In 1966, just before the country went psychedelic and the place to be was off the grid and deep in the woods, there was the beach. The passing this week of Mike Hynson—star of that year's cult surf film The Endless Summer, produced and directed by Bruce Brown—took me back to my childhood.
When I was a kid in the early 1960s, going to New York's Jones Beach was excruciating. It was a place where mothers slathered kids in Coppertone, handed out bologna sandwiches on white bread and nagged about waiting an hour after lunch before swimming. Meanwhile, fathers walked around in the sand in plaid swim "trunks," straw golf hats, shoes and knee-high black socks, and zinc-oxide plastered on their noses. The day was stressful and disturbingly uncool.
Out in Southern California, the beach was a different scene. Beach movies had caught on, cars carrying boards were common and big-beat instrumental surf rock led by electric guitars was the rage. Young love and loud motors had taken over, and the trend was quickly spreading, even at lakes far from either coast.
But the surfing craze actually began as a jazz thing, with alto saxophonist Bud Shank and filmmaker Bruce Brown. Before surfing caught on, enthusiasts who had been in the service in Hawaii discovered the sport and brought it home to California when discharged in the early 1950s. Back then, surfing was an exotic pastime most people ignored, largely because they didn't have access to boards or friends who knew how to do it. That would come later.
Hard-core surfers in the late 1950s preferred secluded beaches up and down the Pacific coastline and often listened to folk. Joining these surfers were another group of enthusiasts—amateur filmmakers and publishers of dog-eared surfing magazines and broadsheets. In the late 1950s, Bruce Brown got the idea to start showing his 16mm films of surfers to teens at auditoriums, halls and small movie theaters. He backed his footage with live narration and he'd play tapes of records he recorded for non-narrative scenes, creating an ersatz soundtrack. At first, there wasn't much interest beyond towns along the coast.
Enter Bud Shank. Brown quickly found the tape recorder unreliable, cumbersome and a pain in the neck to operate smoothly. So he came up with the idea to create cool-jazz soundtracks for his films after seeing Bud perform at the Drift Inn in Malibu (above). Bud loved fast cars and anything that seemed hip, so he agreed. He recorded two surf soundtrack albums—Slippery When Wet (1959) and Barefoot Adventure (1961).
By then, Hollywood tapped into surfing and the beach for teen movies, and artists like Dick Dale, the Ventures, the Surfaris and others pioneered a new sound that mirrored a new teen attitude that was risk adverse and hungry for adventure. Let's go back to the beginning:
Here's Bruce Brown...
Here's what amateur surf films looked like...
And now for Bud Shank:
Here's Monk's Theme, the opening track from Slippery When Wet, with Bud Shank (as,fl), Billy Bean (g), Gary Peacock (b) and Chuck Flores (d)...
And here's the title theme from Barefoot Adventure, with Bud Shank (as,bs), Carmell Jones (tp), Bob Cooper (ts), Dennis Budimir (g), Gary Peacock (b) and Shelly Manne (d)...
These guys would come several years later, basing their vocals on the harmonies of the Four Freshmen...
Notes: To read my WSJ piece on surf rock, go here. To read my JazzWax interview with surfing legend John Severson, go here. For a nifty surf filmography, go here.
