A baby cries. The mother cradles the child and whispers "Ssshhh" into its ear. A most basic and loving act, calming the child. The baby hears the "Ssshhh" sound and is reminded of the pulsing flow of the amniotic fluid it was surrounded in while still safe in the uterus. It is a call to the code written deep in all human DNA, to the tiny little reptilian portion of the brain that still remembers the primordial ocean that we all emerged from billions of years ago. Amniotic fluid has the same chemical saline solution as that of ocean water. In essence we all emerge from the water, in a genetic evolutionary sense as well as the immediate human birthing reality.

The "Ssshhh" sound is white noise. The same sound as the crashing of waves on the beach, and the same sound used in noise generators to relax people to sleep. It is also the sound of information, the pure digital transmission of a modem line transferring data in its most fundamental form. White noise is the sound of every possible audible frequency being played at once. The full frequency sound can engulf your reality and mask out all of the other sounds around you. White noise, not coincidentally, is the sound produced by a reverberation unit to give a false feeling of space.

It is 1961. At small clubs in Southern California, bands like The Belaires and Dick Dale are developing a new form of pop music. It is indebted to many other instrumental styles that came before, and through that synergy a new sound is made.

The heart of this sound is a driving beat and guitars drenched in reverb. Leo Fender had just come out with his first outboard reverb tanks for guitar, and the bands were really testing the units to the limit. The surfers who attended the shows said that the sound of the reverb sounded like waves, and people started to call this new sound "Surf Music". The sound now had a name, and the local L.A. musicians and teenage fans jumped on the surf music bandwagon.

But what about the surfers? What had they heard as they stood in front of the stage listening to the Belaires and Dale? A surfer sits alone in the water waiting for a wave. A swell comes, he paddles, racing to keep in front of the wave, as it sucks him up the face. He stands as the wave now crests over him and he is in the "Green Room". Total visual focus and concentration on the hole at the end of the tube. The only sound heard: the beating heart inside his body and the wash circulating around him, and that rhythm and sound together is the essence of surf music.

Surf music rode its own wave of popularity, producing a few national and dozens of regional L.A. hits, and influencing the American teen agenda to some degree. Record companies were quick to jump on the latest trend and do the big media push that only they can do. Surf bands sprang up coast to coast in the U.S. and internationally. One of the most popular surf bands were The Astronauts from Denver,Colorado, proving that you don't need water to make surf. (Conversely, it could be said that we carry the surf around inside of us all the time.)

The surf sound was easy to achieve because you could buy Fender equipment at any music store. You didn't need a lead singer and the music was easy to play.

Compositionally, surf music set itself apart from rock in many ways. From its earliest appearance, a precedence was set that the songs did not have to follow the standard rock'n'roll/blues/boogie woogie I/IV/V chord progression (Dick Dale's Misirlou being based on a Greek scale while The Belaires Mr. Moto is modal). The arrangements tend more toward the drama of Broadway songs and the aural augmentation of film scores. Being instrumental, the songs lend themselves to sound bites, studio effects and experimentation. And, having no vocal, the great focus was on melody and the emotive ability of the guitar.

As the guitar became the featured instrument, technique and improvisation surely came to be an important part of the musician's vocabulary and would lead to the guitar's revolution as the instrument of choice.

Dick Dale will tell you that he taught Jimi Hendrix all that he knew about playing the guitar. While this is improbable, surf music's emphasis on the electric guitar had a definite influence on the rise in popularity of that instrument.

It is generally agreed that surf music was a peculiar phenomenon whose popularity ended with the arrival The Beatles and The Vietnam War. Some band members were called to serve in Vietnam, breaking up the bands altogether. The Beatles, of course, changed everything stylistically and musically. The girls didn't want to listen to guitar instrumentals, they wanted cute singers and love songs, so most surf bands adapted and evolved in that direction. As they progressed musically, they would go on to be some of the key players in folk-rock, psychedelia and the many other sub-genres of rock'n'roll. By 1965, just four years after its invention, surf music has disappeared from the musical map, but not our consciousness.

During the summer of 1962, my DNA is being written, influenced and encoded by a variety of factors including genetics, my mother's diet, and the zeitgeist that was the era's then current reality construct. As an adult, I will have my father's hairline, crave ice cream and have an inexplicable taste for sea-foam green and Ford Fairlanes.

It is 1971, I am eight years old and I am lying on a box-spring mattress, my ear pressed to the fabric. My foot is at the other end of the mattress kicking it. The sound travels the length of the bed, but to my great amusement, continues long after the impact of my foot. I turn my mouth toward the mattress and shout, then quickly listen as my voice reverberates through the springs. I spend hours listening to the far away echoes and imagine I am in some great cave.

In 1978, I am in High School and listening only to punk rock. Johnny Thunder's album "So Alone" has a cover of some old instrumental song called Pipeline. I was just learning how to play guitar, so (like half the kids in America) this is one of the first songs I learn to play. Then I hear the original version of Pipeline in the movie "The Warriors," and that reverb sound really knocked me out. I can't find the original version of Pipeline at the record store, so I go to the public library and found one of those cheesy compilation records that had a surfer's lingo dictionary and a dozen surf classics. My musical horizons are now expanding, and surf music has become an important part of my life.

1996 now. Classic surf music as a sound may seem dated, but I believe that it was a first attempt at using technology to create the very modern concept of virtual reality. The main element of the surf sound is reverb. Dense reverb that surrounds the listener. A Reverb unit is a fake space generator; a small box filled with springs that can imitate a room or hall, small or large. When you listen to someone singing on an album, chances are that they were recorded in a small studio, in a padded, acoustically designed room. But if the recording engineer adds reverb, you will hear them singing in the Metropolitan Opera House, the Grand Canyon or maybe in a tiled bathroom. Your mind associates the audio input with a mental visual picture of a space where you have perhaps actually experienced that ambience for yourself. This effect is especially obvious when you listen through headphones and with your eyes closed.

When I first heard surf music, I was teleported into a mysterious grey area that exists somewhere in this reverb. The drums appear to carry the natural ambience of the room that they were recorded in, perhaps a small studio setting. But the guitars are other worldly. The guitar might tap a muted note and the reverb will carry it into never-never land. When the vibrato bar is used to bend notes, the reverb will add all the possible in between notes together to produce a disorienting blur. Reverb can meld two separate instruments into a new sound. All of a sudden you can hear string sections and horn charts, sirens singing and howling wolves. Where does that new sound come from? Reverb can be like that primordial ocean for the creation of new sounds.

With a modern digital reverb, it is possible to set up an endless reverb, without decay. Feed a note in it and that sound will be regenerated forever. In a virtual reality, that space might be akin to listening to the sound of a distant star, or more exactly like time travel. Long after a musician has played that note, had a cheeseburger, got married and died, his note will still be playing for anybody who cared to listen.

Back to 1965. Surf music is dead in the water and a major social bifurcation is upon us. Some endlessly argue cause and effect. Was music and the media the cause of social upheaval or merely some of the symptoms? It doesn't matter. A new way of thinking is entering the into the mass consciousness, whether by experience or osmosis. It has been called a "New Age", but this always conjures up thoughts of bland music and varietal spirituality. While these are part of the new consciousness, they are certainly not all of it.

If you think of all time and all actions as objects floating on the ocean surface, the early sixties are like the eery calm before the tidal wave. The crest of the wave would be the late sixties. There occurred way to much political weirdness and spontaneous creativity to say that all the events were not somehow interconnected. Those who would deny this great change were left on the beach, to be crushed as the tsunami hits the shore.

1994. Surf music again comes back into vogue. Revival bands get a more serious listen. Many other bands claim surf music as their roots and develop a more modern version of the classic sound. Film blockbuster Pulp Fiction's extremely popular soundtrack is filled with oldie surf music.

In 1990 in San Francisco, a band called The Mermen are playing the clubs. I see them at the Paradise Lounge on a double bill with The Phantom Surfers, probably the last time that ever happened. Since then, The Phantom Surfers have had several vinyl l.p. and single releases, recorded as if it were still 1961. The songs are short with familiar arrangements and to a future musicologist, they might be indistinguishable from surf music of the early sixties.

On another tack, The Mermen's first album is filled with tight, well written and well recorded songs that can be described as surf music in a traditional sense. A second release comes out, a mix of the traditional style songs and longer, jam oriented numbers. The effects on the guitar tone have gone far beyond reverb into the land of distortion, multiple digital delays and other sounds. The rhythms section stretches out a bit, exploring beats far outside the traditional driving surf rhythm. And yet, the sound is still rooted in surf music.

The Mermen's third CD comes out and features music pieces over nine minutes in length. The sound is extremely emotional, darkness and light clashing. It's not surf music, but it's not not surf music either. Something much larger. The name "Ocean Music" is suggested.

Imagine surf music as the little critter that first wagged it's fins and tail to push it up on dry land. Ocean Music is the fish that came to shore, had a look around and then swam farther back out into the sea.

Conversely,The Phantom Surfers have a strict set of rules about how surf music should be played and sound. The band must have a two guitars, bass and drum line-up. Songs must not be over four minutes, preferably two and a half. The equipment must be vintage Fender guitars and amps.

The Mermen and other progressive surf bands acquire the wrath of the hardcore traditional surf music crowd. They are decried as being hippies and sullying the innocence of surf music. But in comparison to The Mermen, these traditionalist now seem more like nostalgia acts. They have never grown musically and would seem to put stylistic trappings before their own development as musicians.

I should be fair and say that there are a great number of current surf bands who lean more toward the traditional than the progressive, but are infusing the sound with a modern sensibility, adding new vitality to the vintage sound.

1996, the State of the Surf. Record companies know that instrumental music is too esoteric to sell in quantity. It seems that you have to tell the average listener that "This is a love song" before they get the point, and they couldn't possibly be imaginative enough to find their own meaning in wordless music. Remember that the entire music industry is focused on selling "product" to Jr. High and High school kids, who are the largest music buying audience by default, only because they aren't yet old enough to buy alcohol and cars. Musicians play surf or instrumental because there are no words to express what they are feeling, not because they think that they will sell a lot of records.

It is a real leap of faith for non-musician music fans to watch all instrumental music. Having a lead singer gives a typical rock band a focus for most of the audience. Sure, a lead guitarist will take a solo for one verse, but then all attention turns back to the singer, and the words that he sings carry a direct meaning, whereas in all instrumental band, the music is the focus. And pure music exists on a non-verbal, emotional plane where it will have a different meaning for everyone who hears it.

It is not as if surf music will ever again top the music charts, and there isn't another Beatles on the horizon to kill its current popularity. But surf music is evolving again, just as it did in 1964. Modern surf musicians can't deny the influences of the past 30 years, and can't help but to incorporate those influences into the music they now make. Ocean music is the fulfillment of all that surf music only hinted at. It brings our own deep connections to the rhythms and drama of the ocean to the fore.

The surf music phenomenon of the early '60's should not be dismissed as just another teen fad. It was clearly one of the first signs of the great populist movement to come. A resurgence in it's popularity matches the shift in the social and environmental consciousness of our times. Surf, and now Ocean music, carry the primordial sonic envelope of human evolution, written into our genetic code. The sound is a feedback loop from our deep sub-conscious to the prevailing zeitgeist of this new age.

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