The History of Surfing

by Warshaw, Matt

  Then surfing and jazz went separate ways. Boomers were already taking over the sport, and there was no question as to their music of choice: rock and roll. In 1960, a Washington State instrumental band called the Ventures entered the Billboard charts with a snare-popping number called “Walk Don’t Run.” In their matching suits and ties, the Ventures looked more like the Four Freshman than Jerry Lee Lewis, but rock music was then in a lull—Elvis had gone soft, the British Invasion was four years down the road, Motown wasn’t yet a hit-making machine—and these Northwesterners rocked harder than anybody on the charts. When “Walk Don’t Run” peaked at number two in September, it augured well for other rock instrumental groups. Many of the same Southern California teens buying Ventures records were also among the fifty thousand or so Gidget-inspired surfing newcomers jamming the beaches between San Diego and Santa Barbara. They were screaming for Dick Dale almost before they’d even heard of him.

  Dale was a teenage guitar ace in 1956 when he moved with his family from Boston to a Southern California beach town, where he became a middling surfer. He loved Duane Eddy’s thick echo-chambered guitar sound and the murderous chord progressions on Link Wray’s “Rumble.” He also loved Nat Cole, Hank Williams, and the Middle Eastern traditionals that his Lebanese-born father played. In the summer of 1961, Dale and his new backup band, the Del-Tones, played their first show at the Rendezvous Ballroom—a cavernous down-at-heels nightclub eight miles south of Huntington Pier. In better days, the Rendezvous had swung to the music of Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey, and Stan Kenton. But rock and roll, as far as city officials were concerned, was a public nuisance; two years earlier they’d shut the Rendezvous down altogether. Before Dale and band could play there, Dale’s father had to convince the club’s new owners, then city permit officials, that his son was going to put on a “musical review” and that they’d enforce a dress code.

  DICK DALE AT THE RENDEZVOUS BALLROOM, 1963.

  Dale got a dozen of his surfing buddies to show up at the Rendezvous, and before the show started he handed out cheap ties from a cardboard box to anyone who came without one. For fifteen minutes, Dale played songs like “Begin the Beguine,” while his friends dutifully sat and watched. Then he shifted gears and did two or three country numbers, then some R&B covers, and finally launched into some instrumental rock—which got everybody on their feet, cheering.

  By fall, Dale’s shows at the Rendezvous were drawing crowds of four thousand, and he had a regional hit with “Let’s Go Trippin’.” Fans began calling Dale’s instrumental songs “surf music,” and he ran with it. The cover of his 1962 debut LP Surfers’ Choice featured Dale riding a neat little Hermosa Beach wave (the cover was shot and designed by John Severson), and the album’s song list included originals like “Surf Beat” and “Death of a Gremmie.”

  Dale’s sound—surf music itself, for that matter—was best defined by a Greek folk song that he reworked into a two-minute hit of adrenaline called “Miserlou.” Not long before recording Surfers’ Choice, Dale was introduced to guitar-and amp-maker Leo Fender, who gave Dale a Stratocaster guitar and asked him to stress-test his latest 30-watt amp and speaker set—which Dale promptly blew up. More testing followed. Dale liked to brag that he ruined nearly fifty amp-speaker sets, and that a few actually exploded into flames. Eventually, Fender came up with the 100-watt Fender Dual Showman amp and ran it through a fifteen-inch expanded-cabinet speaker; this sonic-monster combo later became the hardware cornerstone for metal rock.

  Dale’s tough new sound hit like a balled fist into American pop music’s soft underbelly. “Miserlou” begins with an ominous bit of single-note staccato guitar picking, and from there it’s a headlong minor-key musical car chase between guitar, piano, and trumpet. At various points in the song, Dale does a machine-gunning slide up the fretboard—his signature move—which he later explained was an attempt to re-create through music the feeling he got while dropping into a big wave. Later, other guitarists further defined the surf sound by turning up the reverb or by leaning heavily on the tremolo bar. Dale, as he put it, was “just into chopping, chopping at the strings.” (Jimi Hendrix saw Dale perform at least once at the Rendezvous and became a big fan; the murmured line, “You’ll never hear surf music again,” near the end of Hendrix’s psychedelic instrumental “Third Stone from the Sun,” recorded in late 1966, is said to be his response to a false report that Dale had just died of cancer.)

  Dale played across Southern California, but continued to make weekly appearances at the Rendezvous in 1962 and early 1963. Undercard acts in the surf-themed Battle of the Bands shows that Dale headlined included the Rhythm Rockers, the Pyramids (featuring Will Glover, surf music’s only black musician), and the Belairs, whose 1961 “Mr. Moto” single, released a few months before Dale’s “Let’s Go Trippin’,” is sometimes tagged as the first surf music single. Bands still performed in suits and ties, but male audience members all wore period surfwear: a white T-shirt beneath an oversize Pendleton wool or Madras cotton long-sleeve, white Levis, and black Converse All-Stars or tire-tread huarache sandals. Packed tight inside the Rendezvous, teenagers invented the Surfer Stomp, dance history’s loudest and most rudimentary step—double-stomp with the right foot, double-stomp with the left foot, with enough force to send ripples across the hardwood floor.

  Life ran a short article on Dale in 1963, just as surf music was peaking, and he played “Miserlou” on the Ed Sullivan show. But he didn’t like to tour, and he never sold many records outside of the West Coast. Other instrumental bands joined in: the Chantays helped define the reverb-drenched “wet” guitar sound, and their song “Pipeline” reached number four on the charts, while the Surfaris hit number two with their drum-rolling low-fidelity masterpiece “Wipe Out.” Still, it was Dick Dale’s turf. Nobody batted an eye when he released a single titled “King of the Surf Guitar.”

  Instrumental surf music may have been inspired by the beach, but really it was a product of the garage—here was a bottom-up rock movement the likes of which wouldn’t be seen again until the birth of punk. And like punk, it burned out quickly. By the end of 1963, with old music industry pros jumping in with records like Bo Diddley’s “Surfers’ Love Call,” Duane Eddy’s “Your Baby’s Gone Surfin’,” and Preston Epps’ “Surfin’ Bongos,” the instrumental half of the surf music enterprise was nearly played out.

  * * *

  The genre’s second, more popular, and arguably less pure form was vocal surf music. This was launched in 1961 with a humdrum ditty by the Beach Boys called “Surfin’.” The melody plodded, the chorus did nothing but repeat the song title over and over, and the lyric flubbed its surfing references (“Yeah my surfer knots are rising and my board is losing wax”). “Surfin’” became a regional hit anyway, and a few months later the group signed a contract with Capitol Records.

  The Beach Boys came from Hawthorne, California, about six miles northeast of Hermosa Beach and its Pacific Coast Highway “Miracle Mile” of surfboard manufacturers. Songwriter and bassist Brian Wilson led the group, which was made up of his two younger brothers, Dennis and Carl, his cousin Mike Love, and Hawthorne High classmate Al Jardine. Brian was eighteen in early 1961, a big gentle-faced oddball who liked nothing better than to come home after school, queue up a Four Freshman record, and spend the next few hours at the family piano doing a note-by-note dissection of the vocal tracks.

  The Wilson brothers all had different ways of coping with their overbearing father, Murray, who shouted at them for making errors during Little League games, laid on with frequent belt-whippings, and allegedly made a point about the world’s inherent cruelty by thumbing out his glass eye and forcing each son in turn to peer into the socket. Carl, the youngest, grew quiet and serious and stayed close to their mother. Brian retreated into music: “I was so scared of my dad,” he later recalled, “that I actually got scared into making good records.” Dennis cut school, went to the beach, and learned to surf. In the summer of 1961, hearing that Brian wanted to
write an original song with a novelty hook, Dennis told him to do one on surfing and offered to clue his brother in on the latest surf lingo. Brian and Mike Love banged out “Surfin’” in one night, music and lyrics. Four months later, calling themselves the Pendletones (named after Pendleton shirts, a must-have “surfer look” fashion item), they went to the studio and recorded the song; just before the record was pressed, the band changed its name to the Beach Boys.

  In the summer of 1962, the Beach Boys had a double-sided hit with “Surfin’ Safari” and a hot-rod ditty called “409,” and released their debut LP, also called Surfin’ Safari. Since instrumental surf music was taking off, the group hedged their bets by including note-for-note covers of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou” and “Let’s Go Trippin’.” Surfin’ Safari made the top 40, and even sold well in New York. Then in early 1963, the Beach Boys’ scored their first real smash hit. Brian slightly altered the melody to Chuck Berry’s “Sweet Little Sixteen” and put in his own surf lyrics, including a chorus that swapped out the original across-American roll call (“Deep in the heart of Texas/And round the Frisco Bay”) for an inventory of hot surf breaks (“Haggerty’s and Swami’s, Pacific Palisades”). “Surfin’ USA” was the liveliest tune the group had yet recorded, and it had the marketing advantage of sounding both familiar and new at the same time—it zoomed to number three on the national charts.

  Just before “Surfin’ USA” hit the airwaves, the group was hired to back a vocal duo named Jan and Dean at a concert in nearby Redondo Beach. Jan Berry and Dean Torrence were both a few years older than Brian Wilson. They’d already had a hit single and performed on American Bandstand, but that was back in 1959; their latest records had bombed, and the two were now looking for a new sound. The Redondo show was a success. Jan and Dean loved the Beach Boys sound, and got along famously with Brian; within weeks they were in the studio doing versions of “Surfin’” and “Surfin’ Safari” for their next album, Jan and Dean Take Linda Surfin’. Best of all, Wilson graciously handed them a not-quite-finished new song called “Surf City.” Jan and Dean rushed into the studio, double-tracked Brian’s voice with Berry’s on the lead vocal, then stood back and watched it rocket to number one that summer—the first surf song to hit the top.

  Both groups were a fixture on the American pop charts for the rest of 1963 and all of 1964, piling up one falsetto-tinged hit after the other: Jan and Dean with “Honolulu Lulu,” “Ride the Wild Surf,” “Drag City,” “Sidewalk Surfin’,” and “Deadman’s Curve”; the Beach Boys (Wilson now producing and arranging as well as songwriting) with “Surfer Girl,” “Catch a Wave,” “I Get Around,” and “Little Deuce Coup.” Jan and Dean were Billboard magazine’s “Duo of the Year” for 1964. The Beach Boys toured Europe, and over the course of twelve months released four top-selling LPs.

  Americans were getting a richer and more realistic dose of California beach life through these new songs than from any of the beach movies playing in theaters across the country. Jan and Dean were both handsome and blond, and the leading purveyors of what had already been named the “West Coast look”—an alternative to the dark-haired Philly-based “teen dream” stars like Frankie Avalon, James Darren, and Fabian. (Dick Clark, as if to underscore the point, moved the American Bandstand studio set from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964.) They talked differently, too. Part of it was all that bouncy surf-slang: “gremmie” and “goofyfoot” and “cowabunga.” It was also the tone and inflection; a casual, lightly drawled Southern California beach accent, with pinched vowels that turned “get” to “git” and “can” to “kin.”

  Vocal surf music, like instrumental surf music, was a short-lived craze—Bob Dylan, the Beatles, and Motown saw to that. In 1966, Jan Berry nearly died in a Sunset Boulevard car crash, just a few miles down the road from “Deadman’s Curve”; Brian Wilson had already gone through the first in a series of mental breakdowns, and was all but locked away in the studio, perpetually working and often stoned. The introductory phase of the Beach Boys’ career was over. “Don’t Back Down,” the group’s last surf song, came and went without notice in mid-1964.

  CONCERT HANDBILL.

  * * *

  Surfers never embraced the Beach Boys, Jan and Dean, or any of the one-hit-wonder vocal surf music groups. Surfshop managers politely accepted Beach Boys promo LPs from traveling Capitol Records marketers, but never bothered to play them. Bruce Brown, John Severson, Bud Browne—nobody used Jan and Dean songs on their surf-movie soundtracks. Surf magazine editors aggressively ignored both groups, even though the music and image seemed perfectly aligned with the clean-cut, USSA-supported view of the sport everybody was pushing.

  Surfers themselves had invented the Stomp, brought the Rendezvous back to life, and named Dick Dale’s new style of music. The Beach Boys and Jan and Dean, on the other hand—this was being foisted on them by outsiders, like the beach movies. Exasperated surfers didn’t know where to start with their complaints. Jan and Dean looked okay—tan, thin, blond, barefoot, with T-shirts and white jeans—but the Beach Boys were soft and chubby and fully geeked out in their matching candy-stripe button-down shirts. Both groups were in magazines like Teen Talk and 16. Plus all that falsetto. And the ballads. Put a gun to his head, and Dick Dale still wouldn’t sing a ballad.

  So went the word on the beach. More than anything, surfers’ disregard for the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean came down to authenticity—or lack thereof. “I was riding in a car with a friend when we first heard ‘Surfer Girl,’” Los Angeles surfer and 1964 world championship finalist Mike Doyle once recalled. “It was this whiny, cornball music, and we stated hissing and hooting, saying ‘What a rip-off!’ Years later I realized how good the Beach Boys’ songs actually are. But at the time, it was like they were pretending they’d made it down the stairs at Malibu and were part of the crew—except they couldn’t even surf, and everyone knew it.”

  While Doyle and his friends picked apart the Beach Boys for their manifest transgressions against the sport’s code of cool, they missed the part where the music went past the brainless two-four rock of “Surfin’” and “Surf Safari” and into the shifting major-to-minor tonal splendor of “Don’t Worry Baby” and “The Warmth of the Sun”—and the rest of what Brian Wilson would later justifiably call his “teenage symphonies to God.” The Beach Boys never did cut it at Malibu. But by the end of the 1960s, it was obvious that, of all the surf boom cultural artifacts, it was the Beach Boys—not Gidget, or the USSA, or Frankie and Annette, or Dick Dale, or even Malibu itself—who had made the strongest bid for immortality.

  From Tokyo to Tel Aviv: Surf’s Up Around the World

  The Beach Boys sang “Everybody’s gone surfin’,” midway through the boom, and it sure looked that way driving up Pacific Coast Highway on any summer morning with a new groundswell pumping in. But how many surfers were there, really? In the pre-Gidget 1950s, the common estimate was around 10,000 American surfers—although the actual figure may have been half that. By 1965, foam-maker Gordon Clark guessed that the country’s surfing population had jumped to 200,000, and everyone else’s estimates went up from there: 350,000, according to International Surfing; 400,000, said Hobie Alter; 500,000, reported Newsweek; 1 million, the USSA promised; and according to the New York Times, “several million.” Clark’s figure was probably closest to the truth. He provided an essential building material to much of the industry, and was in a position to know better than anybody else how many boards were out there. But nobody really knew. To begin with, how did you define a surfer? Did bodysurfers count? Mat-riders? Summer-only dabblers? If summer surfers didn’t make the cut, how many times a year did a person have to paddle out to qualify as a surfer?

  BONDI BEACH REVELERS DO THE STOMP.

  SURF BOOM CROWDS, SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1961.

  Whatever the actual number, it was growing constantly, probably by at least 25 percent a year between 1959 and 1967. Established breaks went from crowded to impossibly crowded, with hundreds at a time jammi
ng the beach and lineup at places like Malibu, Huntington, and San Onofre. Meanwhile, new surfing colonies took root by the dozens on coastlines around the world. The sport once considered impossible for anyone but Native Hawaiians was now attaching itself easily to just about any beach with a rideable wave and gung-ho pack of local teenagers.

  Surfing was dispersed internationally by expats, vacationers, nomads, students, drug-runners, and military personnel. With few exceptions, they were all American and Australian. Los Angeles–born surfer and shaper Tak Kawahara flew to Tokyo in 1964 and traveled the nearby Shonan and Chiba coasts, much as George Freeth had done in Southern California almost sixty years earlier, to give surfing and boardmaking lessons. That same year, a group of Californians traveled to Canada’s Vancouver Island and lent a board to a construction worker named Ralph Devries, who in turn convinced the owner of the Wickaninish Inn at Long Beach to import a few boards for his guests. At nearby Pachena Bay, missionary Jim Stadler made himself a 13-foot paddleboard and taught himself how to ride waves. Devries and Stadler were among the handful of competitors who entered the Long Beach Surf Contest in 1966, the first event of its kind in Canada.

  Dorian Paskowitz, runner-up in the 1941 Pacific Coast Championships, had by that time flown to Israel with a new Hobie, dropped the board off in Tel Aviv, and got things started in the Mediterranean. Joel de Rosnay of Biarritz, while summering on his family’s Mauritius sugarcane plantation in the late 1950s, gaped out at the flawless azure-blue waves of Tamarin Bay, turned the local township upside-down to find an old brass-screw plywood paddleboard, rode as best he could, and returned four years later to find the local kids charging the shorebreak on bellyboards.