The Chantays’ ‘Next’ Wave : O.C. Surf Rockers Emerge From Pipeline With Killer Album

What is it with these Chantays?

Not only does the Santa Ana-born surf band refuse to go away, but after three decades its members now have the audacity to suddenly go frisky on us. These days the group is blasting out sproingy, driving surf instrumentals with the sort of verve its members exhibited back in their teens.

That, of course, was when they conquered the world with “Pipeline.” Their 1962 composition became one of the most immediately recognizable and enduring instrumental anthems ever, requisite material for every garage band and covered by everyone from the Ventures to a 1988 Grammy-nominated pairing of Stevie Ray Vaughan and Dick Dale.

They had a few good years. Not rich ones, since these were the days before bands had attorneys, but ones rich in experience , putting on local dances, touring, surfing, sharing each other’s friendship and jokes and receiving holiday cheese logs from Lawrence Welk after they were the first, and likely only, rock band to appear on his show.

After the 1964 British Invasion, however, all that--except the cheese logs--came to a halt.

“Our work stopped almost overnight. You couldn’t sell an American band,” guitarist Bob Spickard recalled recently. Surf music went from being the coolest on the block to an instant anachronism, and it had to hurt.

Like most of their contemporaries, the Chantays eventually split up. The members kept playing music, going with the trends of the day. After “American Graffiti” made nostalgia hip, some surf bands regrouped, though most--including for a long time the now-revived surf stegosaurus Dick Dale--kept their roots at arms length, often playing with a numbing ‘70s lounge sensibility.

Until recently that might have been said of the Chantays. Indeed, the fact that it was said in a January review of one of their shows prompted the band to shake things up, they say. If so, the group’s just-released “Next Set” album is a winning bit of proof that we critics provide some not entirely leech-like function.

The album is a just-about thrilling return to the Chantays’ surf roots, freshly assaying such classics as their own “Pipeline” and “Blunderbus,” the Bel-airs’ “Mr. Moto” and the Pyramids’ “Penetration,” as well as several new compositions.

It’s those, with such titles as “Killer Dana,” “Bailout at Frog Rock” and “South Swell,” that are the real kickers, true to the surf form, but evolved with adventurous arrangements and razor-sharp playing.

The album is available at Tower Records’ El Toro and Costa Mesa locations. The band will perform at the Costa Mesa Tower tonight at 5:30, as well as at the Rose and Crown in San Clemente on June 19 and the Heritage Brewing Company in Dana Point on July 1.

Whatever the impetus that turned the band around, they clearly didn’t need much nudging. It only took them a couple of months to transform, throwing themselves into rehearsing and writing with the sort of zeal you see in ‘60s gladiator movies, when crusty galley slaves break their chains and shout, “Now let’s show them how free men can row!”

“We’re not just an oldies band. We’re old,” declares drummer Bob Welch. “But we’re portraying newness. Our sound now I think is even so much more energetic than what we were in the past. We’re all so excited.”

At Laguna’s Las Brisas restaurant last week, the four senior Chantays--original members Welch, 49, guitarist Spickard, 48, guitarist-bassist Brian Carman, 48, and 1967 inductee guitarist-bassist Gil Orr, 55 (they were joined near the end of the meal by guitarist Ricky Lewis, 36, a Chantay since 1980)--discussed their lively-upped selves over an all-you-can-eat brunch. And these guys can really put it away.

They’re hoping to try the buffets in other towns soon. While most of their gigs in recent years have been casuals, weddings and the occasional club gig, they’re actively looking now for a major-label signing and a chance to hit the road nationally.

That’s not so outlandish a proposition, considering Dick Dale’s recent successes and a resurgence of interest in instrumental surf rock, noted by a recent front-page article in Billboard.

“That article hit it on the head, saying that surf music never got to complete its natural cycle because the British (Invasion) came along,” Carman said. “We’d like to get out there and let it finish the course.”

They’re a curious bunch. On one hand, they’re now old enough to swap tales of back and cataract surgeries (When told the other band members thought he was 40 instead of 36, Lewis quipped, “Aw, they’ve got Anheuser’s disease”). Yet they’re still young enough to still be out there surfing, biking and Boogie-boarding.

Orr is a retired service station owner and pump attendant--a “petrol transfer engineer” he calls it--and the rest run their own businesses. Though they have the musical skill that comes with age, they still can appreciate the kid-revered qualities of speed and volume.

“We were kind of bored with even playing before,” Welch said. “And now we’re practicing twice a week, five hours at a time, and loving it. It’s just a blast to play, and I’m not even in shape for this. I went through five shirts sweating at a gig the other night.”

Said Carman: “Someone told us, ‘You were just great, but you’re going to have to ventilate Big Bob.’ You know, I switched over to bass years ago and hadn’t played guitar much in years, and I get shivers playing it now.”

“So do the people in front of you,” joked Spickard.

The band laughed, and Carman explained. “It’s not funny. Well, it is kinda. My wife came to see us at the gig, and was sitting there at the front table. Then suddenly on the third song, ‘Killer Dana,’ she said it felt like her brain moved and her ear went with it. I noticed after a while she’d moved to another table. She still hasn’t recovered.”

They weren’t shaking too many brains with their previous lounge-bound approach. Though the fire would flare up a bit on their old surf numbers, they were all but smothered by the cover tunes that surrounded them.

Orr said, “We work for the audience, and particularly at the high-school reunions and weddings we’d play, (the cover tunes) were generally what people liked to hear. But if you’re doing 15 kinds of music a night like that you don’t do justice to anything.”

“The difference now is we have to create our audience. Now we’re going to play what we know is best,” Carman said. “This is where our talent lies. I don’t think there’s any question about it. I feel so absolutely confident now that this is what we should be doing.

“When we first played the new songs we’d written, that’s what really put the glue on it. When you haven’t written something in so long, and then you feel good about it, there’s no stopping you.”

Carman says he hadn’t written anything since the ‘60s. Back then, he and Spickard had composed “Pipeline” within six months of getting their first guitars, and recorded it two months after that.

They’re working at a similar pace now: In addition to “Next Set,” they have an album’s worth of new material they’d like to record.

“Next Set” was recorded much the way the “Pipeline” was, in a rushed session, live with no overdubs. One day in March they set up in Dana Point at Michael’s Supper Club (which is open these days only for banquets and such), brought in their vintage Fender amps and reverb units and portable recording equipment and recorded the 11-song album in as many hours. The session cost $1,800.

Though the tracks are instrumentals, they’re not without stories.

“Killer Dana” is about a famous wave that used to break right near where they recorded the tune, before the harbor jetty was built. “South Swell” was inspired by a Mexican surf band Orr once saw in Cabo San Lucas. “Bailout at Frog Rock” is about a near-gnarly experience Carman and his son had on a boat off Catalina.

“We and two close friends almost drowned by Frog Rock. The music follows it completely: It was a nice slow cruise in the harbor, so the tune’s intro is nice and pretty. Then all hell broke loose when we found there was a big gaff in the hull,” Carman said.

The new songs this time started with Carman and Orr, but all the members had a hand in them by the time they were recorded, and the writing credit is shared by all.

“I read an article on R.E.M., how they’ve stayed together for all these years, and one thing they insist upon is sharing the credit,” Carman said. “Otherwise, it leads to needless problems. A song doesn’t work until you perform it with everybody anyway.”

Spickard, Carman and Welch have known each other since grade school. They formed the band, with other original members Warren Waters and Rob Marshall, while they were all students at Santa Ana High School in 1961.

The name Chantays means nothing. It was just one of several, including the Zantays and the Montays, that they’d tossed around.

Carman had an older brother in a band called the Rhythm Rockers that was a local sensation (its “Soul Surfin’ ” album is one of the best of the surf era). Hearing them practice in a neighborhood garage made them want to start their own band.

Spickard had gotten a $125 Barth guitar and amp for his 15th birthday. Welch “sold his soul” to his parents for a drum set, and Carman took the enterprising step of stealing his mom’s credit card to buy a $47 Montgomery Ward guitar.

They borrowed some of their sound from the reverb-drenched sonic tidal waves “King of the Surf Guitar” Dick Dale was creating at Balboa venues. Unbeknown to Dale, they also borrowed his then-under-development Fender reverb unit.

“It was in for service at Fender once, and someone’s dad knew someone there who borrowed it and let us have it for a week. That was our first experience with reverb, and we thought it was the greatest thing since sliced bread,” Spickard said.

By the time the reverb units were on the market, the Chantays were making money playing local dances, and Spickard and Carman bought their own.

Until Spickard and Waters saw the famous Hawaii Pipeline curl in a Bruce Brown surfing film, their song had been called “Liberty’s Whip,” after the Lee Marvin character in “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.” It also briefly was called “44 Magnum.” But when they saw that wave, they knew that was it.

The song that became an international hit was recorded in a small Downey studio in 1962, using their budget department-store guitars. It became a hit in early 1963, and the group recalls gigs where they headlined over the Beach Boys.

Their success didn’t sit well with everyone. Dale, they said, used to claim they had stolen the song from him, and when he would grudgingly accede to audience requests to play their hit, he would introduce it as “Sewer Line.”

They snagged a three-month job playing in Hawaii, though that plum gig was offset by other road experiences.

Carman recalled, “We had a gun pulled on us at Redwood City.”

“They didn’t pull it on us,” Spickard corrected. “They just showed it to us.”

“Well, what’s that called?” Carman retorted. “This guy wanted us to hire him as a bodyguard. We said we didn’t need one. He pulled the gun and we said, ‘Yeah, we do. We need one real bad.’ ”

Though the band’s star waned in the U.S. after the Beatles hit, they got invited in 1965 to tour Japan, where instrumental music remained popular. By then, Welch and Carman had day jobs, and Spickard went, with other players filling in. “It was tremendous,” he says. “For a couple of weeks we felt like we were the Beatles.”

They also enjoyed the Beatles, Stones and other British acts, though that sound did contribute to the Chantays’ demise. There were other factors. Carman cites problems with their label, their distributor and their manager.

“We also were getting married, getting families and the responsibilities that go with them,” Welch said.

Eventually they called it quits. Then in the ‘70s Spickard and Carman started doing club work as a duo. Orr, a guitar whiz who in his early teens had played alongside the likes of Jimmy Bryant, had joined the Chantays in 1967 and had hooked up with them again by the late ‘70s. Lewis joined them in 1980, and the following year they took on the Chantays name again.

But over the years they had gone from being originators to a copy band, where it just happened that some of the songs they were copying were their own.

“The jobs forced that a lot,” Spickard said. “We were doing a lot of casuals, and they wanted Top 40, so we learned it just to get work, and because we still liked to play. But to get work, we’ve gone through country, blues, the whole gamut.”

Though the surf music they helped originate hasn’t gotten much respect over the years, there have been some ratifying moments. Carman said, “I went and saw Los Lobos at the Greek two years ago with some good friends and our spouses and girlfriends. The band came out for their first encore and did ‘Pipeline.’ The audience stood up and started clapping with it, and I’ve never been so proud in my life. For a band like Los Lobos to be playing ‘Pipeline,’ it was just unbelievable.”

It’s not beyond their dreams to get that kind of response playing their own music again.

“My goal for us is to get the record for having gone the longest time between hits,” Carman said. “There’s been the Meat Loaf phenomenon, but that’s not anything if we can pull it off.

“I think one sign we might make it is the reaction we’ve been getting in the dozen or so gigs we’ve done since we’ve started in again. It’s incredible the response we’ve been getting, from both old fans and kids who have never seen us before.”

“The compliments we’ve been getting are great,” Spickard said. “Even my wife said, ‘I’ve never heard you guys sound so good.’ ”

Carman said, “My wife thinks so too, and she can’t even hear, now that her brain moved.”

“A lot of our old following says we’re like a new band,” Welch said. He likes that following and clearly is joking when he says the band’s goal is to “Get signed; Get out of O.C.”

Though they’re “100% committed” to making a go of their music this time, they leave the impression they won’t be too dissatisfied if it isn’t a hit.

“The thing that’s always been important, that’s brought us together, is friendship, camaraderie,” Spickard said. “We actually enjoy each other’s company. This is our outlet. We laugh a lot. So, we’ll see what happens.”