Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
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In this way surfing is like music, for sound waves vanish the instant they are heard. Both surfing and musicking1 are ephemeral cultural practices that have no quantifiable results or functions other than the feelings they may engender, and the meanings given to them by people. Surfing and musicking require much more time and energy than is reasonable if their purpose is to achieve basic material needs. We clearly engage in them for other reasons. Yet even if we believe passionately that surfing and music are imbued with great meaning, we may not always be able to articulate what that meaning is. Let’s sing another song . . . I’m going to catch one more wave . . .
This book is about surfers and the types of music that they create and associate with surfing. But I need to be clear about which surfers I am attempting to interpret and represent. Surfers form a global affinity group, but as with any group of people, no statement or claim can be true for every individual in that group. We could conceive of surfers forming any number of distinct affinity groups globally. The stories I tell here are illustrative of surfing communities that I have access to: primarily cosmopolitan surfers from California, Hawaiʻi, Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom, with much more limited input by surfers from other points on the globe. These surfers are global—collectively they have surfed at the best surfing beaches around the world—but they still represent relatively affluent cosmopolitanism from North America and Europe more than the cultural sphere on any given beach in Indonesia, for example. To put it another way, dozens of surfers—some of them very influential in my posited global surfing affinity group—have contributed to this book, but that still leaves millions of surfers worldwide whose voices are not represented here.
This is a deeply personal book. I have aspired to ride waves and to make music since I was a child, and being a surfer and a musician has been an important part of my self-identity since my early teen years. Therefore, readers will notice that my authorial voice changes from time to time from that of writer-scholar to that of surfer-musician. In particular, I shift to the first-person plural pronouns we and us occasionally and talk to the in-group tribe of surfers—a community I invite you to join if only for a moment. Come in . . . the water is nice.
The critical scholar in me knows that the “I” and “we” here have very limited experience in the context of globalized surfing. I grew up surfing in Virginia and Florida before moving to California. I also spent about a decade living in Illinois, where I would surf in the chilly waters of Lake Michigan. Once I encountered another surfer at my local Chicago-area break, but only once. Beyond the mainland United States, I have had the pleasure of surfing in Mexico, Hawaiʻi, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Yet my experience with surfing—and with musicking—is individual. My experience is also highly mediated. As with every surfer-musician I interviewed for this book, my experiences are influenced by commercial interests. By this I mean that even the private pleasure of riding a wave is not pure and unaffected by the entertainment industry and other commercial concerns that use surfing as a marketing tool. For example, I am told what I should feel when catching a wave by an old Beach Boys song, just as I am reminded by the latest issue of Surfer magazine that I would look much better in a new pair of boardshorts.
This book asks two interrelated questions: First and foremost, how is music used to mediate the experience of surfing? And second, how does surfing, and changing notions of what a surfing lifestyle might be, affect surfers’ musical practices? Through my interviews and analysis, I find that music is necessary for making sense of surfing, for communicating important information about surfing, and for creating a collective space where surfers communicate together something of the experience of surfing. All of these uses of music by surfers help to form and define surfers as an affinity group.
WHAT DOES MUSIC HAVE TO DO WITH SURFING?
In a feature story in Surfer magazine, Brendon Thomas wrote, “The connection between music and surfing is undeniable,” and Surfgirl Magazine editor Louise Searle described how “[s]urfing and music go hand in hand: like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, strawberries and cream, and vodka and tonic—they’re all better together.”2 Surfing has even been (incorrectly) called the first sport with its own music.3 The notion that music and surfing somehow naturally go together seems to be gaining traction.
Four recent films offer very interesting takes on the topic of surfing and musicking.4 The first is Pounding Surf! A Drummer’s Guide to Surf Music, produced in 2006 by musicians Bob Caldwell, Paul Johnson, and others. Though this film was first envisioned as a primer on playing drums for instrumental rock, it evolved into an elaborate filmic history of early 1960s California surf music and its ties to Southern California surfing culture. Also released in 2006 was Australian surfer Dave Rastovich’s Life Like Liquid, consisting entirely of footage of surfers improvising music together, interspersed with clips of the same people surfing and musing about the relationship between musicking and surfing. In 2008 two additional films were released on the subject. Live: A Music and Surfing Experience, produced by California-based surfing film maker David Parsa, is a wide-ranging look at music and surfing that contains brief comments by leading professional surfers, surfing industry icons, and popular musicians. The fourth film, Musica Surfica, by Australian surfer and filmmaker Mick Sowry, is a curious and at times perplexing meditation on Australian Chamber Orchestra director Richard Tognetti’s genre-expanding violin playing interspersed with Derek Hynd’s quiver-expanding challenge to design and ride finless surfboards. Taken together, these four films spin an intriguing tale about the interweaving of the human performative practices of surfing and music-making. The first sticks close to the named genre Surf Music and captures a key moment in the history of surfing’s reinvention in the twentieth century. (I capitalize the term Surf Music to indicate that I am referring to a specific genre and not all music associated with surfing.) The second is an extended experiment to see what would happen if surfing musicians were cloistered together for some days. The third is an expansive survey of music performed and endorsed by influential modern surfers. The fourth reminds us that both surfing and music-making cannot be limited to the narrow practices celebrated in surfing contests and by popular media.
Music and surfing are mixed and matched in many other ways. Festivals that combine some aspect of surfing and music are popping up around the world in obvious locations like Hawaiʻi and California, but also in places such as the United Kingdom, Portugal, France, Italy, and Slovenia. Surfing magazines routinely list professional surfers’ favorite music, review music albums, promote concerts and music festivals, and publish feature articles on surfing musicians.5 Surfing brands such as Quiksilver promote musicians, include music-related products in their lines, or, in the case of clothing company Rhythm, imply music in their brand name. Much of this is business as usual. Rare is the festival without music, and commercial industries long ago figured out that music was a compelling way to boost and sometimes define their brand images. While this phenomenon is not unique to surfing, the use of music by the surfing industry tells us something about how the industry interacts with and manipulates surfing communities.
More striking, however, is the surprising number of former and even current professional surfers who have second careers as popular musicians. This includes, most notably, the eight-time platinum-album-selling surfer-musician Jack Johnson, from Hawaiʻi; three-time world surfing champion Tom Curren, from California; two-time world longboard champion Beau Young, from Australia; two-time women’s world longboard champion Daize Shayne, from Hawaiʻi; free surfer Donavon Frankenreiter, from California (fig. 1); and other surfer-musicians featured in chapter 5 of this book. There are also professional musicians of all sorts who are passionate