Life-Changing Bands (or Songs)

[Baked Potato]

I've always had a thing for surf music, probably semi-related to my love for ska. I converted my wife by dragging her to see Dick Dale in a tiny club in Oakland not long before he died. It's been a pretty dry spell around here for my kind of live music so I've been wearing black and hanging around jazz clubs but when surf music calls, I need to answer. Two from Santa Cruz who are worth a trip:

The Mermen (who aren't all men, but never mind that)

The Expendables

Nauga,
outside, bruddah!

For a while I was into a surf rock band called the Space Cossacks. They're pretty cool.

 

[nauga]

For a while I was into a surf rock band called the Space Cossacks. They're pretty cool.

Yes they are.

Nauga,
and all the reverb. Yes, *all* of it

 

[judypilot]

The Grateful Dead, hands down. Musically extremely accomplished and diverse. Wrote music for Robert Hunter's spacy poems that made them make sense, could play anything from hallucinogenic rock to country to blue grass. In fact, about the only genre of music they didn't perform (although I'm sure they could have) is classical. Concerts way better than their records, which themselves weren't bad.

My appreciation of the Grateful Dead crystallized when I attended a two-day concert set opened by The Who. The second day The Who performed the exact same songs in the exact same order with the exact same antics and jokes. The Dead repeated one song, and their sets were twice as long as The Who's.