The Concaves perform Friday at The Catalyst.

Bill “Dogfish” Pitts gets a little choked up when he talks about singing “Shallow Reef.” The song, a hard-driving ditty on The Concaves’ latest album Alive From the Red Triangle, reminisces about an absent friend.

“When I sing that song, I think of five young guys who surfed that first shortboard at the hook and how my four buddies aren’t here any more,” said Pitts, who trades vocals, lead and rhythm guitar for The Concaves with son-in-law J.D. Anderson.

It’s that personal connection to the music that binds the four members of this Santa Cruz surf band together. Each member of the group, which plays Friday (August 21) at The Catalyst with Slacktone! and The Restless Kings, has his own story of how instrumental surf music shaped his life.

For Pitts, the music became a window to the wider world. “I was so dyslexic when I started school, they weren’t going to mainstream me,” he said. “I would sit by a piano and strum the strings. My mom found me doing it and said ‘this kid’s crazy! Get him a guitar.’”

Playing helped him come out of his shell. A surfer, he joined a first wave surf band in the ’60s, but it was many years later before The Concaves came into being.

Pitts and Anderson are at the heart of the band, bridging a generation gap. Pitts and his wife went to Soquel High School with Anderson’s parents. The families kept in touch and when Anderson was old enough, Pitts invited him over to see what he could do.

“I put a guitar in his hands and he amazed me,” the restoration contractor remembered. He gave Anderson a tape of surf songs to learn and the next week, “the kid” had them down cold. “His staccato picking was really good. I said ‘this kid has talent’ and started feeding him songs to learn.”

By 1995, Pitts and Anderson (along with original drummer Matt Hicks) were a “gigging band.”

“It was two generations of music playing,” Pitts said. “The younger generation and his influences and the older generation and my influences melded The Concaves into a modern surf band.”

When Karl Hopkins saw the band with their then-drummer Mongo Celebrato (drummers Hicks and Pat Krouse had come and gone) play on New Year’s Eve 2003, he knew exactly what he wanted to do.

Surf music had always affected him on a level he found hard to describe. “It felt soulful to me,” said the former surfer, who was born “the day surf music died” (February 1964, when the Beatles played the United States). A regular listener of KFJC’s “Wave of the West” show, Hopkins remembers owning Jan and Dean Meet Batman.

The custom cabinet builder bought the The Concave’s first CD, A Heavy Surf Advisory, and started to learn to play Fender bass guitar. Then he overdubbed their tunes with his bass lines and asked them, persistently, if they wanted a bass player.

“These guys thought I was a stalker or something,” said Hopkins, who now fits right in. “I didn’t learn bass and then find a band, I found a band and learned to play bass for it.”

The Concaves — which plays regularly around Santa Cruz — is the third surf band Stretch Riedle has been involved with. The drummer, who joined two years ago, wanted to learn drums at age 11, but didn’t pick up the sticks until he was 30 and working at Streetlight Records in San Jose. A fan of surf music, he started jamming with two friends — a bassist and a guitarist — in 1985.

“Surf was great because there was no singer in the mix,” said Riedle, an expert on the genre. “Just a guitarist, bassist, drums and sometimes keyboards.”

His jam sessions yielded his first band, The Shockwaves, which played San Jose from 1985 to 1988 and had a song, “Surfing Louie,” included on volume two of The Best of Louie Louie from Rhino Records. Riedle then played with the Submersians for 10 years, leaving in 2004.

“The cool thing about being in a surf band in the ’80s is that there were three college stations, it had support,” said Riedle, who works for The Starving Musician on Ocean Street . “A punk show would fit in with the high energy, agressive surf music. It was ’60s music without being a bunch of hippies.”

One thing Riedle — a surfer for just one day of his life — enjoys about The Concaves is that their music mixes the traditional surf band sound with other influences, including rockabilly and psychedelic. Vocal music is relatively new for the group, though six of the 13 tracks on their latest album have lyrics. The band plays its own tunes, so when audiences started asking for vocal requests, it led to The Concaves writing songs of their own.

“For me, this music comes from more than 45 years of surfing in Santa Cruz and how things have changed,” Pitts said, “I was born and raised on the beach and surf, it’s in my blood. This is just music about my story and the guys in the band are a perfect match for this kind of music.”

The Concaves and Slacktone! in The Catalyst’s Atrium. 9 p.m. Friday, August 21. The Catalyst, 1011 Pacific Ave., Santa Cruz. $8 in advance, $10 at the door. (831) 423-1338.