #OldeTyme

I flirted with the idea of combining The Surfaris and The Chantays into one post, but opted against because dropping them into a bucket called “surf rock” felt like short-changing both bands. As it turns out, though, neither band did much beyond putting out two famous hits, both in the same year, and in a musical movement that everyone agrees got crushed under the British Invasion, and that few seemed to miss when it left. To contextualize that argument, I lifted this from the LA Times’ obituary from founding Chantay, Brian Carman:

“On his debut album in 1967, Jimi Hendrix promised his listeners that ‘you'll never hear surf music again.’”

Surf came and went, mostly within 1963, and Hendrix still felt like he had to crap on it four years later…

The Surfaris had “Wipe Out” (a brief history of the band and the song) and The Chantays had “Pipeline.” The differences don’t quite end there, but they don’t go much further either. Both bands formed in high school (The Chantays were a bit older, collectively), and wrapped up as going, creative concerns shortly after. Both came from southern California, both looked up to and borrowed from the same bands/artists – e.g., The Ventures, Dick Dale, and The Rhythm Rangers, whose line-up included Carman’s older brother, Steve (just for the record, the Orange County Register’s obit on Carman calls them The Rhythm Rockers). Carman and his friends formed The Chantays for the oldest reason people go into entertainment. As Bob Spickard, the other half of the band’s brain said, “Hey, these guys were making money and getting all the girls, so maybe we ought to think about that.”

One Hit No More, No. 9: The Surfaris Barely Had the Time to "Wipe Out"

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: