Surf X Surfwest: Riding the Northwest's surf rock wave

The Pacific Northwest is home to a small, but fervent surf rock scene with bands often accenting instrumental music with pop culture themes. It's a vibe that culminates at an annual surf music festival in Shoreline. Surf X Surfwest 2024 is July 19-20 at Darrell's Tavern.

Nothing appeared out of the ordinary back in 2016, when Pat Wickline was strumming his guitar next to friend and drummer Mike Bajuk, and some friend of a friend, Hiro, on bass guitar.

The band was slapped together for a Halloween party at Wickline's Bellingham home, a 134-year-old church building. The trio decided to try out some 1990s sci-fi surf rock that night.

"We covered a Man or Astro Man song," Wickline said. "It just so happened that Hiro, Mike, and I were the people who played."

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"We played that surf song together and it really clicked," he said. "Later on, I’m talking with Mike, our drummer, about it. I said, ‘Hey, what do you think of the band?’ And he said, ‘What’s not to like? I get to play with Hiro Yamamoto.’ And, oh my God, I had no idea Hiro was from Soundgarden or anything. I’m glad, because it started our relationship with no baggage.”

"None of that, 'I know who you are' baggage," Yamamoto added.

Wickline is tied to the local art scene (he's known for sculpting the giant squid at Pike Place Market), while Yamamoto is a part of Seattle music history.

Yamamoto describes himself as "semi-famous" as the co-founding bass player of Soundgarden during its formative years in the 1980s. He exited the band shortly before it rode in the pocket of the '90s grunge wave. But he never stopped playing. At that Halloween party, Hiro's wife suggested that the trio stick together and form a surf band.

Today, that band is Stereo Donkey. They practice in the same church building. At the time, the trio wasn't aware that they were dropping in on a surf music scene already churning in the region.

"We love the music, we have a lot of fun, and we're finding that the surf scene itself is kind of like that, too," Yamamoto said. "It's a lot of people who are playing the genre because they just love the feeling of it ... it's a friendly scene, and that's part of the DIY thing, too. It kind of fits with the laid back sort of crowd. We're just hanging out, having fun."

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"We heard about this festival," Wickline said. "Immediately there it was, completely built-in, a group of musicians and a community that normally would take years to develop. And there it was, they were just welcoming to us. And we just plugged right in."

That festival is Surf X Surfwest, an annual surf rock event in Seattle. While Stereo Donkey has performed at the festival in the past, they're not part of 2024's lineup. According to local promoters and musicians, there are enough local bands to maintain a rotating bill each year.

Surf X Surfwest is held at Darrell's Tavern each summer, a dive that promotes itself as the bar “where your dad used to drink." More than a dozen bands perform on two stages, one indoors and another in the parking lot. This year, Surf X Surfwest is July 19-20. Aside from local acts, like the Boss Martians, it's headlined by Mexico City's Strings Aflame and Rhode Island's The Nebulas.

Surf rock scene in the Pacific Northwest

It's perhaps no surprise that a festival like Surf X Surfwest emerged in Seattle. The region has multiple elements that feed its surf rock scene. The Ventures, who are among a handful of musicians credited with spawning the genre in the 1960s, were from Tacoma and Seattle. Since then, the region's DIY indie scene has always been filled with garage and punk bands keeping surf rock going.

“There are bands that have been doing this off and on for decades, like the Boss Martians (from Seattle), and down in Portland, Satan's Pilgrims, but in the last seven or eight years, the number of bands has grown significantly," said Lukas Myhan who plays bass in two Seattle-based surf bands, The Delstroyers and The Woodhavens.

“It's not big, I think it's pretty accurate to say … there's 12 or 13 bands locally,” he said. “If you want to expand out to the Pacific Northwest, in general ... then it goes bigger into 20-something bands. There are people who come to pretty much every single show that we play, or that our friends play …. We crossover with the garage and country scenes around here as well, and The Delstroyers play shows with punk bands.”

Audiences are usually a mix of the expected Northwest jeans and T-shirts, but some come dressed in tiki shirts, psychedelic attire, or as Myhan said, "dressed to the nines." Depending on who you ask, bands and fans skew older, but then again, maybe not so much.

"Sometimes it's people from the old scene," Yamamoto said. "There's some of the people from the very old scene for me, like from way back when. But there's also a younger scene ... it isn't as intimidating as a punk scene. The surf music scene is pretty mellow. Demographically, I think it is older, it's not like we're full of teenagers, let's put it that way. But there are younger people there, too."

"There is this cosplay version to it, which is fun," he said. "It brings people back to an era, it helps them move back to Americana, so I enjoy that part of it too. The genre is not just the music. It's the lifestyle, the clothing, it's a little bit of everything."

"A little bit of everything" for some bands includes carrying a theme, often sci-fi or horror, or at least wearing matching outfits. Some bands play B movie clips behind them as they perform, or incorporate movie quotes into songs, all meant to accent the instrumental music.

“When you don’t have any lyrics to your songs, but you’re wanting to set a mood, set a vibe, it helps with that. It helps really tie things together," Myhan said.

The Delstroyers are horror themed. Everett's Cosmic Wrays give the impression of a 1950s sci-fi B movie. Boise-based Seatopians draw inspiration from pretty much any movie featured on "Mystery Science Theater 3000" (they're named after a race of undersea dwellers from Godzilla movies). Vancouver's Verbtones wear matching red/black striped shirts. The Viking Surfers ... don't actually dress up as Vikings. Seattle's Muertemen are dark and mysterious.

All are surf bands, yet impart very different vibes through reverb heavy riffs and instrumental tunes. Some are more traditional, others are more punk, and others are just their own thing.

“I feel like the thing that unifies Pacific Northwest Surf music is that the bands tend to sound very different from one another," Myhan said. "I know that is a weird, backwards way of looking at it, but I’ve definitely seen in areas of the country … there is more of a tendency to have bands that sound more like each other. I think in Seattle, and the Pacific Northwest in general, you almost never have any bands that sound exactly the same. They all bring their own unique energy to it. I mean, I have heard people say that Northwest surf music leans a little bit darker, and a little bit more rock and roll.”

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Different or darker, or more rock, there appears to be a demand for it. Even if local crowds are small, the genre spans the USA, and the globe.

“There is an international, worldwide audience for this music," Myhan said. "It’s not huge, but we sell records to people in Russia, Germany, Greece and Japan, and Spain, and Italy. We send records all over the world."