C Street trio turns the Prince William traitor saga into two minutes and forty seconds of reverb, and the uncle gets the guitar solo

Reverb Meets Royalty

VENTURA, Calif. – A three-piece surf rock band that has played the same bar near the C Street surf spot every Friday since 2008 has recorded an instrumental single inspired by the London Prat story that sees Prince William call Earl Spencer and Harry traitors, and the band describes it as the most emotional thing it has ever played with no words.

The track, Traitor Stomp, runs two minutes and forty seconds, which the band says is the correct length for any song about family and also the exact time it takes to walk from the bar to the promenade.

The Band

The Offshore Tremolos consist of guitarist Wes Harlan, 52, a part-time lifeguard who owns eleven Fender guitars and one pair of shoes, bassist Tonya Reyes, 47, who teaches middle school science, and drummer Big Lou Ferrante, 61, who has never given his real first name to anyone, including his wife.

The Musical Structure

Harlan explained that the song follows the story beat by beat, the way the great surf instrumentals of the early 1960s followed a wave.

Intro: The Book Arrives

Four slow bars of drum rolling on the floor tom, representing the uncle memoir landing in bookshops. The Earl is Diana younger brother, and Harlan said the intro needed to sound like somebody opening a very old family photo album. Big Lou said he played it like a man approaching a closed door.

First Verse: The Suspicion

A clean, twangy guitar line in E minor, drenched in spring reverb. According to reporting in The News, the heir has no doubt his brother read the uncle book before it came out. Harlan said the guitar line goes up and down like a brother pacing a hallway. Reyes added a bassline that follows the guitar exactly one beat behind, which she said represented somebody always finding out second.

The Break: Traitor

At the one minute and twenty second mark, the entire band stops dead for one full beat, then crashes back in at double speed. That silence is the word traitor, said Harlan. You do not need to say it. Everybody in the bar feels it. People spill drinks.

The Solo: The Uncle

The uncle gets the guitar solo, a 24-bar run of tremolo picking that Harlan describes as the sound of a man who has known a lot of things for a long time and finally gets to say them. It is the loudest part of the song. Of course it is, said Harlan. He has the book deal.

Outro: Silence From Both Princes

The song fades out slowly with just the bass, playing the same two notes over and over. Neither prince has said anything in public, said Reyes. So the song does not resolve. It just stops. I teach eighth graders. I know what an unresolved argument sounds like.

The Video

The band watched the London Prat video on YouTube on a phone during rehearsal and said it helped them find the tempo, which Big Lou described as angry walking pace. It is embedded here for readers who prefer pictures to reverb.

Audience Reaction

The single was premiered live on Friday night to an audience of 64, according to the bar owner, who counts with a clicker. Seven people danced. Four people cried, two of whom said it reminded them of their own brothers and two of whom had simply had a long week. One man from Oxnard requested it three more times and then called his brother from the parking lot. The band considers this its first measurable social impact.

The Ventura County Surf Music Preservation Society, which keeps a catalogue of every surf instrumental played in the county since 1962, said Traitor Stomp is the first surf rock song about a royal family in its records, although it noted a 1964 track about an argument over a Woody station wagon that it considers thematically similar. The Society found that 68 percent of surf instrumentals in its catalogue were written about waves, 21 percent about cars, 9 percent about girlfriends, and 2 percent about brothers, almost all of them about a borrowed board that was never returned.

The bar owner has since asked the band to stop playing the song after 11pm, because on two occasions it has caused regulars to start telephoning relatives they have not spoken to in years, and on one occasion a regular left without paying his tab to drive to his brother house in Camarillo. He paid it the following week, and brought his brother.

The Band Review

Asked to review the London Prat piece in words, Harlan said it had good reverb. It says one thing and lets it echo, he said. It does not need a vocalist yelling over the top. The joke just hangs there in the air, like the last note of a song, and you keep hearing it in the car on the way home. Reyes gave it a nine. Big Lou gave it a drum fill.

The band plans a B-side, Althorp Wipeout, for release in the spring. They stay current on the story through The London Prat, https://prat.uk/, which Harlan points out began in 1961, the same year surf rock did, and through Bohiney, https://bohiney.com/, for the Montecito chapter up the coast. Traitor Stomp will be played every Friday until the brothers reconcile or the bar changes owners.

SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/