One of my favorite bands that truly does not deserve the one-hit wonder label is the Minneapolis band the Trashmen. Their 1963 song “Surfin’ Bird” is one of my very favorite 1960’s songs to this day – and believe me when I tell you that that is saying something! The story is that they were at a gig when drummer Steve Wahrer stopped playing and improvised a growling, spitfire performance of a doo-wop song called “The Bird’s the Word” that he had previously heard being performed by a group called the Sorensen Brothers. He then coupled that with a similar performance of another doo-wop song “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” by the Rivingtons – not knowing that “The Bird’s the Word” was also originally by that band. A local DJ Bill Diehl who was in the audience encouraged them to record the song, and they later won a Battle of the Bands competition.
The Trashmen were signed by Garrett Records and reached #4 on the charts with this wyld recording. On one of the over-priced but essential Born Bad CD’s – also known as Songs the Cramps Taught Us – “Surfin’ Bird” is preceded by the original recordings by the Rivingtons of “Mama-Oom-Mow-Mow” and “The Bird’s the Word”; both songs were follow-up singles to their biggest hit “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow”. It is in that setting that “Surfin’ Bird” can best be appreciated: Their song could hardly be more different from these other much slower performances, yet in their own way, this surf rock band is also honoring the doo-wop tradition that formed much of the basis for the surf sound in the first place.
I have never gotten a copy of the hit 45 (or their first album either for that matter), but I did purchase a copy of the Trashmen’s second single “Bird Dance Beat” at the time (it reached #30 on the singles charts); the flip side was a car song, “A-Bone” (the only thing surf bands love as much as surfing is cars). It is amazing enough to think of there being a surf band from Minnesota – which is about as far as it is possible to be from an ocean and still be in the United States – never mind one that is so uniformly excellent.
The Trashmen are often lumped in with the garage rock bands since their sound is garagey in nature (they certainly have the name for it also), even though the garage rock era was several years later (1965-1968). Allmusic summed it up well in their article on the band: “Unfairly depicted as a novelty act, the Trashmen were in actuality a top-notch rock & roll combo, enormously popular on the teen club circuit, playing primarily surf music to a landlocked Minnesota audience.” They say that the Trashmen only released the one album Surfin’ Bird, although I have a copy of a second album Bird Dance Beat that sure looks it could have been a follow-up album (though my copy was obviously much newer than the mid-1960’s), along with The Great Lost Trashmen Album. Sundazed Records even put out a 4-CD box set in 1998 called Bird Call!: The Twin City Stomp of the Trashmen.
(November 2014)
