The Surf Sibs

 

Unlike their contemporaries the Ramones, the four members of the Surf Sibs actually did share the same last name.

Mikal, Karl, Bryan and Denise Surf grew up in Omaha, Nebraska. In 1964 (six months before the eldest sibling was born), their father legally changed his name from Randolph Esterhaus to R. California Surf due to what their mother Pam considered an unhealthy obsession with Southern California culture.  Although R. California (who went by Cal) had never traveled outside the Midwest, he lived vicariously through his extensive collection of hot rod, pinup and surfing magazines and every piece of vinyl put out by the Beach Boys.  (Unfortunately for Cal and the siblings, Pam left the family in the summer of 1968 with one of the many traveling door-to-door salesmen she had befriended over the years.) 

The Surf siblings showed little musical aptitude growing up, but their father insisted they participate in “Christmas caroling season,” which often started the Saturday after Thanksgiving, much to the dismay of their neighborhood.  As a consequence of these outings (and the hours of prep sessions to which Cal subjected the children), the kids eventually developed a natural harmonic cohesiveness.  Following the ’78 season, in January 1979 Cal surprised his children with his latest idea:  a family “band” in the style of his beloved Beach Boys.  Cal did not play any instruments, but he had written two notebooks worth of lyrics featuring his favorite subjects (cars, surfing and girls) and thought it would be “boss” to try to record the songs. 

Karl, who was a freshman at Omaha’s Northwest High School, sheepishly approached a couple of juniors he knew who played in the school’s Crown Point Jazz ensemble.   A subset of the band—for some reason referring to themselves as the Smash Squad—had recorded radio and TV jingles for a local advertising company and had even provided the backing tracks to a minor regional hit by local disco singer C.C. LeBlanc.  Selling one of his two dirt bikes and a lathe, Cal scraped together enough for a half-day of studio time.  Crowding the kids and the Smash Squad into local Cornbuskers Studio, the collective came up with the four songs that the family self-released as the E.P. Riptide!  (Cal had photographed the siblings posing in the studio for the E.P. cover, but after developing the film he realized that Denise bore absolutely no resemblance to her brothers (or to Cal, for that matter), which was perplexing; to avoid confusion, Cal elected to use a close-up of a portion of the elaborate 1/24” scale Venice Beach diorama he had painstakingly assembled in the family basement.)

The song “Surf’s Up” received some local airplay (primarily due to the novelty of 12-year-old Denise singing the lead).  However, it quickly became apparent that The Surf Sibs project would be short-lived.  Mikal and Karl hit puberty and both of their voices changed to a deep baritone, destroying the harmonic diversity of the group.  Also, although Cal as the lyricist had been exposed from afar to a great deal of California culture, he had no true understanding of it; for example, rather than telling a single story, he insisted on cramming every song with as many car, surf and girl references as he could, whether or not they made any sense.  And then there was the issue of the musical genre.  Although the airwaves featured a diverse variety of styles in the late ‘70s (e.g., disco, punk, new wave), vocal group surf music was not one of them.  (It would be another decade before a version of the Beach Boys had a surprise #1 hit with “Kokomo” from the movie Cocktail.)  

The Surf boys ended up running a successful pawn shop in Cedar Rapids.  Denise was a nun for four years, after which she took up professional wrestling.   In 1998, Cal married wealthy local widow Caroline North and the couple moved to an active senior community in Pasadena, California.