{"id":13504,"date":"2017-11-09T05:30:57","date_gmt":"2017-11-09T10:30:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=13504"},"modified":"2017-10-12T12:46:06","modified_gmt":"2017-10-12T16:46:06","slug":"slacktone-gets-to-the-good-part-quickly","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2017\/11\/09\/slacktone-gets-to-the-good-part-quickly\/","title":{"rendered":"Slacktone Gets to the Good Part Quickly"},"content":{"rendered":"

Surf instrumental music is a distinct musical style, one that has persisted in popularity even as countless other musical fashions have come and gone. While today surf music enjoys a cult following, that cult is as strong as ever. And thanks to its modern-day exponents \u2013 like Los Angeles-based Slacktone, who agressively update surf music, keeping it fresh for the 21st<\/sup> century \u2013 the rock ‘n’ roll style that evokes surf, sun and the beach is here to stay.<\/p>\n

Slacktone guitarist Dave Wronski recalls how he first fell in love with surf music in the 1960s. \u201cThe dad of the kid across the street had a Ventures record,\u201d he says. \u201cI really liked the sound of it. I had always listened to a lot of different kinds of music, and my dad and uncle were big music enthusiasts, too.\u201d Wronski’s father had a big record collection, and even as a first-grader, young Dave would make his own mixtapes on a reel-to-reel deck.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen when the British Invasion hit, I got the idea of bands in my head,\u201d Wronski says. He learned to play guitar and has been playing ever since. \u201cI made my living that way for a long time,\u201d he says; these days he also works at Fender Music, building the very guitars used by many surf-style musicians.<\/p>\n

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By the early 1980s, Wronski had joined Jon and the Nightriders, a popular \u201csecond wave\u201d surf instrumental band. There he first played with drummer Dusty Watson, who today is in Slacktone with Wronski and bassist Sam Bolle. After playing on some studio recordings, Jon and the Nightriders got a gig opening for Malibu’s notorious Surf Punks at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium.<\/p>\n

Wronski knew how Surf Punks fans treated opening acts, but he was prepared. \u201cI said to the other guys, ‘We\u2019re gonna have to take care of that.’\u201d By that time he and Dusty were seasoned players with experience in punk bands as well. So they decided to alter their approach from the band’s traditional style. \u201cWe decided we would play real fast and hard,\u201d Wronski says with a chuckle, \u201cand just shove it down their throats.\u201d<\/p>\n

The gig was a success, and soon the band took off on a tour. \u201cWe were the first instrumental surf band to go to Europe,\u201d Wronski says. The band eventually cut some tracks \u2013 covers of surf standards \u2013 at famed Gold Star Studios with producer Shel Talmy, the man who first recorded the Who, the Kinks and David Bowie. But since Wronski wasn’t the leader of the band, he had little say in the material chosen to be recorded.<\/p>\n

Eventually Wronski decided, \u201cOkay, screw it. No covers. And I want to do this the way it should be done, as a three-piece.\u201d He and Watson formed Slacktone, and from that point forward played original music. Slacktone would turn out highly-charged songs true to the surf aesthetic \u2013 lots of twang and reverb, a solid, steady backbeat \u2013 but with a harder, modern sensibility.<\/p>\n

Wronski spends a lot of time thinking about how to convey the surf vibe in his music. He compares surf style to what celebrated film score composer Ennio Morricone did in \u201cspaghetti western\u201d films like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly<\/i>. \u201cGuys like him wanted to create imagery with music and sounds,\u201d he says. With Slacktone, Wronski takes those ideas and applies them to the surf idiom. \u201cThe sound of Fender reverb, that really big and romantic guitar sound, kind of a mournful tone\u201d is central to the music.<\/p>\n

But Wronski and Slacktone aim to take things a step beyond the original surf groups. \u201cThose guys wanted to create imagery to match the sport of surfing,\u201d he says. Slacktone’s music is designed to do that as well, but also to evoke the spirit of extreme sports like snowboarding, off-road motorcycling, competitive skateboarding and mountain biking. These days, the band often gets booked to play at extreme sporting events.<\/p>\n

For Slacktone, it’s not about long, showy jams; the songs are concise and built around razor-sharp hooks. \u201cI listen to some pop songs,\u201d Wronski says with a laugh, \u201cand I think to myself, ‘get to the good part!’\u201d His goal is to make sure that nobody who hears a Slacktone song ever says that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Surf instrumental music is a distinct musical style, one that has persisted in popularity even as countless other musical fashions have come and gone. While today surf music enjoys a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":13505,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[40,41,62,3233],"tags":[3252],"class_list":["post-13504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-instrumental","category-interview","category-rawk","category-surf","tag-slacktone","cat-40-id","cat-41-id","cat-62-id","cat-3233-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13504"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13558,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13504\/revisions\/13558"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13505"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}