My brother David, who would have been 67 today, loved music of all kinds but especially Beach Hot Rod music. It seemed surprisingly out of character for him. He was in no way a surfer. He was thin, dark, and wiry, with a jazzman’s soul (and unfortunately jazz club vices). Play the twang of a slack key guitar, though, and he would light up with all the sunshine happiness of a dude shredding a wave.
He adored performers like Dick Dale and the Ventures, the Beach Boys, and the Surfaris with equal fervor. His favorites by far were Jan and Dean. He claimed it was because they had introduced him to Surf City. For all his adult life, he would call me at random and say, “We should go to Surf City, Keith because it’s two to one. [Two girls to every boy!]”. I have no reason to doubt that the siren song of a beachside paradise had a great pull on him, but I know that his favorite song of theirs was “Deadman’s Curve.” Many were the times that he would break out in terrible falsetto to warn me (and everyone in earshot) that “you won’t come back from Deadman’s Curve.”
There are a few reasons that a song like “Curve” would appeal to my brother. He always enjoyed the corny addition of the squeal-of-brakes sound. I never knew him to let it pass without wry comment. Couple that with the voiceover narration towards the end as the singer recounts the terrible events of the drag race gone horribly wrong and the song has a brilliant narrative arc. David loved a good yarn.
As a classicist, he certainly appreciated the oracular nature of the song. You may be a great drag racer, it cries, but no matter. There is nothing but doom for you in your current course. No Delphic pronouncement could be so dire. He would have especially savored the implication that, despite Jan and Dean’s harsh warnings, arrogant fools would test the curve anyway and fall in humiliation, adding a Cassandra-type feel to the prophecy.
Most of all, my brother reveled in irony. In 1966, two years after “Deadman’s Curve” hit the charts, Jan Berry suffered a severe brain injury in an auto accident driving his Stingray on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Although he rehabbed enough to eventually be able to sing and tour, the pair never achieved the success that they were building towards or that they deserved. When Jan died in 2004 of seizures arising as a complication from his chronic brain injury, David phoned me in tears. I think it was that touch of doomed tragedy that kept Jan and Dean and their signature song so dear to him.
I miss David dearly, but he is always there for me in the memory of his favorite songs.
Happy birthday, Dave.