The Soul of Surfing – Part Three

Soul Sound

In 1963 (while the Dick Dale led reverberating electric guitar and drum based surf sound was booming) Southern California surf guitarist Johnny Fortune wrote and recorded the instrumental ‘Soul Surfer’. Soul music was also booming. For over one hundred years African American communities had been fusing European influenced songs with ancestral vocals and rhythms. The development of this music was game changing, ranging from clapping up-tempo joyful move-to-the-beat gospel songs, to slower songs of yearning. The first big soul hits were gospel songs with re-written lyrics from the likes of Ray Charles, James Brown and Sam Cooke.

In 1959 Berry Gordy started Motown Records in Detroit, Michigan. Motown's house band, the Funk Brothers, were jazz musicians (another African American art-form) whose rhythms were easy for middle class white listeners to dance to and consume. Their secret was playing tambourine and rhythm guitar on the second and fourth beats of each bar, with female singers like Diana Ross and The Supremes using irresistible upbeat vocals instead of their natural bluesy voices, modelled on blues great Etta James’ classic soul song I'd Rather Go Blind. A different style of soul developed in Chicago, Illinois, where Curtis Mayfield and The Impressions had been recording for Vee-Jay Records since 1956, and in the early ‘60s Curtis became passionately involved in the civil rights movement, writing about poverty, racism and injustice, soon launching Curtom Records.

While ‘Northern’ soul blasted out from Detroit and Chicago, the centre of ‘Southern’ soul was Memphis, where a powerful, dynamic ‘deep soul’ (spearheaded by Stax Records) and a smoothly-produced ‘Memphis soul’ (spearheaded by Hi Records) developed. Stax used driving rhythm and blues, played by their mixed-race house band Booker T and the MG’s, and funky brass riffs played by their horn section The Mar-Keys. Otis Redding was Stax's biggest star. The Hi Records house band, the Hi Rhythm Section, also developed a funky feel to which house producer Willie Mitchell (whose own big hit was Mercy Mercy Mercy, a jazz beauty written by pianist Joe Zawinul and first recorded by Cannonball Adderley) added strings, horns and backing singers. Hi Record's biggest star was Al Green. Other soul artists from the South included Aretha Franklin and Percy Sledge who recorded with a group of white session musicians called the Swampers at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama.

Although built with a backbone of Polynesians and Peruvians, globally surfing continued to be a white dominated activity, largely the privilege of the middle class in the USA, Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Soul singers, however, worked tirelessly for an end to racism. Sam Cooke’s A Change is Gonna Come in 1964 became an anthem. Before it was released Sam was murdered in Los Angeles, inspiring many African American musicians to achieve social justice through their work.

But surfing did touch on some powerful opportunities for equal rights, showcased in The Endless Summer, released in 1966. Director Bruce Brown and Californian surfers Mike Hynson and Robert August set out on a three months’ long around the world trip. They arrived at Los Angeles airport wearing suits and ties. That’s how you travelled then. Air flights were like going out to a fancy restaurant. Importantly the scenes giving surf lessons to Ghanaian kids at the height of the Cold War remain a great social icebreaker, while the ‘discovery’ of ‘the perfect wave’ at Cape St Francis, South Africa is the stuff of legend. Yet local context prevented many black surfing communities developing until the 1990s, finally injecting a fresh wave of soul into surfing.

George Greenough

The line-up at the 1966 World Surfing Championships in San Diego didn’t include a single African American surfer. The world’s best noserider at the time was Hawaiian raised, California-based David Nuuhiwa. He mastered the paradox of noseriding - apply weight, remaining weightless. He never hesitated, confident that he could pull anything off. Nuuhiwa’s epic ten-second soul-arch-nose-ride was widely expected to win. But a young Australian wildfire called Nat Young took the title, riding a smaller board with a revolutionary fin shape. It was completely different to the favoured ‘D’ shaped fins on the surfboards Nuuhiwa and most Californians were riding. In contrast it was long and raking, inspired by the dorsal fin of a dolphin. With this Nat had developed an aggressive style, carving arcs and ‘S’ shaped turns on the wave. Nat’s American friend George Greenough, riding short and stubby kneeboards, was showcasing on his knees what could be done standing up. Greenough thought that surfing could move from straight lines to short arcs, but the big boards would not allow vertical turns and the use of a low centre of gravity. Nat’s secret was his big feet. They spread like a frog’s webbed feet across the deck and stuck like glue. It was as if the power that Nat generated in his turns flowed upwards from those giant soles.

George Greenough was a visionary, and still celebrated as a pioneer soul surfer. But his ideas were part of a wider movement when lifestyles were pushed into experimental places, minds often fuelled by psychedelic drugs and spiritual practices like yoga and meditation. Greenough inspired a handful of young Australians, including Bob McTavish and Nat, to build shorter boards. Once the boards got smaller, vertical thinking (the mind going tall) then took over from horizontal thinking (cruising along the wave face) and surfing followed. Surfers could suddenly ride the steeper area of the wave. As boards contracted, so minds expanded. ‘Thinking with a surfboard’ required a new mindset of liberation from the smooth flow of longboard surfing to think in smaller, tighter arcs. Surfer magazine cartoonists such as Rick Griffin fantasised in their panels that some day a board would be flipped all the way over, a head-over-heels turn, right inside the tube.

George Greenough also made two pioneering films, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1968) and Crystal Voyager (1973). Greenough himself had persuaded Pink Floyd to allow the use of their music for the climax sequence of Innermost Limits. It was a sensation. Greenough had strapped a camera to his back and shot the first genuine in-the-tube footage, with Floyd’s Echoes from the album ‘Meddle’ providing the backdrop. It took the viewer on a deep and hypnotic ride with groundbreaking water photography. Surfboard designers and shapers studied Greenough’s ‘hull’ kneeboards carefully to see what could be translated across to standing up.

With the advent of the hypnotic potential to ride the tube - the place where time stands still as the wave zips up over your head and you try to gain enough speed to keep slightly ahead of that zipping up until you are spat out at the exit - religious overtones were inevitable. In 1969 Tom Blake wrote ‘Voice of the Wave’ to explore the religious elements of waveriding. After decades studying surfing’s cultural roots in ancient Polynesia, Blake’s concise philosophy was “Nature = God.” Other surfers explored the metaphysics of waves - pulses of energy moving through water particles, formed and shaped by various oceanographic factors. Surfing was inspiring deep scientific appreciation and study. Californian Ricky Grigg was a big wave North Shore pioneer, winner of the Sunset Duke Kahanamoku (the World Title of the day), and becoming a leading oceanographer and coral reef expert at the University of Hawaii. Ultimately Plymouth University launched the pioneering Surf Science & Technology degree in 1999, an interdisciplinary study based around surfing’s liquid flux, including meteorology, business, marketing, coastal tourism and surf sociology.