SURF REPORT Wipeout

SURF REPORT

7 September 2009


At 34,000 feet in the air the sea is as far away as Maude Smallin’s 6th grade blackboard. The clouds way-way down below are so close to the sea and far from us that they are like butt-smudges on the gray-green slate of the Pacific Ocean. We are going to Hawaii! Hawaii! “I wish you would come along with me.” Because its always nice to share the trip with a fellow traveler. It’s lovely and lonely. I lived here for four years. Long enough to be able to go to Eva Beach during a south swell when all the locals are warning me about the locals, and I say:

“ Nah, I am too old to mess with.”

When I show up there they just wave their shakabra fingers at me and grin from behind their sunglasses, then they just go back to their reveries in the cars they’ve had parked in the sand down there for decades. Maybe folks even inherit those beach heaps. Like nobody is going to show up at Eva unless they belong there, Brah, or they are crazy.

Old surf song lyrics remind me of Maudie’s son, Dale. Dale managed The Surfaris in the 1960’s and its Dale who cackles out that wicked Edgar Alan Poe inspired EUEUEHWWWIIIIPE-OWT! …at the beginning of the Surfari’s big hit of the same name off the album of the same name.

Maudie brought Dale to school so he could pull off his wild EUEUEHWWWIIIIPE-OWT… in person for us at a school assembly. Can you imagine how cornellacious it would be if we asked him to do it twice today? He did it twice then. Three times would have been too much. Dale looked a little too Pillsbury to have been surfing much back then. But he had that wild howl down and gave us a thrill. He didn’t seem to think it was lame to be doing it like that, a capella in some sterile auditorium. God bless his heart.

Then they cued the record for a little more entertainment, and we all sat there in our khaki uniforms and black ties, thirteen-year-old sergeants and little 4th grade corporals, listening to the Surfaris on some RCA Victor portable record player. The song was a vacant and inappropriate sound when heard out of place, when we were all crammed together in the formal circumstance. But out back of the barracks late in the afternoon that song would come on like an anthem when everybody’d be putting the gloss to the belt buckle with a little Brasso, and shining their clunky black shoes or big bad boots ( I never felt like ponying up for, nor swaggering in such, myself) back when we were somewhat under house arrest.


Then KRLA would play something else cool like Dick Dale’a Misirlu (Ah, ya habibi, Ah, ya leh-leli, ah!) or the great instrumental Apache by Jorgen Ingmann. It’s a shame that people won’t settle for s nice straightforward instrumental anymore these days, especially since the good lyricists can be counted on two hands. Back in 1963 you had to have a good strong instrumental in the repertoire. Words can be a bit overvalued. Even the Rolling Stones covered 2120 South Michigan Avenue. We were 27 miles from Corona Del Mar listening to all this but were feeling the vibe, all the same. Wipe Out was recorded where I grew up, in the lemon groves and grape vineyards of Cucamonga, at a place run by Frank Zappa.