Earworms: Surfin' Hootenanny by Al Casey
You never forget your first love, especially when it's the first rock'n'roll you ever knew.
Certain songs take hold in my head, sometimes old, sometimes new, for reasons which may or may not be obvious. So, I’ll write stuff about them.
My parents were pretty smart cookies. They figured out by the time I was five that I loved records. But, it didn’t matter to me all that much what records I heard. I picked favorites mostly by the way the record labels looked when they were spinning around at 45 prm. (Decca with its spectrum across the label was probably number one in my book.) This doesn’t mean I didn’t wind up falling in love with particular songs, but that was only after I heard them, never before. I was way too young to make a connection between what was on the radio or television and what could be played on what I precociously called my bop (whatever record player I had access to at the time, which by late 1964 was my grandparents stereo console.)
So, my parents could make me happy by picking up whatever super cheap 45s were thrown into grab-bags at Walgreens or Shoppers Fair, or grabbing singles for 5 cents apiece at the sidewalk sale outside Britts Department Store in Normandy Shopping Center. Somehow, that’s how we wound up with a copy of “Surfin’ Hootennany” by Al Casey, a record released in the summer of 1963 and which rode the Billboard charts all the way to number 48 before tumbling its way down to the remainder bins.
I had no idea what surf music was. I definitely had a single of “Wipeout” by the Surfaris, but I’m pretty sure I acquired it later even though it was released earlier in 1963. I definitely didn’t know what a hootenanny was, and I don’t think I’d even heard Peter, Paul, and Mary to introduce me to folk music yet. With no older siblings and parents whose taste was formed in the 40s, I had no prior exposure to rock’n’roll music. This record was my first taste of the sound of loud guitars played really fast.
It's a nice combination of three early sixties pop music trends. Every white college student was into folk music at the time – I think I learned that eventually from a My Three Sons rerun. Those who dropped out or never went to college, especially if they lived in California, were crazy for surf rock – there are literally dozens of movies teaching us every thing we need to know about that sociological fact. (I recommend The Beach Girls and the Monster for one which mixes in horror tropes with the sand.) And teenagers were snapping up girl groups right and left.
Girl groups, you say? Al Casey wasn’t a girl. No, he was a session guitar player a year or two away from being in the highly respected Wrecking Crew collective that played on so many great records you can’t count them. But, he needed singers for this song, and he hired a vocal trio called the Blossoms (who sang the studio version of “He’s A Rebel” by the Crystals because that group wasn’t available when Phil Spector wanted to make the record). I’m connecting the dots here - the singers on the record sound close enough to the Blossoms, and Casey definitely worked with them on other records at the time.
If you’re familiar with the Ramones, you’ll recognize the basic 1-4-5 guitar progression which anchors the song – heck, if you’re familiar with American music in the 20th Century, you’ll probably recognize it. Casey wasn’t trying to invent anything here. He just wanted to rev up a surf-rock groove for some African-American singers to pretend to be calling for a folk hootenanny. It works even if you don’t know any of that – just ask my five-year-old self if you have a time machine handy. But, now that I do know, it’s great to realize how good my taste was at spotting such a meta-record.
That vocal track is exhilarating, by the way. The lyrics aren’t much – “We’re gonna have a surfin’ hootenanny” and “Come on, come on” are the two most repeated lines, with another verse about all the guitar players who are coming setting up Casey’s big trick. He imitates familiar guitar licks played by Dick Dale, the Ventures, and Duane Eddy. It’s kind of wild to think these were the first versions I ever knew, years before I heard the original inspirations. The whole record lasts just over two minutes, and it was one that I know I played over and over in succession (unless I was stacking up 45s on the changer, dropping records on top of each other to scratch them up in exchange for the convenience of not having to put a new record on myself).
Epilogue: In 1981, I saw the Morells for the first time. Lou Whitney and Donnie Thompson were rock’n’roll lifers from Springfield, MO who had been in the Symptoms and would be in the Skeletons and who were the best guarantee of a great musical time no matter what the band was called. Friends had been urging me to see this band, and I was enjoying the heck out of their mix of rock’n’roll classics and ridiculously obscure but highly entertaining non-hits. Then, the opening chords rang out, and the band started singing, “We’re gonna have a surfin’ hootenanny” and I went crazy. Prior to that moment, I had never met anybody outside my family who had ever heard this song. I saw the Morells and Skeletons many times after that, but I think they dropped the song from their set after that first weekend I experienced. Still, it was nice to find a connection to the first rock’n’roll song I ever loved.