FZ & Don Donahue
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FZ: And next we have a record called "Grunion Run," which was recorded about six years ago in a studio that I used to own in Cucamonga, California, and it was produced by Paul Buff, who also happened to be the engineer on another fantasticly succesful teen-age record a few years back that we all know and love, "Wipeout." He's the man responsible for committing that thing to tape, and he's trying to live that disaster down. And he, under, uh, forcing him, uh, agreed to record this piece of music called "Grunion Run," which at the time seemed to be not very commercial at all. He didn't really wanna do it, but it wound up being the B-side on a record called "Tijuana Surf," which turned out to be a very good selling record. It sold eight thousand copies in Fresno, and a hundred and fifty thousand copies in Mexico, where it was number one for seventeen weeks.
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FZ: "Grunion Run" was a little ahead of its time because of the technique of the fuzztone stuff used in there. The fuzztone used on the guitar on this record was a homemade number. Before they were commercially available, Paul Buff, the electronic wizard who is now the recording engineer at Original Sound records for Art Laboe in Los Angeles, had manufactured this little homemade cheapy fuzztone by accident. He tried to make a transistor amplifier, he didn't know what he was doing, and found that every thing you plugged into it distorted like crazy, so he started running everything through it, the bass, the guitar, you know. And, here it is, the B-side of "Tijuana Surf."
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FZ: [...] I'd like to say that Ray Collins and myself wrote that tune a long time ago, and we started hassling it all over town in Los Angeles. This is [...], and we wanted to be teen-age songwriters, and I think it was the first teen-age song that I ever wrote, I thought, "God, I like this stuff so much, and it must be so easy to write those kind of songs." But we really sweated our buns when trying to get it together and make it really swell, so it wound up taken to of all people, Art Laboe, and he says, "Well, I got a group, I got this group called The Penguins, you know, they made 'Earth Angel,' you know, and a few of them are working at the car wash, but I can get them down here to sing this tune." So he actually brought their Penguins, or he purported this people to be The Penguins, to the recording studio, and introduced them to us, and we showed them how the song went, and they sort of liked it, and it took about two or three months to actually get into finally have a session and record the tune. They recorded it, and they put it out on the market, and it sold about four thousand copies in New York, and nobody in El Monte wanted to even know about it, you know, they forget it. They don't like to be reminded that they live in El Monte, I guess. Whether El Monte is something really spectacular. There might be a few who like the idea, but . . . Pandora likes it. But we, uh, still perform this tune on stage sometimes, you know, just for fun.
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When we finally moved to Southern California it wasn't much better, 'cause we wound up living in Lancaster, which is in the middle of the desert, in a sort of depressing place with, uh, you know, where there's nothing happening there. So they make sure that I didn't learn to drive, or anything. They wouldn't even sign a permit for me to take drive education at school. So I didn't get a car until I was 23. But I absorbed enough of the legend and lore of the auto freak of Southern California to be able to write a few songs pertaining to that subject.
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