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April 14, 2025 81 mins
Bob Berryhill, founding member of The Surfaris and surf rock legend, joins Graham to discuss the band's 1963 album "Play". Bob shares insights into the early days of the Surfaris and their influences (6:15), the recording of their first original and iconic songs "Surfer Joe" and "Wipeout" (22:15), as well as the pressure of major label and their conflicts with the unscrupulous industry characters around them (41:20). Also turkey sandwiches.

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Episode Transcript

Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:07):
It's major label debut. This is the podcast about major
label debuts. I'm Graham right, listen to this sh that's reverb,
or more precisely, that's a reverb tank. That's what it
sounds like when you put a reverb tank down while
it's on. Basically, it's like a metal box with a

(00:28):
spring inside, and the sound bounces around in it, and
it simulates the effect of reverberation, which you have heard
if you've ever like shouted in a big room or
in a tile bathroom or something. Right, So the reverb
tank affects unit. Is this miraculous little box that captures
that sound, that effect of reverberation in a box that's

(00:48):
small enough to fit in your amp or on top
of your amp, or on your pedal board. This is
standard issued stuff today. It's not that impressive, but it
wasn't always. The reason I bring this up is because
my guest today is Bob Berryhill of the Surfaris, and
that's surfaris as in surfing, as in hanging ten and
reverb on electric guitar is kind of the essential component

(01:12):
of the surf rock sound. Surfrock, as you might expect,

(01:36):
came out of southern California more or less. Look, I'm
not like a precision music historian. If I get anything
really wrong, please feel free to tell me. But basically,
broadly speaking, surfrock emerged out of southern California and like
Beach Towns obviously in the late nineteen fifties, which I
think is really interesting because that makes it one of
the last new expressions of American rock and roll music,

(01:59):
right before they started cross pollinating with British rock and
roll music in the sixties and you know, change the
destiny of rock forever. Wipe Out by the Surfaris is
one of the quintessential surf rock songs. It's also just
one of the quintessential songs period. I mean, it's the
song that goes like this. Everyone knows that music, right,

(02:26):
even if they don't know what the song is called
or who wrote it. It's so elemental that it's kind
of easy to forget anyone wrote it. It feels like
it's always just been floating in the ether, right, But
of course it wasn't. It wasn't there until the Surfaris
came along and made it up. And so it's incredibly
cool that I get to talk to Bob Berryhill, one

(02:46):
of the guys, one of the four guys who made
up the song Wipeout. He's a founding member of the Surfaris.
He is the sole remaining founding member of the Surfaris.
He's keeping the name alive today. We get into all
of that in the conversation, but look, it's too simple
to say that rock and roll history is divided before
the Beatles and after the Beatles. But I think we

(03:08):
can all agree that the Beatles did sort of define
what it came to mean to be in a rock band.
And an amazing thing about Bob is that he started
his band before the Beatles existed. So I was really
eager to ask him what records he was listening to
while the Surfaris came together. And here's his answer to
that question. And then a bunch more my conversation with

(03:30):
Bob Barria. I have this theory, maybe kind of crack pop,
but that's my favorite kind of theory, which is that
every band that has formed since the Beatles has essentially,
on some level wanted to be the Beatles. You know,
when I started a band, I think basically what I

(03:51):
wanted was to be one of the four lads in
the band. That story is so pervasive. But the Surfaris
started before Beatlemania swept America. When you know, when Private
Presley was still at the top of the charts, and
when you started jamming with friends, when you decided to
come together as a band, what was the day dream,

(04:13):
what was the impetus? What were you hoping for with
those wide open eyes and this fresh horizon.

Speaker 2 (04:18):
Well, I fell in love with the ventures that kind
of music. And remember back in those days, people danced.
You didn't go to a concert and stand there and
stare at somebody playing music. You actually had to participate, yea.
So we were dancing. So we were playing dance music,
and so the louder, the more raucous it was. And

(04:40):
of course surf being was the hit thing to be.
It was to be a surfer and with Dick Dale
coming out playing surf music at the Rendezvous down in Balboa,
we wanted to be in that genre because that's what
was exciting to us. And when we were sophomores in
high school, that's when we started the band.

Speaker 1 (05:00):
What music were you listening to when you started the group.

Speaker 2 (05:02):
So I grew up really loving fast guitar music like that,
Merle Travis, you know, Chad Atkins, those kind of things.
When I was really really young, and then my sister,
who was four years older than me, really was into
Elvis Presley. Every record. She had a stack of forty
five's like that, even the interview of him leaving for Berlin,

(05:23):
you know, nobody was on the train. She bought everything.
So I grew up listening to all of her do
wop music. She had all the you know, the coasters
and the penguins and all of that fifties dance music.
So I moved from country into that. And then when
I was about ten, I started taking guitar lessons which
were really great. Was their name was Woody and Lena.

(05:44):
They were a country duo, and my dad knew because
my mom and dad were great fans. They would go
to local bars or my dad called a beer joints
where they would play, you know, two guitars and all
of that and that. Really I say, I just loved
instrumental because I listened to a track, that's what I
hear is the guitar. I really don't even listen to
the vocals. I can't understand the words anyway, So I

(06:07):
just let that go, and I listened for the guitar tracks.
Even today, every guitar, every country song I hear out
here in Nashville, it's got a lick in the beginning,
and I just wait for that lick and then I
turn it off and move on to the next song.

Speaker 1 (06:20):
You know what was your first guitar.

Speaker 2 (06:23):
My first guitar was a standing guitar that my dad had.
It was a silver tone Acoustic standard six string. And
then I played that for the first year when my
fingers bled. You know, it's kind of like the strings
are off the neck half an inch. Oh my god. Yeah. Anyway,
I just loved it and then started taking lessons when
I was thirteen again from a lady in Glendora and

(06:46):
she had this telecaster. I said, hey, I really want
to do an electric guitar, you know, because that was
the next step. And I'm about thirteen. So my dad
had a friend named Walter Crabtree who was a Chad
Atkins picker, and he's said, you know what, I can
find you a telecaster. I said, cool. He found a
fifty six blonde telecaster, brought her to my house. I

(07:07):
opened the cakes, put my hand around the neck, and
I was in love.

Speaker 1 (07:11):
Oh my god, you must have been going a mile
a minute all of a sudden.

Speaker 2 (07:13):
Yeah, it's like strings were on the neck, you know.

Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh, that's what it's supposed to feel like to pockatize.

Speaker 2 (07:19):
And I started playing that and I I just couldn't
put it down. I was like practicing four or five
hours a day just myself. In fact, I was doing
it so much that when of my uncles came over.
He was an artist, he sat down and sketched on
notebook paper me what I looked like sitting there practicing
all the time. And I got several of his pictures

(07:40):
in one of my scrap books. They're beautiful, and he
was really an excellent artist, so really beautiful pastel pins
that he was using.

Speaker 1 (07:47):
Did you keep the sketch?

Speaker 2 (07:49):
Yeah, I've got it right here in my book.

Speaker 1 (07:51):
That sounds like the cover of your Greatest Hits album
or your autobiography.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
Well, they are beautiful, and it would be great to
put them on a memorabilia Greatest Hits, for sure.

Speaker 1 (08:00):
I'd buy that T shirt. You were a surfer, a
true surfer. You were out there on the waves right, Yeah.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
I learned a surf in Hawaii on Waikiki Beach. That's
my first surf.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
That's about as true as it can get for a
neo fight like me. That sounds like surfing one oh one.

Speaker 2 (08:14):
Well, it was truly amazing because those people lived and
breathed the ocean, and I being basically born on the
water as it were, I really loved the Hawaiian culture tremendously.
It was a case where we were trying to sort
of capture that sound in the might say, the true

(08:37):
sense of the word. We were trying to build it
up to where when you felt our surf music, you
felt like you were on a wave. Now, if you've
never served, you wouldn't know what that feeling was like,
but we did because we were all surfers as it were,
from the early sixties.

Speaker 1 (08:54):
I'm so fascinated by how the reverb is such a
critical element of the genre of the sound. Do you
think that there's something about that reverb that just gets
the surf vibe into it.

Speaker 2 (09:05):
Well, if you remember back in the early days, like
for instance, when Dwayne Eddie was out, he would plug
directly into the amp, you know whatever it was a showman,
you know, whatever amp he had because Fender was the
hot amp, and that was the sound and the Ventures.
If you look at their sixty five tour of Japan,

(09:28):
they're plugged directly into those Tisco amps and that was
a clean, dry treble sound. Well, when we first heard
Dick Dale, we went down to Harmony Park in California.
He was playing concerts there and when he plugged in
those reverbs, it was like it was in a canyon

(09:49):
from the stage. We had never heard that before, and
so that really turned to us on me. Were only
like fourteen or fifteen when we saw him, so it

(10:09):
was like, wow, he's got a new sound. Because everybody,
if you look at any rock and roll movies, it's
always how come you're so different than anybody else? And
we said, this will make us different, This will give
us from the stage a sound. I remember, we didn't
have sound reinforcement then. In fact, we never even had
a PA system. Yeah, so we've just played directly right

(10:33):
on as loud as we could with the drum over
the drums. So when we hooked out the reverb, it
just brought a whole new depth and dimension to the music.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
And it's such an interesting thing because everyone intuitively knows
the sound of reverberation of echo, whether you're in a
big giant room or you know, in a you know,
next to a metal wall or whatever. But hearing it
coming through an amp, hearing it come out of the
reverb tank is the synthetic version of one of the
most natural sound effects there is, which makes for something

(11:03):
really special.

Speaker 2 (11:05):
Yeah, the reverb just gives it a quality that you
don't get. I mean, obviously Les Paul with his double
recording systems, he was getting a kind of a delay echo.
But when the reverb the spring reverb. As you know,
we did a song called Scattershield, which is one of
our hit songs. I actually kicked the reverb you andit

(11:25):
just to get that sound effect on the record, and
it was like magic. And every time we'd get a
stage that was rickety and rocket around, that thing would
be shaken all the time. In fact, Dick Dale at

(11:48):
Harmony Park used to hang his with two big leather
belts from the ceiling so it wouldn't get hit by
the drummer. So it was quite a day and night thing.

Speaker 1 (12:07):
I remember years ago playing live and I'm on stage
left and Josh is on stage right, and I went
over to him to you know, play the guitar and
rock with him. But he had a lot of reverb
on it. I did like a cool jump and when
I landed and could have messed up his whole thing,
and he told me not to do that again. So
I learned an courtant lesson about when and when not
to jump near the reverb.

Speaker 2 (12:27):
Yeah, those kind of effects I remember. Like I say,
we started with just the guitar. If you look at
the back of the Wipeout album, you'll see a picture
in Dale small and Studio was our manager at that time,
and you can see my my Fender bandmaster and there
isn't even a reverb there because we bought it before
we started recording. But it was a case where we

(12:48):
started without it until we saw dig Dale and said,
we need the reverb you in it. He sent us
down to Fender actually in Fullerton, and we got him
from the Fender factory.

Speaker 1 (12:58):
And it is amazing to me how much the name
Fender is tied in with the surfari story and the
surf music and the rock and roll story in general.
It's like all of a sudden, these these guitars and
amps appeared and they were affordable, and they just supercharged
this whole scene.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
Yeah, well you were again with surf surfing and surf music.
The Fender is also developed because you remember, Dick Dale
was the recipient of the reverb unit of the stratocaster
of the Showman AMP. Showman is named Showman because of
Dick Dale. He was the Showman, the show Man. So
the surf industry blossom, surf music blossom, Fender blossomed and

(13:38):
still continues to this day, except as you mentioned earlier
about the Beatles. Yes, you remember, everybody had to throw
their Fender guitar down and pick up a Guild or
a Gibson or a Gretch because suddenly, if you were
playing Fenders, you weren't.

Speaker 1 (13:54):
Cool, which is astounding to think back on now. I mean,
I personally consider Fenders still the cool as guitar as
anyone can play. I mean, what's better than a telecaster.

Speaker 2 (14:02):
It's kind of like it goes up and down, and
Paul McCartney says, you go in and out of style,
and you know, for a while you couldn't sell a
Fender anywhere. It were really cheap, and then suddenly it
turns around when you got Jeff Beck and all these
people picking it up and here. But remember whoever heard
of a Rick and Bocker guitar before? You know the birds, right,

(14:24):
you know, I never heard anybody play. And when I
heard Turn Turn Turn with that rick, I said, I
got to have one of those, you know.

Speaker 1 (14:31):
So fenders in hand, amps ready to go, gear coming together.
What kind of gigs were the Safaris playing in the beginning.

Speaker 2 (14:39):
Well, because we were only teenagers, we went to teen centers.
The local city, like Azusa had an Azusa teen Center, and
we had a bunch of surf bands that had come
up during that time, and we were all rotating in
and out of teen clubs in that San Gabriel Valley,
So it was Citious and Gabriepe, Pasadena, Irwindale, all the cities,

(15:03):
Pomona all had youth concerts because that was still the
cities were putting on concerts for their youth because there
weren't anything though, I mean, the Forum was not there,
the you know, things like that were not happening. So
the only place that kids could teenagers could gather would
be a high school dance or a teen center dance.

(15:24):
So those are the gigs we played.

Speaker 1 (15:26):
Take me there to that stage looking out at the
teen audience. What are you seeing when you're up there?

Speaker 2 (15:33):
A bunch of kids dancing the surfer stomp? Now also
dancing change. Now, remember prior to Surf Music, dancing was
called the bop right, That's what it was called. Everybody
was holding hands doing their moves. You know, if you
see Rick Nelson on Ozzy and Harriet, they're all doing
the bop right, holding on to each other. Well, Surf

(15:55):
Music said, aha, we can stand next to each other.
We don't have to touch each other, but we can
each do our little thing and surfer stomp because if
you look at Dick Dale at the Rendezvous, the floor
was made out of wood like a skating ring floor
and people would stomp bump bump, bump bump, and after

(16:16):
he would stop playing, the floor would still be bouncing.
And so that whole surfer stomp was the dance. That's
what they called it.

Speaker 1 (16:26):
Before you wrote wipe Out, before you wrote went into
the studio and made the Surfer Joe Wipeout single, What
was your like big song? What would be your set
closer or you know, you're the song that you play
that really gets the most kids out there surf Stomping.

Speaker 2 (16:39):
Uh probably misser Loo, Dick DALs, Misser Lou uh I
played all of the you know, Walk, Don't Run and
stuff like that, the Ventures albums, and Jim Fuller would
play the Surfer the Surfer's Choice album. We also picked
up songs like from local surf bands that had a
nice song like Earthquake by Aki Alion and the Nobles.

(17:13):
You know, we'd hear the Lively Ones play. We heard
their stuff, you know, the different bands, and if we
liked one of their songs boom, we would put it
in our set. So by the time we finished playing
our concerts, we had over one hundred songs that we
could play as a band, So we had a pretty
big repertoire as I.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
Yes, that's very impressive to be able to call on
that many. And with then the band that went on
after you or the band that played before you, would
they play a lot of the same tunes.

Speaker 2 (17:42):
Yeah, Usually what we played, people would say, Okay, tonight's
the battle of the bands, and so, you know, you'd
have the best version of Miserloo. Who could play the
best you know, the best version of Pipeline you know,
so and we always won. We won every Battle of
Bands we ever played, So I think we did a
pretty good job.

Speaker 1 (17:59):
I guess I think you've called Ron Wilson a lead
drummer before. Could you explain what that is? Well, when
you play with a drummer that is so loud, he
played with sticks, huge sticks. It was short, stocky. He
would play so loud as a marching band drummer marching
in parades that he just led. He'd set up his
drums in the front of the stage, we'd set up

(18:21):
behind him, and he would just lead the show. And
there's no pa to amplify any of this, so you
just had to crank your amps up to be as
loud as he was.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Right. Fuller had a little eight in speaker amp when
we first started, and we all three plugged into my Bandmaster.
That's all the application we had, and that was like
wide open all three of us play at the same time.
So thank you for making the show manail. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (18:44):
And I guess thank you Ron for playing so loud
that we get those nice edgy tones as you go
into the rat on those amps.

Speaker 2 (18:51):
Yeah, Because if you listen to the hit City sixty
four album, Ronnie's drums are right there in the front
of the track and we'd kind of fill in behind
him best we could keep up with him.

Speaker 1 (19:01):
I can certainly hear in even the early recordings how
locked in the band is and how much energy I mean,
and it is a lot of it comes from the
lead drumming. It's fast, but it's not out of control
at all. It's right in the pocket.

Speaker 2 (19:15):
Okay, well, let me tell you what happened to running.
Ronnie began as a marching band cadence drummer. He has
like a metronome in his head. When he starts a tempo,
you're locked in. We played a gig for Casey Kasem,
which was a huge radio DJ out in Thousand Oaks. Well,
every once in a while we'd go into some as
time went on during the evening, we'd go into some

(19:37):
kind of a funk jazz kind of a thing, and
we would start playing a song and Ronnie would go
into a drum solo. He would play a solo and
just knock everybody down, and then we'd come back in
and play the song. Well, after the evening was over,
Casey Casem came up on the stage and said, you
know what, I've never heard a band play a song
at a certain tempo, go totally offer that tempo and

(19:58):
then come right back to the same temple. And that's
the beauty of the talent of Ron Wilson. He could
do those things. So that's why today I always test
my drummers are you and marching band drummer because they
have to play cadence, they have to walk and play
at the same time. And you can always tell a
drummer who knows marching band technique because they're excellent snare drummers.

(20:21):
They can play the whole night on a snare almost
they don't need anything else. And that's the kind of
drummers that make great surf drummers.

Speaker 1 (20:28):
Absolutely, and great studio drummers. And I want to talk
now about recording Surfer Joe and Wipeout, which was your
first time recording anything, right exactly?

Speaker 2 (20:39):
Yeah. Well, Dale Smallen was our manager. He had a
studio in Irwindale where he did videos. In fact, I
was in one of his first bicycle safety videos and
he came to my sixth grade school and I rode
my bicycle in his safety video. So I had met
him there and later he became my scout master. But anyway,

(20:59):
We're in his studio and ron Wilson comes in one
night and says, hey, Bob had a dream about a
song called Surfer Joe. Because Ronnie was always listening to
the Beach Boys, he always thought he was related to
Brian Wilson. This his last name was Wilson. But anyway,
so he starts. I said, well, okay, Ronnie, hit it.
So he starts playing this drum beat which you hear
on Surfer Joe, and he starts singing. So I put

(21:22):
some chords to it and we all filled in and
we made a little tune out of it.

Speaker 1 (21:26):
Down in Daheedy where the surfers all go, there's a
big leach blondie named surfer Joe. He's got a green
surfboard with a what are you to match?

Speaker 2 (21:35):
And when he's riding the.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Freeways, man is he hard to catch? Surfer Joe Nah looking.

Speaker 2 (21:46):
Dale comes in and said, hey, boys, let's go and
record that. That sounds like a beach boy song. I
think it'd be great. I said, oh cool, let's go.
So that was like November of sixty two, and so
December of sixty two comes around and everybody shows up
in my driveway. I got Ron Wilson, Jim Foller, Pat Conley, myself,

(22:07):
and Dale Swallen. And Dale goes, okay, we're going to
go to Pal Studios in Cuckamonga, California. I go, what,
that's an old ghost town out in the desert at
that time, and he said, yeah, this guy's got a
cool thing. His name's Paul buff it's called Pal Studios. Okay,
we're gonna go, but there's one problem. I need some money.

(22:28):
That always comes down. And so Fuller, Conley, and Wilson
opened their pockets and they got nothing. And I said, well,
what does any kid do? You go in and ask mom.
So I asked my mom for a check for one
hundred and fifty bucks. Now do you remember nineteen sixty two,
one hundred and fifty bucks was a journeyman wage for
a whole week. Yeah, okay, so that wasn't like asking

(22:51):
for you know, chump change. This was asking for a
lot of money. And so my mom says, okay, she
writes a check for a outdred and fifty bucks if
at the Dale Small and we head out to the studio.
We show up, this little lefre chaun opens the door
and this is a small young guy and he says, Hi,
I'm Paul buff. He would be considered the father of

(23:13):
surf music recording at this point because the Chantes actually
worked on Pipeline there, didn't finish recording there, but he
was instrumental in getting that particular song developed. But anyway,
we show up and he knows how to play his room.
I mean, he's a consummate engineer. He created all of
his own equipment from hand scratch. You know, he just

(23:36):
erect your sets. He built everything.

Speaker 1 (23:38):
Because now you go into a studio and everything in
there you bought it from the manufacturer, from the music store,
from guitar center or wherever else, and you can get
a big console, and you can get outboard gear and
tape machines and this, that and the other. Thing that
wasn't always the case. Time was famously in Abbey Road obviously,
and also in any other studio, if you wanted sound equipment,
you had to be an electrician and you had to

(23:59):
make this equipment using wires and solder and technology and expertise.
And so these guys, these engineers were not just creative
musical thinkers. They were also electrical engineers.

Speaker 2 (24:12):
Literally, well that's what he was. He was trained by
the Marines as an electrician and electronics engineer, and so
he created his own equipment and it was a monaural
studio quarter inch reel to reel and that was it.
But basically he was a master of setting up microphones.
I had my Fender Bandmaster, we had another amp we'd

(24:32):
brought and Pat Conley shows up with a bass guitar
and we plugged that directly into the board. So that
was the first direct in to the board guy we had.
He had like a three channel board or something. It
was very primitive. Anyway, we set all that up and
he says, okay, let me do a sound check. So
we practiced a few things and he said, okay, let's

(24:54):
try Surf for Joe. Now, we didn't have a mic
setup for Ronnie to sing, so Ronnie actually said the
song as he played his drums, so he just did
the instrumental track, no overdubs. We just played it a
couple of times till we got it right, and then
Ronnie overdubbed Surfer Joe the vocal. That's basically our first
experience with recording. Now, when Ronnie finishes Surfer Joe boys

(25:20):
because we were only kids, right, you need a second
song for your forty five And we go, well, we
don't have a second song. He says, well, we can
put Surfer Joe on both sides of the record, as
some people did in those days, or you can write
a song right now. Well, Ronnie starts playing Wipeout right
out of the gag. He didn't wait, he just said, okay,

(25:42):
turn the tape on. Boom. He starts playing the wipeout
drum roll. And I said, well, we better put some
guitar and bass and rhythm on this, or it's going
to be a drum solo like Sandy Nelson, because that
was available in those days. You could just you know,
drum solo leaders. So start playing. Pap Hanley goes bow
and bound about it, bowing with the bass and and

(26:04):
he goes baha, boum ba boum. Jim Fuller ghos da
da da da da da da, and I go, okay, now,
drum break crash, And then the drum solos came in. And
then we recorded it once and they said, okay, let's
try it one more time. So we did it again
and they said that's pretty good. One more time for
the gipper. We record a third time, they said, okay,
we got it.

Speaker 1 (26:24):
I mean, it's like a scene from a movie, Bob,
you know, the guy coming on and saying, okay, right now,
write a song, and then your drummer just launches into
wipe Out, one of the most famous songs ever written
by a human. Talking about it, like I say, it
sounds like a movie. It's so, it sounds like something
from legend. But you were there. You were a kid
in that room with a guitar in your hand coming

(26:46):
up with those ideas. I mean, how did it? What
were you feeling in your in your body.

Speaker 2 (26:50):
Well, it was like a creative moment for all of
us because the four of us, you know, fifteen year
olds and seventeen year old were sitting there just putting
our efforts because we'd been we were a really experienced band.
We've been playing for three months. You know, we didn't
we didn't know anything other than just playing at dances.
So what we did was we just started putting our

(27:12):
efforts into it and we get it all worked out because,
like I say, Ronnie was such a leader of the
drum that we just fell in and you know, when
you have a band like the Stones the Beatles, everybody's
part is so important to the mix. Like you can't
take George out, you know, you can't take Ringo out,

(27:33):
you can't take Paul out, you can't take John out.
You take any one of those members out, and it's
not the Beatles. And it's kind of like the Safaris.
The four of us came together, each of us played
our parts the best we could play it. And so
when we get all done with wipeout and he says, okay, boys,
what are you gonna call it? They go, well, I

(27:54):
don't know. You know, it takes you got to think
about it. Well, Jim Fuller had gone to Tijuana week
before bought an illegal switchblade, which was illegal in those days.
He brings it out to a microphone, stands at the
microphone where Ron Wilson recorded so for Joe and goes, click, switchblade.

(28:15):
Well that's cool, but that click was anemic. We need
something to really sounds like a click. So my dad,
who had to drive you out out there because I
was only fifteen and a half, goes out in the
alley brings in a cement soak piece of plywood. Pat
Conley grabs it and turned the tape on he busts
it us to the microphone. I'm I go, wow, that

(28:36):
doesn't sound like a switchblade anymore. It sounds like a
busting surfboard. And they go, well, let's call it that.
I go, hold it. There's already a song called busting surfboards.
Can't use that. But I said, how do you break
a surfboard? You wipe out? Dale Smallen, our manager comes
out of the recording room, goes up to the microphone,

(28:56):
does the laugh, does the wipeout? Nobody asked him to
do it, didn't even know what it was. He did it.
I go, oh, that's cool. So he got the crack,
the laugh and the song. Two weeks later we have
a forty five on DFS records.

Speaker 1 (29:10):
Do you remember the first time you heard it on
the radio?

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Yeah? I do. It's like in the Tom Hanks movie,
that thing you do where you see the kids all
running around the hardware store of the client store. That's
the way it was. The radio. It came on KFWB
and everybody had AM radios in their cars. They came
driving in my driveway, all these people going, Bob, your
song's on the radio. Because they knew we had recorded

(29:35):
this song because we'd played local dances and we didn't
play in it, and it was just it was magic.
You know. It's kind of like, as a musician, how
do you know you've arrived? Well, getting a hit song
on the radio is the best evidence that you're a
professional musician. Now we're only sixteen at this point. Yeah,
So I have lots of friends in high school and

(29:58):
other places that are just better guitar players than me.
They played for the next thirty years and never had
a hit record. Yep, I get one song at fifty
and have a hit blew their minds.

Speaker 1 (30:10):
But hey, say LEVI, when you started playing it, it
shows before it came out. Could did it connect with people?
Could you tell? Or did people start stomping you know
a little harder? Was there something about the song? Even then?

Speaker 2 (30:21):
Well Dale Smallen used to come up to the stage
and take the mic that was the PA mic for
the basketball announcer, and he would take the mic and
yell the wipeout laugh. Then when we would play it
and people would go nuts, They go, wow, it's the
greatest song. They'd love to dance to it. So yeah,
I mean it was it was a moment in the show,
from the moment that we recorded it all through the

(30:45):
first spring and summer of sixty three.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
And then it takes off remarkably quickly. I saw a
picture on the Safari's website of you have a picture
of the chart, the actual chart, and it's nestled right
there next to Elvising, next to the man who's posters
and pictures covered your sister's wall, and there you are
with him. You're still in high school? Did you go

(31:09):
mad with power? I mean, I can't imagine if I
had got a hit record when I was sixteen, I
would have become a monster overnight. I'm sure you didn't
become a monster, Bob, but it must have changed how
you felt about your life.

Speaker 2 (31:20):
Oh yeah, because suddenly your phone is ringing off the wall.
I mean, my mother and my father were small business
people in Englandorra, so my mother was our first basically manager.
Because you got four or five teenagers you got to
wrangle them. My mother wrangled us and got us to
our gigs because we couldn't drive yet, you know, somebody
had to take us. So she would answer the phone

(31:42):
and go hello, and she go, well, this is Casey Kasem.
This is Wink Martindale. This is you know every hit DJ.
We need boys to be in Pomona Friday night. You know,
two hundred and fifty bucks? Can you make it? And
she'd go, boys, do you want to go play a gig?
I go, yeah, okay, we got it. Thanks, We'll see

(32:02):
you click. I mean, when people are constantly you know,
at you, it did affect I was only a sophomore
in high school. We all were. Pat and Jim Fuller
both quit high school at the end of the sophomore
year because they thought they were musicians and you know,
they didn't need to go to school. I stayed with it,
so I had to kind of put up with lots

(32:23):
of fans. You had to walk around school girls and
guys all asking me basically for money most of the time.
So it was a case where mentally you're put on
a pedestal and you don't even know why. You know,
it's just it's there. It's a phenomenon. And so as
a child, you're having to have constant sessions with your mom, like, Mom,

(32:46):
this happened. You know, how should I handle this? This
girl wants me to go there, or this guy wants
me to come here, they want me to do this
or that, and I constantly had to get counsel and
fortunately my mother was very good at counseling and keeping
me on a straight train. So I credit my parents
with keeping me a level head.

Speaker 1 (33:03):
And not just that, with financing the recording of Wipeout,
with providing the critical folly effect at the beginning of Wipeout?
Did your mom ever get paid back the one hundred
and fifty dollars, Well.

Speaker 2 (33:14):
That was the issue. All the members of the band
were supposed to pay my mother back, and before she
passed away some years ago, had a meeting with her
and she said, you know, they never paid me back.
So my mother is the executive producer on Wipeout. But
everybody claims that, you know, Jim Pash would tell stories
about he was executive producer, and no, Jim wasn't even there.

(33:37):
But the idea was that my mother, I'm the only
one who paid her back. Okay, so I kind of
inherited it. But the idea is that somebody, the dominoes
had to be lined up. And if my mother had
to have been a great person, business person, intelligent, capable,
strong woman, as they say, she knew what to do
and how to focus our attention on what the goal was.

(34:00):
That was to get a hit record. And she's the
one who worked with all the attorneys. Her and Pat
Conley's mother would do it as well. Jim Fuller's mother
would do it. But my mom was basically Ramrod that
made it all happen.

Speaker 1 (34:13):
That's so beautiful. I'm so this is the first time
a major label debut that we've paid tribute to mom's
and we couldn't do it without him.

Speaker 2 (34:20):
You can't do without him. I mean, my dad was
a very successful businessman and he paid for all of
my equipment. I mean, I didn't didn't get that jazz
master that I used on Wipeout without him. I didn't
get my amps without him. But he and my mom
worked together and they wanted me to be successful in music.
So Mom and Dad, you know, thank you.

Speaker 1 (34:40):
So the forty five came out on Dot Records.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Right, No, it came out on DFS DFS. Dale F.
Smallen was the name. Okay, now, well let me give
you the story. Okay, So we record Wipeout. Paul buff
takes it to Art le Beaux. Art le Beaux was
oldies but goodies. He passes on it. They took it
to Capitol, they passed on it. So a guy came

(35:06):
to his studio. His name was George Hoka. He was
a Merit Distributing Company distributor. His job was to come
to different recording studios and pick up records that were
made at those studios. And he picked up wipe Out,
took it down to Merit Distributing Company, and guess who's

(35:26):
sitting at the desk none other than Richard Delvy. Richard
Delvy The Challengers. Richard Delvy produced Sonny and Cheer. He
was really up and coming, young drummer, producer, that kind
of thing. So he plays wipe Out and he goes,
that's a hit. He calls his buddy, John Meriscalco, who

(35:48):
owned Princess Records. So from DFS he calls John and
John says, Okay, that's a hit. I'm going to put
that on Princess. He presses it and then from there,
as any record company do they find a bigger label.
So John Meyriscalco is in a restaurant in Hollywood and
a waitress comes up to the table and says, what

(36:09):
do you guys, do you know we're record producers? Would
you like to go over to my house and listen
to some songs? So she does. She goes over to
Merrilskalko's house and he plays Wipeout for her, and she goes,
you know, I got a buddy. He's a disc jockey
in Fresno. She sends it to Johnny Hyde, who has
a make It or Break at midnight show in Fresno.

(36:32):
Kyno it's still a radio station. He plays it on
a Monday or Tuesday. By Friday it's the most requested
song of the week. And so what happened then is
the next level has to happen. A guy his name
was Irwin Zucker, which was an attorney for Dot Records,
calls Johnny Hyde and says, you got any new songs

(36:55):
for me this week? Yeah, I've got Wipeout. He puts
the forty five, which is a Princess wipe Out in
a folder, mails it back to Hollywood. It gets on
the desk of Randy Wood. Now Randy Wood, he is
the president of Dot Records. It gets on his desk,
He plays it and goes, yeah, that's a hit. Let's
sign these guys. And so Mario Skalco, Richard Delvy, rondy

(37:17):
Wood get it on the dot forty five and they
start putting it out there. So by April, May, June,
by July it's number one in Los Angeles. So that
was a skyrocketing approach.

Speaker 1 (37:32):
Indeed, the best approach, I would say, if you can
get it. How aware were you of all of that
travel in my mind as you were saying that, I
was watching the red line on the map zig and
zag around from point to point to point. Did you
know about that? Well it was happening.

Speaker 2 (37:45):
Oh no, I didn't find out until fifty sixty years later. Really, Yeah,
before John Mayrscalco passed away, he gave me his publishing
and rights to the song because he knew he was
passing away. He was sick. He said, Bob, you've got
a publishing company, Salt Talk Music. I'm going to give
you my fifty percent because Richard Delbi owned the other
fifty percent of the publishing. So he says, I'm going

(38:07):
to give it to you. You can run with it.
By the way, let me tell you the story about
how wipe Out got on the radio. Because I'd never
heard it and it was like fifty years later. So
I Finally, I'm putting all these two and twos together
to give this story for you succinctly that I didn't
know anything about that, because you remember, we're only fifteen.
What does a kid know about the Hollywood scene. You

(38:29):
don't know anything, especially behind the scenes, which is what
is really difficult.

Speaker 1 (38:34):
And this is a music industry that's still, in many ways,
is in its primordial phase. It's not the music industry
of the eighties of the nineties where everything is they've
really figured out how to make money, how to make hits,
how to run it smoothly. You know, it seems like
am I right in saying that, It seems like it
was a bit more of a maybe not a wild West,
but a developing civilization.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Well, they definitely had processes and procedures for how to
get a hit song going because they had to overcome
people not liking instrumental music on the radio. I mean,
Dick Clark wouldn't let us on his show because he
didn't like instrumental music. No kid, you know, I mean
he actually we wanted to go on there, and he says, oh,
there's no words to it. I don't want to hear it.
I think the Schante's got on there once, you know.

(39:18):
So instrumental music has its own place, but it's not
at the top of the list. Justly beatle fans. You know,
you got to have words, which is what the whole
industry CHaGS do.

Speaker 1 (39:28):
The Surfaris now go on to make a record for
Dart Records, although it kind of turns out that the
Surfaris only sort of are on that record. Could you
tell that story?

Speaker 2 (39:40):
Well, I think what you're referring to is the Wipeout album. Yes, well,
we were asked in June of nineteen sixty three to
record the songs of that album. Well, we went out
to Koukamunga and there was another guy out there. It
wasn't Paul Buff who did the recording. It was another guy,
Dave Arnie. He was an engineer for Paul Buff Serve,

(40:02):
a student engineer. Dale calls me up and says, Bob,
we need to have the boys come back out to
Cuckamonga on June seventh and record this list of songs.
We go, well, if they want to do an album,
we'd like to write our own songs. No, you must
do this list again him. That's the pressure of a

(40:23):
big label. You will play this song, you will play
that song, not that one. They had a list, and
fortunately all of the songs on the list were part
of our repertoire, so we already knew the songs. So
guess what. We went up on Saturday morning recorded all
of the songs for the Wipeout album except Sir for
Joan Wipeout and the next week Dale Smalland shows up

(40:46):
at my house with the Wipeout album. Now in nineteen
sixty three, is there any way till one day on
Saturday record it? The next Saturday the album is in
your hand.

Speaker 1 (40:58):
Seems a little suspicious to me, Bob.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Does that give you any clue as to what was
going on?

Speaker 1 (41:02):
Sounds like maybe they had some other cats already putting
those tunes down.

Speaker 2 (41:06):
Well, that's what led us to get off of DOT
was in April they asked Richard Delvy, we need an
album to go with this hit record. He says, fine,
I'm going to record it, not the Safaris. What's so
bad about it is Dale Small And our manager was
at the recording studio where they recorded these songs and

(41:27):
for April, May, June, and July. He never came out
to us and said, Hey, I was at the studio
they recorded this, but they had to fake us out
while allowing us to go and record it, because if
it had come out that week without us even going
the studio, we would have known we weren't even on
it except for wipe Out and Serve for Joe. So
that began the whole process of getting kicked off of Dot.

(41:50):
Because once the album came out, there's a picture on
the back of five gentlemen. It was Fuller Barry o'connelly,
Wilson and Pash Pash being thirteen. Now, wipe Out and
Surfer Joe are the only two songs on that album
that are the Safari's the four of us and the
fifth person wasn't there. So Jim Pash's dad, who was

(42:13):
a piano player musician, knew that his son being on
the back of an album was fraud, and so he
decides to sue DOT Records for putting his son's name
and likeness on an album that he had nothing to
do with. So we had no control of that either,
and so suddenly we had to go to Hollywood and

(42:34):
enters Lawrence Park Watkin, one of those lawyers that are
in these big studio City towers, you know, the five
hundred dollars an hour guys, you know, and they're going, well,
we'll represent these young lads for you know X amount.
My mom dad goes, we don't got any money. Well,
we'll do it for a percentage when we win. So

(42:57):
twenty percent of our money has gone to that law
firm until two years ago. You know, that was the goal.
I mean, nobody believed that we were going to make
any money with this other than us kids, of course.
So once Pash started suing everybody, we had to leave
Dodd Records because you can't stay with a record label

(43:17):
you're suing cord. So we got kicked off that and
in September we got in the court order that said
you must stop producing that album. Well they said, no,
we're not going to do that because once I hit
record is out, we're not going to stop selling. And
so they came up with a second generation where they
literally cut the picture of Jim Pash off and put

(43:38):
the four of us on. And then they the next level,
they took the picture completely off and just made it
a back panel with nothing on. It just worked. And
then September of sixty three, ed pash knew the guys
at Universal or Decca Records as it was. He said, Hey,
I want you guys go to this group. So Deca
signed us for a three year contract.

Speaker 1 (44:00):
Do you get a recording advance in those days?

Speaker 2 (44:02):
No, not really. Jim, Jim Fuller, I mean Jim Fuller
and Pat Conley got some money to go buy some guitars.
Ron Wilson got some money to go and get some drums.
I didn't need any money, so I didn't ask for
any I didn't get any. I just I already had
money because I was already doing things with my mom
and dad and stuff. But yeah, we got a little bit,

(44:22):
but nothing like you know, fifty thousand or anything like that.
It was a few hundred bucks in those days.

Speaker 1 (44:29):
So then how quickly did you move to make an
LP for Deco? Were you going to the studio right away?

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Yeah? That was like September of sixty three, and that's
the Safaris Play album. Now, that's where we wrote Point Panic.
That was our second follow up hit. We showed up
at the studio again, no songs. None of us ever
rehearsed outside. We rehearsed songs. We never wrote songs. We

(44:55):
would come to the studio, plug in and go, okay,
let's hit it did Ronni would go and Fuller had
come in. He just started playing it. I'd come in
with the rhythm, patriuld come in with a bass. And
so every song we wrote as the Safaris, were written
in the studio at the moment. The only person that

(45:17):
had anything outside the studio was Ron Wilson because he
would write words to I'm Leaving Town and different songs
that he wrote were all instrumentals, but we never rehearsed
them outside of the studio, and so when you hear
the album, there is no overdubbing. If there was a
mistake made, that's the way it was. We'd never go

(45:39):
back and say, okay, let's overdeb this part. I mean,
Jim Pash made a mistake on I'm Leaving Town and
he re recorded it and he said, yeah, we'll put
that in. They never did it. They just put it
in with the mistake at all. So our music was
always raw, the five of us. That's the way it
sounded for that day.

Speaker 1 (45:57):
So even after you had this big hint and you're
going into to capitalize on it to make this record,
your songwriting process doesn't sound like it changed a lot.
It doesn't sound like there was a lot of pressure
to you know, because some bands could have gone in
and then said, oh my god, what we got to
do is write ten more wipeouts right away, and it
has to be better than wipe out and bigger than wipeout,
and that kind of pressure can do your head in.

(46:18):
But it sounds like you guys were chiller than that.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
Well, we basically were a dance band and we were
playing every weekend, so we would create little things. Ronnie
would create little things, and some of those ideas came
into the studio, but we never purposely said, you know,
that's going to make another hit record. We just went
to the studio and it turned on the reel to reel,
and that's why it's called Safari's play. That's what we did.

(46:46):
We just played and whatever came out of us for
that day was what came out. It was never aforethought on, gee,
I better write another hit song. We just played what
was feeling from sixteen year olds. You know, how much
forethought does a sixteen year old have? Not much?

Speaker 1 (47:03):
I mean, that's why a sixteen year old mind is
maybe the perfect rock and roll mind. It's just it's
it's perfectly present.

Speaker 2 (47:09):
It's all creativity, it's all just the spontaneous what makes
you feel good for the moment, what energy? And we
would go out like say, we bought the reverb units,
we bought an ecophonic you know. Uh, we even bought
a fuzz tone when it came out, you know, stuff
like that. We would buy these things, bring into the
studio and just start playing around. Kind of like when
I watched Edge from You two, the video of him

(47:32):
in his little room with all his little effects, That's
what I would do. I'd go to the studio and
I'd bring all my stuff and hey, listen to this,
listen to that. You know, we just make all these
sounds with whatever it was, equipment, dzure, you know that
kind of.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
A it's so exciting because it's all new to you
and you can feel at least like you're inventing everything
that happens every you know, echo on the tape that
if you know, if you knew everyone, if you'd had
a YouTube record back then, magically you might have heard
it and said, hat geez, that kind of sounds like
what Edge did? So I better do something else. But
instead it excites you. You respond to the excitement and

(48:09):
you keep moving forward like a sixteen year old should.

Speaker 2 (48:11):
Well, we had a guy who was a great producer
in those early days, Charles bud Dant. He was a
producer of Hawaiian music for the Queen of Hawaii. The
family had a large orchestra on the Big Island and
he was the band leader for that, and so he
knew how to arrange songs, so he would allow us.
He'd say, boys, try that again, do this a little differently,

(48:34):
get a little control on us, but not much and
if we had something to change. I mean later on
when we did go go go for Louis's place, he
came out and said, hey, let me play the piano
on that. So we did have some input like that
in our first couple of albums.

Speaker 1 (48:50):
What was the studio like where you were recording Safari's play, Well, we.

Speaker 2 (48:54):
Recorded at Western and United, which were really top notch
studios in the day. Mean, Glenn Campbell was in the building,
Gene Krupa, the Wrecking Crew, gay guys were all starting
to show up because before Brian Wilson kind of collected
everybody and said this is my band. Those guys were
in those studios wandering around. They would come in and

(49:17):
watch us record and leave. We would go down and
watch them record and leave. Ron Wilson was there for
be true to your school. Got to sing on that. Wow,
you know, I mean, we're all mutually helping each other
come in and out of studios. So that was a
great time.

Speaker 1 (49:33):
It sounds I was listening obviously, I've been listening to
the record a bunch getting ready for this, and even
going from the first forty five to the Surfari's play,
it sounds like you guys are digging in a little harder.
The tones, the sounds are just a little more edgy
and present and aggressive, and it's just really exhilarating to

(49:53):
listen to it.

Speaker 2 (49:54):
It sounds say because every week we tried to come
up with a new tone, you know, I mean again,
a different effect. We'd bring in a single twelve vamp,
or we'd do the dual Showman's sometimes got to the
point where were so loud in the studio we'd have
to stand in the control room, you know. We'd play
it and then we'd go back and do some overdubbing

(50:14):
a little later on, but most of all of us.
We would play in those big studios if you see
inside the big studios at Western, these big rooms with
the insulation all over in the rugs. We'd set amps
up and put blankets over them and cloud them in
and then play as loud loud as we could through
those things. So we were experimenting. I mean when we
went from our producer to Gary Usher, he was always

(50:38):
trying double micing one mic and one end of the room,
one mike at the other end. He was trying to
capture the room sound, the direct sound, experimenting different microphones.
People were inventing new mics. He'd be bringing those in.
So we were at Western United where they had the
latest gear and we would go into another student and say, hey,

(50:58):
I want to use that mic, put that on mind,
you know, and stuff like that. So we were just
grabbing equipment, different parts of different drum sets. Ronie would
bring in a three piece set, we'd add another tom
aside tom and he'd grab a cymbol from Earl Palmer's
set and bring it over here. We'd start banging on it.
We were just having a great time doing everything we

(51:20):
could to come up with something new for each song.

Speaker 1 (51:22):
That we did it sounds like heaven.

Speaker 2 (51:24):
Yeah, yeah, it was really great. I mean, and remember
the engineers were very important then because they wouldn't let
you touch the board. But we'd have sometimes different engineers
who would have a different ear than we wanted. So
if you hear like Baja or some of the songs,
some of the songs sounded kind of funny, Like when
we re recorded wipe Out for Decca, that was the

(51:46):
most boring version we ever did on the Safari's Play album.
But that's the way the engineer heard it out. That's
the way we played it at that point.

Speaker 1 (51:55):
And did you re record it simply because dot still
had the other master.

Speaker 2 (52:00):
Yeah, Deca wanted their own version, and by that time
another thing stepped in, which we were getting bored. We
played Wipeout every day. I mean we would literally get
in a car and go from dance to dance to dance,
show up, play wipe Out, getting back in the car,
go to the next dance, play wipe Out. We'd played

(52:20):
wipe Out five or six times a day for months
and months and months, and so by the time we
did the Safaris play, we didn't even want to play
it again. You know, they said you gotta do it again?
Oh man, and Ronnie had a different drum set. It
was a sonar set. Didn't have the crisp feeling that
Wipeout originally had, but it's what we had at the time.

Speaker 1 (52:40):
I thought it was really interesting how it's point panic
on the play record that starts with an homage or
a throwback to the Dale small in cackle and shout
at the beginning of Wipeout? Was that Dale again?

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Uh? No, that was somebody from New York, because what
we would do is we record our tapes, they'd ship
them to New York and master them there. But it
was just a guy who did sound effects and they
threw that on the front of the record and we
never kne who it was.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
So the label looked at it and they said, oh,
the Safaris. No, their songs need to start with someone
shouting the name of the song and laughing. Put the
put that on there, and then you didn't know about
it till you exactly.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
That was our trademark, and they has any brand says
that's got to have that stamp on it or it's
not a Safari record. So we continued that with when
we did Scattershield. We kicked the reverb unit. You know,
we have to ad some sound effects. But other bands
were doing it. We weren't the only and the first
to do it, but just the biggest ones.

Speaker 1 (53:42):
Oh yeah, that's well. And especially on instrumental music, it's
a way of having a vocal hook there, at least
off the top exactly.

Speaker 2 (53:49):
They call, you know, wipeout some vocal. Because Dale Smallen
did the laugh, he never got paid for it, and
then he was really pissed. But actually you go back
to Dale Dale based the night he recorded the wipeout laugh,
he told me, I said, well, Dale, do you need
credit for this? He says, no, I'm giving it to
you boys as my contribution, and that was very magnanimous.

(54:12):
It wasn't until twenty thirty years later that he called
up and said, you know, I never got paid for it.
So I think Delvy eventually gave him some money. He
never really got rich, but it was his own fault
because if he would not have lied to us or
made fools of us for that album, we would have
kept him as a manager. He could have made tons
of money, except he took a bribe. I think he

(54:34):
got a couple of grand to not say anything, and
then he got sued as well and took off. He
lived in the Sacramento and think he tells the story
of how he got screwed and stuff like that. But hey,
it was his own making what we needed at the time.
He was just perfect. But later on we moved on.

Speaker 1 (54:52):
Neither the first nor the last unscrupulous band manager to
grace the music industry with their presence exactly.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
I've heard a few horror stories, but it is.

Speaker 1 (55:01):
It's a danger when you walk with one foot in
the world of the band and your buddies with the band,
and then your other foot is with the suits, and
your buddies with the suits, and they've got all the money.
It's very easy to tip over onto the suit side
and all of a sudden you're betraying your boys.

Speaker 2 (55:16):
Well, you know, it's like, you know, Elvis Presley's manager.
There've been plenty of stories about him, but yeah, you know,
in the music business you need to have somebody who
is your advocate out in the audience because they want
to sit there and make deals for you. And that's
what Dale used to do. He would go and somebody
would hear us play and go, yeah, I'd like to
have these guys at my club. Well he's doing deals.

(55:38):
Well if he gets kickbacks, you don't know how much
he got. You know, he might have got us one
thousand dollars he told us five hundred, you know, stuff
like that. I mean, the difficulty with the music business
is that you need these people because it takes a village,
someone once said, and hit records don't happen in a vacuum.
You've got to have people who's their job is to

(56:01):
take your product and get it out there any way
they can. And so in hindsight, you could say, yeah,
it would have been great if you had a screwed us,
but instead you actually got to hit record because of it.
And even today, I mean, there's plenty of songwriters and
musicians that sign contracts they never should have signed, but

(56:21):
that's how the business is. You may not get paid,
but you're number one. You know. Let me say this.
Without the five attorneys that we had, we wouldn't have
gotten our publishing writers or any money. It would have
been all just you get a half a cent when
they play Wipeout on Krola somewhere, you know, and everybody
hates lawyers. But boy, they saved our bacon. Without it,

(56:44):
we wouldn't be able to be controlling wipeout today as
we do.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
And it is you know, you see the poster on
the wall of Elvis, or of the Beatles, or of
the Surfarias, and you think you're sixteen. I want to
be that. I want to be in the poster. And
here comes someone that says, I'm the man who lets
you into the poster. If you come with me and
you sign here and you do this, you two can
be Elvis Presley. How can you say no? Who could
say no to that?

Speaker 2 (57:08):
What a deal? You can't say no? And the only
advice I can give to a young person is see
a lawyer first. But nobody's got the money to pay
five hundred bucks an hour to get a contract reviewed. Yep.
And so it's just going to perpetuate itself and it
always has. But in hindsight, you know, we were protected
because we had five sets of parents who tried to

(57:29):
help us. We had five lawyers that all came together
to I mean, the day we went to court, we
weren't allowed to be in the courtroom, no kidding, We
had to because we were miners. We had to be
outside of the courtroom in a separate room. When they
got the trial going, we came into the courtroom. They said,
are you Bob Berryhill, Yes, you, Jiff Fuller, Pat Conley,

(57:50):
Ron Wilson. Yes. They also us back out. Then they
did the all. We didn't see any of it. The
only reason I got is I have the court documents
from and other people. That's the reason I know what
went on is after the fact.

Speaker 1 (58:06):
So you make the play LP, do Surfaris play the PLAYOLP.
This is a true and proper document. Really your debut,
LP as the base.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
So that's what we actually sounded like. Exactly.

Speaker 1 (58:18):
How did it go? How is the reception, How is
the touring? How is the promotion? How did it feel?

Speaker 2 (58:23):
Well? Very good in the beginning, because Decca was a
new label, we still had DOT. I mean we're talking
September of sixty three, we went to Hawaii, so we
were touring all the TV shows in Los Angeles on
Ninth Street West and all of the dance parties, Lloyd Thaxton,
all of those things were there and we were going there.

(58:43):
We were so busy doing TV shows. We'd show up
and lip sync wipe Out on Ninth Street West. You know,
how do you lifstake an instrumental? You just stand there
and look like you're doing something right and picking up
songs like we would find another group, like you know,
we'd pick up a song for that group and this group,
then we'd bring it back in so along with our
originals that we wrote it studio, we would bring in

(59:05):
songs from the outside. So we were able to pick
up a lot of good material. And we were changing
instruments because well basically our sound changed. If you heard
the Wipeout album, you hear well, you hear wipe Out
and Surf for Joe. It was recorded very precisely in
a studio with these types of equipment. Well, when we

(59:27):
got our money from Decca, everybody went out and bought
new amps, new guitars, new drums. So your chat sound
is going to change. And remember we suddenly got the
record in stereo, Wipeout's mon ooral. As you know, the
Beatles were doing the first four track things. I believe
we were still doing two tracks, you know, but yet

(59:47):
the console was getting bigger. At Western United, they'd bring
in a new console, new reel, de reels, you know,
finally started doing a half inch take. You know, that
was a big deal. So you know, we started getting
those bigger things. So because we'd go from gold Star
to Western United to Capitol, we played in all those
different studios, you'd get a different sound, of course, so

(01:00:09):
we just kept trying to evolve with that sound. And
then Ronnie was writing new vocals and we were trying
to do that. So the first two albums wipe out
Savari's play, and then the second album Hit City sixty
four and then I think it's fun City. Well between
sixty four and Fun City, that's we got a new producer. Okay,
so here you are an instrumental band. Now we're talking

(01:00:33):
probably June of sixty four or so. But we sounds
were changing. Now if you remember what happened February seventh,
nineteen sixty four, it was a little four guys showed
up at someplace in New York and played a little bit,
and so that changed the music business right there. Okay,
So anyway, what happened was is that we got to

(01:00:54):
go on tour with the Beach Boys in January of
nineteen sixty four. So here we are flying down to Australia,
with the Beach Boys, Roy Orbison and Paul and Paula,
and so we're suddenly in the world, being top stars.
When we land at the airport, you saw pictures of
the Beatles getting mobbed by fans. We had the same thing. Wow. Now,

(01:01:18):
my mother, being the consummate person who knew what to do,
dressed us in striped T shirts with little collars, and
when we got off the plane, the fans went nuts.
It happened to be Sydney's football team stripes. She didn't
know this, but we didn't know until later on. The
fans were going nuts because they thought we were encouraging

(01:01:40):
their football team.

Speaker 1 (01:01:41):
The oldest trick in the book You wear the home
team's jersey when you go on stage and.

Speaker 2 (01:01:45):
Exactly and we did it unintentionally. So anyway, we got
to play and go on and on, and as the
story goes, I'll give you this quick story. We're in tour.
We're in Sydney, Australia. We're doing the Year and around
it's ten thousand people were packed out. After the show,
we all went to a theater and we're watching a movie. Well,

(01:02:07):
in between the movie, they would show these one minute
shorts of rock bands. And when the short is done,
we're ready to leave. Brian Wilson stands up and goes,
they'll never make it. Who it was the Beatles, So
you can see how competitive mister Wilson.

Speaker 1 (01:02:24):
Was famously feuding back and forth with them year by
year by year.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
And he did, I mean it was true. I mean
it wasn't like it was a casual thing. He was
so incensed because when we came back in La, the
record stations were going fans, would you like to hear
a Beatle record or a beach Boy record? Well, initially
it was all beach Boy. When it switched to all Beatles,
he was really pissed.

Speaker 1 (01:02:46):
I believe it. And did that augur the beginning of
a new phase for the surfarreas and surf music in general.
Where did it go from there?

Speaker 2 (01:02:57):
Well, instrumentals are obviously dying fast in the case where
the instrumental could take you anywhere. So Decca came in
and said, listen, we've got a new producer. Jam's Gary Usher,
which wrote four o nine. He was close with the
Beach Boys. They said he's going to give you guys
a new sound, and we said, oh cool, let's go
for a good sound. Turns out he wanted us to

(01:03:17):
be the beach Boys. Ah, so it was the beach
Boys sound. If you hear the Safaris other albums like
it Ain't Me Babe and those other albums, they're all
basically beach boy songs with vocals hot Rod high and
we had Chuck Gerrard and Joe Kelly doing the background
vocals because we were no good at singing harmonies like that,

(01:03:37):
so I brought in some other people. We did some
recordings where suddenly we had the Wrecking Crew around us
instead of us by ourselves. It was kind of like, well,
we need to fill out the sound a little bit,
and that just created hell oh yeah, because Ronnie was
not good at following directions, and so when Ronnie he'd
say I want you to do eighth notes on this,

(01:03:59):
Ronnie would do something totally different, end up cussing at us,
you know, yelling now is because we wouldn't follow his script.
So that became a lot of a lot of trouble.
But we made some good recordings. I mean, if you
hear those vocal albums, they were really well done. And
that's because Gary Usher, not because we did them. That's
because Gary Usher was producing it.

Speaker 1 (01:04:18):
When you listen to the Safari's play as, you were
just saying that's you, that's you and the boys playing
the songs. When you listen to those later albums, do
you feel the same sense of ownership if that's me,
or does it feel a little bit less in your hands?

Speaker 2 (01:04:30):
Well, the last the title of our last album was
called it ain't Me, Babe, and that's the way you
feel about it, it ain't me. But they were good songs,
I mean they were. It was kind of like Gary
would say, hey, these are all top ten songs. You
guys ought already like these. I'm going, yeah, right, but
that's you know, it's well, this thing is called major label. Well,

(01:04:52):
Decca is a major label, right. I Mean we'd go
we'd go down to Universal Studios where their offices were,
and we walked through all the suit videos and hang
out and they have all these gold records on the wall,
and you'd feel pretty much, hey, they know what they're doing.
You know, you're just kind of following along at that point.
So that was okay. I mean it was it was challenging.

(01:05:12):
It wasn't what we exactly wanted to do, but hey,
you know, it was a way to make records, and
that's the way it was.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
Yeah, it's such an interesting thing because they too think
or know that they know what they're doing, but a
lot of the time you can sort of sense that
they kind of wish that there wasn't these pesky musicians
in between them and getting the idea done, you know,
And I'm sure that's why they liked the Wrecking Crew
and other expert executors who didn't get too uppity about
what their ideas were.

Speaker 2 (01:05:38):
Yeah, if you if a producer can make a record
without an artist, they would do it.

Speaker 1 (01:05:43):
They're trying.

Speaker 2 (01:05:44):
That's what they do right now, they don't. I mean,
with AI, it's going to write the song for you,
it's going to play it for you, it's going to
be digitally produced. You don't need the artist. You just
need what they call the producer. If that's all you need,
then good luck.

Speaker 1 (01:06:00):
And of course to guys like me, and I suspect
guys like you, you know, the artist is the one
thing you really do need. And the sound of four
people or three people or five people playing in a
room together with no adornments or overdubs or even fixes
to the mistakes is a million times more interesting and
exciting and meaningful than the greatest AI masterpiece ever computerized.

Speaker 2 (01:06:21):
Well, I feel that way. I mean, obviously from the
old school. I just love the sound of live drums.
I have a set of drums right here in my
studio which are my son's drums. I mean, when I
stand in front of a live drum, it is just
inspiring to hear live drums behind the music that I'm
trying to play. And there's sometimes where my wife is

(01:06:41):
my bass player and my older son Devin is my
the guitar player son Joel and drum. Sometimes I'll go
into something that my laugh will go that was ethereal
What you just did, you know, is because it's just
mesmerizing to be in the right environments at the right moment.
You can play things that you didn't know you even knew,
or arrangements that you didn't know you even had in you,

(01:07:03):
but it comes out. So that's the beauty of live music.
There's no feeling like it.

Speaker 1 (01:07:08):
I should check in just foreclosure on how did the
original incarnation eventually call it a day.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
Well, it was sort of a one by one We
all played together and then one night we were going
to do a TV show and Pat Conley didn't show
up the bass player, and come to find out he's
in jail for being with some bank robbers. Dar he
was driving the car. So he has to leave the
band because in those days, being sort of unethical, no

(01:07:36):
one would hire you because you were convicted of burglary, right,
you know that kind of thing. So he left the band,
and then we had Chuck Gerard come out and play
bass a few times, and we got another bass player.
Ron Wilson left the band because Ronnie is Ronnie. He's
his own person. And we would set up a date,

(01:07:58):
recording date, a gig, he would not show up, or
he would show up late. It was like he was
always doing Ronnie and Ronnie would always be difficult. So
he left the band. And then Jim Fuller decided he
wanted to hang out in Hollywood and play with the
Seeds and Sky Saxon and all these guys. So Fuller

(01:08:18):
thought he was too hip for the room, so he
quits the band. So it's down to just Jim Passion
and I and I think Ronnie played a few times.
And then Vietnam War. Anybody remember that little epic little thing. Well,
we all kind of said in sixty six, hey, everybody's
getting drafted going other ways, let's just stop playing. So
Jim Pash got drafted into the army. My wife and I,

(01:08:42):
Jeene and I got married in nineteen sixty six. We
had Devin in sixty seven, and so we kind of
just said, well, let's just all go separate ways at
that point. So it was basically over at that point.

Speaker 1 (01:08:55):
Was it Maybe this is a obvious question, but was
it sad at that point? I mean, it's such a
whirlwind trip from being sixteen, from getting your first guitar,
you know, playing, making your first record, having this meteoric rise,
and then before you know it, it's it's coming to
a close. Did it feel premature to you or we don't?

Speaker 2 (01:09:17):
You know? It was just a sign of the times.
Like I said, the Beatles kind of it was like
when Elvis came in. Rockabilly kind of went out, but
Elvis took it and went his own way, so that everybody,
if you weren't in Elvis clone, you couldn't get on TV.
And so when the Beatles hit, suddenly, you know, Fender
guitars were not needed. Reverb units were not needed, and

(01:09:38):
so we kind of hung on again. We didn't stop
until sixty six, so we were still doing a lot.
So it was a case where by the time you
were eighteen, unfortunately, people were calling us has beens.

Speaker 1 (01:09:50):
What an experience.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
It's pretty pretty devastating, but you know, we all were
kind of moving on with our lives. Everybody was doing
their own things, and so it just kind of faded
it out. And then as time goes on, suddenly in
nineteen seventy three they want to do a first international
surfer Stomp and they put us back together again. So
we had another Jim Peter, who was a big DJ

(01:10:13):
in La So I still have the poster for it.
It was Dick Dale, the Safaris, Dean Torrents of the
Jan and Dean. That's the famous night if you saw
the dead Man's Curve movie where the tape stopped rolling
and they got laughed off at the stage. That was
the night it happened, was at that concert. But they
didn't go back on the stage until years later. But anyway,

(01:10:37):
so we've had some kind of reunions, and then in
nineteen eighty one Disneyland called and said, listen, we're gonna
have the Ventures, Dick Dale, the Safaris, the Lively Ones,
all at Disneyland, and so we reformed again with Fuller
was on bass at that time. I was playing rhythm guitar,
gimp Pastors playing lead, and Ronnie came back a little bit.

(01:10:58):
So we kind of mixed and matched over the years,
and then people started dying. Ronnie died in nineteen eighty
nine a brain memorrhage, Jim Pash died in two five,
Jim Fuller died in twenty twelve, I think, And so
I'm the last man standing. Pat Conley is still alive,
but he doesn't play because of his entanglements with the law.

(01:11:18):
And then I kind of replaced everybody with my two
sons and my wife and it's been a great tour
since two thousand to play together the last twenty five years.

Speaker 1 (01:11:28):
Yeah, I mean, what does it mean to you to
be able to share this music, this experience. I'm sure
you go out and play for people that are so
thrilled to see it, and you know, whether they were
there when it was new or whether they've caught up
to it later. To get to celebrate not just wipe out,
but like all of the amazing tunes in your repertoire
with your wife and kids, it must be so special.

Speaker 2 (01:11:49):
Well, like I say, because my wife and my kids
are with me if the gigs a bust were on vacation.
So I've always shared. My wife and I have worked
together for years on other music projects and things like that.
And she used to be a concert violinist in her youth,
and about nineteen ninety I said, hey, I need a

(01:12:10):
bass player. Violin has four strings, bass has four pick
it up, and so she bought a Fender Precision bass
and started playing. We started playing some local gigs, picking
up a drummer and of the guitar player. So we
kind of worked up, and then in two thousand my
son said, hey, we want to join the band. So
we kind of got together. And I'll tell you it's

(01:12:31):
been wonderful to have them with me. I mean like,
we've been to Hawaii many times. We've been around the world.
We played the Surfer Joel Festival last year. Year before
we played Surf one oh one. We've played so many gigs,
done so many opportunities together. But I tell you what,
I'm standing there and I look over I see my son,
Devin who's a consummate guitar player, My son Joel great

(01:12:53):
on drums, my wife. It's just pleasure to be together
as a family. How do you get your kids to
want to beg around you where you're an old geezer.
You got to have some reason. So I pay him
and I say come and play, and they say okay.
So that's where we.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
Are, and which one of you gets to do the
wipeout laugh At the beginning of wipeout?

Speaker 2 (01:13:15):
Fortunate through technology, Joel has it on his iPhone. We
plug it into the sound system. Now, remember we didn't
have sound systems in the sixties. No, it wasn't until
the Beatles came out that they started making sound systems
for concerts. But today it's so wonderful to have a
complete array of sound equipment that can reinforce what you're doing.

(01:13:37):
And so by able to Joel clicks it on the
drum with his iPhone, a laugh comes on and we
use the original laugh goes over the PA boom, it's
right there, and then we start the drum.

Speaker 1 (01:13:47):
So to go from having if you have any public
address system at all, it's like the basketball announcers one,
to having someone dedicated who can change how the high
hat sounds and your personal stage monitor.

Speaker 2 (01:14:01):
What a leap. Yeah, it's truly mesmerizing to see how
small an AMP you can have and have such a
big sound reproduced. Yeah, it was a big transition, but myself,
I've always been into electronics and equipment and all this transition.
I got my own home studio, ear pro tools and
all of that. But it's so awesome to have this

(01:14:22):
digital world be able to recreate. I mean, when you
hear my Curly Sessions LP, we went down and recorded
that the same way we recorded the Wipeout LP. We
just set up and played all through all the songs,
no overdubbing, and with digitally pro tools you got a
few clicks and hitches, you can fade those out and

(01:14:42):
not have to redo anything. It's awesome with all the
tones that you can get today on stage and it's studio.

Speaker 1 (01:14:50):
I mean, it's a career that literally spans recording technology
basically from its advent to its current state of total
futuristic mod And what can I say about congratulations, It's
such an honor to talk.

Speaker 2 (01:15:04):
Thank you. I started with a wall and sack reel
to reel. That was my first tape recorder and to
I have a pro tools digital. It's incredible. But yeah,
now it's been wonderful to watch the music business evolve,
and because wipe Out is a perennial hit in so
many genres. It's not you can wipe out surfing, but
you can wipe out on a motorcycle. You know, wipe

(01:15:27):
out can be anywhere for anybody, and so it's such
a song that lifts people's hearts. I just heard from
a guy in Australia who's the Aborigines play wipe Out
because they love it so much. So, I mean, it's
just it's a great song and it makes people happy.
I'm just so excited.

Speaker 1 (01:15:44):
It's a perfect illustration of the value of instrumental music,
which that it's completely universal. I mean, my god, Bob,
I had to go to John Paul, our local surf
music expert, and say like that, this is the song
that goes like that. This is that's a melody that
just feels like it's always it feels like it's just
in humans, DNA. It's so natural and perfect and you

(01:16:07):
guys made it up.

Speaker 2 (01:16:08):
I know. It's kind of like in Crazy Heart where
Jeff Bridges says, here's this song. He's laying in bed
with a cast on. He goes, what do you think
of that song? She says, I think I've heard that before.
He said, all the good ones you've heard before. It's
like Chuck Berry, you know, he invented that riff. Everybody's
learned from Chuck Berry, and drummers have all learned from Wipeout.

(01:16:29):
So yeah, it's one of those things where it just
keeps building on its own mystique.

Speaker 1 (01:16:33):
Before I let you go, Bob, there's one question that
we always finish with here on major label debut. The
most important, trenchant, insightful question there is to ask. While
you were in the studio recording the Safaris play LP,
what were you eating?

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Ben Franks was a restaurant down the street, and I
loved turkey sandwiches, playing turkey, a little mayonnaise, whitebread. That
was my main meal.

Speaker 1 (01:16:59):
Fueling the Surfaris play LP. Bob, thanks so much for
your generous time. Thank you, it's such a joy to
have spoken to you. I really can't thank you enough,
and I wish you all the best with the rest
of your incredible career, which is still ongoing.

Speaker 2 (01:17:12):
Well, I'll tell you, it's just been a blessing. And
I'm so excited to still be able to play after
all these years. And I hope that we get together
again sometime and hope to see you in Toronto at
a gig.

Speaker 1 (01:17:23):
I will be there. I'll learn the surf stomp. I'll
look it up on YouTube. I'll get I'll get it down.

Speaker 2 (01:17:27):
I always ask people, if you will come up and
do surfer stomp, I'll bring you on stage.

Speaker 1 (01:17:32):
Okay, that's a deal. You heard it here first. Bob
barry Hill still of the surfaris what a life to
have lived. I loved that. That was great. One of
the things that really grinds my gears is the fact
that you can never know what it was like to
be alive in the past, Like the nineteen fifties and

(01:17:54):
sixties are a long time ago now, and I think
someone like me who has grown up with screens all
around and the Internet simply cannot wrap my head around
what music like the surfaris meant like when it was new,
when it was current, when it was exploding into the world.
This this fresh new sound. I talked before about how

(01:18:14):
Wipeout is in a lot of ways more than a song,
and I meant that as a compliment, and I think
it's true. But when something transcends like that, it also
stops getting heard as music. I have this friend who
really loves the circus music like.

Speaker 2 (01:18:31):
Doo Do Do Do Did Did Did.

Speaker 1 (01:18:34):
Do, And he explained to me that that music is
actually a song called Entrance of the Gladiators. And I
looked it up. It was written as a military march.
It was music at one point. It was a new
song too, and now it just sounds like, you know,
a clown in a tiny car driving in circles around
a tent. Now Wipeout, I think, is not quite that

(01:18:55):
far from what its original meaning was. But consider this
Entrance of the Gladiator. The Circus song was written in
eighteen ninety seven. Wipeout came out in nineteen sixty three.
That is sixty six years later. Nineteen sixty three was
sixty two years ago, so it's almost been as long
since Wipeout as it was when Wipeout was written from

(01:19:16):
when the circus song was written as a military march.
All of which goes to say that it's just really
nice to consider Wipeout and to consider the music of
the Surfaris and this music from so long ago as
not like a museum piece, not like something you hear
on VH one, remember the sixties, but as a song
that was written by people. And it was amazing that

(01:19:37):
I got to talk to Bob barry Hill, one of
the people who wrote that song, and it was really
cool of that guy to get on his computer and
talk to me about it for like ninety minutes. So
I thank Bob kindly. Bob and the Surfaris don't have
any shows on the Horizon right now, but they do
still gig, so definitely keep an eye out and definitely
make sure to catch them if you can. Finally, just

(01:19:58):
a tip, I'd like to point out, kids love Wipeout.
It's a universal song, right, It's just like anyone can
instantly understand it. So if you're hanging out with your
kid or your friend's kid, or your nieces or nephews, whatever,
put on Wipeout and they might think you are cool.
Just a friendly tip from us here at major label Debut,
which is to say me Graham Wright and our producers

(01:20:19):
Josh Hook and John Paul Bullock. Thanks guys. Our music
is by Greg Alsop and we're trying to make the
podcast more successful, and the things that help, I think
are if you subscribe to the podcast and if you
rate the podcast highly. I think leaving reviews probably helps
a lot too, but who has time for that anyway,
If you like the show, and if you have a minute,
please do me a favor and help me become more

(01:20:40):
personally popular. Follow you one, follow us on social media,
let us know what albums we should talk about. Reach
out with all of your thoughts and comments and corrections
and praise. That's all for the show this week, but
Major Label Debut will return with more tales from the
intersection of art and commerce.

Speaker 2 (01:20:57):
See Ye the Books A bottom in the Stable.
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