The surf craze hit the beach just ahead of the British Invasion. For the better part of nearly 3 or 4 summers, roughly 1960-1964, it was time to ride the wild surf. So what if you were miles from the nearest coastline? You had a radio didn’t you?
It was a wholesome phenomenon, devised for dancing in the sand, shaking bikinis, and fabulous reverberations that could be heard at the top of a 40 foot wave. Surf bands featured multiple guitarists, dancing and kicking in sync, and a drummer who tried so hard to be heard over a few dozen cranked Fender amplifiers.
Rarities, hits, surprises, and grimeys await you. I have a cover of Wipe Out which is so strange, and even a segment of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand where he gets into a deep discussion with the guys in the audience about whether or not they would shave their heads if the money was right.
Somewhere along the pipeline we hope to recreate the Sixties beaches of southern California, and the 90s movies of Quentin Tarantino. This is Old School #66 as we say welcome to the endless summers of the Monsters of the Surf Guitar.
The Monsters of the Surf Guitar are still riding their boards and the stratocasters into the endless summer sunset. We are putting the bookmark into the episode of old school at the beginning of the British Invasion which ended the first waves of the genre. Surf punk came along in the late 70s. It’s a fact that there are more surf bands playing today than were ever around in the 60s. So we are hardly finished with the bitchin’ majesty of the Surf Guitar.
Professor Mikey’s Old School is a podcast produced for educational purposes. You can find it wherever you get your podcasts, just search the whole name because everybody including the little old lady from Pasadena has a podcast called Old School. We also appear semi regularly on Professor Mikey’s YouTube channel depending on whether the censors got lucky recently.
Any music you may have heard in this show resides within the public domain, was offered or loaned for perpetual promotional use by the labels or the artists, or it is used within the guidelines of fair use provided for in Section 107 of the copyright act of 1976.
We will close with a favorite from the Chantays, and band who originally called this song “Liberty’s Whip,” inspired by the Lee Marvin/John Wayne Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. The next movie they saw featured the Banzai Pipeline in Hawaii, and the song got a new name that would put it in surf rotation for the next half century and probably a lot longer.
Hang five, hang ten, hang out anytime with PROFESSOR MIKEY’S OLD SCHOOL.
Peter Gunn Theme - DICK DALE
Listen to the King of the Surf Guitar - DICK DALE
Let’s Go Trippin - DICK DALE
Let’s Go Surfin’- JIM WALLER AND THE DELTAS
Walk Don’t Run - JOHNNY SMITH, CHET ATKINS, THE VENTURES
The past is a blast on Old School, the educational underground pirate radio podcast. DJ Professor Mikey curates vintage vinyl, recalls dope details and fills the air with audio archives from a half-century plus treasure pleasure of singles, albums, reel to reels, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and audio memorabilia.
The past is a blast on Old School, the educational underground pirate radio podcast. DJ Professor Mikey curates vintage vinyl, recalls dope details and fills the air with audio archives from a half-century plus treasure pleasure of singles, albums, reel to reels, 8-tracks, cassettes, CDs, and audio memorabilia.
OS#66 Monsters of the Surf Guitar