Reunion Discussed : Former Surf Musicians See a New Wave of Popularity

These days, Dave Stadler owns a company in Long Beach that finds new homes for people displaced by redevelopment projects.

But as a 19-year-old in the early 1960s, the Manhattan Beach resident played bass guitar with the Vibrants, one of several South Bay teen surf bands that created a pulsating style of instrumental music that celebrated riding the waves from Ventura to San Diego County.

“We played all the local dances where the surfing crowd went--Moose halls, high schools, you name it,” said the 45-year-old Stadler--savoring the memory of when the Vibrants were billed over The Beach Boys, a Hawthorne band that was just starting out.

It’s been a while, he said, since he has touched a guitar.

These days, too, Bob Spickard--a guitarist who organized the Chantay’s in the 1960s--owns an industrial equipment manufacturing company in Santa Ana. But the Chantay’s have remained together all these years and play four or five dates a month--from oldies shows in Reno to private parties at the posh Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Laguna Niguel.

Expanded Repertoire

“We’re more versatile than we used to be and, of course, older,” said Spickard, 42. While retaining the basic guitar-dominated surf music style, the Chantay’s now play “everything from Buddy Holly to Bob Seeger,” he said.

It was the music that glorified the beach and surfing and came to symbolize life on the sand along the California coast.

The producers of a nostalgic CD and cassette of vintage surf music would like to bring together these former surf musicians, many of whom are now in their 40s and in careers far removed from music.

“We want to have a reunion to get everybody together . . . and sort of have a nice, relaxed instrumental jam session like the old days,” said Steve Hoffman of Dunhill Compact Classics. “We want them appreciated and applauded. A lot of rock ‘n’ roll fans would be interested in hearing these pioneer musicians.”

The time for this is right, said Robert J. Dalley, a one-time surf musician and historian of the music. Surf music, which has been in and out of favor over the years, is becoming in again. “It’s really good, clean dance music,” he said.

In today’s music world with its leather, torn jeans, heavy metal and spiked purple hair, the ‘60s boys of summer appear innocent, indeed. Period photos taken at sock hops and teen fairs show smiling kids with short hair, skinny black ties and matching jackets.

Craze Ended

Some were hardly out of puberty when they put together bands with eager, surfing chums who twanged electric guitars, coaxed gritty sounds out of saxophones and made everything sound hollow and echoing by using electronic reverb units.

And many were barely out of their teens when the surf music craze ended in 1965 after five short years--killed off by the so-called “British invasion” and its shock troops, the revolutionary Beatles.

“The Beatles took the thunder away,” said Paul Johnson, 42, who was 15 when he put together the Belairs--named for the ’55 Chevy one band member owned--at his house in Rolling Hills Estates.

“Music had to have a message, and instrumental bands got shoved aside,” continued Johnson, who lives in Carlsbad and makes a living repairing and installing auto interiors. Surf music, however, is still a part of his life, and he was written a history of the Belairs and leads a surf band.

Dalley, who chronicles 41 bands in his illustrated “Surfin’ Guitars,” said there also were political and social overtones to the bands’ demise.

Their music conjured visions of girls, “woodies,” boards and the beach, “a time of good, innocent fun,” he said. The assassination of President Kennedy, Yankee Go Home and the Vietnam War brought a darkness to America.

“The innocence was gone,” he said.

Dunhill’s “Surf Legends (And Rumors),” issued in December, is a collection of 26 instrumental tunes recorded between 1961 and 1964 in a studio in Downey. Among the bands are the Chantay’s, Blazers and Revels. The music--on Downey Records--was recorded at Wenzel’s Music Town record store. The store is still there, says owner Tom Wenzel, but the recording studio is gone.

Dunhill acquired re-issue rights and put out the collection. And while they know the names of all the bands, the identity of some of the musicians is a mystery, said Dunhill’s Hoffman. So another purpose for the reunion would be to “set the record straight about who some of the people were in these records.”

Finding these people would be a challenge but not impossible for whoever might want to find them, based on Times interviews with some one-time surf musicians and with Dalley, who spent eight years tracing people for his book. They live in such places as Redondo Beach, King City, Yorba Linda and Sacramento.

Some are still in music, often as a sideline, while others see the flowering of surf bands as something out of long ago.

“I was 19 when it was all over,” said former Blazers drummer Chris Holguin of Yorba Linda, who is a 40-year-old parts fabricator for Hughes Aircraft in Fullerton. “I went into the service and I was looking to do other things.”

He said that if there is a surf band reunion, someone will have to provide the drums because he hasn’t had any for years: “I don’t play at all, and as each year passes, things (about the band) slip my mind.”

Another Blazer, 41-year-old contractor Wayne Bouchard of Orange, long ago dropped surf music for a new obsession--ski boat racing. He and his wife, Lynne, are going to Australia next week to compete in a National Speed Boat and Water Ski Assn. challenge race.

“When I get the urge, I plunk blues on an acoustic guitar,” said Bouchard. “I liked older blues even when we did surf music.”

Most recall the surf-band era as one big party; local schoolboys became teen idols, appearing with the likes of Jan and Dean, cutting records and traveling to dates in Palm Springs or the San Bernardino Mountains.

“I loved it,” said Bill Humphrey, 45, who owns a Lawndale car rental business and in the early ‘60s was a member of the Revelairs from Manhattan Beach.

“I loved the music, and the girls who came to hear us play definitely had a lot to do with it,” he said. “I dated many of the girls and, in fact, I married one. It lasted a couple of years.”

New Style

A Redondo Beach resident, Humphrey is still a musician, but a country and Western singer, not an instrumental surfer. “I tour a lot and just finished a record album,” he said.

Tony Guidice, who was lead guitarist with the Vibrants and now works for a house-cleaning service in Sacramento, calls his surf band days an “ego trip. . . . We had quite a following. The income was nice to have at that age and we didn’t have to ask mom and dad for money. I was able to afford a car and put gas in it.”

In those days, he said, “everyone wanted to have a band, and everybody surfed. For me, it was a board and a guitar, two pieces of wood.”

The 45-year-old Guidice is a musical hobbyist who plans to put a recording studio in his home. “I want to start writing, carrying on the instrumental surf tradition, putting in on tape,” he said. “These are our roots.”

Most of the former surf musicians say they never made large amounts of money, but what they did earn--at a time when other boys were collecting for their paper routes--was fine for a teen.

“In the summers, we were making $50 to $75 apiece every week working three nights a week,” recalled Bouchard. “We were in tall cotton for 16-year-olds.”

The Chantay’s made it big with a tune called “Pipeline,” which Spickard said “was the No. 1 instrumental in the country” in 1963. “In my senior year in high school, I made $15,000 and the others made as much,” he said. “For a 16-year-old kid in 1963, that was all right.”

Today, the Chantay’s pull down in the neighborhood of $1,000 a gig. “It’s a hobby I get paid for,” Spickard said.

Norman Knowles, who played tenor sax for the Revels, said he got out of performing because he got tired of traveling and making very little money. He bettered his income by going into managing and booking other bands and now, at age 50, owns a 200-acre ranch near King City in central California. Today he’s an Amtrak ticket agent.

The Revels, too, had a hit tune called “Churchkey,” which he said some cities banned because it was “derogatory of religion.”

Are these tuneful former surfers interested in a reunion?

“I’d love it,” said Bouchard. “It’d be fun to jam again, but I’m probably a little rusty.”

Commented Humphrey: “I’d be there. I’m no worse now than I was then.”