From the days A&Rs would do the occasional string arrangement. The Billboard Hot 100 sounded different. This particular one from 1963 reminded me of the days I did full song chart themed mix tapes of, say, summer 1964, southern Calfifornia local radio charts music. That way I had a nice helping of surf instros, among their contemporaries. I would pop it in the car-radio-tape player, blasting out of 2 sixties Dual speakers in the back of my beetle on the way to St. Peter with my 9ft board on the roof. You never know what it feels like until you try it.
A big article and interview on Brian Wilson in the Washington Post.
(through the exotica mailing list)
The Beach Boy’s Hymns to the Dream State of California Belied The Nightmare He Was Living
By J. Freedom du Lac
Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 2, 2007; Page M01
LOS ANGELES — Brian Wilson still hears voices.
They stalk him sometimes when he’s on the concert stage, bedeviling him from inside his head. They ridicule and threaten the original Beach Boy, backing him into dark corners that don’t exist. Watch closely, says his wife, Melinda, and you can tell when Wilson’s schizoaffective disorder is having its way. His eyes become distant and glazed. Another auditory hallucination…full article at washingtonpost.com
Surf legend Rod Sumpters guide to the art and graphics of surfing. Hundreds of images of everything from old movie posters, logos, surf shop signs spanning decades and providing a great resource for designers, collectors or anyone interested in the graphic history of surfing. Items include valuations.
Surf Art! at Amazon
Nancy Sinatra put some photos of her and the late Lee Hazlewood online. Click here.
Thanks to Robbie on the Exotica Mailing List.
Dumb Angel Blog is delivering the goods here. The next best thing to being there at the time is knowing all the good stuff.
All the themed night-clubs. The recording studios and labels. The Doo-Wop groups, the R&B and soul acts. The garage bands who covered them. The cool jazz-acts. Early Doors, artists and mindblowing interior design. Pheww… You owe it to yourself to check out this update of the Dumb Angel Blog.
Domenic Priore from Dumb Angel writes:
(It’s all about the ocean, mannnnnnn…… — Dom)
It’s been a while since I contacted everyone about a blog or somethin’ cool, but this time, it’s for real….
Dig, The American Cinematheque at the Egyptian Theater is letting us do our “Beatnik Beach Film Night” this Friday night. We did one last summer at Sponto Gallery in Venice, then in December we brought it to the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. Now, everybody’s been asking us for months to “do this in town” (Venice is a long haul for most of you), so we’re doin’ it up right then, and including a truly great piece of Beat cinema from 1961, “Night Tide” (starring Dennis Hopper and Linda Lawson), plus our slide show of Greater L.A. area Beat coffeehouses and jazz joints of the late ’50s and early ’60s, along with two primordial shorts from the Venice West Cafe back in the day.
If you’ve never been to the Egyptian Theater, it was the immediate predecessor to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. When Sid Grauman opened it in 1922, it had the same elaborate Hollywood flair (it’s gone through a nice rennovation in its current incarnation as the American Cinematheque). This is gonna be a fun night, in the right place, with all the right people, yeh… We are working on some special guests; all three filmakers may very well be there for Q&A, at least. The American Cinematheque’s description below says it better than I can (o.k., I helped write some of it). Thanks for plannin’, and makin’ an evening of it this Friday. We’re gonna have a ball… — Domenic Priore
Friday, March 30, 2007: Egyptian Theatre
The Friday, March 30th program is a 7:30 PM screening of NIGHT TIDE, (1961, 84 min.). Director Curtis Harrington’s debut indie feature is a masterpiece, a haunted, poetic hymn to the dark world of the fly-by-night carnival, lonely midways at dawn and the siren call of eon’s-old passion spawned by the devils of the deep blue sea. In a fond nod to Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur’s CAT PEOPLE, at-loose-ends sailor Johnny Drake (Dennis Hopper) falls in love with sideshow mermaid, Mora (Linda Lawson) who may just somehow be related to the real thing. Shot in and around Santa Monica and Venice Beach in the beat culture’s heyday, the film continues to exert a strong spell, and is brimming with the heady atmosphere of bygone coffee houses, poet hipsters, languid jazz and bongos on the shore. With Luana Anders, Gavin Muir. “…captures an intangible quality of what Santa Monica was like in the early 60s. Quite apart from Los Angeles, it was a quiet residential community. The funfair pier has just the right air of seedy despair about it. Everyone seems to be living ‘just off’ the mainstream.” – Glenn Erickson, DVD Savant Preceded by the shorts: “Venice In The Sixties” (15 min.) directed by Leland Auslender. Originally shot for a television show and never used, this is essentially a full-color look inside the atmosphere of the Venice West coffeehouse, its various sections, activities and people; “The Beat From Within: Reflections of a Beatnik” (10 min.) Produced by Ralph Morin and directed by Tom Koester, this short covers a day in the life of a Venice beatnik in glorious black ‘n’ white.
Plus, following the screening, Authors Domenic Priore and Brian Chidester (Beatsville, Riot on Sunset Strip: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Last Stand in Hollywood, 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 Cafe, to the Unicorn and Shelly’s Manne-Hole in Hollywood, the Lighthouse and Insomniac in Hermosa Beach, then all the way down to Cafe Frankenstein (owned, operated and painted by Burt Shonberg). Arists 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.
P.S. Also, a new Dumb Angel blog is at: http://dumbangelmag.blogspot.com/
For a very long time I was contend with my Boss DD3 echo pedal. Of course it’s generic and cold sounding compared to old tube-tape or disc delays like the Dynacord I once owned. But trying to get spare parts for those was impossible in pre-internet days, at least for my amptech back then. And the old echos require collectors money – when I just wanted a tool, not a museum piece. The earlier delay modelers like the Line6 tried to do too much I don’t want and too less of what I want, the variations of multihead delay patterns. I always found them a little too expensive! Now the Magicstomp recreates tape and multihead delays very well. And timebased effects like echo and reverb escape the detached feeling latency encountered with other digitally generated effects, like amp-modeling and distortion. I got mine used and it’s of the first variety, later versions include a headphone jack.
What really convinced me beside the current low prices for them, was finding this page, where a dutch guy programmed a large number of sixties tape echo patches for the Magicstomp, mostly Meazzi and Vox. There’s also a Roland, and the patch really resembles the sonic signature. You can download patches from Yamaha’s site or dedicated www-groups (2 on Yahoo!) and install them with your pc or mac with OS9 and built in usb. Just connect an usb cable and start the Magicstomp editor. You can deep edit a lot of effect parameters and store them to 99 user presets.
Integrating the effectbox into a live-set-up brings some problems. Read this message from one of the Yahoo! Magicstomp boards:
I’ve finally got round to attaching my magicstomp to my board only to
find a considerable drop in volume when patches are engaged. Tried
reducing the input level but no change.
Is this yet another defect (along with the half second pause between
patches) that has lead to this product being discontinued?
Here’s another point. I’ve decided to use my stomp to replace certain
effects that I only use occasionaly – phaser,flanger, uni-vibe and for
delays etc…problem is that I thought I could navigate up and down
and then just use the on/off footswitch to activate the chosen effect.
Turns out that even though the display reads “reverb” for example, I
still have a bloody harmoniser. Have to go back to the patch that the
sound corresponds to and then move up or down. Useless. I never
noticed this before when I used it as a stand alone effect. Anyone had
similar problems ar know something I don’t?????
Cheers.
I just found this little article on Makaha skateboards. My third board was a Makaha I bought it in 1978. It was back to wood decks, after giving my first, a Nash Shark (green), away and riding the daylight out of the kicktailed plastic thing that followed it.
Incidentally Domenic Priore wore his Makaha teamrider jacket two or three weeks ago arriving at the Luxuriamusic.com studios.
This site has a very informative primer for Indorock newbies. Indorock is the closest equivalent to Surf western Europe had at the time (early 60s). It was performed by indonesian emigrants living in the Netherlands and touring western Europe, mainly the Federal Republic of Germany.
Here are The Tielman Brothers doing an Elvis vocal during the period the above picture was taken, with Fender Jazzmasters and Bass VI.