was a
costly enterprise financially and even emotionally. It involved a
lot of complicated equipment that could and would screw up. All of
the cohorts involved in my brand of music seemed to be as complex,
moody and unstable as I am. Sometimes it all turned to mush. Other
times to shit. And then, every once in a while, the band slipped
into some other universe entirely where the words and the music
created their own rules, and their own beautiful codified
enthusiasm for a celebration of life. And then we soared above our
individual frail human limitations.
At the heart of the SurfPoets
was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the
universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old
surf music from the Sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf
language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the
intellectual weight of the band's “message.” And I decided early on
that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated
over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord
changes.
Like all bands, ours evolved.
We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street
in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the
biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many
people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that
“Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia.” Some ideas die hard and I think it's
a generational thing. What they really mean is, “Nobody surfed in
Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.” Which was probably mostly
true - the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea
and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer
day.
But people do surf in Nova
Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for
public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule
audience for surf poetry in Canada. In truth, most Canadians would
tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem
there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three
oceans.
Of course, the SurfPoets
ignored all of these realities and went ahead and coalesced there
in the basement on Gottingen Street in late February of 1993.
Actually, there were only two surf poets coalescing: myself and
Doug Barron, aka Hal Harbour. Doug had a keyboard that sampled
beats and sounds. I had an electric guitar with a fuzz box and the
masterful skill of strumming an A minor chord over and over again.
Years later I would tell the press, “Life is like an A minor
chord.” If you know what an A minor chord sounds like on an
electric guitar, you'll know what I mean.
I also had sheaves of
unpublished poetry, some of it even about surfing. Our first ever
tune was called “Traction.” It was about cars, not surfing. Now the
Beach Boys did surfing and then cars. We did cars first and then
surfing. Brian Wilson, after coming out of a couple of decades of
seclusion and mental illness, would explain to the media that the
Beach Boys actually sat around trying to determine the next popular
obsession to sing about after they milked surfing to death. Brian
would say something like, “So we had done surfing and it worked,
even though most of the country didn't have an ocean nearby. But
then we realized that everybody had a car.”
And so the SurfPoets would
begin with cars - a long surreal, hyperventilated spoken word poem
about a nightmarish landscape that was automotive. It was all just
one chord with a synthesized driving beat and an amazing embroidery
of sampled sounds and voices that ranged from William Burroughs to
a chanting Gregorian choir. I played some really frenetic high
squeally notes that hurt the SurfPoets' ears if played too loudly
in the basement.
Part of the lyric went like
this:
Hands on the rim of all
possibility, I'm haunted home
barricaded on four sides by
darkness
while up above the universe,
unhinged,
dazzles me like a rowdy
all-night service station
with check-the-oil
costly enterprise financially and even emotionally. It involved a
lot of complicated equipment that could and would screw up. All of
the cohorts involved in my brand of music seemed to be as complex,
moody and unstable as I am. Sometimes it all turned to mush. Other
times to shit. And then, every once in a while, the band slipped
into some other universe entirely where the words and the music
created their own rules, and their own beautiful codified
enthusiasm for a celebration of life. And then we soared above our
individual frail human limitations.
At the heart of the SurfPoets
was a creative cocktail of three great elemental forces of the
universe: music, poetry and surfing. While we did not emulate old
surf music from the Sixties, we did have an underpinning of surf
language, surf stories and surfer philosophy that carries the
intellectual weight of the band's “message.” And I decided early on
that our songs should mostly have just two or three chords repeated
over and over. I get easily confused by too many chord
changes.
Like all bands, ours evolved.
We began in the basement of a recording studio on Gottingen Street
in Halifax, six blocks up from Halifax Harbour. Halifax is the
biggest surf town on the east coast of Canada, even though many
people in Nova Scotia will still state with inaccurate bravado that
“Nobody surfs in Nova Scotia.” Some ideas die hard and I think it's
a generational thing. What they really mean is, “Nobody surfed in
Nova Scotia in the nineteenth century.” Which was probably mostly
true - the exception being the odd Mi'kmaq canoeist who put to sea
and then caught a wave back to the beach on a warm summer
day.
But people do surf in Nova
Scotia and they also create surf poetry and record it on CDs for
public consumption. This occurs even though there is a minuscule
audience for surf poetry in Canada. In truth, most Canadians would
tell you that there is no surfing in all of Canada. The problem
there is that most Canadians live hundreds of miles from the three
oceans.
Of course, the SurfPoets
ignored all of these realities and went ahead and coalesced there
in the basement on Gottingen Street in late February of 1993.
Actually, there were only two surf poets coalescing: myself and
Doug Barron, aka Hal Harbour. Doug had a keyboard that sampled
beats and sounds. I had an electric guitar with a fuzz box and the
masterful skill of strumming an A minor chord over and over again.
Years later I would tell the press, “Life is like an A minor
chord.” If you know what an A minor chord sounds like on an
electric guitar, you'll know what I mean.
I also had sheaves of
unpublished poetry, some of it even about surfing. Our first ever
tune was called “Traction.” It was about cars, not surfing. Now the
Beach Boys did surfing and then cars. We did cars first and then
surfing. Brian Wilson, after coming out of a couple of decades of
seclusion and mental illness, would explain to the media that the
Beach Boys actually sat around trying to determine the next popular
obsession to sing about after they milked surfing to death. Brian
would say something like, “So we had done surfing and it worked,
even though most of the country didn't have an ocean nearby. But
then we realized that everybody had a car.”
And so the SurfPoets would
begin with cars - a long surreal, hyperventilated spoken word poem
about a nightmarish landscape that was automotive. It was all just
one chord with a synthesized driving beat and an amazing embroidery
of sampled sounds and voices that ranged from William Burroughs to
a chanting Gregorian choir. I played some really frenetic high
squeally notes that hurt the SurfPoets' ears if played too loudly
in the basement.
Part of the lyric went like
this:
Hands on the rim of all
possibility, I'm haunted home
barricaded on four sides by
darkness
while up above the universe,
unhinged,
dazzles me like a rowdy
all-night service station
with check-the-oil
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