“Surfin’ Bird” is a song performed by the American surf rock band The Trashmen, and it is also the name of the album that featured this hit single. It was released in 1963 and reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It is a combination of two R&B hits by The Rivingtons: “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” and “The Bird’s the Word”, which was influenced by Red Prysock’s “What’s the word? Thunderbird!” (More from Wikipedia)
It is not really a rare event for a song to come out of nowhere and grab the zeitgeist – that’s virtually the definition of a novelty song – but there have been a host of songs that are just as sideways compared to the recording charts at the time without truly being of the novelty variety. I have written of several in previous posts: the Trashmen’s 1963 hit “Surfin’ Bird”, the Ran-Dells’ “Martian Hop” (also from 1963), and “Rip Van Winkle” by the Devotions from 1961. They were among my very favorite songs for years after I first heard them, so it is easy to see that I am partial to this kind of song.
Now, of all of the songs that Greg Shaw could have used to name and then subtitle his magazine Who Put the Bomp, two of them came out in 1963, and the other in 1964, though that one could just as easily have been made in 1963. Why 1963? Greg Shaw was 14 in 1963; and, according to neuroscientist and author Daniel Levitin in his book, This is Your Brain on Music, this is when the brain is most susceptible to the influence of music. As quoted in Bomp 2, Levitin writes: “Part of the reason we remember songs from our teenage years is because those years were times of self discovery, and as a consequence, they were emotionally charged.”
Many years later, Greg Shaw wrote in 2001: “One of my favorite phases of 60’s garage was 1963, when nobody had ever heard of England, and songs like ‘Louie Louie’ [by the Kingsmen] and ‘Surfin’ Bird’ [by the Trashmen] were drawing on 50’s R&B to create something new.”
(May 2013)
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Later I picked up the Pebbles, Volume 4 LP (subtitled “Summer Means Fun”). There are songs by Lloyd Thaxton, a piano-playing DJ from LA whose show ran on TV in the afternoon when I was growing up; two songs by the immortal Trashmen (the flip side to their big hit “Surfin’ Bird”, “King of the Surf”, plus “New Generation” that features a hydrogen bomb blast); “Masked Grandma” by the California Suns, an answer song to the Jan & Dean hit “Little Old Lady from Pasadena”; “California Sun ’65” by the Rivieras (a remake by this Michigan surf band of their own well-known hit, “California Sun”); “Anywhere the Girls Are” by the Fantastic Baggys (composed of P. F. Sloan, author of “Eve of Destruction” among many other songs, and Steve Barri); a version of “Hot Rod High” by the Knights; and a paean to the California capital city “Sacramento” by Gary Usher. A bonus track is a radio jingle for Coca-Cola by Jan & Dean.
(December 2014)
