The song has stuck to the wall of my mind, thrown by such force. I can hear it slipping at times, but when I try to catch it falling, it stays still … or perhaps that’s just an illusion. It has already fallen and what I am catching is the stain left behind.
It begins with the Word: “Everybody heard about the bird!”
I first heard the song when I was part of the theater arts department at Sacramento State. The school was not known for its fine arts, but lucky for us drama kids, it did provide the town’s best venue – Sac State’s oldest building, a 30-seat black box theater, which stood in the middle of the campus. The theater was truly a black box: no lobby, no ticket booth, no backstage. The bathroom doubled as a green room. Near the top seats was the lighting booth, which consisted of a stool and a rusty creaking machine that ran eight brand-new Fresnels, the only items in the room that weren’t from the early 1930s. We had to bring in our own sound system, a borrowed stereo offered by one of our classmates. Sure the theater doesn’t sound like much, and it wasn’t, but for us, it was The Place, mainly because we had complete creative control over it. No faculty ever came by the building. Ever!
My college friend Don Radovich and I put up our own plays there – short, absurdist works-in-progress, in which some of our fellow theater classmates love to participate, anything away from those great big boring musicals that the Drama Department was running in the main theater at the time.
During one midnight rehearsal there, we were working on a series of playlets, to be presented later in the semester. A freshman actor came up to Don and me and said, “There is a bird motif throughout these plays. Did you two intend that?”
“Bird motif?” I wondered. “I didn’t know there was a bird motif here.” I turned to Don. “Did you know about the bird—”
Don cut me off with his reply: “Everybody knows that the bird is the word!”
The actor walked away bewildered.
The next day, Don came in the theater and played an old cassette in the stereo. The first song: The Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird.” There it was. That was the theme song for our production. Long after the show ended its run, I would play that song constantly throughout that year and the following several years.
The Trashmen, an obscure 1960s surfer band, could be considered the founders of the mashup genre, except they didn’t have any digital help. They connected two songs by the even more obscure R&B band The Rivingtons – “The Bird’s the Word” and “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow” – to create the great “Surfin’ Bird.” I love all three songs, but “Surfin’ Bird” is the best. For a little more than two minutes, the rhythm section races down like a runaway train, as the distorted sandpaper vocals gnarls the lyrics, first chopping up “The Bird’s the Word,” then drowning in its own title, before coming up for air with “Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow.” It’s pure punk, and nothing else.
Now you know about the “Bird.” Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-
pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-pa-oom-mow-mow! Papa-oom-mow-mow!
So what song is stuck in your head right now?
