Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom

By Brian Chidester and Dominic Priore. Santa Monica: Santa Monica Press, November 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-1595800350, $39.95. 272 pages.

Review by Kristin Lawler, College of Mount Saint Vincent, New York

The surfer is everywhere. Ubiquitous in print, on television, and up on the big screen, the image of the surfer has found yet another home, on the coffee tables of America. Scores of outsized, large-print, image-drenched books have been published over the last decade or so. Brian Chidester and Dominic Priore’s Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film, and Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Boom, is the latest entry in this extremely profitable genre. The focus of the book is the heyday of surf culture in early 1960s Southern California, and the central place that the innovative rock known as surf music held within surf culture at that time. As a matter of fact, the title is a bit misleading. This book is almost exclusively about surf music, so much so that a reader unfamiliar with the expanse of mid-century surf culture in all its visual, literary, and subcultural permutations, will probably get the idea that surf music and surf culture were largely identical. The history of the subculture is treated strictly as prelude to what the authors see as the key moment – the explosion of garage rock teenage indie surf bands during the first four years of the sixties. The mentions that other incarnations of surf culture do warrant – the surf movies, for instance – are generally limited to pointing out the centrality of surf music within them. Music was central to the surf movie genre, but so were the characters, the storylines, and the fluid image of the surfer gliding across the wave. So as a comprehensive treatment of “pop surf culture,” the book largely fails. However, read as the story of surf music and its intense penetration into early sixties pop culture, its centrality to other aspects of surf culture, its roots, its reverberations – in the mod British invasion bands, in psychedelic hippie music, through 80s new wave, to the Pulp Fiction soundtrack and into the 1990s hipster rediscovery of lounge music, burlesque, and go-go – it’s as comprehensive a treatment as you’ll find. And it leaves no room for doubt that surf music’s relegation to a footnote in the history of rock and roll has been a serious injustice. Surf music deserves a central location on the map of rock history, and thanks to Pop Surf Culture, it may just take its proper place. Most important, the authors turn up the volume on a largely overlooked aspect of surf culture – its link with bohemianism, in both its beat generation and its hippie incarnations. The academic treatment of surf culture is pathetically thin, given the surfer’s prominent and enduring status as an American archetype. Worse, when the pop culture image of the surfer is discussed, it’s generally dismissed as some kind of bland, all-American, wholesome reaction to the truly oppositional incarnations of mid-century youth culture. The authors insist on the “bohemian,” “beatnik,” “psychedelic,” and “trippy” content of surf art and music, implicitly arguing against the standard misinterpretation of pop culture surf. It’s in making this argument that the treatment of the visual aspect of 1950s and 60s surf cultural productions transcends the marginal status it’s given in much of the work as a whole. (The chapter on fashion, for instance, feels like an afterthought.) The connections between beat-hip Southern California artists and the producers of the early surf graphics, magazines, and comics are laid out with such precision that there can no longer be any question of the role played by surf culture in the history of American bohemianism. With similar attention to detail, the authors trace the transition between “beat-surf” rock and roll and the “psychedelic surf pastiche” it later morphed into. In fact, Pop Surf Culture is best when it’s providing incontrovertible evidence for the idea that surf culture is actually the forgotten link between the beat generation and the hippies – beat, it seems, went to the beach, got a tan, grew its hair, and turned hippie. In the end, though, the authors abandon their own narrative of the lasting significance of surf culture. Their conclusion, that after the early seventies, the baby boomers’ “emergent culture of unconsciousness” combined with the “professional sports mentality” to send “the true story arc of pop surf culture…underground from here on out” is facile and simplistic, to say the least. It springs from the book’s most glaring limitation – its reliance on the fiction of an “authentic” surf culture, somehow unspoiled by big commerce. The book begins with the statement, “Let’s get something straight, right off the bat – authenticity has nothing to do with it.” Ah, would that it were so. The very simplest version of co-optation theory is at work here, an assumption that an “authentic” surf culture produced by mid-century youth flowered until commercial forces evacuated it of its meaningful content and pimped its shell out for profit. The problem is, there’s no evidence here, or in any of the twentieth-century history of surf culture for that matter, that supports the authors’ theory of the relationship between “authentic” subcultural production and the degradations of commerce. The simple fact that the authors miss is that surf culture, like rock and roll itself, has been a commercial product since its inception. This confusion about the concept of “pop” leads the authors to rely on quite insufferable pronouncements about the “great” stuff vs. the “drivel” in place of more interesting lines of cultural analysis. And as in most analyses grounded in a discourse of authenticity, the distinctions the authors draw are arbitrary, inconsistent, and irrelevant. For them, obscure bands and fly-by-night labels from beach towns were real. Surf bands from the Midwest were real, too, however, presumably because they, like their coastal counterparts, played the heavy-reverb guitar riffs and rolling, thunderous drumbeats that evoked the power of the wave and that, played live in teen dance venues, set kids dancing the “surfers’ stomp.” But then, the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean – who were far removed from the garage-punk aesthetic and the surf rock sound – are treated reverentially here. The reason seems to be that the authors just really dig them. If devolving into matters of taste were the only danger of the always-arbitrary discourse of authenticity, it might not be so bad. But it also places severe limitations on cultural analysis, as the authors inadvertently demonstrate. These guys are just a little too indie for their own good. Although the image of the surfer is more prominent today than it’s been in decades, and surfing itself is more globally popular than ever before, the authors make of obscurity such a virtue that they fully miss the big story – that surf culture in all its (still) countercultural glory is alive and well and gaining strength. For them, “true” surf still exists – but only in and around one artsy surf shop in San Francisco! We’d overlook an awful lot about what’s actually happening in surf culture, and its continuity with its bohemian roots, if we followed the authors down this lonely road. So it’s better not to. The book is wildly uneven, and suffers from some serious problems of logic and organization. But the depth of the research (not to mention the exhaustive parade of obscure and fabulous record covers) makes it an enormously significant, if very partial, contribution to the history of what is arguably America’s most enduring countercultural form. The key is to check your critical eye at page one. Imagine you’ve met a beat-style hipster in a Venice Beach café, one with an encyclopedic knowledge and a wild, untamed enthusiasm for what he considers to be the coolest and most important thing that’s ever happened, man. He may contradict himself at times, bore you with meaningless details at others, but you won’t be sorry you listened. What Pop Surf Culture lacks at the level of cultural analysis, it makes up for at the level of straightforward cultural history. Take it for what it is, and enjoy.