Johnny Bartlett on the History of Wig Torture

I sat down with the amazing and talented surf guitar legend Johnny Bartlett a few weeks ago. We had a chance to talk about a band called Wig Torture I had blogged about last year. Johnny told me all about the conception of the band and allowed me a peek into his man cave. It is with great pleasure that I am able to round out the history of a great local Bay Area band and present to you the following interview with one of the nicest guys I know, Mr. Johnny Bartlett.

"It's the wig torture!"

Julie Green

April 9, 2016

Soon after me and Dale started the band, Phil said “Hey I’ll play drums because my brother has a set of drums”, his brother is the drummer of The Mermen. Dale said “I’ll play bass because that only has four strings”. And that left me with guitar, so we all learned our instruments and then we met (thee) Michael Lucas.

Phils’s brother was playing drums in Michael’s band “Mal”, which I later joined and am on the 2^nd album, which came out when I was still in high school.  My first band before Wig Torture was The Dangling Genitals! We played Mike’s 18^th birthday at his house in Hillsborough.

We said “Hey can you manage us? But you have to change your name.” So Phil had a budgie (parakeet) and they had a lamp that had tassels hanging down and they used to put the budgie under the tassels and they used to say “It’s the wig torture!” with their British accent. So he said “What about Wig Torture”? and we said “sure”.

We played shows as Wig Torture for years, like The On Broadway and The Mab and The Sound of Music was our first gig. We opened for bands like GBH and The Circle Jerks. The great thing happened at The On Broadway, Faith No More opened for us and each band received $2! And about six months later they were huge.

Then I started getting into surf music and those guys, Wig Torture, started getting into marijuana and I was moving to go to college in Santa Cruz, so I bowed out. Aaron Nudelman was playing drums for us at the last stage of my involvement with the band and took my place on guitar when I left.

We met when we were 15 and had lunch everyday as the outcasts at Hillsdale High, I named my record label Hillsdale Records even though I hated high school. I didn’t go away to college right away, I went to CSM for 2 ½ years, so I was 21 when I quite that band, maybe 22 years old.

So when I went to college, I started writing all these surf instrumentals. I kept in touch with Michael Lucas who said we should start a surf band. So I went up to the City one day for our very first practice. We got a call from, I wanna say David Nudelman or maybe Aaron, and they said “Hey Wig Torture is supposed to play at Sluggos Pizza at UCSC, we can’t do it. Do you guys wanna play?”, the day we formed The Phantom Surfers , we didn’t even have a name. And we said “Hell Ya!”. So drove after like jamming basically, we took the place of Wig Torture on this bill. So that’s the end of my Wig Torture story and the beginning of my Phantom Surfer’s story.