Surfing about Music. Timothy J. Cooley
magazines, such as the article in Surfer, titled “Is God a Goofyfoot,” in which Brad Melekian asks a Catholic priest, a Christian pastor, a Jewish rabbi, and a Buddhist monk if surfing itself might be a religion.25 (His conclusion is that it is not, but that it can be a powerful spiritual and meditative practice.)
In my experience as a surfer, and in talking with other surfers, I’ve concluded that those who keep at it for some years tend to find the practice of riding waves to be a deeply but inexplicably satisfying experience. Personally, surfing adjusts my attitude, removes anxiety, and provides a level perspective on dry-land problems and pleasures. A Christian myself, I have a practice of surfing after church Sunday mornings, a tradition I only half-jokingly call the sacred ritual of the post-Communion surf. Sometimes this sacred ritual is more spiritually satisfying than Mass itself.
The contemplative possibilities of surfing may also lead some surfers, though not all, to seek musical expression. Other surfers are more focused on the adrenaline boost surfing can provide, and this inspires their musicking (something that Dick Dale claims, as I will show in chapter 2). There are many reasons and ways that surfing might encourage musicking among some, but in most cases, surfing and musicking are enacted in different spaces/places/locations. On dry land—even on damp, wave-swept beaches—there is only memory of the adrenaline rush, the search for oneness, the healing power, the spiritual redemption, and so forth that motivates the surfer. There on the beach surfers try to recapture some of the feeling of being in the water, surfing. They swap stories about their best rides, tell lies, exchange knowledge, reenact their moves, and, as we shall see, make music. Therefore, the place of musicking is a place of removal, away from the place of surfing itself. Connections between surfing and musicking must always be tenuous, changing, fluid.
SURFING AND MUSIC: APPROACHES TAKEN IN THIS BOOK
A key ethnomusicological tenet is that musicality is an integral part of group imagination and invention. Though the affinity group surfers is fluid and as fickle as the surf during a rapidly changing tide, its individual members do share the core experience of riding waves. Water may be the universal solvent, but it also binds us all. In my look at the musical practices of surfers in locations around the world, I keep returning to this shared experience that binds surfers. And where I may theorize the global, I also keep it real by grounding my interpretation in the real-life stories of individual members of this community. This book presents a series of case studies that explore different ways that surfers—and sometimes nonsurfers—associate the cultural practices of surfing and musicking. Along the way, I also hope to expand ethnomusicological thinking about the many ways musical practices may be integral to human socializing, and perhaps to being human in the first place.
The first three chapters are historical and move chronologically, with some overlap. I start with the earliest known music associated with surfing—Hawaiian chant—and continue through Hawaiian popular music during the first half of the twentieth century. I then move to the named genre Surf Music. Third, I analyze the music used in surf movies to see what they can tell us about surfing and musicking from the mid–twentieth century to the present.
Chapter 1, “Trouble in Paradise: The History and Reinvention of Surfing,” considers the origins of surfing and music about surfing in Hawaiʻi. The passage of time does not enable me to speak directly with pre-revival-era surfers, so I rely on Hawaiian legends and myths, early written accounts of surfing (most by Europeans and North Americans, but some by Hawaiians), and, most significantly for my work, Hawaiian mele (chants). A number of mele about surfing from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the earliest examples of surfing music. Through these voices from the past, we see that surfing was ubiquitous in pre-revival Hawaiian society, practiced by women and men, girls and boys, and though we know more about royal surfers since it is their surfing mele that survive, we also know that common folk surfed, too. Thus it is not surprising that there were chants and dances, rituals, and even temples associated with surfing in Hawaiʻi.
Popular Hawaiian songs from the first half of the twentieth century reveal a changing role for surfing, especially as tourists began to visit Hawaiʻi and to learn to surf themselves. Surfing spread from Hawaiʻi to the rest of the coastal world, and at least during the first half of the twentieth century, emerging surfing affinity groups tended to look to Hawaiʻi for appropriate cultural practices, such as music and dance, to express community. Hula (dance or visual poetry) and hapa haole (half-foreign) songs from Hawaiʻi were and still are practiced by surfers on California’s beaches, for example. Yet surfing also changed as more and more people traveled to Hawaiʻi, and as surfing was exported from the islands. The first stop for globalizing surfing was California, and I show how the interaction between Hawaiʻi and California led to the reinvention of surfing in the twentieth century. No longer the ubiquitous cultural practice of pre-revival Hawaiʻi, what I call New Surfing became hypermasculine, and would be increasingly driven by commercial interests.
Chapter 2, “ ‘Surf Music’ and the California Surfing Boom: New Surfing Gets a New Sound,” picks up the story in California. Most conversations that pair the words surf and music are focused on two related genres of music that came to be called Surf Music: instrumental rock à la Dick Dale and the Del-Tones, and songs about surfing à la the Beach Boys. Both genres emerged in the early 1960s, and they do capture something of the history of surfing, especially in California at that time. What Surf Music captures is the mass popularization of surfing that resulted from new technologies of mass-producing lighter boards, not unlike the mass production of electric guitars by Fender, a Southern California company that became the preferred brand of surf rock bands. Surf Music encouraged the global spread of surfing itself and engendered enduring myths about Southern California and a newly white, youthful, and masculine surfing lifestyle. However, naming a popular genre of music surf was a problem for some surfers at the time, and became a problem for many who desired to make music about surfing subsequently. This second issue has only recently been resolved with the popularity of a number of surfing musicians.
If music on the beaches of Hawaiʻi and Southern California is a good index of surfing trends in the first half of the twentieth century, the music used for surf movies is an even better index for the second half of that century. In chapter 3, “Music in Surf Movies,” I survey the music used in a selection of surf movies that were particularly influential in shaping the musical practices of significant groups of surfers. I begin in the 1950s with the first surf movies for which we have the original musical soundtracks and then move through the formative boom years of the 1960s, to the VHS era, and then on to the present-day digital formats. With these movies I show what music was popular among at least some surfers before the named genre Surf Music existed, how some surfers responded to that genre, and the musical directions surfers have taken since the 1960s. The music used in surfing movies illustrates some of the diversity of musicking among surfers, but it also reveals distinct trends. For example, I show that surf-movie production emerged out of New Surfing’s new cultural centers: California and Australia. Surf movies, made by surfers for surfers, were a powerful tool for spreading ideas about surfing culture, especially music, to a growing and globalizing number of surfers.
The next three chapters are focused on the present or near present, and draw from my ethnographic work with living surfing musicians. Chapter 4, “Two Festivals and Three Genres of Music,” is a comparative study of two festivals, one celebrating a genre of music and the other featuring a surfing contest with an attached music festival. Both festivals took place in the summer of 2009 in Europe, and each represented very different approaches to music and surfing. The first festival took place in Italy and centered on the named genre Surf Music. However, there I discovered that the musicians most engaged with surfing were not playing Surf Music but were covering Jack Johnson songs or writing new songs about surfing in a punk rock style. The second festival was in Newquay, “the capital of British surfing,” located 260 miles southwest of London on the wave-grabbing coast of the Cornish peninsula. The music at this festival, which started as a professional surfing contest, tended toward two poles described to me as “mellow and surfy” on the one hand and “heavy and punky” on the other. The two festivals nicely frame three broad genres or styles of music that have emerged as key to my project: Surf Music, punk rock, and generally acoustic singer-songwriter music favored by an influential group of prominent surfers.
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