The Duo-tones, masters of surf guitar
The Duo-tones, who play the Old Town Music Hall in El Segundo Sunday night. He wouldn’t realize it until much later, but one day in 1961 Paul Johnson created a new musical genre. He’d been playing guitar for only a year. Johnson was a freshman at Bishop Montgomery High School, and in the process of messing around with his new Stratocaster, he wrote a song called “Mr. Moto.” Johnson and his buddy Eddie Bertrand had met on a school bus. Both were just learning to play, and both were obsessed with the guitar. “I used to draw the thing on my notebooks,” Johnson recalled. They played at family parties, but then one day Johnson’s sister introduced him to a rare specimen – a drummer – and suddenly the kids had a band. “Back then there weren’t bands everywhere, so it was kind of a rare thing,” Johnson said. “We’d never seen a real drummer…He was a drummer in a dance band at Redondo. We invited him to come over and try out and he was terrible but we loved it. We’d never heard drums with our music before.” Thus the Bel-Airs were born. They added a piano player and a saxophonist and in March of 1961, they went in the studio and recorded the single “Mr. Moto.” Music historians would later…
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