Sea of Joy album artwork

Classic surf films have often been accompanied by classic soundtracks. Stranger reveals one man's obsession.

Words by Jonny Trunk

(First published in Stranger 13, February 2007)

There’s a common misconception that old surfing music is all Beach Boys or twangy geetar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Lost somewhere in the retentive, secret world of film music collecting lies a series of wild, maverick and prescient recordings that soundtracked some of the most important surfing films ever made.

We’ll start simply, just like the musicians had to. In 1958 director Bruce Brown made his first longboard documentary Slippery When Wet. A simple Oahu-based surf doc, it was soundtracked by his mate, Bud Shank, a west coast jazz head. There was no budget, no time really, so Bud set about improvising a score with his sextet in a small studio with, apparently, the rides playing out on a white blanket pinned to the wall. The results were fresh, interesting and just about profitable enough to repeat the process a year later, but this time with a budget of $200. Barefoot Adventure is the resulting film and disgustingly cool LP, both classics of a small but important genre, and the benchmark by which all future surf projects would be measured. Barefoot sold in excess of 10,000 copies on vinyl and introduced a young, hip surf crowd to the sounds of modern jazz.

By the early 1960s Hollywood had spotted the booming lifestyle market called ‘surf’ and promptly cashed in – masses of cheap blue-screen surf and party adventures hit cinemas and disappeared just as fast, all soundtracked by soda pop tunes aimed solely at teens who knew no better. The odd exception included Gone With The Wave (1964) a fast, Latin-tinged accompaniment to the annual Surf-A-Rama in California, Hawaii and Mexico. Lalo Schifrin, a young Argentinian who at the same time was busy scoring pilots for the TV series Mission Impossible, provided the sound and instantly lent a newer, cooler and more sophisticated vibe to wipeouts.

The Fantastic Plastic Machine album artwork

By 1965 the surf movie phenomena was flagging; Hollywood had left making room for the real surf scene to re-establish itself. Bruce Brown’s third movie, Endless Summer raised the bar even higher than before. It’s a faultless picture of ocean ideology and tracks Mike Hynson and Robert August as they follow the summer around the globe, looking for the perfect wave. For the music Brown left his favoured jazz behind, and went for a more youthful and commercial approach, employing The Sandals, a beach-bumming pop quintet formerly known as The Twangs. Their guitar-led score was the first by an authentic surf rock group, and an instant smash.

More underground flicks followed in the wake of Endless Summer, slowly picking up on the psychedelic and dreamy pop values of the latter day 1960s. Follow Me and The Sweet Ride are fine examples of underground hippy surfspolitation, bringing in fractured imagery and hash as well as classy wacked-out scores that mixed guitar with electronics or drifting vocal harmonies.  

Other movies took a more factual approach – in Australia the documentary To Ride A White Horse played to packed beachside theatres with all sound provided by Sven Libaek, a Norwegian composer happy to mix straight instrumentation with the avant garde. And The Fantastic Plastic Machine featured world champion surfing across two continents with a sick funky jazz-rock score by the little known Harry Betts. The film also introduced the world to George Greenough, a fearless kneeboard surfer with a keen interest in science and engineering.

To Ride A White Horse album artwork

George realised that fish turn faster in waves than he could, so, if he changed his board accordingly he’d move more freely. So George made smaller boards, designed a sharp fin (based on the yellow fin tuna) and started to film the results using a military camera strapped to his back. His first movie, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun is the cornerstone of the short board revolution; it’s history in the making and one wild cosmic ride deep inside the waves. No one had seen anything like it before, and no one had heard anything like the Dragon Brothers’ music written for it one afternoon at Greenough’s house. It’s a psychotic mix of rock, soul, jazz and stoned freaky-deak that fuses perfectly with the slo-mo drifts and rips Greenough captured so brilliantly. His head-screwing footage through the waves was spotted the same year by a touring Pink Floyd, who subsequently made a deal with Greenough – they wanted his footage as backdrop for their stage shows and in exchange they‘d give him music for his next film. That film, Crystal Voyager is another classic of the genre; dreamy, insanely mind altering and accompanied by ‘Echoes’ from Floyd.

Barefoot Adventure album artwork

At the same time but on the other side of the world, the Australians were also riding the psyche and surf trail – Sea Of Joy, Morning Of The Earth and Evolution are all high points of hippy surf and trippy musical mayhem, albums now feverishly collected by musical entrepreneurs the world over. Evidence of this hit me only last week, as Ninja Tunes got in touch to try and license a cue from A Sea For Yourself. This is the music from a Hal Jepsen underground classic, and incidentally another Dragon Brothers’ surf music oddity. It’s a privately pressed double LP (from 1974) of mental and progressive funk, and Ninja want it for their next Solid Steel compilation. It may be over 35 years old but its sound is still fresh and very relevant today.

Little is known about these rare surf LPs outside of the handful of retentives like me who collect them. And there’s really very little hope of them ever appearing on CD or iTunes in the near future; they belong to the vast sea of vinyl that flows gently around the world. If by chance you see one of these LPs for sale, buy it quickly – it could just be the musical ride of your life. 

Jonny Trunk runs Trunk Records, DJs internationally and specialises in beautiful film music. He has a show on London’s Resonance FM. Some of the music from Ride A White Horse is on the CD Inner Space by Sven Libaek.