Alaska Employment Law

Introduction

For many years now I have been trying to discover the earliest recorded song that really and truly sounded like surf music.  You know, surf music – guitars and a drum kit, a particular sound, and typically lots of reverb – a “wet” guitar sound.  Surf historians have traditionally identified Dick Dale, on the one hand, or the Bel-Airs (their big song: “Mr. Moto”), on the other, as the likely originators, in each case around 1961, maybe 1960.  Dale, in particular, used a double note style and positively slathered his songs in reverb.  Think of “Misirlou” and “Let’s Go Trippin’” (which was not about drugs, but about finding a good beach).  Before I knew much about Dick Dale, I grew up loving 17-year-old Carl Wilson’s splendid surf guitar work on a cover version of “Let’s Go Trippin’,” which can be heard in glorious stereo on the early Beach Boys album, Beach Boys Concert, performed in Sacramento around 1964.  But that was later.  There are other songs from this period, like the Ventures’ “Walk, Don’t Run” and “Perfidia,” that make early, effective use of the whammy bar on the Mōsrite guitar and are temptingly close to surf music – but not quite.  Lately, current events have led me to approach this question from two angles, one starting with Phil Spector, the other with Jack White

Part One

First of all, we have the Phil Spector trial.  Much has been said in the popular press about what a nut case, what a really bad guy, Spector is, though a recent biography of Spector, Tearing Down the Wall of Sound, by the British journalist Mick Brown, reveals some sympathetic qualities, too.  We also know that Brian Wilson, the other reclusive West Coast nut case/genius producer, was fantastically inspired by Spector’s “Wall of Sound” techniques, to the point of hiring Spector’s session musicians, a/k/a “The Wrecking Crew” (which at different times included Sonny Bono, Leon Russell, Glen Campbell and Hal Blaine, among many others), when Wilson recorded his own magnum opus, Pet Sounds.  (Some people think that the Pet Sounds title was an homage to Phil Spector, but I doubt it.  Though it is significant that Wilson, like Spector, recorded in mono.)

Wilson to this day regards “Be My Baby,” the brilliant Ronettes’ single that Spector produced, as the greatest achievement of pop music.  (That’s not a crazy position to take, by the way.)  In 1964, Wilson actually wrote an answer song, “Don’t Worry Baby,” that Spector, I am happy to say, rejected.  Yay for that, since it ended up as a heavenly B‑side in the Beach Boys’ sacred canon.  (The A-side:  “I Get Around.”)  But the Beach Boys did not invent surf music, they merely exploited it.  The earliest Beach Boys surfing hit, “Surfin’,” sounds like lousy doo-wop, and has no reverb at all.  (By the way, so there is no mistake, I worship both Spector and Wilson as producers.)

Part Two

In late July I went to see The White Stripes, my current favorite band in the whole universe, play at Boston University.  It was a great concert, even though the band did not play the old Son House song “Death Letter,” my all-time favorite song by the Stripes.  “Catch Hell Blues” is pretty close, and that was on the bill, so I was okay.  Jack White, f/k/a Jack Gillis, is from Detroit, where he used to be an upholsterer in the mid-90s.  Mr. White, who for a time was actually in a band called The Upholsterers, is a brilliant minimalist who until recently was a mainstay contributing to a kind of Detroit garage rock sound that I truly love.  (Now he lives in Nashville.)  Around 2001 he had a clever idea – he got together all the bands he knew in Detroit, rented a studio and set up a couple of guitars, a bass and a good drum kit, and then in a single day paraded all those local bands through the studio, asking them to knock out a song or two or three, all on that same equipment.  (You can still find this session on a terrific album called Sympathetic Sounds of Detroit.)  One of the bands on this collection is The Dirtbombs (who contributed the hilarious “I’m Through with White Girls,” which is not the least bit racist).  The lead singer of The Dirtbombs, Mick Collins – who has a unique voice – used to be in a Detroit band called The Gories.  The Gories put out a couple or three albums, all of them sonic disasters, sounding like they were recorded on a cassette tape on a boom box in a garage with the doors open in December (there actually is an album, God Says F*ck You, recorded in exactly that fashion by a Cleveland group called The Electric Eels, but that’s for another story).  The Gories had two guitars and a drum kit, but the drummer couldn’t really play.  Anyway, at the very end of The Gories’ final album (this is a group, mind you, that recorded a song called, “Hey Hey, We’re the Gories”) is an instrumental called “Ichiban,” which is likeable enough.  But the Gories, who wrote most of their material, didn’t write that song.

Part Three

Nope, that little instrumental was created a long, long time ago, in a land far, far away from any ocean surf, by a group from Pontiac, Michigan called Nick & the Jaguars (and I bet you a dollar that Mick Collins, who is very smart, knew who they were).  The song appears, as “Ich‑I‑Bon #1,” on the first (1959-1961) multivolume set of The Complete Motown Singles, which will likely run to over 50 CDs when it is fully released.  Nick & the Jaguars were actually the first white group signed to a Motown company (the drummer’s daddy knew Berry Gordy).  The lead guitarist, who certainly must get some credit here, was Marvin Weyer, who now resides in the Rockabilly Hall of Fame, though I know nothing about him as a rockabilly.Debuting on the Tamla/Motown label on August 2, 1959, “Ich‑I‑Bon #1” is undeniably surf music.  I keep listening to it, and each time I am forced once again to conclude that it is surf music.  Accidental or not, I cannot say.So – whether they meant to or not, it was Nick & the Jaguars who recorded the earliest surf song, at least by my count.  And surf music apparently started in Detroit, and on the Motown label.  Who knew?  Maybe, deep inside, everybody does have an ocean, across the U.S.A.

© Dean F. Hanley