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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:
