Pipeline, Chantays (1963)

Today I was going to write about some morose seasonal affective disordery thing like Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon and Garfunkel (even though it's sunny for the second day in a row), but then I thought, why wallow in the fact that we have months of crap weather still to endure and instead go for the complete fantasy?  The surf music category!

I've been listening to a lot of early instrumental music lately thanks to a Richard Thompson shout-out to Hank Marvin of the Shadows (about whom I'll probably write another time) and was poring over forgottenhits.com which has lists galore, including the best instrumentals. One I had especially nostalgic feelings for leapt out, so today, Pipeline is on the menu. By the Chantays.  I have no idea who they were/are, but we're about to find out.

According to their Facebook page (because it turns out they are playing together nearly 50 years later and have a need to get the word out!), the song was written by original members Bob Spickard and Brian Carman. They still perform with their original drummer, Bob Welch, and long-time members Ricky Lewis and Brian Nussle.  Growing up in Orange County, California, they formed a band while in high school as boys will sometimes do, and the rest is history. 

If I had my life to live over again, I would have wanted to be a surfer chick.  It would have been a whole other life, and I'd be a completely different sort of person.  Good thing, bad thing ... you decide.  I just know that it's a life that suggests a more carefree existence than the one I have lived or lived when I was young, and why wouldn't that sound sweet any day of the week?

Pipeline is considered to be the first instrumental surf-rock hit, with the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (1962) the first with vocals. But the seeds were sown in 1961 by Dick Dale (and the Del-Tones), a guitar shredder who played one of the first Fender Stratocasters through a 15-inch JBL D130F speaker and created the sound that instrumentalists the world over have tried to duplicate, something he described as close to what he heard in his head when he was surfing.  His sonic embellishments were pioneering and, as a southpaw, he did it all while playing his guitar upside down and backwards - without restringing it.  

Dale's Let's Go Trippin' was considered the first surf song ever recorded, but it was only a regional hit - and not in my region. (And "trippin'" did not refer to dropping acid but going on a road trip to find the best surf.)

Pipeline has been a surf rock standard for decades, and isn't likely to die on the vine anytime soon. I played it today for the first time in eons.  It made me happy like it did the first time I heard it as a mere child. Let me tell you, when you're landlocked and surrounded by icicles a foot long, a music-induced surfing high can be very therapeutic.

And now I leave you with this great find:  a 1987 collaboration between Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughn on a cover of Pipeline for the soundtrack of a Frankie Avalon-Annette Funicello beach flick sendup, Back to the Beach - somehow this was nominated for a Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental.  Hi-fricking-larious!

 

Dance, Dance, Dance, Beach Boys (1964)

After six hours of school
I've had enough for the day
I hit the radio dial and
Turn it up all the way
I gotta dance ...

It's foolhardy, I know, but thinking back to simpler times has a lot of allure right now, and Dance, Dance, Dance is the musical poster child for such a time. It was actually the first vinyl single I ever bought with my own money. I've always wondered about that - why it was the Beach Boys and not the Beatles, whom I idolized.

It's probably because this song is an elixir - those first 15 seconds! - and I was big on those in my preteens. No matter what the psychic torments of the moment were, a song like Dance, Dance, Dance could obliterate them, at least for awhile. With all of the world's trials and tribulations right now, wouldn't it be nice to just worry about what's happening after six hours of school? Though then I was typically overwrought, now it seems positively idyllic.

But there's a lot going on beneath the surface of this happy-go-lucky ditty with its exuberant arrangement and glorious harmonies, and it's that Brian Wilson had a crippling anxiety attack just days after Dance, Dance, Dance peaked at #8 on the charts. In fact, that meltdown took place on a plane enroute to Houston for a performance that would be his last live (non-televised) appearance with the Beach Boys for 12 years.

Most people weren't aware of the tremendous pressures on Wilson who, with his brothers Dennis and Carl, cousin Mike Love and friend Al Jardine, comprised the hugely likeable Beach Boys. The group had formed in 1961 with a focus on surfing and hot rods that resonated to some degree even with non-Californian kids whose lifestyles involved no such things.

They were like whirling dervishes with the schedule they kept, touring incessantly and releasing 6 singles before achieving their first #1 hit, I Get Around, earlier in 1964. The advent of Beatlemania and the British Invasion generally was a game changer for many American acts that had had the musical landscape pretty much to themselves to that point. Wilson bore the brunt of the need to churn out material and serve it up to the gaping maw of teenage demand, and though it was great, more broadly focused stuff, it took its toll.

The Beach Boys Today! album that Dance, Dance, Dance also appeared on the following year is thought to be an early manifestation of the album-as-cohesive-artistic-statement (in this instance, all up-tempo songs on side A, ballads on side B) that was arguably pioneered by Brian Wilson as he eyed and competed with the Beatles. It was his first effort as a studio-only musician after his life-saving decision to leave the road, and was the beginning of years of creative output that most consider to have been some of the most influential in rock music.

Eight Miles High, The Byrds (1966)

The most evocative psychedelic record of the 60s, to me, is generally believed to be one of the first, Eight Miles High, written and performed by the Byrds. A cornucopia of complexity, it had many distinctive features, not the least of which were the spectral voices in alternating unison and harmony against the mesmerizing riffs of Roger McGuinn's then-unconventional 12-string guitar and Chris Hillman's throbbing bassline.

This is another one of those songs where just hearing the first notes triggers an immediate magic carpet ride back to my turbulent adolescence. The almost menacing intro, followed by "eight miles high, and when you touch down, you'll find that it's stranger than known" signaled a radical departure from the group's previous hits, such as Turn, Turn, Turn and Mr. Tambourine Man, which were Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan covers, respectively.

McGuinn, David Crosby, Gene Clark, Michael Clarke and Hillman distinguished themselves with music that seemed a hybrid of British Invasion and contemporary folk. In fact, their first tour of the UK positioned them as America's answer to the Beatles. Unlike the Beatles, however, they all had cut their teeth in the California folk scene and, knowing next to nothing about amplified instruments, might have seemed an unlikely pioneer of this new genre. In the liner notes to the Byrds box set There Is A Season, Tom Petty writes, "Without a single member with a rock background, they came from folk trios, bluegrass, Christy Minstrels and beatnik coffee houses. It was almost like a lab experiment, mixing the elements and seeing what came out."

What came out in Eight Miles High was an acknowledged homage to John Coltrane and the emerging influence of Ravi Shankar. The Byrds' first foray into psychedelia was surrounded by controversy from the outset, with baffled radio stations banning the record in the belief that the title was referring to drugs - which it probably was to some degree. (As with so many of these songs, the real story of what the song was "about" takes different forms depending on the source. There's an entire discussion about the song's genesis that can be read online in Eight Miles High: Folk-Rock's Flight from Haight-Ashbury to Woodstock by Richie Unterberger.)

It's interesting to me now how unsettling I found the shifts in the output of many groups circa 1966. It might seem strange, but I still remember being filled with foreboding, at age 14, as I witnessed the metamorphosis of the Beach Boys, the Beatles, and the Byrds, just to name three, from their comparatively clean cut origins to new realms that were fraught with allure, yes, but still on some level, danger.

Good Vibrations, Beach Boys (1966)

When it came to bands of the 60's, the Beach Boys were America's sweethearts. Everything they produced seemed to touch the right nerve. If I remember correctly, the very first single I bought with my own money was Dance, Dance, Dance. But one song was the show-stopper out of all those released before Brian Wilson's various psychoses led him to withdraw from society. Anyone hearing Good Vibrations that very first time was stopped dead in his or her tracks. "I don't know where, but she sends me there." I still remember the moment we crossed into this new frontier.

Good Vibrations hit the airwaves about six months before Strawberry Fields Forever and, while the two are often compared, I have always vastly preferred the former. It was an extravaganza of sound that was both simple and insanely complex - developed, according to some reports, over 17 separate recording sessions. It broke all the rules that had up to that point been observed in producing pop songs and, with its separate movements, has been described as a pocket symphony. At 3:37, it seems much longer.

One of the many instruments featured in the song was an electronic version of an old instrument known as a theremin. Playing a real theremin involved controlling sound by moving the hands through the air varying distances from two antennas, thus altering the resulting electronic fields. The modification Wilson used, a cross between the original instrument and the later synthesizer and better suited to a musician who knew how to play a guitar, created one of the many signature "good vibrations" of this groundbreaking song.