GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY! Jimmy Durante - Godfather Of Surf? Dept.

Say, fellows! Can you descry producer's credit, bottom left?

You'll know veteran comedian Jimmy Durante from previous visits to th' IoF© [here and here - Ed.], but did you know he has an important role in the development of surf music? As unlikely as this sounds, it's more unlikely that you did, given your lamentable education and lack of interest in the really important stuff, so I'll tells ya! Those of you with short-term memory skills undimmed by the passing of the years may remember the last piece to appear here a couple of days back, featuring Michael Lloyd's tragic descent into music biz success [Here's a link so you don't have to scroll and make your eyes go funny - Ed.]. During the course of my research I learned that Lloyd's Godfather was none other than Th' Shnozzola hisself, James Q. Durante! But wait! There's more! But first, take a hinge at this ultra-rare piece of movie memorabilia from the collection of the late Gene Siskel:

Only evidence that movie ever existed!

 

That was fun, wasn't it? Probably the most fun you're going to have all day, which is simultaneantly heartwarming and throat-slashingly pathetic. But back to 1963 or whenever it was. Lloyd was in the successful surfbeat combo The New Dimensions, what you ain't heared of because frankly you don't care that much about anything since your ex torched your trailer home with your Pokemon© collection still in it. But this band could actually play, looked spiffy, and got to support some major major acts, such as like f'rinstance the Beach Boys. Wow! Great Concert! And it was th' Shnozz what gifted the young Michael Lloyd with an actual Fender guitar, which was like giving him a Cadillac full of blondes in bikinis. Anyway, they wus dumb kids and signed a contract with a couple of feckless rubes just off the Azusa bus, ensuring no income from their three record albums, the first of which is today's FoamFeature™ Deliverable, and as far as I'm aware the only place you'll find it in this condition on the internet. It may be on SoulSuck, but so what. (Mildly interesting factoid: it was because of SoulSuck's frosty, insular, no-help attitude that I started this blog thing.)

It's surprisingly fantastic. There's some real production imagination added to musical skill making it a cut above most surfbeat albums. As it's on the dump-bin Sutton label, there are no credits (so musicians and composers lose their royalties), no band picture, and the producer's name - which really interests me - is illegibly small, bottom left front cover. William J. Something? Robert J. Whomever? He knew his stuff. It's in true stereo, not a standard thing back in '63 and totally unexpected on a no-budget label like Sutton. There's always something fun and imaginative happening in the arrangements and mix. And it's twenty - count 'em! - fun-packed minutes long! Hoo boy!

After cutting a couple more albums, with an ill-advised Hail Mary pass at soul, the band [left - Ed.] morphed into ... ta daa! ... dese guys:

... and let me tell you, it's a crushing disappointmink. They're basically a franks n' beans white blues band. Yes, they played on the Strip and were probably great fun to watch at Pandora's Box, and yes, they had top-line talent supporting them on the album - Bones Howe, Larry Knechtel, Hal Blaine, Mike Deasy, and ... Warren Zevon. And they were pretty good players and singers themselves (although Lloyd had moved on). But it's as exciting as waiting for dial-up in Uzbekhistan. There's a version of Smokestack Lightning that lasts until next Thursday and is nearly as crushingly wretched as Love's version on Da Capo, with a drum solo that will have you frantically climbing a tall building to jump off. I'm not uploading it, as a pubic cervix. The New Dimensions album is better in every way, except the cover. Perhaps. I should mention Art Guy, who was not the graphic designer but the drummer. The graphic designer was probably Drum Guy.

Cooling to my theme ...

This "evolution" of pop into rock is a clear illustration of what was lost. By '69, when the Smokestack Lightnin' album limped out, surf music was dead in the water - SWIDT? - and times were suddenly grim. The brief Technicolor burst of the Summer Of Love had faded into clouds of foreboding. Nobody was playing the ridiculously-named Surf n' Bongos album, or even remembered the group. "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone" may work sometimes, but not here, for what was gone was innocence, and that's gone forever in pop, evolving into today's AI shuffle of familiar elements. Doesn't matter if it's an algorithm or the more insidious human version, pop is a constant reshuffle of an old, old hand. In '63 The New Dimensions were a product of a scene (don't sneer, it's exactly the right word) that was exciting, fun, and fresh. Dick Dale and a few others were doing it already, but it was happening, right there and then, the product of a limited but intensely vivid youth culture with the money and the time to get it moving. There was no playbook, they weren't ticking boxes, they weren't playing within a tradition, but they were having as much fun as they knew how.

The Smokestack Lightnin' album is no fun at all. It's unfair to single it out, perhaps, there were hundreds of bands worldwide doing the same thing, grabbing at shreds of authenticity by appropriating black culture. Check out the seriousness of the cover shot. Po' boy caps, 'tache n' glasses ... not a surfboard or a smile in sight. I'm not a great fan of the real blues. It's not a question of musical quality or whatever, I can't feel it's speaking either for or to me. It's as distant, culturally speaking, as biergarten polka, and perhaps shamefully, as boring. But whiteboy blues bands I have even less time for. They have that late 'sixties, early 'seventies dreariness, a sense of hunkering down paranoid post-acid bleakness and death of dream that I remember all too clearly.

No, we can't be frugging to The New Dimensions supporting The Beach Boys in '63, but playing the record re-ignites a spark of innocence. The memory of it can be indiscernible from the real thing. What, me worry?

This post made possible by a heatwave that's keeping me indoors, chugging ice-cold water in front of a fan (one of my many lol haha).