International Surfing Museum Surfin' Sundays
Surf Museum, Huntington Beach, CA
Liquid Kitty, West Los Angeles, CA
Huntington Beach International Surfing Museum, oddly enough, is located in Huntington Beach. (Even odder, they are at the location that the old Safari Sam's used to be.) Every year the International Surfing Museum puts on free music shows by local and touring surf instrumental bands. Three times per year, they put on shows from 11:00am to 5:00pm on the pier. Most every other weekend during the summer, they have bands play in the parking lot of the museum from 1:00pm until 4:00pm. This day, the show was at the International Surfing Museum parking lot. Since the parking lot is in the corner, there are 2 walls behind the band, and the band faces the streets and other buildings in the area.
http://www.myspace.com/bboandthesurfrockets The first band, Billy Blastoff and the Surf Rockets, is the typical surf instrumental band, 2 guitars, 1 bass 1 drums, no vocals. Actually, not quite typical. They did sing a few songs. When they are performing for a more general audience, they do more vocal tunes and less instrumental tunes. They do a lot of instrumental tunes, including a few that normally have words as well as a few that you might not think of as surf instrumentals.
Both of the guitarists in this band, are also in the Detonators. The bass player, is also the guitarist / keyboardist for the Sound Waves (the next band up). The drummer was previously the guitarist for the Fabulous Planktones (no longer active). All members of this band have played in a number of other surf as well as non-surf bands. Neither the Detonators or Billy Blastoff and the Surf Rockets have CDs available. Which may explain why even though they rarely ask me in advance to record them, they usually pay for recording when I am there. They are in the process of listening back my recordings to try to figure out if they can find a single show that works, or if they will need to pick and choose the best performance of individual songs to create a live CD. I have seen / heard / recorded most of these musicians for a number of years, in a number of other surf instrumental bands that they have played in.
http://www.soundwavessurfband.com/ Next up, was the Sound Waves. Almost a standard surf instrumental band, 2 guitars, 1 guitarist / keyboardist, 1 bass 1 drums but some vocals. They did sing a few vocal tunes. Since this was an audience that came for the instrumental music, most of the tunes performed were instrumetals. The first time I ever heard of this band was a year ago, so I am not as familiar with their accomplishments as musicians. At least not from a personal basis. This is another case where even though the band didn't know me, they decided that having a recording of themselves performing live was a good idea. So they have paid for my recordings most of the time that I have seen them perform. Since they do not have a CD, one of the possibilities we have discussed a few times is using some of my recordings on either some kind of promotional CD or on their web site. They also hired to to go to their next show to record.
My second show of the day, was not one where I was recording the bands. Liquid Kitty in West Los Angeles has an annual event they call the Punk Rock BBQ. While I have recorded bands here before, this event is crowded enough that it makes my style of recording difficult. So I only went to see the Raw Power Rangers (an Iggy and the Stooges tribute band). The singer in this band is one of the guitarists for the Insect Surfers. Although they were scheduled to play a 5:30pm, it was closer to 6:00pm before they started. This was fortunate for me, as packing up my gear, and driving from Huntington Beach to West Los Angeles took a bit of time. I only stayed long enough to watch the whole set by the Raw Power Rangers and drop off the Insect Surfers CD from the Scene from Wednesday August 9, 2008.
I might have stayed later if I hadn't already made plans to stop off at a client (my day job is an independent computer consultant) and work on their backup system. Fortunately, everything was working the way it was supposed to or it might have turned into a real long night as well.
At this point, I figured I had enough excitement for one day, and headed home.
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Last updated by Chrome Oxide on 08/17/2008
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