GIFT IDEAS FOR A SURFER CHRISTMAS

By Corky Carroll

Every year at about this time I do my annual great gift ideas for a surfer Christmas column.  And, looking back over the past years, it seems that I pretty much offer up the same ol’ stuff each year.  The predictable surf staples.  New surfboard, wetsuit, surf accessories, surfwear, Paddleair rashguards and the ultimate surf trip vacation.  I usually find a way to plug my surf trip business by mentioning you can find out about that at www.corkycarroll.com.  And, of course, there are always the same stocking stuffers.  Surf wax, leashes, ding repair kits, CD’s and surf videos.  

So, this year instead of spending a lot of time on that stuff I want to tell you about a couple of interesting other ideas.  And these are not expensive either.

The first is a whole different approach to Christmas cookies.  I found this fantastic bakery in Newport Beach that custom makes cookies.  The can make your surfboard shaped cookies with what ever you want them to say on them.   These are great for your Yule parties or just to give that surf dude or dudette on your shopping list.  You can have ones made that look like fins, or waves or anything.  And they are killer tasting cookies.  

The name of the place is Wonderland Bakery and it is located at 1314 Bison, right off Mac Arthur at the 73 freeway, in Newport Beach.   My wonder daughter Kasey turned me onto this place a few days ago.  She goes to school at Orange County School of the Arts and is a creative writing major.  She got the job to write the copy for a talking bear that Wonderland Bakery is working on and she wanted to show me all the cool cookies and cakes and other bakery goods that they had there.  She knows I am a sucker for pastry.  

So we went down there to grab a cookie platter that I took back to the hallowed halls of this very newspaper for holiday snacks.  I was amazed at all the cool things that they could do with cookies and cakes.   And it turns out that this is the cookie hangout for both Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, so I was feeling like I was in good cookie company.   It seems that I can have retro 70’s style twin fin surfboard shape cookies make with a little corky model logo.  And, even better, I can have them made to resemble the airbrushed cow design that I use on my personal boards.   I am not sure, but I think they can actually bake me a new board.   Anyway, I thought that this was a cool idea for a really special gift or for a party.  They also have lunch boxes that you can have made to order.   Put your surf person’s photo on it and some killer slogan.   “Ralph Shreds Jaws.”   They will keep it forever.   You can get more info by calling them at 949 640 9095.  

The other great, and unique, gift idea is a rare and previously almost impossible to get Clark Foam t-shirt. For over forty years the only way to get an authentic Clark Foam t-shirt was to be given one by Grubby Clark, or an employee of Clark Foam. This made the shirt the ultimate insider, local surfers only icon.  Clark Foam closed its doors in December of 2005.  Prior to that, every December Clark’s foam delivery truck drivers would give their special customers a green, long-sleeved Clark Foam t-shirt for Christmas.  You had to be a surfboard shaper or some prominent member of the surfboard industry to be given a Clark Foam shirt.   They were never for sale so the average person could never own one.  

Last year when Grubby closed the foam business my pal and long time Orange County surfing entrepreneur Allan Seymour worked out a deal with him to obtain the exclusive rights to Clark Foam logo t-shirts.  And now you can get one by going to Allan’s website www.classicsurf.com.  If you don’t have a computer you can send $22.50 plus $4.50 shipping to classicsurf.com, Post Office Box 2446, Capistrano Beach, Ca. 92624.

I personally think that this shirt would be a really cool gift for anybody that has been surfing for awhile and would be able to appreciate the significance of having one of these really rare and formerly impossible to get shirts unless you were way far into the “in” crowd of the surfboard industry. 

To show you just how hard these were to get I remember once when I was still in my teens I sort of snaked Grubby out of a wave he wanted at Cottons Point and I was off the t-shirt list for like 5 years.  I had to sign an agreement that I would give Grubby any wave he wanted for at least one whole summer to be granted the right to have a Clark Foam shirt again.   The surf world can be a hard place folks.  It’s not all peaches and cream ya know.

So, there are a couple of totally off the wall ideas for you for this year.  This is not to say that the surfboards and wetsuits and rash guards and surf adventure trips are not still fantastic ideas too.  But this just gives you a little different sort of thing to think about.  

I do have to point out that the cookie platter that I took to the newsroom did arrive a few cookies short due to the fact that they really tasted good with my coffee that morning.

THE RED GUITAR ~ THE WAVE

by Corky Carroll

This morning I was listening to the radio and for some crazy reason I had on the “oldies but goodies” station.  Now I know what you’re thinking but honestly I hardly ever listen to that.  So just shut up about being an oldie.  Well, unless you include the goodie.  Then it’s cool.   Anyway, I was drivin’ down P.C.H. checkin’ the waves and they played an old instrumental song by Duane Eddy called “Forty Miles of Bad Road.” 

What a flashback that was.  This was one of the roots of early surf music.  I had that 45rpm single on my stack all the time when I was a kid growing up in Surfside.  We used to put the record player out on the front deck of Mike DeCheveroxs’ house, that deck was actually in the shore break most of the time, and crank it to the max so we could hear the music while we were surfing.   There were a couple of terminal problems to that though.  First off you could only put about 12 records on the stack at one time.  And in those days the songs were very short, maybe 2 to 3 minutes at the most.  So by the time you turned it on and got it going and paddled out all the records were usually over with.   That combined with the fact that the sun melted the records make that practice very short lived.   Where were the waterproof ipods when we needed them?

But the point was, as I remember, that musicians like Duane Eddy were the early influences of surf music.  It was all instrumental bands mostly.   The Fireballs were actually from New Mexico, but they had the perfect sort of rhythm and lead combination that became a staple in all the surf films of those days.  Sandy Nelson’s “Let there be Drums” was a huge surf favorite.   And, naturally, the Ventures.  These dudes had the sound down, especially when they added a fantastic guitar player named Nookie Edwards. 

Still, the king of the surf guitar is and always has been and always will be Dick Dale.   Dick set the bar.  After his fan base got too big while playing on weekends at the Rinky Dink Ice Cream Parlor, no I am not making this up, in Balboa he worked out a deal to use the old Rendezvous Ballroom for dances.  It was 1961 and the birth of the genre was in full swing.   I can remember so many weekend nights rockin’ to Dick Dale and the Del Tones and trying to talk young surf babes into a trip out onto the beach to “check the surf.”   It is a good thing that they didn’t know the fact that there was no surf in front of the Rendezvous Ballroom.  But that made it even better because you could use the “lets sit down and wait to see a set” line.  It is amazing how often that worked.

At that time I was twanging away on a really cheap acoustic guitar that my dad had bought for me in Tijuana.  As I was taken with the sound of surf music I asked for an electric.  So he got me a homemade red electric guitar along with a really, really used old tweed Gibson amp.  The amp had a just slightly blown speaker, which actually gave it a really cool sort of moderately distorted sound quality.  

I immediately learned to play the instrumental version of Ray Charles’ “What I’d Say.”   I had been taking piano lessons for years and was able to transpose it to guitar without too much problem.  I was stoked.  Most of the early songs were actually very simple progressions.  Usually some sort of melody based off of the 1-5-flated 7-octave scale and only using the 3 basic major chords.  It was all tone.  Later it got more sophisticated.  

There was a dude who lived down the street from me named Glenn Karash.  We started, and I use the term very loosely here, jamming.  He had a new Fender electric and a nice amp and I had my red guitar.   That thing didn’t intonate well over the 5th fret, but I never got that high on the neck in those days anyway.   Those were the roots of my early serious interest in music.

Later I got hung up on folk music and was strictly an acoustic player for many years.  That and my life long struggle with the violin.   But sometime in the mid 90’s I got interested in playing electric again and then a few years ago I started be influenced heavily by the playing of Mark Knopfler, formerly of Dire Straits.   He uses an almost exact same tone that was the basis of early surf music.  Listen to their song “Sultans of Swing” and you can hear what I am talking about.   So now I find myself 40 years later seeking out that same sound and attempting to integrate it into the style of music that I play, which is not surf music.   Hearing the Duane Eddy tone on the radio brought me back to the days of the red guitar.