Perhaps the most famous instrumental in rock history and certainly its most famous drum solo is the surf rock classic, “Wipe Out,” composed and performed by the Surfaris.

Recorded in late 1962, the band virtually made up the song on the spot at Pat Recording Studio in Cucamonga, California. The band was there recording “Surfer Joe,” a vocal piece they intended as the A-side of their first single. They had forgotten to think about a B-side for the single. So, Bob Berryhill, Pat Connolly, Jim Fuller, and Ron Wilson quickly recorded a simple 12-bar blues instrumental with that rather flashy drum solo by Wilson.

The title, of course, came from southern California surfer slang for falling off your surfboard, especially in a spectacular fashion. A band member, now lost to time, suggested starting the song with the crackling sound of a surfboard breaking up. The group‘s manager, Dale Smalin, provided the maniacal “Ha-ha-ha Wipe out!” cry that kicks off the record.

It may have been that cry that put a kink in the Surfaris’ plans. Because deejays in those wilder, less restrictive times, bypassed “Surfer Joe” and started playing the B-Side. During the summer of 1963, “Wipe Out” actually made it all the way to #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 (held out of the top spot by Stevie Wonder’s debut recording, “Fingertips”).

The song was re-released in 1966 and got to #16 the second time around. The original recording or covers by other artists have been featured in more than 20 movies and TV shows, appearing in at least one per decade. And its drum solo became the hallmark by which any garage band drummer of the 1960s was judged.

While the Surfaris never duplicated the success of “Wipe Out,” the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2020.

And Pat Recording Studio? It was eventually purchased by a young employee they hired who was eager to learn about the recording business. Some SoCal kid named Frank Zappa.

One of the real giants of the motion picture industry passed away in May at the age of 98. Yet, for most of his career, the industry looked down on him as a guy who cranked out cheaply made movies that primaritly played at drive-in theaters.

Roger Corman broke into the movie business in 1948 as a mail room messenger boy at Paramount Pictures. After years of bouncing around in various jobs, including some time spent living in Paris, Corman sold his first script in 1954 for a low-budget film called Highway Dragnet.

Corman took the money he made from his script and found some other money from show biz contacts he’d made and financed his first directorial effort, Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954). Made on a budget of just $12,000, the film turned a profit, so he was allowed to produce a second film, The Fast and the Furious (1955). Yes, this little hot rod epic did inspire the multi-million dollar, multi-sequel franchise of today.

Corman’s second film was distributed by a low-rent outfit called American Releasing Company. They liked Corman’s product and were happy to advance him money to make other films. Corman quickly established himself as a producer/director who could bring films in on time and under budget.

Along the way, American Releasing Company changed its name to American-International Pictures, cranking out pictures to feed the boom in drive-in theaters that were springing up all over the United States. Corman divided his time between grinding out pictures for AIP and Allied Artists, another Poverty Row distributor. He worked in all the genres that were big at the drive-ns, Westerns, science-fiction, horror, and gangster pics. In fact, it was his Machine Gun Kelly (1958) that got him his first positive reviews (and gave Charles Bronson his first starring role). That same year, his The Cry Baby Killer gave Jack Nicholson his first lead.

Corman had a reputation for completing films quickly. His best-known movie, Little Shop of Horrors (1960), was shot in just two days. Reportedly, Corman wanted to see if it was actually possible to complete a feature film that quickly.

As he moved through the sixties, Corman became very well-known for a series of 8 pictures he made based on the works (or at least the titles) of Edgar Allen Poe. These included The Raven, Masque of the Red Death, and House of Usher.

From the seventies through the eighties, Corman concentrated on producing more than directing but continued to crank out films that have become cult classics like Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, Grand Theft Auto, Boxcar Bertha, and Death Race 2000.

Corman’s influence goes way beyond his filmography. He gave starts to directors Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, and James Cameron. Acting graduates of his drive-in pics include Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern, Dennis Hopper, and Diane Ladd.

And it doesn’t stop there. As a distributor, Corman brought to American screens the films of Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, and Akira Kurosawa.

We are unlikely to see his like again. But if you’d like to salute this great American filmmaker by watching one of his cinema classics tonight, here’s just a partial list of his films not already mentioned in this post:

• The St. Valentine’s Massacre
• Tales of Terror
• X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes
• Buckets of Blood
• I, Mobster
• The Wild Angels
• The Wasp Women
• The Trip
• Bloody Mama

Law enforcement calls them “rebound scams.” It’s when someone who’s been scammed once, gets scammed again. It’s not a rare occurrence.

62% of people who were scammed once, got scammed again. In fact, the average number of times a victim gets scammed is 59! Why? There are a couple of reasons:

1.) Scam artists, like any business, keep a record of who they've done business with. That way they know who may be ripe to be conned again, especially if they’re small dollar amount scams. Nicking a mark for $20 or $40 a pop may not seem like much, but if they clip you 59 times, that can add up to between $1,180 and $2,360.

2.) Scam artists can also sell their lists to other scammers. It can be a complicated computer database or as simple as a hand-written list, but “lead lists” can be reused over and over to steal from the unwary.

Once on such a lead list, it’s unlikely your name will ever be removed, so what can you do to reduce your risk of falling victim to a rebound scam?

Tell Your Family – Embarrassing as it may be to admit you were conned, studies have shown that telling family members can reduce your chances of falling for another con by as much as 50%.

Practice Scam Prevention – Never answer scam emails promising you free merchandise, even if they seem to be coming from a legitimate retailer. Big corporations simply don’t use this type of email for promotions. Don’t give your credit card, bank account, or social security number out over the phone. Other tells: con artists frequently ask for payment in the form of gift cards, financial transfer apps, or cryptocurrency – all of which leave you with no way to ever recover the money.

Avoid Recovery Scams – These types of cons add insult to injury. The scammers use the lead list to call and offer to recover the money you’ve already lost but for a fee. Once you’ve paid the fee, they disappear.

Be Smart with Your Smartphone – Never answer calls or text messages from people & numbers you don’t recognize.

No other fashion trend quite represents the “swinging sixties” like the miniskirt!

Hemlines had started to creep up as we moved from the fifties into a new decade, moving up above the knee for the first time since the Roaring Twenties. But it wasn’t until the British Invasion moved the center of fashion from Paris and New York to London that skirt lengths shortened radically and the miniskirt was born.

There is some debate over who really started the trend. Carnaby Street designer Mary Quant gets credit, but there is evidence that she wasn’t the first designer in London to come up with the idea. Regardless, young girls all over the world quickly embraced the design.

Here in the U.S.A., the miniskirt gave school principals fits. Schools across the country broke out yardsticks and spent many a morning measuring skirt lengths and sending home those hussies. Of course, many smart girls would begin by wearing a somewhat longer skirt to get by their parents and school officials at the start of the day. Then, they would head to the girl’s bathroom and readjust the length of their skirts to be as short as they thought they could get away with.

(it will seem totally strange to people under the age of 60, but during that decade most schools did not allow girls to wear slacks to school – dresses and skirts only.)

Despite their length, true sixties’ miniskirts were not tight or form-fitting. Instead, they looked like the simply flared, A-line skirts of the 1950s, just cut shorter.

As this style was not conducive to wearing stockings with garters, the miniskirt also helped popularize the recently introduced pantyhose as well as a variety of colored tights.

Of course, a few designers tried going even shorter with the micromini, and skirt lengths continue to go up and down with each new fashion season, but the miniskirt has never really disappeared from the fashion scene.

Research conclusively proves that walking is good for your health and can actually extend your life. A study in Europe found that walking right around 2 miles a day can reduce your risk of dying from anything!

If that sounds like too much (especially if you haven’t been walking at all), walking just 1,000 steps a day (about 10 minutes’ worth) can reduce your risk of dying by 15%. Walking just 500 steps a day can drop your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by 7%.

So take some steps to increase your lifespan today!

Debut albums. They really have never been “make-it-or-break-it” kind of releases as many of rock’s greatest acts had less than stellar initial offerings. But the reverse can sometimes be a bit of a curse.

Here are just a few debut albums that may also be these artists’ best albums:

The Doors – Their first, self-titled LP was an instant classic, giving us “the long version” of “Light My Fire,” which clearly indicated the way rock was going to go in the next few years. It also contained bona fide classics like “Break on Through,” “Soul Kitchen,” and “Twentieth Century Fox.” Add to that one of the obligatory roots blues numbers so popular at that time, “Back Door Man,” and a weird 1925 German opera song written by playwright Bertold Brecht & composer Kurt Weil, “Alabama Song.”

And of course, the cherry on top, the long, stream-of-consciousness ramblings of “The End” (allegedly recorded while Jim Morrison was tripping on acid). While the Doors had a long, successful career until Morrison’s tragic end, as far as the critics were concerned nothing ever matched up to their maiden voyage.

Led Zeppelin – The band actually began life as “The New Yardbirds,” thrown together by Jimmy Page to cover some gigs the Yardbirds had been contracted for before they decided to break up. However, once they got together, Page, Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham decided it made more sense to create a musical identity that owed nothing to the Yardbirds’ past. Their first album was actually recorded before the band even had a record deal. They financed it themselves. This gave the band total creative control. The album was an instant favorite on the newly emerging string of “progressive” radio stations that were popping up on the FM dial. With songs that remained live favorites for years like “Communication Breakdown,” “Dazed and Confused,” and “Good Times Bad Times,” this LP instantly established Led Zeppelin as one of rock’s top acts when it was released in 1968.

Unlike the Doors, many of the group’s subsequent albums were better than or at least equal to this first offering.

Meat Loaf: Bat Out of Hell – Marvin Aday, under his stage name Meat Loaf, was touring with a National Lampoon stage show. For some reason, fledgling composer Jim Steinman was also along on that tour. The two bonded and began working on a rock opera project based on Peter Pan that Steinman called Neverland. That soon morphed into taking 3 songs from the Neverland project and combining them with 4 new Steinman songs to become a project we now know as Bat Out of Hell.

Unable to get any record label interested in them, Mr. Loaf and Steinman recorded the album by themselves over a two-year period (1975-76). Somehow, the duo landed Todd Rundgren as their producer.

What followed was a series of brutal rejections by virtually every major label. Finally, the album secured a release in 1977 through the tiny Cleveland International label. It went on to sell more than 43 million copies (making the major labels look pretty stupid) and established Steinman as a composer who went on to have hits with artists as wide-ranging as Barry Manilow, Bonnie Tyler, and Boyzone.

Unfortunately, Meat Loaf never did find much success singing anyone else’s songs. After their long-delayed Bat follow-up Dead Ringer stiffed, a brief period of feuding between the two ensued. Eventually, they patched things up and Meat Loaf went on to record 3 more LPs of Steinman’s compositions.

The Cars – By the late 70s, much of rock was mired in over-produced, self-important sludge. The remedy was a back-to-basics movement dubbed “new wave.” And one of the leading proponents of that wave was this little band from Boston led by Ric Ocasek. Their debut album, released in 1978, has some interesting parallels to the Doors. Both LPs came out on Elektra Records. Both featured multiple cuts that got extensive FM airplay, and most critics considered both debut albums to be each band’s best.

While the album peaked at #18 on the Billboard chart, it had remarkable staying power and wound up at #4 when the magazine released its year-end chart covering sales & airplay for all of 1978.

With a second side that featured each track seamlessly segueing into the next, band member Elliot Easton has said of the album, "We used to joke that the first album should be called The Cars' Greatest Hits.”

In 1957, a package of the old, classic monster movies (Frankenstein, Dracula, etc.) was released to local TV stations, touching off a craze for movie monsters that continued strongly through most of the 1960s. Of course, as we grew older, the monsters were played more for laughs than screams. The Addams Family and The Munsters had made their prime-time debuts in 1964.

So, it wasn’t surprising when, just one year later, Saturday mornings got their very own lovable creature feature, Milton the Monster. Milton was the product of the lab of mad scientist, Professor Weirdo, high atop his gloomy mansion on Horror Hill. His clumsy assistant, Count Kook, caused the Professor to add too much of “the tincture of tenderness” to his formula. The result was a totally ineffectual monster who blew clouds of smoke out his sawed-off skull and spoke like Gomer Pyle.

Created and directed by a guy named Hal Seeger, the show followed the format most kiddie cartoons used back in the day – 3 different short cartoons, each starring a different lead character. Unlike most other shows, the line-up of other cartoons rotated between 5 characters. Most episodes featured Fearless Fly (a silly Superman knock-off) as the second feature, but during the show’s run, there were also cartoons featuring Muggy-Doo Boy Fox, Stuffy Durma (a hobo who became a millionaire overnight), Flukey Luke (a detective in an urban setting who was still somehow a cowboy), and Penny Penguin (a young girl mammal with the cuteness factor turned to overload).

Most of the voices for all these features were provided by versatile voice guy, Bob McFadden with the sole exception being Stuffy Durma, where the voice work was handled by Dayton Allen (who also provided the voices for both Heckle & Jeckle among other cartoon characters).

Milton the Monster proved popular enough to remain a part of ABC’s Saturday morning line-up through 1968. The entire series was released on home video by Shout! Factory back in 2007, but has since gone out of print and now commands stiff prices in the second-hand market. There is also a book about the series, Milton the Monster: Horror Hill Epitaph by Kevin Scott Collier, which is still in print.

Since the advent of cell phones and the internet, the ways unwary senior can get scammed has multiplied rapidly. Before you move any of your retirement savings into a new investment, make sure you do this:

1.) Check Its Legitimacy – These websites – BrojerCheck.finra.org, AdvisorInfor.sec.gov, and nfa.futures.org show all registered financial advisors’ records and licenses. If you don’t see your guy or the company trying to hustle you, stay away.

2.) Check Its Transparency – Any legitimate investment should have several independent ways you can find its price and performance. Don’t take the word of other investors. Most Ponzi schemes pay off the early investors so they will become unknowing shills for the people who are really going to get fleeced.

3.) Check with a Friend or Independent Adviser – Before making your decision, run the opportunity by another professional with no skin in the game or even just talk about it with a friend.

4.) Take Your Time – Any advisor who is urging you to act quickly is not acting in your best interest. Legitimate investments will always be around tomorrow.

How dark is your bedroom when you sleep? Believe it or not, if it’s not dark enough, it might cause you back pain!

Even when we sleep, our bodies can detect the amount of light in our surroundings. If there’s too much light, we don’t get the kind of deep sleep our bodies need. Sleep helps relax our muscles, especially our back muscles. It also gets rid of lactic acid, which contributes to back pain. On top of all that, the less sleep we get, the more susceptible we are to feeling pain. Add all of that up and lack of sleep can be a significant contributor to chronic back pain.

Make sure your bedroom is as dark as possible.