Another long day of snow and sleet in New York sent me off to my iTunes library and my surf-rock folder. There, I have a few hundred shack tracks from the early 1960s by groups like the Tandems, the Vibrants and Johnny and the Shy Guys. I've always loved the romance of surf culture and the raw, drum-driven rock that built up around it in California starting in the late 1950s. I even gave surfing a shot a few times in St. Barts in the 1990s, managing to get on my feet up a couple of times. Soon I realized that my passion for the sport was more about the beauty of what I saw and its history rather than what I personally experienced. It wasn't easy.
The history of surf documentaries is actually quite interesting. The most famous one, of course, is The Endless Summer, which was released in 1966 and featured two guys who traveled the world in search of isolated beaches and great waves. But the movie was merely an extension of an art form that had begun on a shoestring in the mid-1950s by hard-core surfers with a passion for the sport and beauty. [Photo above by John Severson, 1964]
Back then, cameras weren't waterproof and film wasn't cheap. Yet several surfers began wrapping cameras in rubber and taking them out on their boards to capture the grace and energy of the ocean up close. From pipelines to wipe outs, they caught it all. They were surf entrepreneurs and surf evangelists who documented the slow roll of waves and friends artfully being propelled by them, and shared the results with others. Thousands of teens were converted along the way. If you want to know how surf fever caught on in California, you have to start with these amateur filmmakers in the '50s. [Photo above of John Severson working on an issue of Surfer in 1964]
Recently I had a chance to chat with John Severson, the godfather of surf movies and surf culture before it became the stuff of ballads for love-lorn teens and beach blanket movies. John started surfing in 1946, and after the Army in the early 1950s, when he was stationed in Hawaii, he decided to devote his life and career to the ocean. He filmed surfers, wrote about them in Surfer, a magazine he started in 1960, and even painted the surf, illustrating all of his movie posters.
In 1957, John decided to string together film footage he shot to create films that could be shown at high schools up and down the California coast. He used records as the soundtrack and narrated what teens were seeing on the screen, since his footage was shot soundless. The band he most associates with surfing wasn't the Ventures, the Beach Boys or Jan and Dean. It was the Weavers.
Before surfing was exploited by rock bands and films in the early 1960s, it was considered an extreme sport for those who had a fine sense of balance, were in sync with the water and liked being away from crowds and at the mercy of the ocean's many moods. It was an all-natural acoustic sport that used a wooden board and an unpredictable surface. Surfing was pure zen, since it let you disappear with friends to remote beaches, listen to the rhythm of the tide and form a bond with nature. Just you, a beat-up old car and the elements. In the beginning, the folk sound passionately idealized what surfers felt in their hearts—the solitude, the camaraderie and the ride.
Here's what John told me about the Weavers during our phone chat...
"The song that reminds me most of those early days is Woody Guthrie’s Woody's Rag/900 Miles from The Weavers at Carnegie Hall album in 1957. I started filming surfers in the mid-‘50s, when only a few of us were shooting images or film. Our early movies were little more than entertaining travelogues rather than feature films.
"In 1959, I was making Surf Safari, my second film, when a few carloads of us were driving along the coastal cattle roads north of Santa Barbara in an area known now as “The Ranch.” Ahead of me were friends in a ’39 Chevy, loaded with surfboards. As we neared the Pacific, I stopped and began filming with my 16mm camera. I captured the tan Chevy making its way toward the coast just as lines of waves came into view. Stoked by what they saw and the conditions, the guys pumped their arms out the windows. The scene expressed sheer joy for the sport.
"For Surf Safari, I spliced together scenes I had shot, including that one of the Chevy, to create a narrative. Surfer John Elwell in Hawaii had turned me on to the Weavers album, and Woody's Rag/900 Miles was perfect for the Chevy scene. It had a yearning, soulful vibe that was in sync with the sport’s purity then. High school kids loved that scene and gave it a standing ovation.
"Unfortunately, prints of my films disappeared over the years, and key scenes turned up in other filmmakers’ surf movies. Today, whenever I hear that Weavers’ song, I think of the Chevy and how those guys inside lit up emotionally, stoked to get in the surf. I think the Weavers would probably be shocked by the role they played in popularizing surfing." [Album cover photo by John Severson]
Before surf was hip, it was even hipper. Today, John is as laid back and in love with the sport and the beach as he ever was. We also talked at length about the other type of music surfers loved—West Coast jazz.
JazzWax pages: If you love surf and surfing—even if your passion ends with what you see and feel—John Severson's new book Surf (Damiani/ PUKA PUKA) is a must. Go here.
The book is loaded with his photographs and artwork, and gives you a real feel for what the original surf scene was all about. I read the book while listening to Shorty Rogers, Chet Baker, Art Pepper and Bud Shank (who in 1958 recorded the soundtrack for a surf film by Bruce Brown called Slippery When Wet). The music and images of surfers before the sport was discovered were completely in sync.
JazzWax clips: Here's a documentary on John Severson...
And here's an interview with Gilmore on the sport today...
Want even more? Here's a site on surf films and soundtracks, including Bud Shank's blowing on Slippery When Wet.
