Jim Messina & the Jesters

Early in his career — best first, actually — 18-year-old Jim Messina was a devotee of surf music, enamored from the music of Dick Dale, the Champs et al. The Jesters was among his early professional initiatives, a surf music group that included, along with Messina, Costs Beckman and Ron Home on guitars, Jim Sholstedt on bass, Dave Archuleta on saxophone, and Larry Cundieff on drums. They gained a whole lot of regional band tournaments in California, where in fact the competition in the field was still brutal in 1965 and 1966, and had been good enough to access record a whole LP for Sound Fidelity. It had been re-released in the Thimble label in the middle-1970’s, to capitalize on Messina’s achievement as one fifty percent of Loggins & Messina.