This magnificent website has an article on one of my favorite yeye-girls – Chantal Goya! I dig France Gall, Francoise Hardy, Sheila and Sylvie Vartan very much for their music, but Chantal appeared in my favorite non-surf movie, Masculin Feminin by Jean Luc Godard, where she sings, and plays – what else – an up and coming yeye-girl. If I had never seen this film I wouldn’t understand yeye, Paris, french movies, mod, the 60s, and thus wouldn’t really have lived.
The trailer for the movie.

Here’s her MySpace.

Is bodysurfing the most soulful kind of surfing or what?

I don’t have that many of his records – but I sure found a lot of his tracks at iTunes! He was very busy covering any style of popular guitar playing you can think of during the 60s and 70s. I guess most of you don’t know him, so for starters I made a little 42 track Buddy Merrill iMix, which you can find at Itunes.
Here’s what I wrote about it:

The versatile Buddy Merrill!
We start with a surfy/Ventures-style division before going into a nowsound/funky part. This turns over into his best bossa tracks on iTunes. After this we are exposed to a little gang of country favorites leading into Buddy’s steel guitar skills featured on his coolest hawaiian offerings. We go Exotica for the second to last bunch of tunes. This leaves us to close this collection with three tunes pulled from the classical catalogue – Where Czardas had briefly taken us during the bossa section.

Here’s his homepage www.buddymerrill.com.

Buddy on iTunes

This I found today at Dumb Angel Gazette:
quote from site

Thursday, December 7, 2007. 7:00-11:00 p.m.
Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th Street at Valencia, Mission District, San Francisco, California

Authors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester (Beatsville, Smile: The Story of Brian Wilson’s Lost Masterpiece, Dumb Angel #4: All Summer Long) will present a unique one-hour slide show documenting the Beat Generation’s long stretch over the Greater Los Angeles area between 1956 and 1966, via visuals of coffeehouses and Jazz joints from the Sunset Strip to Malibu, Venice and Newport Beach.

Legendary locations only heard about in books or in liner notes, from the Gas House and nearby Venice West, to the Unicorn and Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and Insomniac Cafe in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned, operated and painted by Burt Shonberg) in Laguna Beach.

Artists from John Altoon to Eric ‘Big Daddy’ Nord gave these places a colourful splash, as did the wide variety of Folk singers and poets who performed on their stages. Accompanying the slideshow will be a rare screening of Dirty Feet (1965), shot primarily at the Prison of Socrates coffeehouse in Balboa. Special guest speakers TBA, there will be another short Beat film or two (including a color one shot inside Venice West), plus a few new routines by San Francisco’s own Devil-Ettes to jazz the room.

I’ve seen pictures from the inside over at Tiki Central, and it looks very promising, so all tikiphiles over on the misty island probably should check in there soon.

1 Dover Street, Mayfair, London W15 4LD

www.mahiki.com

John Severson book Surf Fever.

And in limited (1000) edition Taschen published the Leroy Grannis book, which is really gorgeous!

I know the image says “sold out”, but I still saw them in several stores, in Berlin that is.

read more here

Surf Fever at Amazon

Leroy Grannis at Amazon

Here’s an online article about the tune Miserlou, that has always been an Exotica favourite, and proven to be a great guitar melody over the years as well.

picture: Dick Dale

Cheeky Tiki blog
quote from blog:

Hawaiian Print Vintage Telephones
Hand-painted by UK artist, Chris Moon
Fully working

I say: beautiful!
And one can buy those, too!