also loses social context—with the exception of King’s “Honolulu Maids,” in which surfing is part of the protagonist’s courtship of a Hawaiian woman. In the other songs, surfing is depicted as something to be marveled at, or to learn as an individual who wishes to go native. Though that is very interesting in and of itself, there is no suggestion in these songs that certain individuals should ride only certain types of boards, at certain locations, in the company of certain people. Surfing is reduced to a flat (a nasty word in modern surfing parlance, meaning “no waves”) achievement, at best a way of demonstrating one’s attachment to Waikīkī. Lost are the elaborate descriptions of named surfers, of named surfboards, and of the particular qualities of waves. In other words, lost is all the detail that makes surfing exciting. A corollary is hula, especially as depicted in English-language hapa haole songs. Hula is reduced to an attractive display of the exotic female body—a “naughty little wiggle,” to quote one of Sonny Cunha’s 1909 compositions.
There is much that we can learn about surfing across time and space through the musical practices of surfing communities. Surviving mele from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi show us that surfing was thoroughly integrated into Hawaiian society and the Hawaiian worldview, and that the skillful riding of long papa olo surfboards by Hawaiian kings and queens was the ultimate symbol of establishment power. New, reinvented surfing originally found musical inspiration from the mimesis of popular Hawaiian music, especially hapa haole songs, but these already suggested a renegotiation of Hawaiian society where women are objectified, as is surfing. Both are attractions to the islands, even while surfing becomes a major export.
CHAPTER 2
“Surf Music” and the California Surfing Boom
New Surfing Gets a New Sound
Surfin’ is the only life
The only way for me.
Now surf, surf with me.
Bom bom dit di dit dip
Bom bom dit di dit dip
—“Surfin’,” Brian Wilson and Mike Love, 1961
Mention the phrase surf music, and one of two iconic sounds usually comes to mind: the vocal harmonies of the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, or the instrumental, guitar-driven rock championed by Dick Dale, the Bel-Airs, and a long list of other bands. These two subgenres of what was dubbed “surf music” in 1961 emerged in the Los Angeles area, and each illustrates a different myth about New Surfing. Though the named popular genre Surf Music is not the first, most important, or necessarily best music associated with surfing, it did mark a key moment in the history of surfing as a global cultural practice: the shift of the cultural center of surfing from Hawaiʻi to California. Thus Surf Music stands as an icon of a watershed moment in the reinvention of surfing.
While Surf Music can be considered to mark a triumphant moment for Californian surfers at the expense of Hawaiians, I will show that the genre garnered mixed responses among surfers then and subsequently. For some surfers the music became and remained an anthem of their youth, but for others then and since it created a problematic popular image of surfing frozen in time while their surfing community moved on and changed. Naming something “Surf Music” may have even limited musicality among some surfers. After the initial popularity of Surf Music, many surfing musicians felt the need to separate, at least publicly, their musicking from their surfing. Eventually Surf Music took on a life of its own and lost any tenuous links it may have had with surfing other than remaining an iconic symbol of early-1960s surfing culture in California. Surfing itself moved in other directions, and surfers sought different musical practices to represent their changing priorities.
If this book is about anything, it is about the intersections of music and surfing before and since Surf Music. Though I find that the genre name Surf Music inadvertently limited musicking directly associated with surfing by subsequent generations, I recognize that the genre marks a significant moment in the history of surfing worldwide. This chapter is about that particular moment when certain musical practices were given the name Surf Music, and about what that act of naming tells us about surfing and surfers then and since.
LET’S GO TO THE BEACH! THE MIDCENTURY RISE OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
The Second World War interrupted surfing to a great extent in California and Hawaiʻi, but it also introduced new technologies that affected surfing practices in many ways—from the construction of surfboards to the dissemination of ideas about surfing through popular media. As a result, surfing experienced rapid growth, notably in the postwar United States, Australia, and South Africa, but also in Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, and other points south. New Surfing soon spread to England, France, and Portugal, and eventually to Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, China, and other coastal regions of South and East Asia. Surfing was now establishing a global community, and California was well positioned to exploit this emerging market.
The United States emerged from the Second World War as a leading world power, and California played a big role in that transformation. While California’s population had been growing steadily since the Gold Rush, the United States’ entry into the Second World War led to the significant expansion of military bases and government factories in the state. As people moved west to staff these factories and bases, the population of California rose from below 7 million in 1940 to 10.6 million in 1950. After the war, California continued to receive the lion’s share of defense funding during the emerging Cold War era. The rate of population growth in the state increased, with more than 15.8 million people in the state by 1960, and two years later California was the most populous state in the Union, with more than 17 million people. More than half of the residents lived in the southernmost ten counties of the state, informally known as Southern California—a region that makes up about one-third of the state’s landmass.1 This includes the coastal counties of San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego. These were heady times for Southern California; the United States’ film industry was firmly settled in Hollywood, and there was plenty of sun, agriculture, and now plenty of new employment opportunities, many of them providing affluent white-collar work. Life was good. Why not go to the beach?
More people did go to Southern California’s beaches, where they encountered repurposed wartime technologies to ease the willing into surfing. Light and easily shaped polyurethane foam (developed during World War II) encased with rigid and waterproof fiberglass (from World War I) began to replace wood as the standard materials for making surfboards by the end of the 1950s. The resulting lighter and more maneuverable surfboards facilitated a boom in surfing popularity. Wetsuits, another wartime technology, made surfing all the more attractive, since even in sunny Southern California, the water is chilly year-round. Whereas the fabrication of objects necessary for surfing had been a DIY (do it yourself) and custom affair, with only a few early commercial attempts, in the 1950s manufacturing these items was suddenly becoming a commercially viable enterprise, and California was at the center of this new industry.
The allure of surfing and the success of the new industry that supplied the emerging surfing community were bolstered by new dry-land lifestyle technologies as well. Battery-operated transistor radios brought new musical sounds directly to the beach as DJs began to exploit (and create) a new music-fueled youth-culture concept.2 The established technology of film was used for the first time to create surfing movies in the 1950s, and those films were always accompanied by recordings of popular music, usually mixed together by the filmmaker using the first commercially available tape recorders. Particularly in Southern California, a seemingly sudden critical mass of surfers collided with postwar optimism, new ideas about music and youth culture, and technologies that brought it all to the beach, setting the stage for the creation of new cultural practices that would define New Surfing.
CALIFORNIA AND THE NEW FACE OF NEW SURFING
