One Punk’s Guide to Surf Music By Sean Carswell

Originally appeared in Razorcake 132 (Feb./March 2023) and 133 (April/May 2023)

Illustrations by Brad Beshaw
Layout by Todd Taylor

Surf and Razorcake

Here’s a bit of trivia. One of the first bands the two founders of the Razorcake print zine went to see together was Man Or Astro-Man? Todd and I first met in Flagstaff, Ariz. in 1994. At the time, the local live music scene was classic rock cover bands and Grateful Dead wannabes. As bad as this may seem, it was worse. I was starved to see live music that moved me.

In August, 1995, Todd got word that Man or Astro-Man? were playing in Phoenix, which is two hours south of Flagstaff. This being pre-internet days, we weren’t able to buy tickets in advance. We made plans to get to the venue five hours early. We figured that would be enough time to buy tickets before the show sold out. The only hiccup came on the drive down. An overturned semi closed the I-17 for two hours. But no worries—we still got there three hours early and got in. Just getting in was my second favorite thing about the show.

My favorite thing about the show was everything that happened between the time Man Or Astro-Man? got on the stage and the time when they left. They were all energy and madness. I only stopped dancing once, and that was to catch a Little Debbie snack cake that Starcrunch threw into the crowd.

I don’t know how many bands and shows I’ve seen live at this point. It’s well over a thousand, anyway. And that Man Or Astro-Man? one is easily among my all-time top ten. (Strangely enough, Brad Beshaw—the illustrator of this piece and the vast majority of the columns I’ve written for this zine—and his band Lux-O-Champ opened for MOAM? in Albuquerque the night before Todd and I saw them in Phoenix.)

About five years later, I visited Todd in Los Angeles. He was the managing editor of Flipside at this point. Things didn’t look good at Flipside HQ. Todd and I had our first conversations about doing a zine of our own. And, during that trip, I dragged Todd to Mr. T’s Bowl to watch The Bomboras. Maybe they weren’t in my all-time top ten, but they did put on a hell of a show. They even had go-go dancers.

And there you have it. Two events in the founding of this zine had surf music as the soundtrack. So when Todd asked me to write this article, I could only feel like I should’ve done it twenty years ago.

There is, of course, a challenge to writing a One Punk’s Guide to Surf Music. I’m trying to jam eighty years of music into a few thousand words. This necessarily means that things will be left out and nuanced points will be simplified. I think of how protective and critical I’d be if someone wrote a One Surf Musician’s Guide to Punk. Regardless how well they did it, I’d think, “No, no. They got it all wrong.” Then I’d have to remind myself that it’s just one person’s abridged view of a big, complicated thing, and I’d relax.

And with that caveat, here we go.