The Surfbird Has Flown

Every cultural allusion hides a small eternity, and if a work of art pointedly alludes to more than one cultural thread, well…look out. You might have thought a little background on the tune Surfin’ Bird and a brief nod toward spaghetti westerns was a good starting point for describing The Surfbird, yet another sporty offering from Vintage Voyage. Set aside the fact that you’re back so soon after writing up Voyage’s Grodsky, a font whose letters took you back to glitzy New York haunts frequented by people that shook off the Great Depression like a barely discernible draft.

But here you are, mind stretched every which way by a maelstrom of interconnected information and history, and much to your grave misfortune, it’s all really, really interesting. Obviously it’s ALL got to be in there. You can do it. Focus.

You can’t do it. Mainly because of the last guy. Instead, let’s take a look at just a few exhibits, so at the very least, the scope of the problem will be clear. First, here’s what we know about The Surfbird: “Summer vibes are here with Surfbird!…the point of this family is getting more modern moods into a classical cowboy-western typographic. The result is a playful western slab…”

The folks at Vintage Voyage are absolutely right. By softening up the wizened, Marlboro Man lines and corners of a traditional western font, they have imbued it with surfboards and sand, custom vans and Frampton coming alive. You have a font for home decor, mugs, t-shirts, stickers, logos, music/podcast covers, menus, posters. And indeed, the sharper styles can still convey Eastwood with a dangling cigar butt, but the softer emanations give you “playful” western, more toward Travolta on a mechanical bull.

And then there’s the fun-in-the-sun problem. Consider Surfin’ Bird, a song you’ve heard since always, in Full Metal Jacket, Pink Flamingos, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Family Guy, your own mind under circumstances you’d prefer to keep to yourself. And the song gets covered—many heard the Ramones accelerated version of an already fast song before they heard the original.

The “original” version of Surfin’ Bird made famous by the Trashmen in 1963 was actually a hybrid of two 1963 songs by the Rivingtons, Papa-Oom-Mow-Mow and its redux The Bird’s the Word. To make matters worse, the Trashmen concocted their version after hearing another group called the Sorensen Brothers perform The Bird’s the Word live. All of this confusion led the Trashmen’s Steve Wahrer to arrive at the logical conclusion that he must have been the one that wrote the song in the first place, so he credited himself accordingly when Surfin’ Bird became a hit. Fortunately, this is one music fairytale with a happy ending, as the Rivingtons got full songwriting credit for Surfin’ Bird after threatening to sue for plagiarism.

One place you might have heard Surfin’ Bird was on Detroit radio during the summer of ’76. Because then there was The Bird. 1970s Detroit was not an optimistic place. Jobs leaving, crime rising, future bleak. Baseball followed suit, a losing city with its losing team: the Tigers. But out of seemingly nowhere a lanky 21 year old baseball pitcher with a mess of blond curls appeared, Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. When he was called and told he’d been drafted, he joked that he initially thought it was the army calling. In reality, he’d been at work sweeping a garage when he got the news. A kid called The Bird because of his resemblance to Sesame Street’s Big Bird, and the sounds of Surfin’ Bird naturally followed.

The Bird won games. The crowds in and around Tiger Stadium carried placards reading, “The Bird is the Word.” Laid off autoworkers would hand him envelopes with one-dollar bills inside, as The Bird was paid the standard rookie rate of only $16,500 a year. This was before the internet and during a time when the Detroit Tigers weren’t on television all that much. So Bird was myth and rumour—if you wanted to see him on the mound talking to the ball, gesticulating toward the mysterious planet he came from, or on his knees grooming the pitcher’s mound himself, you had to go to the stadium in-person to see the magic and idiosyncratic new force powering the resurgent Tigers.

Myth and rumour, that is, until June 28th, 1976 when the swaggering Yankees came to Detroit and the game was nationally televised. The Bird beat the Yankees in front of a riveted nation, and Detroit went wild. Detroit’s unwilling Icarus and modest rock star, the only baseball player ever to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. You can see the delight he brought in the fans’ faces, and indeed, this sweet kid from Massachusetts injected optimism into a Motor City that continues to fight to this day, with its renowned tough spirit giving it more wins all the time.

Like the shooting star that he was, The Bird was there for only a moment. During a game on July 4th, 1977, the arm went dead. That’s exactly how The Bird described it. He was never the same again, and now he’s elsewhere entirely.

So that’s the bit on “playful” Surfbird, but now let’s toughen up with the “more serious sharp styles” and head out west. We can all surely agree that the best starting point is here with the soundtracks of Ennio Morricone.

Ennio Morricone, musician and composer. Where did you go wrong? Don’t blame yourself, virtually everyone would choose his music as the soundtrack to Surfbird’s western characters. You can see tumbleweeds blowing past the font if you look at it long enough. You could never have known The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly would be a wholly appropriate soundtrack to the first terrifying encounter one has with Morricone’s massive Wikipedia page—Wikipedia, the ostensible condenser of lives into suitable modern-person portions. Considering that Morricone wrote his first piece at age 6 and just left us last year at 91, you’ve got an 85-year long career to summarize within the tight confines of a blog post. You decide to take the easy way out, and simply list the film and television soundtracks he didn’t write. With 400 film and television scores and over 100 classical pieces, Ennio Morricone’s hand is in everything. And he played Garry Kasparov and Boris Spassky at chess, the latter match ending in a draw. Metallica opens with Morricone, the Ramones close with him. He’s way too much for here.

In this post-modern world it can seem like specific stories and definitions have become uncomfortably fluid, that the melding and re-melding of disparate themes causes a singular unease as we look into the cultural tempest all around us. In the end, nobody knows where anything comes from, granting such a broad statement is open for discussion. But having that discussion—digging in, looking back, putting it together—that’s the fun and the obligation. And a font like The Surfbird is a starting point. Lest you think a few artfully designed letters shouldn’t be credited for inciting a long, resonating journey back into the 20th Century that scoops up the Trashmen, the Ramones, Mark Fidrych, and Ennio Morricone, please consider: this post exists.

The power of print—the way it looks, the eras and places it can evoke with a few changes of line—can’t be underestimated. Each design features a unique psychology and serves as an entry point to its own multiverse. Designers dedicate their lives to making that happen. Check out all of Vintage Voyage’s offerings and dig in, as they’re one of the best. Thanks again, Vintage Voyage, for opening up innumerable doors, for guiding the ship down strange tributaries, for all the unique places you take us on your ongoing Voyage. We’ll be seeing you again soon, we’re quite sure.

The Surfbird has two graphic styles, a contour and a fill for color. It has 82 decor graphic elements to add fancy style to your design. The Surfbird comes in Cut, Slab, Smooth Cut, and Smooth Slab. Its seven widths are Light, Regular, Medium, Semi Bold, Bold, and Black. OTF/TTF and Multilingual.