Beach Music

It is with much trepidation that I write of "beach music," a phenomenon that has consistently been making waves across America and the world (yes, Virginia, there are even "beach enthusiasts" in Muncie) since the early '60s.  Over the past three decades, I have become increasingly fond of a questionable musical consciousness termed "beach music".  Yet, I fear writing about it, not just because I still do not know what IT is, but because neither does anybody else.

One thing beach-nuts do agree on is that the sounds which inspire partying on the East Coast have absolutely nothing to do with California and surf music. In the East, a beach party means shuffling a little bit in the sand (a dance called, appropriately enough, the shag) and guzzling beer or sipping bourbon.  In the Wild West of the '60s, a beach bash implied some surfing, and required the sounds of the Ventures and the Beach Boys as well as many weird bands such as the Pyramids and the Trashmen. 

Beach music of the East Coast bears the light of nostalgia and beams it through the AM radio waves--a longing for a past that was never a part of the scene to begin with.

Unlike the music on the West Coast, which was by white kids on an instrumental warpath, beach music has always been primarily music by blacks.  What's more, whereas the classic image and style of surf music suggested a homosexual subtext (with rockabilly's similar subtext right on its tail:  Roy Orbison's "Domino" being the first example of rock music emulating the sound of the waves), the theme of East Coast beach music is heterosexual love and desire, often thwarted but always remembered.

Because beach music tolerates more than it excludes, it's not really a definable genre like surf music.  The beach music categorization includes rock 'n' roll from New Orleans (Ernie K-Doe, the Showmen), Philadelphia soul (O'Jays, Archie Bell and the Drells), Stax (Sam & Dave, Booker T & the MG's), Motown (everybody), disco (Trammps, Tavares), '50s R&B (Joe Turner, Five Royales), '70's smooth soul (The Floaters, Tymes)...and yes, even garage punk (the Gentrys, the Swingin' Medallions).  

It's a mixed-up, shook-up celebration of a musical past, of passionate summers spent on the beach.

This phenomenon has been documented on zillions of excellent compilations (see above for a good example), but it was officially and best presented back in 1967 by Atlantic Records on two volumes called--you guessed it--BEACH BEAT (still, never reissued on CD).  

Compiled in response to the demands of Carolina beach lovers seeking oldies amidst the dearth of psychedelia in the late '60s, these two packages contain the quintessential beach performers and performances--classics by the Clovers, the Coasters and the Drifters; Willie Tee's "Teasin' You," Lenny O'Henry's "Across the Street," and, courtesy of Chess, Bobby Moore's amazing "Searching For My Love."

Atlantic being one of the great R&B labels, these two collections was almost ready-made, and so, in a sense, was the beach music scene. Clearly, here was a programmed sensibility, not a phenomenon based upon stylistic substance but on a memory of a romantic lie:  that music once had a meaning it now completely lacked.

The East Coast beach music sound is easy to package but impossible to pinpoint.  It's like you have to be in on IT to get IT.  

Beach music has become an institutionalized form of party ritual restricted to the coastal resort cities and inland campus areas of the Carolinas and Virginia.  The majority of the black groups branded with the "beach sound" were never intentionally creating music for this East Coast circuit. Instead, they were consumed by a locale desperately in need of an identity during a time when pop music seemed to be running riot with hippies and weird sounds.

It was an idea based on the belief that dancing to soul or doo-wop records would outlast the trendiness of the British Invasion and psychedelic rock.  And, oh, how right they were, those determined reactionary shaggers on the beach!

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, where boys and girls at the University know how to party for weeks on end.  I have grown accustomed to the reactionary nature of beach music and its maddeningly nostalgic need to ignore the present until it becomes the past.  

I used to read loyally each new issue of the slick mag, It Will Stand, dedicated to the preservation of beach music, its very name suggesting the notion that the South will rise again.  I have listened faithfully to the old Rockin' Ray's "Hall of Fame" and "The Best of the Beach" radio shows on WBT in Charlotte.  And shopping for beach music has never been easier thanks to the Internet.

But still, amidst the beach hubbub, I have always felt that the meaning of its presence eluded me, and then one day I discovered why.

In the early '80s, I once had a long conversation with an A&R guy at Arista Records, Mitch Cohen.  Cohen was then compiling an anthology of beach music for the label called The Beat of the Beach (great title).  He had been asked by a higher-up at Arista to compile this collection because certain oldies were being consistently requested by distributors in the Carolina-Virginia area. Despite the invisibility of a discernible style, Cohen went for the job full throttle, talking with the editors at It Will Stand and oldies know-it-alls.  Never did Cohen assume that he knew what a beach record was.

At the time, Cohen agreed with me that there was no discernible style to beach music, but he did say that he understood that you had to be "on the inside" to properly pick up on the cultural codes and signs that distinguish a "beach record" from your ordinary oldie.  To know the shag beat may not involve a conscious effort but only an instinctual response to a manner of partying that has remained stable since the early '60s.

So, Cohen, in programming the anthology, went for the feeling of the record. In other words, he tried to hear exactly what a shagger on the dance floor would hear in the air, not what a rock pundit thinks someone should hear.

And what a shagger hears is so subjective it can only be compared to the gooseflesh twinge of recalling a lost love that is suddenly regained at the intimate moment of remembering. That a seemingly reactionary musical consciousness can be so romantic is a shuddering thought.  

But the idealism behind this love for an old record is also stirring:  For through the all-encompassing, albeit nebulous, harmony of the beach music scene, if a record was once loved, then there's the guarantee that it will endure.

You can find many of your beach needs daily at PopKrazy .