Surf’s Hearse of a Different Color

A pink hearse will be tooling around Orange County during the next few days. Its mission is not to give some dearly departed an unusually colorful send-off, but to herald the resurrection of an historical body of Southern California rock ‘n’ roll.

The man with the hearse is Bob Keane, president of Del-Fi Records, which has just reissued its 12-album catalogue of 1963-vintage instrumental surf rock music on compact disc.

Keane says he used to travel around the country giving away hearses 31 years ago as part of the initial promotional push for Del-Fi’s surf-music collection. At the time, surfers favored hearses for reasons both practical (you could easily fit a longboard in one) and image-conscious (what better way to advertise your death-defying bravado than by riding in a hearse?).

“We gave away hearses in Pittsburgh, Dallas, San Francisco,” Keane recalled Tuesday, over the phone from his office in Hollywood. “In Pittsburgh they had a traffic jam because all these kids were following this hearse down the street.”

To honor tradition and to help push his “California Surf Series,” Keane and his hearse will make a series of Orange County appearances this week.

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Today at 11 a.m., he is scheduled to be at the Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum, where he will present some of the original, out-of-print album covers to the museum, which is at 411 Olive St.

On Friday at 1 p.m., the hearse will dock at Tower Records in Anaheim, and a Sunday afternoon visit is scheduled at Tower at Newport Boulevard and 17th Street in Costa Mesa. Del-Fi won’t be giving away its Cadillac hearse, but it will be running a surfboard giveaway contest.

The Del-Fi reissue comes at a time of renewed interest in surf music.

Dick Dale, who pioneered the raging surf-guitar sound in Orange County ballrooms during the early ‘60s, emerged last year with a successful comeback album, “Tribal Thunder,” and recently followed it with another raucous release, “Unknown Territory.”

Dale has been pitching his music not toward old-line surf fans, but toward the young hard-rock audience--witness the stamp of approval that MTV’s “Beavis and Butthead” gave to the 57-year-old ax-wielder’s “Nitro” video.

“Come Out and Play,” the hot track that recently launched O.C. punk band the Offspring to national success, also is an MTV staple. One of its most insinuating hooks is a snaking, Arabian-flavored guitar riff rooted in surf-rock sources.

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Last April, Billboard magazine did a long feature surveying the signs of rekindled international interest in surf music. It cited new activity by such ‘60s bands as the Chantays (the Orange County band, which scored in 1963 with a definitive surf hit, “Pipeline,” recently issued a solid new album, “Next Set,” on its own label), and the emergence of many younger surf bands.

Keane says the Billboard piece helped persuade him to put his Del-Fi surf archive back in circulation after about 25 years out of print. It gives surf music fans a chance to discover--or rediscover--two more worthy Orange County bands from the ‘60s: the Lively Ones and Dave Myers & the Surftones.

The Lively Ones dominate the Del-Fi reissues with five albums of their own, and they appear on two compilation discs included in the series. Dave Myers and the Surftones are represented on an album of their own, “Hangin’ Twenty!” and on the two compilations.

The Impacts, the Sentinels and Bruce Johnston’s Surfing Band (led by the guitarist who would join the Beach Boys in 1965) are the other groups in the series with full albums.

Keane says the 12 surf albums he issued in 1963-64 sold a combined total of about 130,000 copies in their initial release. Now, he has hopes of selling at least triple that many on compact disc.

“Today, the market for everything is a thousandfold what it was in 1963,” he said. “I think young people will buy it, and middle-aged people too, as a nostalgic thing. We’ve had a lot of reaction from college stations. They love it, and they’re playing it.”

Those with a morbid streak might see the Del-Fi hearse promotion as symbolic of the label’s ill-starred history.

Keane’s first major artist was Sam Cooke, whose early hits appeared in 1957-59 on what was then called the Keen label. Cooke went on to even greater success with RCA but was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel in 1964.

Del-Fi’s next big star in the making was Ritchie Valens, whose career had barely gotten off the ground when he plunged to his death in the famous 1959 plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and the Big Bopper.

Next came the Bobby Fuller Four, which recorded for Keane’s Mustang Records imprint--including the signature hit, “I Fought the Law”--until its leader was found dead in 1966. Los Angeles police ruled Fuller’s death a suicide, but Keane insists it was foul play. Keane says he is working to get a film about Fuller made, which will outline his theory of the rocker’s death.

“After that happened, I was kind of burned out,” said Keane, who had started out in music as a teen-aged clarinetist who fronted his own swing band. Keane folded his labels in 1970 and worked for a time with his sons Tom and John as they launched their own careers as performers and, later, songwriter-producers.

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Keane, now in his late 60s, revived Del-Fi last year to issue new compilation albums by Ritchie Valens and the Bobby Fuller Four. He also has a stable of new acts, including the Latin rock acts Bambu and Latin Touch, and Banig, a 16-year-old singer from the Philippines who Keane says has been likened to Whitney Houston and is dubbed “The Cinderella of Manila.”

In the 1960s, Keane’s surf records didn’t stir the chart action that releases by his doomed heroes did. The principal players of the Lively Ones and Dave Myers & the Surftones didn’t gain the immortality of Cooke, Valens and Fuller. On the plus side, they have managed to make it to 50 without fulfilling their mortality.

Jim Masoner, lead guitarist of the Lively Ones, lives in Anaheim and is the owner of several apartment buildings.

He says he read about Dick Dale’s comeback and last year received notice that reissued Lively One albums were circulating in Europe. Given those developments, Masoner said, “It wasn’t a real shocker” that Del-Fi would reissue his band’s catalogue in the United States.

Nevertheless, he said: “It’s surprising that such a simple form of music (would return), after what rock ‘n’ roll has gone through. It’s made a complete circle. It’s a good music for young players to grasp onto, because it’s simple.”

Now Masoner and the Lively Ones’ rhythm guitarist, Ed Chiaverini, have been approached by Ken Roland, a surf-music promoter who wants the band to reform.

Masoner thinks he’ll do it, although “I’m still wondering how much stress or trouble or time this is going to put on me, for what it’s actually going to be worth. But people are taking an interest and it might mushroom into something.”

Masoner, 50, played professionally until about six years ago, most recently in the North Fork Trio, an Orange County club band.

“I’ve stayed proficient on the guitar. Right now, I’m probably a much better player than I’ve ever been in my life,” said the guitarist, who feels one of his accomplishments with the Lively Ones was to help popularize Fender’s Jaguar guitar model.

Masoner still sits in occasionally with his old partner, Chiaverini, who continues to play on the local scene under the name Eddie Day. Chiaverini’s current gig is a one-man-band act at the Saddleback Inn in Santa Ana.

The two former Lively Ones both have some gripes about their financial dealings with Del-Fi: They say the Lively Ones never saw any royalties from their records.

“To say the least, people weren’t happy,” Masoner said. “But there’s no sense holding a grudge after 30 years.”

Keane said that when he initially put out Del-Fi’s surf records, he paid the musicians a one-time flat fee for them, so he doesn’t owe them any royalties.

Dave Myers was a young folk guitarist playing the Orange County coffeehouse scene when he saw Dick Dale at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Balboa sometime around 1960. “I liked what Dick was developing. I liked the power. It attracted me to this raw, new thing, and I wanted to be part of it.”

Now a marketing consultant, the Huntington Beach resident fondly remembers how fertile the surf-band scene was.

“By the time we got on Del-Fi, we were running our own dances,” Myers recalled. “Anybody who could open a hall and get a band in there could draw 300 people. American Legion halls, bingo parlors--everybody went dancing. It was a great opportunity to play to a lot of people. It didn’t take much to get jobs and stay busy.”

Myers figures that surf music died a natural death brought on by inevitable musical evolution.

“In the ‘60s, everything was experimental,” he said. “That’s where the music was. Surf music was experimental music, and it carried a lot of themes that were important to youth at that time. When those themes changed, suddenly music switched again.”

Like the two Lively Ones guitarists, Myers kept evolving through the late ‘60s, playing other rock styles in new bands that bore the stamp of the hippie era. After that, he rekindled his early love for bluegrass music and still goes to bluegrass festivals looking for impromptu parking-lot jam sessions.

Now 50 years old, Myers says it would take “a lot of warm-up” to get back in the rock ‘n’ roll groove. But he might be open to playing the occasional surf gig.

Myers hasn’t listened to his Del-Fi album in five years, and that was by force: He was running a fishing tackle company, and one of his employees fished up a copy of “Hangin’ Twenty!” and played it over the office intercom system at lunch hour, as a birthday joke on the boss.

“They did it so they could give me a hard time, but what the heck. It was my birthday, so I couldn’t say much. You’ve gotta be a good guy on those days.”

Masoner said that on Monday, for the first time in many years, he went through his Lively Ones albums and listened to his two favorites, “Surf Rider” and “Surf Drums.”

In the face of the surf-rock revival, his reasons weren’t nostalgic, but practical.

“I needed to stimulate my memory,” he said, “in case I have to play some of those.”

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JURASSIC SURF?: Speaking of Dick Dale, he’ll play a free concert today at 6 p.m. at the Virgin Megastore at Triangle Square, 1875 Newport Blvd., Costa Mesa.

The always-effusive Dale is especially revved these days about the prospects for his new album, “Unknown Territory,” and for a just-completed video for one of its tracks, “Terra Dicktyl.”

“The director (Andrew Doucette) put these micro-mini cameras, as big as an eraser, on my fingers. It looks like a train going down a railroad track. My pick looks like it’s coming out of the bowels of the guitar.” Dale says these up-close glimpses of his fret-board action are combined with quick cuts to reptilian eyes and footage of a figure who goes airborne and then “comes back down again and goes down through this tunnel of hell.”

“It never stops; you get dizzy just watching it. It goes too fast for me. I like to get a good look at something. But they know better than I do.” Dale said the final edit should be going to MTV any day now.