Sunday Screening

As a lover of classic pop culture, I watch a lot of videos that are corny. A lot that are cheesy. A lot that are campy. But less often do I find something, from what was at one time the centerpoint of the American mainstream, that is completely bugshit insane. Look:

That's Jan & Dean, performing their 1960 single "White Tennis Sneakers" on what I am assuming is American Bandstand. You can tell just by looking at them that there was something seriously wrong with these boys.

They were pioneers of surf music, which is best remembered these days for producing the immortal Beach Boys, but which was also a fad in its own right in the early 1960s that produced unbelievable amounts of dreck. My analogy would be that the Beach Boys were to surf music what the Bee Gees were to disco: a group of musical geniuses whose brilliance was outpaced tenfold by meritless commercial imitators. And if the Beach Boys are the Bee Gees, then Jan & Dean have to be ABBA: talented but totally synthetic and really, really creepy. To illustrate, here is the ultimate text of the surf genre, Jan & Dean's decidedly pre-feminist 1963 hit "Surf City" -- which was co-written, by the way, by the Beach Boys' Brian Wilson:

This shit was everywhere. Here's a particularly unnerving little thing, a clip from a 1963 TV pilot called "Surf Scene" starring Jan & Dean themselves -- I'll let you decide for yourself why the networks never picked it up:

Surf music, always a strictly American phenomenon, passed when the Beatles came along and pop-rock as we know it today began. But Jan & Dean kept at it; Jan (his full name was Jan Berry) suffered debilitating injury, including brain damage, in a 1966 car accident, and briefly the name "Jan & Dean" was used for both an album entirely by Dean and, later, a truly freaky psychedelic album called "Carnival of Sound" recorded by the convalescent Jan, his girlfriend, Glen Campbell, Davy Jones of the Monkees, and Phil Spector's studio musicians, among others. It is a scattershot, nonsensical collection of songs and random noise; their label (Warner) never released it. (I had the luck to get it from BigO, a strange website run by Singaporean leftists who regularly upload rare lost albums and concert bootlegs, then take them down almost immediately. Want to hear John Cage in San Francisco, 1965? Get it while it's hot...)

Yet Jan & Dean pressed on. Here, as proof, see one of the most incredible things I ever found on YouTube: this is from a VHS tape called "Surfing Beach Party" that Jan & Dean made, apparently, in 1983. This thing will scramble all your chronological indicators. Look:

Are you trying to figure out why that clip feels so strange? I'll tell you -- and it's not just because the costume designers couldn't seem to figure out whether it was the 80s or the 50s (and the song is from the 60s!). It's because, even though "Surfing Beach Party" is a comparatively recent production, it's completely without irony. These boys are totally earnest! And that just doesn't happen in our understanding of pop music, post-1960s. It's not coincidental that I mentioned the Beatles above; they changed the paradigm for pop, which they performed with a knowing smirk instead of the traditional big ol' grin. Most latter-day performances of great classic pop understand this and temper themselves accordingly (not to mention, the songs are so great that they stand on their own) -- Jan & Dean, clinging as they are to a tiny shard of Kennedy-era flotsam, have no such luxury. If you're anything like me, that makes you uncomfortable.

I'll leave you to ponder that. Enjoy the rest of your weekend; this is an open thread.