Pipeline (to California)

Idaho, where I grew up, is in many respects a very cool place. Mountains, lakes, deserts, mining ghost towns, great skiing and hiking. Here is a photo of the Sawtooth Mountains, less than half a day's drive from where I grew up. Most members of my extended family are still there. Mostly you could not drag them away to anywhere else.

So what made me so hot to get away and move to California for college? Some of you are thinking, dumb question, everyone wanted to go to California in the late 1960s - hippie mecca, land of opportunity, specifically the land of very good colleges that were not all the way away on the East Coast of the USA. (One of the few times my father absolutely put his foot down was when I got a college recruitment letter from Columbia University in New York-- way too far away for him, and kind of scary.)

For me the siren song of California was kind of there in the background, past and present. Even my father had ridden freight trains to there looking for work during the Depression. But its attraction heated up for me with surf music and the whole early 1960s image of beach paradise in California. (My weakness for Brazil shows that I still like a good beach paradise.) I remember reading car magazines about the hot rod customizers of LA, hearing the Beach Boys on the radio, and absolutely loving instrumental surf music (still a prominent mix in my iTunes).

So here is a little post-modern take on surf music, mixed with Texas. This is a video of Dick Dale, king of the surf guitar, playing one of the archetypal surf songs, Pipeline, with Stevie Ray Vaughn, who is so beloved in Austin that he has a statue on the Town Lake walk/bike trail. The clip is an extended take with footage from Back to the Beach, a fun but silly movie with the fictional post-1960s adventures of Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Enjoy. (For a second helping, if you like the first, or for greater authenticity, if we can use a word like that here, is a clip of Dick Dale from 1963 playing Misirlou, which some of you may remember from Pulp Fiction. Third scoop, if you are feeling nostalgic, is the Beach Boys, combining both car and surf images, very important California icons, in Don't Worry Baby. The cars and striped shirts from the latter did make it to Idaho, but the surf was hard to import.)