Santo & Johnny & Surf-Fusion Inspiration

Rock & Roll has almost an infinite amount of sub-genres that stretch across a vast spectrum. The sub-genres vary ever so slightly from one to the other, and sometimes they're hard to differentiate. When looking at the spectrum as a whole, however, opposite sides may seem totally unrelated. A certain piece of the Rock & Roll pie that has made it into the Super 8's inspiration/sound library stands out more than the others; it's an idiosyncratic element of the rock genre that isolates itself on a small island, where the soft background hush of crashing waves is forever present, and where surfer guys and gals jog on the beach during a sunset and smile with each other in a cheesy, slightly tacky, and dated fashion.

Surf Rock can be one way to describe Santo & Johnny's music. 99% of the time, it consists of mellow, smooth, sliding, reverberated chord progressions, usually at around the same slow tempo, and more often than not - in a 3/4 time signature. Although it can get homogenous real quick, this type of music has definitely put its defining trademark on Rock & Roll's golden age. With "Sleepwalk," the duo's #1 hit, the two young, sleek guitarists captured the nation's attention:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4peMwQQz3E

Santo & Johnny wouldn't be Santo & Johnny without the slide guitar (bottom right corner of above photo). This iconic instrument is usually plucked with one or two fingers at a time, and a metal bar is moved up and down its horizontal neck with the other hand to produce the creamy, uninterrupted slide one doesn't get on a normal guitar. S & J run this instrument through a highly reverberated tube amp to get their particular sound from it. Such an iconic sound is always a good thing, except whenever it's used today, it's hard to get any originality out of this one instrument. It's been rooted in time.

Our band is making the attempt at merging the out-of-date surf mentality with modern funk, jazz, and alternative rock. Our objective is to take this cheesy surf-sound, which can nowadays be found in films to portray a false sense of beauty (see the film "Twelve Monkeys," where, in a dystopian world, the now-cheesy song "Sleep Walk" is used to back a commercial for a paradise getaway, illustrating an illusion of happiness that the depressed characters can never reach), and combining it with a more modern rhythm or melody. This combination, if performed correctly, will depict my band's natural and unaffected appreciation for the catchiness of Santo & Johnny, while also adding another level of musical complexity.

Playing parts of throwback music is important to me because I think there's a lot of value in showing how I can express my own take on something outdated. If I can manage to fit a slide guitar into one of Super 8's songs, we can reference the old artist and create new juxtapositions that have never been done before. In this outlook, the more distinct the differences are, the better. We might just f*ck around and put a slide guitar through a crunchy rock amp, sample some S & J, and add it all to a hip-hop beat and see what happens. After all, we've always been a band of experimentation.