Back in the early days of Rock’n’Roll, songs would played on radio pop stations and some of the songs would be instrumentals. Not so today.
And, in the early 1960s, a new genre–Surfer Music–made its appearance. Sure, The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean sang plenty of songs about surfing and beaches, but I enjoyed instrumentals like The Chantay’s “Pipeline” and The Surfaris’s “Wipe Out.” Of all the songs here–and there are some great ones!–my favorite is Jack Nitzsche’s “The Lonely Surfer.” Nitzsche would go on to do great work with Phil Spector and Neil Young.
I consider 1960 to be a milestone year for me. That’s when I got my first transistor radio! I listened to it constantly. And the songs on Billboard Top Rock’n’Roll Hits–1960 are all very familiar to me. I listened to them tons of times over that time period. Do you remember these songs? Do you like instrumentals? GRADE: A (for both CDs)
| Elvis Presley– | It’s Now Or Never | 3:16 | |
| The Everly Brothers*– | Cathy’s Clown | 2:25 | |
| Chubby Checker– | The Twist | 2:36 | |
| The Drifters– | Save The Last Dance For Me | 2:30 | |
| Johnny Preston– | Running Bear | 2:39 | |
| Elvis Presley– | Stuck On You | 2:16 | |
| Jimmy Jones– | Handy Man | 2:02 | |
| The Ventures– | Walk – Don’t Run | 2:05 | |
| Hollywood Argyles– | Alley-Oop | 2:45 | |
| Maurice Williams & The Zodiacs– | Stay | 1:39 |
| 1 | Chantays*– | Pipeline | 2:23 |
| 2 | The Belairs– | Mr. Moto | 2:12 |
| 3 | The Surfaris– | Wipe Out | 2:41 |
| 4 | The Frogmen (2)– | Underwater | 2:08 |
| 5 | Dick Dale & The Del-Tones*– | Miserlou | 2:16 |
| 6 | The Ventures– | Diamond Head | 2:04 |
| 7 | The Astronauts (3)– | Baja | 2:28 |
| 8 | The Mar-Kets*– | Surfer’s Stomp | 1:59 |
| 9 | The Tornadoes– | Bustin’ Surfboards | 2:30 |
| 10 | The Pyramids– | Penetration | 2:05 |
| 11 | Eddie & The Showmen– | Mr. Rebel | 1:59 |
| 12 | The Crossfires– | Fiberglass Jungle | 2:14 |
| 13 | The Challengers– | K39 | 2:14 |
| 14 | The Surfaris– | Point Panic | 2:19 |
| 15 | Dick Dale & The Del-Tones*– | Let’s Go Trippin’ | 2:09 |
| 16 | The Lively Ones– | Surf Rider | 3:22 |
| 17 | Johnny Fortune– | Soul Surfer | 2:34 |
| 18 | Jack Nitzsche– | The Lonely Surfer | 2:35 |
We have all five volumes of the Rock Instrumentals Classics CDs and we play them frequently. Everything from “Tequila” to “Popcorn.” My favorite on the Surf CD is “Miserlou”–which you can’t hear now without thinking of “Pulp Fiction.”
Deb, I may have to track down the other four volumes in the ROCK INSTRUMENTAL CLASSICS series. RHINO put together some wonderful compilation CDs!
I can, I remember seeing Dick Dale (and the Del-Tones) at the Avalon Ballroom in Anaheim in 1963. They both opened and closed with “Miserlou”. In SoCal, alpaca cardigans were huge at the time. Ah, the memories.
Rick, like you I revel in the memories of the early 1960s! What a great time to be alive! No Pandemic, no AIDS, no Inflation. Yes, the Vietnam War was on the horizon, but it was just school, malt shops, and rock’n’roll music for me!
If we were caught wearing a cardigan back then we would have got the crap beat out of us. So unhip. At least in the Detroit area. Our local music when I was in High School tended to be darker than the west coast’s. Mitch Ryder. MC5, The Stooges. The MC5 were so good live that a lot of national bands coming through the Grande Ballroom (our Fillmore) had it in their contract that the MC5 would not be allowed to open for them. And I never saw a malt shop in the Detroit area. A lot of drugstores with lunch counters but not quite the same thing.
Steve, I’m guessing that malt shops were more of an “Eastern” thing. But, they didn’t last past the 1970s unless it was in a retro restaurant.
I know everything on the first CD. I could do without Running Bear and Alley Oop. The second CD is mostly unfamiliar to me. Although I do like Dick Dale. But where are the instrumental hits I remember by Sandy Nelson and Duane Eddy? And Wild Weekend by The Rebels? These were among the first records I ever bought.
Steve, I’m sure Duane Eddy, Sandy Nelson, and “Wild Weekend” by The Rebels are on one of the four other CDs in this series.
I remember taking my transistor to the beach when I was about that age and thinking nothing would ever top that miracle.
Patti, my transistor radio played all day long. I went through a 100 batteries per year in those days! I loved listening to music and fortunately we had some great local radio stations–both U.S. and Canadian–broadcasting great music!
It’s true! Transistor radio batteries never lasted very long.
Jeff, those transistor radios ate up a lot of batteries. Those were pre-Energizer days!
I know I’ve posted this before, but in his book THE FIFTIES, David Halberstam posits that the entire youth movement of the 1960s started when teenagers had access to transistor radios and could listen to their own music, not the music their parents listened to. The radio went from being a huge piece of furniture in the living room to a portable object you could take anywhere.
Deb, I totally agree with Halberstam (and you!). I felt a whole new freedom with my transistor radio (the first of many!) and the music I could listen to.
I mostly like the stuff on the first CD, although I’m sort of hazy on RUNNING BEAR and don’t remember ALLEY-OOP at all. I must not have been into surf instrumentals at all. Of the 18 songs the only two I remember are WIPE OUT and MISERLOU. Loved the Beach Boys though.
Michael, I bought The Beach Boys albums and loved Jan & Dean’s albums, too. Then, like magic, Surfer Music just disappeared.
All good stuff here.
Wow! Old habits die hard. I too spent A LOT of time listening to the radio, especially in the evenings and after school. That’s why so many boomers know so many songs.
Those were the days of when folks called to dedicate songs. I often heard dedications to and from people I knew. Sadly, none of them were for me.
Beth, I remember DJs sending out songs dedicated “to the one I love” every night on those 1960s radio stations! We had a TV but there were only three stations. I preferred to listen to the radio than watch BONANZA.
I’m not a big fan of instrumental surf music for some reason. Growing up in Socal, even though I didn’t learn to surf, I loved the surf music. I also was a transistor radio user. Brings back a lot of good memories.
I’m on the committee for my high schools 55th reunion, and if we have music, it will definitely feature the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean.
Maggie, The Beach Boys still tour. Sadly, Jan & Dean are gone. But their music lives on!
Not the same Beach Boys without Brian.
Steve, all the brilliance of The Beach Boys went away when Brian Wilson did.
Yes, I know the first CD well. In fact, I have it, along with the Billboard Hits 1957-1958-1959=1961 in one box, plus 1962 through 1966 in a second box. Plus, I have their Top R & B Hits of 1965. The problem with these is not the quality of the songs, but rather:
1. THer eare only 10 songs on each CD
2. A bunch of even bigger hits are not included, presumably because they couldn’t (or wouldn’t) pay for the rights.
As for 1960, I agree on “Alley-Oop,” which we have on several collections. Jackie likes it. I don’t. As for “Running Bear,” I liked the rhythm of it when I was a kid, but I always thought it was a dumb song. They’re Indians, they live on the opposite sides of the river, instead of swimming (and drowning – SPOILER) across the “raging river,” why didn’t they just take a canoe and paddle across? One more bit of fun trivia – it was written by J. P. Richardson aka The Big Bopper, who sang background along with George Jones.
Second question, yes I LOVED (still do) instrumentals. I used to think if I had a blog like Bill Crider’s, instead of the random songs he posted there, I would have one day a week with just istrumentals from the late ’50s and early ’60s mostly. Tequila. Telstar. Sleepwalk (Santo & Johnny). Apache (Jorgen Ingmann). Last Date. Last Night. Wipe Out. So many more.
Jeff, I’m with you on the 10 song format these BILLBOARD compilation CDs employed. Half the CD is empty! I’m sure it was a money thing. If the rest of the ROCK INSTRUMENTAL CLASSICS CDs have 18 songs on each of them, that would pretty much take care of a year of weekly instrumental posts on a blog like Bill’s.
The very best surf instrumental song isn’t here, and probably isn’t on the other CDs either: “Endless Summer” from the Bruce Brown film of that name.
Rick, I might have the soundtrack to ENDLESS SUMMER around here somewhere.
A fine group of songs with only a couple of clunkers! When I was in high school I bought a tiny transistor radio in Times Square for $12, which was a lot of money for me back then! It was so small it would fit inside a Marlborough flip-top box! One year I rigged it up in one of those boxes so I could listen to the World Series in school through an earpiece! Alas, I left it on the rear deck of a car one summer day and it warped so badly it never worked again!
Bob, I snuck my transistor radio into school to listen to baseball games, too! I was never found out.
I used my transistor to listen to the radio under the covers at night. The Ramones sing about doing this in Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio.
A bit OT:
Around 1950 my parents moved into the same four families house that they had lived in when he was a sergeant in Hitler’s army which of course had been taken over by our French occupiers until new houses were built for them.
I had a room under the roof (no heating …) but a very good radio reception on my “Volksempfänger”, a cheap radio, only AM that the Nazis had designed so that everybody could listen to the dictator’s speeches.
The German radio stations had no Rock&Roll but in the evening I could get the English edition of Radio Luxembourg. Later I got my parents’ old FM radio and could receive AFN – the American Forces Network. Fantastic!
That continued when we moved into the new house that we had built in 1957. I got my own room in the cellar und could turn up the volume as I liked. FM Transistor radios were too expensive, only AM was cheap.
Wolf, radio was a Big Part of everyone’s lives back in the 1960s and 1970s because of transistor radios. But when car makers made radios standard in all over their models that made a big impact, too. But when MTV and other music formats took over in the 1980s, radio became less prominent. Of course, now that streaming services for computers and cell phones are ubiquitous, radio listening retreated even further. I basically listen to the radio when I drive my SUV and that’s about it.