Keywords

1 Rise and Resurrections

Before getting into the heart of the ethno-aesthetic analysis, a brief history of surf music must be traced in order to understand its nature and its challenges, and what motivated a new approach to this musical movement intrinsically linked to surfing culture. Surf music and modern surfing took off at the same time in the 1960s in Southern California, which became the front runner of this cultural revolution for and by young people. Surfing and surf music formed an innovative phenomenon characterized by new sounds, semantics, and practices. For Kent Crowley (2011), “The new music was loud, vulgar, primitive, primeval, sexual, and sensual. … When local surfers embraced it as an expression of their experience, it became surf music” (p. 5). Indeed, surf music constitutes the expression of localized surfers’ experience, an expression apprehended here in its geographic and temporal diversity. For theorists working on globalization, the rise of mass media in the late twentieth century has enabled the dissemination of culture in multiple directions and with diverse reifications globally (Appadurai, 1996; Massey, 1993; Robertson, 1995). Surf music had California as its center but quickly embarked on national and global cultural flows, first thanks to the transistor radio as early as the 1950s and then through mass media. Doing so, it quickly became what Bennett and Peterson (2004) described as a transregional phenomenon, globally diffused and connecting diverse local scenes of surfers. Surf music has never been continuous or uniform, so in this work, it is designated as a movement, not a genre—a conception responsible for an excessive categorization limiting surf music to a space and time intrinsically linked to its Californian roots.

1.1 1960s California: The Iconic Surf Music Decade

Surf music emerged in California from the combination of several factors—three specifically, according to Chidester and Priore (2008). Hawaiian ukulele had been imported to the mainland in the early twentieth century and formed an ideal acoustic base for what was going to become surf music. Jazz and rockabilly were other influential elements, along with stompin’, a form of R&B dance vernacular, which inspired the surfer’s stomp in the early 1960s. The dance was practiced in legendary places, such as the Rendez-vous Ballroom in Balboa, still associated with the advent of surf music today, since it was there that Dick Dale & His Del-Tones recorded parts of the album Surfers’ Choice, released in 1962. What is designated here as iconic surf music was intrinsically linked to California and was marked by the various surrounding cultures that were fundamental in the evolution of the movement it was going to become. The last element was flamenco and Mexican guitars, which according to Surfaris saxophonist Jim Pash, “played a key role in the development of California’s guitar culture” (cited in Crowley, 2011, p. 30). The instrument appeared in early twentieth-century surf films, including those of surfer John Severson, the founder of Surfer magazine in 1960 (Chidester & Priore, 2008, p. 57). It also lent itself particularly well to surfers’ lifestyle, which included impromptu evening jam sessions on the beach, requiring inexpensive and easily transportable instruments. Therefore, the guitar played a distinct role in this new style of music compared to other genres, for instance, country music, in which the twang of the guitar complements the melody. In iconic surf music, the guitar was placed on the forefront and took on the function of percussion rather than harmony. While this helps to define the sonic characteristics of iconic surf music, in this work, the emphasis is on the context of reception of music that surfers listen to. In other words, I look at a surfers community’s modalities of musical consumption over time rather than just the stylistic criteria of a musical genre, which would be associated with a stereotypical representation of the surfer figure. Indeed, surf music is an aesthetically inclusive, temporalized, and localized style, hence its singularity and the inappropriateness of calling it a genre, unless we refer to its iconic version.

It was during the late 1950s and early 1960s that the musical instruments that defined surf music were born and democratized. Instrumental surf rock developed thanks to the Fender Stratocaster guitar produced in southern California in the town of Fullerton when surfboards were starting to be made of fiberglass, and cars were becoming a full-fledged culture. The advent of the amplifier set up by Leo Fender made the acoustic guitar evolve into the electric guitar that allowed Dick Dale, in particular, to create the first sounds of surf music. Originally a percussion instrument, the electric version of the guitar allowed musicians to maintain notes over time, and to develop the technique of finger vibrato with a wrist tremolo, also called double-picking, later becoming the benchmark of surf guitar. In addition, the Dale-Fender association allowed to develop the sound capacities of amplifiers but also their mobility, which made it possible to quickly mount and dismount scenes without restricting the volume or the quality of sound. The title of Ernest Hemingway’s work, A moveable feast,Footnote 1 was cleverly taken up by Kent Crowley (2011) to describe how the new Fender enabled artists to transport surf music anywhere (p. 86).

While the music style was labeled surf music in the summer of 1961 (Chidester & Priore, 2008, p. 112), it is difficult to base the beginnings of surf music on the careers of artists who admittedly incorporated traditional sounds of the iconic style but did not necessarily define themselves exclusively as surf-musicians. Artists like Brian Wilson, Neil Young, or Ritchie Valens were moving in this direction, but according to Kent Crowley (2011), the style was too ephemeral and inconstant to perpetuate these artists (p. 40). Despite the inherent unstable characteristics of surf music making it difficult to categorize or assign to a precise stylistic origin, history has constrained it to relatively limited temporal and stylistic criteria rooted in the 1950s–1960s R&B and rowdy rock’n’roll epitomized by Dick Dale (Wheeler, 2004, p. 116). This style does not correspond to Florida and shows that surf music is a localized cultural construction before aggregating into a global phenomenon. When it comes to tracing the origins of surf music, not everyone agrees on the subject. Just as surfers see their subculture as a construction imbued with adopted and rejected legends (Warshaw, 2003), surf music is also made up of a series of instrumental innovations and references to the past. In California in the 1960s, music that resonated like the sound of waves was surf music, and it was materialized by Dick Dale or The Belairs, who started tapping the guitar strings to make them vibrate and interrupt the sound. Many of the artists favored by Floridian surfers today also demonstrate instrumental innovations, but at the same time and almost systematically, appeal to the sounds of the past, notably bands like SWIMM or The Jacuzzi Boys. According to Paul Johnson, the composer of “Mr. Moto” (The Belairs, 1961), an awareness of what surf music was going to be started to appear during the summer of 1961 (cited in Crowley, 2011, p. 63). In other words, the first songs of the style could not have been created as surf music. This decade also saw the rise of The Beach Boys, discussed in detail in the next section, in order to set out concretely the aesthetic representations of surf music.

If the birth of surf music remains debated, artists and historians agree that simplicity was the key element to it. Unlike musical creations from previous decades, like jazz, surf music only required a few instruments, mainly guitars, fairly simple chords, and transportable equipment (which corresponds to the Floridian approach to current surf music). In its early rock’n’roll form born of blues and R&B, surf music allowed generations of self-taught teens to enter the recording studios as it was perhaps one of the first musical styles to be created only by adolescents. The Chantays, The Beach Boys, The Surfaris, and The Frogmen were all under 18 when they recorded their first album (ibid., p. 107). The advent of the vocal trend as opposed to the purely instrumental trend of the beginnings of surf music (1961–1966) marked a turning point in the movement’s history. The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean were very successful because their style allowed teenagers to sing with their favorite artists while dancing or stomping.

In the early 1960s, female artists started to appear on the surf scene, including the Surf Bunnies, The Honeys (produced by Brian Wilson), and Kathy Marshall—the Queen of Surf Guitar (Dalley, 1988, p. 105). There were also songwriters, including the most famous Carol Connors, lead vocalist in the Teddy Bears and songwriter for Dick Dale (Chidester & Priore, 2008, pp. 143–144). Girls took part in musicking, but as with surfing, they were mainly groupies supporting a male-dominated surf industry.

The music of the 1960s was created by a middle-class who had the means to entertain themselves and was looking to have fun, so it was different from what was to follow. If songs were not about surfing, they were about cars, girls, etc. Only the bands who understood the complementarity of these themes persisted and imposed themselves in the center regions of the United States, where the theme of surfing was certainly attractive, but where it was going to run out of steam. Indeed, surf music experienced a first decline in the second part of the 1960s because of the advent of The Beatles and a new awareness that music had to be more than a simple, frivolous, and irrelevant praise of happiness. It had to become an art, a form of resistance to the status quo, and a celebration of women (rather than women celebrating the exploits of surfers). With the arrival of English rock bands like The Beatles, Americans were confronted with a new way of approaching the musical function. For British bands who formed complete artistic productions, the vocal and visual aspects were more important than the instrumental aspect of music, whereas for Californians, the power of the Fender amplifier remained the essential element of their music. From then on, two aspects of the so-called English Revolution resulted in the decline of surf music: emphasis on the artists’ vocal abilities and the power of the texts. The Beatles understood better than surfers that the female audience played an essential role in the success of artists. A Paul McCartney would not ask a girl to wait for him on the cold Californian beaches while he surfed, but he would want to “hold your hand” (Crowley, 2011, p. 165). So while the 1960s show the importance of geographic and societal contexts in the advent of musical culture, the 1970s highlight the importance of the notion of aesthetic relativity: the same causes (surfing) do not produce the same effects (surf music), especially in terms of cultural representations: when a phenomenon increases and supply increases, demand diversifies and becomes singular (as the criticism of the CCCS’ theories underlined). The Beach Boys understood that there was a space to occupy, between too Beatles and too surf music. From the beginnings of the band, which many arguably describe as a surf band (a band playing surf music), Dennis Wilson was the only one to benefit from a certain legitimacy with surfers because he surfed. That said, the guitar skills of his brother Carl also played a role in granting the band its acclaim in surf music.

In essence, the arrival of English bands in the United States is not the only cause of the waning of surf music. In 1965, Leo Fender sold Fender Musical Instruments to a subsidiary of the American network CBS, a moment that marked the origin of the decline of Fender’s reputation and the end of the so-called Pre-CBS Fender era (Orkin, 2014). The technological developments were seen as going in the wrong direction and breaking away from the iconic guitar that had given birth to surf music and to the sound signature of Dick Dale, who withdrew from the scene a year later because of cancer.

1.2 The 1970s: Punk and the Reinvention of Surf Music

As a prelude to the 1970s, the release of Bruce Brown’s film, The Endless Summer (Brown, 1966), had given surfing a musical background. While in the surf music world, the 1960s were characterized by the rise of surf bands, the 1970s saw the advent of the first punk bands from New York. A lot has been written about punk, but these writings rarely connect the various punk scenes to surfing. They acknowledge periods and places associated with various punk approaches, including but not limited to a destructive UK scene or a US Do-It-Yourself (DIY) scene conceived as authentic (Moore, 2004; Thompson, 2004; Thornton, 1995). Yet, as Lohman (2017) has pointed out, both academics and punks have struggled to define punk (p. 50). Hebdige’s (1979) foundational book, Subculture: The Meaning of Style focused on the stylistic practices of young working-class people as symbolic resistance. His work has been criticized for being written from an outsider’s point of view, and for denying any type of agency to “hangers-on” versus original punks (p. 122). Against this idea limiting authenticity to the originals, there exists a consensus on the idea that punk is predominantly founded in DIY and anti-capitalist ideologies (Thompson, 2004), two ideologies that connect surfing and forms of punk.

The musical evolution of surf music within two decades shows that surf music is not a genre in itself but that it results from the appreciative construction of an audience—surfers. In other words, punk’s popularity among surfers in the 1970s means that this genre can be included in the surf music movement. The 1960s surf music revolution was repeated in the 1970s through the punk revolution. Chris Fleming of Fender Musical Instruments explained: “If you think about it, early rock’n’roll and early surf music was punk music, really. That’s where it started” (cited in Crowley, 2011, p. 87). In the 1970s, the sounds of the first surf music revolution fomented by Dick Dale, The Surfaris, or The Beach Boys had been replaced by Woodstock, Maurice James (Jimi Hendrix), Black Sabbath, and the Allman Brothers. Far from the accessible, simple, and happy characteristics of music from the 1960s, transgressive, sulfurous, and carnal punk artists offered something more visual and in contrast with the tunes of the previous decade, which had become mainstream. Punk music, like surf music, was characterized by various styles and aesthetics from one continent to another and from one period to another. In the United States, this meant that it could represent liberal anarchism or, conversely, Reagan conservatism.Footnote 2 At the same time, The Beach Boys were still present but had adopted a new style. The band then included two South Africans, Ricky Fataar and Blondie Chaplin. The public was better prepared to welcome their music since surfing culture had become more democratic. Arguably, some surfers considered that the band was able to express their concerns about the world and the pollution of the ocean due to growing tourism. This so-called second wave of surf music reached its peak in 1978 and absorbed punk, which corresponded to what surfers wanted at this specific moment. The contrast between punk and The Beach Boys helps to understand the debate over the band’s legitimacy as representing a certain surf culture.

In the 1970s, surf music could still represent a relatively homogeneous whole from a geographical point of view. Today, it seems necessary to distinguish the historically established genre as iconic surf music from the music surfers listen to around the world—surf music. I would compare this taxonomy of surf music with the way we describe historic city centers: an agglomeration [read surf music] consists of a historic downtown [read iconic surf music] and an eclectic peripheral expansion forming a set of new and different cultures and neighborhoods [read scenes]. As an illustration, Jon and The Nightriders, the band formed by John Blair in Santa Monica in 1979, are responsible for the reinvention of 1970s surf music because they succeeded in capturing the attention of old-school surfers but also of those who had chosen reggae, ska, punk, or new wave as their mode of expression. This band marked the beginning of a phenomenon that has become surf music as it exists today: a permanent reinvention, like a language moved to a new place and reinvented according to local needs. Blair’s band did the opening for Surf Punks, a band that was inspired by surf culture and engaged in a form of artistic performance more than surf music as such: during their live performances, they featured girls in bikini, and in the background, lifeguard cabins. Insofar as this kind of performance gave context and subtext to a music claiming to be surf culture, some have considered that in the 1970s, surf music entered the folk movement since it had acquired a known and interpretable repertoire by any group claiming to be surf music. However, folk music is generally associated with pre-modern rural populations whose oral style is often described as unsophisticated (Regev, 2013, p. 22). It is a representation that hardly fits surf music and excludes the various sub-genres it generated and that differed from it in sound nuances and equipment. These included spy music, exotica, or hot rod (while similar to surf rock, it uses car sounds). Surf music and its sub-genres represented California, but the rest of the world developed their own ways of expressing their surfing revolution. Thus, in the 1970s, Californian sounds already had alter egos in Hawaii, Europe, and Australia.

1.3 The Nostalgic 1990s

The 1980s marked a sort of connection between the 1970s and the 1990s with DIY punk-rock, a shift from the compact cassette tape to the CD, and the fading of iconic surf music, which reappeared in the 1990s as if revived by a nostalgic trend.Footnote 3 In 1994, the filmmaker Quentin Tarantino was influential in bringing back iconic surf music when he used “Miserlou” (Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, 1962) for the introduction of his hit movie, Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994). The entire soundtrack of the film, which included The Tornadoes, The Centurions, Link Wray, The Markets, or The Revels, was part of a surf atmosphere that played on the disconnect between rock‘n’roll and spaghetti western in which the characters’ journey was the opposite of the surf lifestyle. Thus, for those who define surf music as a succession of waves, the first wave consisted of new bands playing new music, the second wave consisted of new bands playing new music based on old forms of music, such as bluegrass or folk-blues, and the third wave was launched by Pulp Fiction (Tarantino, 1994) and was intended to be a cohabitation of old and new bands. However, while surf music has a historical origin linked to the advent of surf and rock in the United States, it responds poorly to a categorization by waves since it is a cultural construction taking place over time and emanating from surfers’ communities around the world. In other words, surfers and surf music go hand in hand. Surf music has existed and will exist as a mode of expression that has manifested itself in forms of local re-appropriations of what global surf music is: a set of constructs relative to given cultures, moments, and spaces, whose constitution in terms of genre can vary according to the expressive needs of the communities that build it.

2 From Sonic Style to Musical Movement

2.1 Dick Dale and the Reverb Sound of Waves

The characteristic sounds of the first forms of iconic surf music are consensually associated with Richard Monsour and his band, Dick Dale & His Del-Tones. From the 1960s, this band and many others, like Jan & Dean, gave a sonic background to surfing, which became increasingly popular thanks to a technological revolution in the massive production of foam and fiberglass surfboards. Dick Dale was himself a surfer, and from his beginnings with the Del-Tones at the Rendez-vous Ballroom, his audience was mainly made up of surfers. Early on, Dick Dale imposed his style as the iconic sound of surf music, and many musicians of the time agreed that “Let’s go trippin’” (Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, 1962) was one of the founding songs of surf music. The Lebanese legacy of the artist undoubtedly influenced his sounds and techniques, thus, having an impact on his unique way of playing the guitar. One of the Lebanese culture’s instruments is the oud, a kind of lute from the Middle East, the strings of which are picked with a feather. According to the legend, Dick Dale poked the guitar strings so rapidly that his picks melted during his concerts. The peculiar sound of his guitar comes from the famous Fender Stratocaster (also used by Buddy Holly and Ritchie ValensFootnote 4). The Fender Stratocaster is the heir to the Fender Telecaster created in 1949 when Leo Fender modified his model by adding a third pickup giving it a more ergonomic shape. So the guitar was only one part of the electric guitar, and the other essential part was the amplifier. For many surf bands, the reverb tank was what made surf music, which would not have existed without it. Indeed, springs placed inside the amplifier propagate the sound in waves and create a wet sonic effect characteristic of iconic surf music, as illustrated in the song “Miserlou” (Dick Dale & His Del-Tones, 1962) used in Pulp Fiction’s (Tarantino, 1994) opening. This title that granted Dick Dale the status of legend is part of his cult album, Surfers’ Choice, and is the result of a challenge to Dick Dale from a fan who suggested that he played an entire song with one string. The American House of Representatives recognized Dick Dale as The King of Surf Guitar, and in 2009, he entered the Musicians’ Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville, Tennessee (Musicians Hall of Fame, 2020). The importance of Dick Dale goes beyond musical sounds and lies in the artist’s approach to surf music that inspired the perspective envisaged in this book. Indeed, for Dick Dale, “surf music was about the audience, not the musicians performing it: that was the reasoning behind Dale titling his first album Surfers’ Choice” (Crowley, 2011, p. 66). For the artist, surf music, a living and performing art, had to be experienced. His vision translates well into the dynamic approach to surf music presented here as building an audience whose lifestyle includes an active relationship with music.

2.2 Surf Music: An Aesthetically Inclusive Musical Movement

Surf music can be understood as a musical style in the sense that it constitutes the sum of expressive traits specific to the culture of surfing, but it is above all defined here as a movement. Indeed, it is an emotional, cultural, and social reaction responding to an expressive need and manifesting itself in an aesthetically inclusive ideology, which from the start, marked the artistic and intellectual principles of surfing culture. In its debut, surf rock was above all a movement of young people that included two different genres, instrumental surf rock, and vocal surf rock. The first, as its name suggests, was based on the guitar and twangy sounds related to country music, while the second had closer ties to rock’n’roll and Chuck Berry’s blues. Thus, iconic surf music has a recognizable sound style, but in its temporality, it has not crystallized into a distinct genre because it has been at times rock’n’roll, ska, punk, reggae, etc. In addition, surf music differs from place to place because of the sociocultural and environmental influences of the places where it develops. In his article on surfing and musicking, Tim Cooley (2011) reported the point of view of Dennis Dragon, a member of a band called the Surf Punks in the 1970s: “The instrumental stuff wasn’t surfing music, ever, to me… To say that this is the exclusive music of the surf, I mean… that’s bullshit” (p. 25). While interpretations may differ, this comment highlights the idea that surf music is aesthetically inclusive, and it is not a genre but a plurality of genres constructed as all the potentialities of a movement. Surf music is multifaceted and amounts to the achievement of those who shape it. It is a spatio-temporal construction that started as a musical style, but that has diversified in response to a conjectural expressive need.

It is then possible to consider that surf music differs from other musical movements because it was born from the convergence of several factors that are at the same time aesthetic, cultural, spatio-temporal, and social: a mixture of genres, a specific expressive need, a place and a time favorable to the development of surfing, a demographic group ready to welcome it. The 1970s marked the peak of the Baby Boomers who were then between 15 and 30 years old. That is to say, across the generational spectrum, there were adolescents promoting subcultures, and wealthy adults willing to spend their money on surfing and musicking. Baby Boomers are now at the end of their careers or retired, but they are still surfing and inspiring younger generations. These white middle-class adolescents were connected by an ethnically exclusive but musically inclusive subculture when we consider the evolution of the movement in mobility (starting in California and then spreading to the whole world). Surfing became the prerogative of white metropolitans living the Californian dream. In this surfing America, there was no place for the African-American population to whom blues, jazz, R&B, and later rap were assigned. Although black artists were the founding fathers of rock’n’roll (Fats Domino, etc.), this is where their contribution to surf music ended. In an interview published in Time in 1965, one of The Beach Boys’ members claimed: “We’re not colored; we’re white. And we sing white” (Time, 1965). These issues are part of the US history and identity and have not entirely disappeared today. The white-black divide still exists in different forms in the United States: reggae has entered American surf music, but the most popular artists are not necessarily black or surfers.

2.3 The Beach Boys: Commercialization of Surf Music

In the early twentieth century, at the time of legendary Hawaiian surfer, Duke Kahanamoku, the term beachboys applied to native Hawaiian surfers hired by hotels to teach swimming and surfing to mainland tourists visiting Hawaii and looking for an exotic escape (Desmond, 1999). In the 1960s, when the band The Beach Boys formed, they appropriated the name, running the risk of being backlashed by the surfing community. But despite a difficult start due to their lack of legitimacy, The Beach Boys were able to create a niche for themselves. The band was originally composed of singer Carl Wilson, his brothers Dennis (percussions), Brian Wilson (bass), and guitarist Al Jardine, who was later replaced by David Marks. By adding lyrics to their music, The Beach Boys democratized surf music and surfing. Thus, they built an audience of non-surfers in search of the Californian dream.Footnote 5 One of my interviewees, the D.J. and surfer, Bart Kelley,Footnote 6 explained that being from Indiana, he had entered the world of surfing and its music thanks to The Beach Boys, who had made it a global phenomenon. However, from its inception, the band suffered from a lack of credibility among surfers. They considered the musicians to be posers who had damaged the image of the sport and the music. The themes of their songs were not exclusively those of the beach and surfing, at least initially, as they also celebrated the automobile, girls, food, etc. Besides, even if Mike Love and Bruce Johnston had tried to learn surfing, the band was not part of this community. Today, they would be considered impostors of the surfing world, and many of my informants have maintained this ambiguous image of the band even if, paradoxically, the Baby Boomers have granted them some redemption. What may have helped The Beach Boys maintain their popularity despite the early controversies, was that they had managed to surround themselves with surfers, and thus, to enter the culture to preserve the illusion. Their first hit, “Surfin’ USA” (The Beach Boys, 1963), probably owed its success to the fact that they borrowed sounds from Chuck Berry. Arguably, the only period during which the band was considered an authentic surf band was when Marks was part of it from 1962 to 1963 because he could compete musically with other surf guitarists, like Eddie Bertrand of The Belairs. The Beach Boys’ critics have accused them of selling a sport and a lifestyle that did not belong to them through their songs.Footnote 7 In this regard, Cooley (2011) quoted a telling exchange between a pioneer of Californian surfing in the 1960s, Greg Noll, and a sports journalist, Drew Kampion:

Noll::

The Beach Boys and all the rest of those guys that were jumping on the bandwagon to try and get in on the surf scene. For the most part we hated all that crap. When I had my shop, they’d send music to us and we’d say thank you very much and the minute they’d leave they go in the trash barrel.

Kampion::

As a surfer, we never really considered The Beach Boys to be surfer music frankly. It was overflow from the surf culture but really it seemed to talk to inland people or something like that (Cited in Cooley, 2011, p. 25).

This exchange highlights an important point: surf music is not self-determined, and it is still ill-advised today for bands to present their music as such because, in the end, it falls to the public of surfers to attribute this title to artists or to include them in the movement.

2.4 Lifestyle Celebration and Credibility Issues

During the waning periods of iconic surf music, artists always had the option to turn to other popular themes. The bands that survived the longest and occupied the most media space are those who, like The Beach Boys, were able to diversify. They nuanced their offer while managing to combine themes that were popular in the Midwest with those of the surfing world, such as automobiles and girls. This thematic adaptation of musical productions shows the impact of song content and non-verbal elements on the audience, and it raises two issues: first, the universality of the discourse of surf culture supposed to appear in mercantile music; second, the relativity of this discourse linked to the need for bands to propose the right themes to the right audiences. If focusing solely on surfing ran the risk of being trapped in an exclusive subculture, a celebration of the lifestyle’s satellites allowed artists to reach a larger population. 1963 marked a turning point in surfing and surf music as The Beach Boys and Jan & Dean turned it into a user manual for the Southern Californian lifestyle accessible to all and hitherto unvoiced. The alternative theme of the automobile guaranteed their continued popularity and was also linked to the surf lifestyle since surfers chased waves with their Woodie Jeeps.

From a scholarly perspective, the challenge is to understand how and why The Beach Boys have remained the main icon of surfing culture despite their lack of legitimacy among the members of the culture. In their case, as in the case of other world-famous surf bands, it was a matter of marketing and branding. Thus, the controversial success of The Beach Boys may appear to be one of the reasons the question of authenticity is so present among surfers today. Indeed, from a marginal DIY culture to its instrumental musical representation based on implied wave sounds rather than explicit lyrics, surfing culture became a global phenomenon spread out by popular bands selling the surf experience to a global audience of non-surfers. The problem of legitimacy encountered by bands like The Beach Boys comes from the fact that musicians may not proclaim themselves surf bands making surf music as they could subscribe to a genre by respecting the musical standards of this genre. The surf music label must be validated by the members of the (sub)culture from which the name of the musical style came: surfers. The omission of this principle in the attempt to define surf music runs the risk of contradiction. Some claim that surf music is folk music because it has a text and subtext as opposed to popular music that they define as disposable music for idiotic minds (Crowley, 2011). The same proponents of this definition consider that The Beach Boys were a surf band playing surf music. This approach is contradictory because The Beach Boys do not match the folk music definition on account of the gap between the band’s productions and their reception. How can we legitimize the text or subtext of a so-called surf band whose members have admitted that they adopted the theme of surfing because it was popular (Smith & Longfellow, 2016)? The focus of The Beach Boys was not to address surfers but to address the masses: they sold a style but did not understand or control the subtext. In contrast, bands of non-surfers can offer a subtext validated by surfers without even having to promote the image of the surf lifestyle. What makes a band or a genre part of surf music is that their style and subtext speak to the various communities of the surfing world. Dick Dale played at the Rendez-vous Ballroom where young surfers went to dance the surfer’s stomp, and it was also there that Leo Fender and Fred Tavares (both non-surfers) went to listen to their artist, and to understand the demand of the audience and the needs of musicians. The credibility problem also stems from the fact that since its inception, surf music has been divided into two trends of different natures and different functions: instrumental (Dick Dale) and vocal (The Beach Boys). The first required being live to exploit its full potential through the energy of the musicians in synergy with the audience; the second granted musicians more freedom, but it is not guaranteed that their live performances matched the quality of the former—which was The Beach Boys’ issue. Among surfers, music is often made to be lived and shared, as illustrated in this work through Sonny’s Porch concerts, where surf music emerges from the meeting of two microcosms (surfers and artists), that come up with an original creation responding to an expressive and creative request at a given time.

3 The Floridian Scene

Florida developed its surf music in the early 1960s as a continuation of the Californian garage bands phenomenonFootnote 8 which had been accentuated by easy access to inexpensive guitars and amplifiers. It is worth noting that while Florida no longer identifies as a Southern State in relation to the Mason-Dixon line, in the 1960s, the state maintained Jim Crow laws that hindered the broadcast of the influential sounds of early surf music, like black R&B—even with the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Chidester & Priore, 2008; Revels, 2011). That said, these rules did not prevent young people from gathering in clubs to listen to the new sounds that eventually lead to the emergence of surf music in several regions of Florida, including the Panhandle (Pensacola), the west coast (Tampa Bay, Saint Petersburg), the northeast (Jacksonville, Daytona, Cocoa Beach), the center (Orlando), the south (Miami). Local radio stations, like the WFLA in Tampa, supported local artists, which is also what the D.J., Bart Kelley, is striving to do today on the Space Coast with Endless Summer radio. Young Floridian musicians were inspired by Californian artists and covered their songs and albums. Historian Jeff Lemlich (1991), in his study of The Savage Lost, showed that garage bands were active in Florida as early as the 1960s. However, very few recordings exist today because artists lacked financial and technological means. The Dynamics from Auburndale and The Nep-Tunes with their album Surfer’s Holiday (The Nep-Tunes, 1963) were among the only ones to have recorded an album (Chidester & Priore, 2008; Cunningham, 2014). As in the rest of the country, a very small number of these surf rock bands were made up of surfers. However, there were exceptions, including The Roemans of Clearwater, Vanguards IV of St. Petersburg, and The Nation Rocking Shadows, better known as Shadows. With the bonds that formed naturally between the cultures of surfing and the automobile, some of these bands also recorded instrumental songs inspired by the new world of cars: The Miami Lincolns with “Night Drag” (The Lincolns, 1964), or The Surftones with “Drag baby USA” and “Speed demon” (The Surftones, 1995). Then under the leadership of The Beach Boys, many of these 1960s bands began to include vocal harmonies, like The Aerovons from Fort Lauderdale. They played for surfing competitions in Miami and covered Beach Boys titles. Few of these songs by Florida surf bands mentioned surfing except “A wave awaits” (The Gents Five, 1969) by Dave Tubin, “Surfbeat USA” (op. cit.) by the Surftones, and “Surfinanny” (Gram Parsons & The Shilos, 1979) by The Shilos (Cunningham, 2014, p. 230). In Florida in the 1960s, surf rock vocal songs focused on the theme of Florida beaches but not on what to do, surfing. For example, in 1967, Larry & The Loafers, originally from Pensacola, wrote “Panama City blues” (Larry & The Loafers, 1960) or “Let’s go to the beach” (Larry & The Loafers, 1966); in 1966 Steve Alaimo made a hit in Miami with his song “On the Beach” (Alaimo, 1966). Many of these bands performed at concerts but never recorded their work. These include bands like Surfin’ Vibrations, The Surfin’ Boys, The Stingrays, Bobby Cash and His Surfers from Cocoa Beach, The Surfin’ Tones, The Tides, and The Fort Pierce Sand Trippers, who were real surfers.

As with the rest of the United States, the decades that followed saw ups and downs for instrumental and vocal surf rock. While today these bands could be well-known or self-produced and broadcast via YouTube, this was not the case. Like in California, in the 1970s and 1980s Florida, punk and the DIY movement prevailed in music as much as in surfing. Surf music of the second decade of the twenty-first century experienced a resurgence of surf rock, a moment described by Cunningham (2014) as “the fourth-wave surf rock movement” (p. 234). For him, it was a kind of contemporary renaissance that mixed the old and the new in sounds and instruments. Genres crossed and came together at a specific point in time and space to form a strand of surf music. Cunningham (2014) categorized the fourth wave of surf rock in Florida into two types: progressive instrumental surf rock and beach-oriented indie/noise-pop. In the fourth surf rock wave, Floridian musicians are Baby Boomers, former rockers or punks, who were or still are surfers and cover surf music classics but also compose their own songs (p. 234). One of the prominent bands from this wave is The Cutback (named after the maneuver). They are Baby Boomers from Fort Lauderdale. Their titles “Atlantico,” “Shark Pit,” “Secret Spot,” and “Conan the Surfarian” (Cutback, 2014) are all related to surfing in Florida. They express the Floridian surf lifestyle through their music, but it should be noted that they evolve in their own microcosm in Fort Lauderdale and do not represent a state of mind common to all of Florida. For instance, on the Space Coast, a bastion of surfing and its culture, Satellite Beach is home to surfer and musician Bill Yerkes, nicknamed “Balsa Bill.” Bill Yerkes is known for making balsa boards and for making ukuleles, very popular with local surfers, who particularly appreciate Polynesian sounds. He and his brothers have a surf music band called The Surf Chasers, which pays homage to The Beach Boys. The siblings authored a documentary about surfing in Florida called The Summer of ‘67 (Yerkes, 1967).

Since the 1990s, so-called surf bands have played more and more classic surf with a mixture of punk and rock, but also reggae. For example, the Nova Rays are an instrumental progressive surf rock band from Orlando. Formed in 2003, they draw their inspiration from punk-rock with, “an aggressive style and a DIY aesthetic with rockabilly fair to classic instrumental surf” (Cunningham, 2014, p. 236). The Intoxicators are another band from Tampa, who bring to Florida “a funny, worldly, and aggressive hard rock aesthetic to instrumental surf rock” (ibid., p. 236). They won recognition from the Surf Guitar 101 Convention in California in 2012. There are other bands in Florida, like Skinni Jimmy and the Stingrays from Deerfield Beach. All show how much, if there is a movement called instrumental surf rock, it is well established in Florida and represents a Floridian beach culture particularly appreciated by hipsters.Footnote 9 The themes of the Floridian beach and surf cultures associated with what constituted the sounds of iconic surf music seem to have connected these bands over the years. Surf music in Florida is no longer based only on surf rock since the styles included in the movement also depend on generations. For example, many young surfers are turning to alternative rock, rap, or indie, among other styles, thus, toward bands like Surfer Blood (West Palm Beach), Guy Harvey (Lake Worth), or The Jacuzzi Boys (Miami), who play on the musical tones of the 1960s with reverb sounds and vocal harmonies. Other generations are very reggae oriented, and this is reflected in the programming of many events related to surfing, like Sonny’s Porch concerts or the Rootfire Festival.

4 Nature of the Links Between Surfing and Surf Music

In order to understand lifestyle sports and the relationships that their participants have with them, it is necessary to look beyond the activity toward what punctuates and shapes the lifestyle at a given time and place. Music is one of the fundamental aspects of surfing because the activity alone or the music alone gives an incomplete portrait of one or the other. These two aspects of the lifestyle (activity and music) were merged as soon as they appeared in California under the name, surf music: music for surfing. This is why they must be apprehended together to provide a concrete vision of the aesthetic, sociological, and cultural ties that unite them. Only this way can we grasp the interconnectedness of the experience, the image, the discourses, and the identities that are embedded in the contemporary cultural practice that constitutes surfing (Wheaton, 2004, p. 9). The experiences of lifestyle sports participants are difficult to express and share outside of the practice, but music makes it possible to shape both a verbal and symbolic speech that can be explored and interpreted to start a reflection on the musical consumption of surfers. From this perspective, it is also necessary to question how various musics are monopolized by other entities than surfers themselves to speak precisely to surfers. For instance, manufacturers create lifestyle products linked to music or sporting events integrating music, such as the X Games or even the Olympic Games, who all affix music to the physical performance (Beal & Smith, 2013, p. 55). Artists are associated with events, places, communities, and thus lifestyles because their music has been used in those singular spaces, or because they have performed there, as illustrated by Sonny’s Porch concerts: videos of the concerts are then posted on YouTube and the Sun Bum Web site. Localities sometimes reappropriate global phenomena, which is why surf music crystallizes in places that did not give birth to it.

In this work, qualitative data made it possible to establish links between surfing and music and to analyze their nature and function. While some surfers tend to look for links between their sporting activity and their musicking to understand their surfing practice, others express themselves through other art forms. Whether through music or other forms of expression, there seems to be a common need among surfers for aesthetic expression. The focus here is on those who have chosen music as their mode of expression, not necessarily because they produce it but because they consider it a part of their surf lifestyle. My informants, representing a certain approach to surfing, insisted on experiencing and participating in both surfing and musicking. The term was coined by Christopher Small (1998) who defined musicking (the gerund of the verb to music) as an action: “To music is to take part, in any capacity, in a musical performance, whether by performing, by listening, by rehearsing or practicing, by providing material for performance (what is called composing), or by dancing” (p. 9). Like surfing, musicking is a human, thus a sociocultural activity that includes listening to music (live or recorded), dancing, writing music, playing an instrument, etc. In this book, the focus is not on the types of music a relatively global group of surfers have created and associated with (Cooley, 2011, 2014), but on the idiosyncratic experience of musicking as a space for sociocultural construction and identity marking of a specific community of surfers. While their aesthetic expressive needs are apprehended as the instigators of musical experiences specific and meaningful to their community, the approach can be applied to other groups of surfers. Exploring these issues implies to understand why and how people listen to music. Pleasure resulting from participation in the musical act in all its forms (production or consumption) seems obvious. However, in addition, people music to find ways of expressing aesthetic, social, and cultural commonalities that may mark the contours of their communities composed of individuals culturally linked either by the form of their musical consumption or by its social function. In other words, music is intrinsically linked to human existence and serves to create communities where individuals can express feelings that allow them to understand each other.

In this book, the links between surfing and musicking were posed as empirical facts by the inductive approach based on the observation of surfers’ environment (physical spaces and social networks). There are many types of correlations between surfing and music, but the only ones targeted here are those deemed legitimate in the ethno-aesthetics of surfing. These correlations are affective, sensible, and cognitive as they refer to surfers’ feelings, experiences, and capacity to reinforce their identity and that of their group—using music as their tool. The shaper, Ricky Carroll,Footnote 10 expressed this idea when he said that the only thing that could replace surfing when there were no waves was music. In the next part of this book, I deepen the reflection on the links between surfing and music from the point of view of their re-appropriation. Two models make it possible to understand how surfing and surf music can contribute to marking a sense of social and personal identities by being recovered by a community and adapted to a new geographic and cultural context, in our case, Florida.