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later, as the keynote speaker for the International Council for Traditional Music, Ireland, held at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick. I benefited from the comments and observations of several keen surfers on these Irish campuses, as well as faculty colleagues Juniper Hill, Colin Quigley, Helen Phelan, Mícheál O’Súilleabháin and Tony Langlois. All of these scholars and their students added depth to—and helped me identify the limits of—my understanding of surfers as an emerging global affinity group.

      My home institution, the University of California, Santa Barbara, granted me a sabbatical to work on this book, which I took in England. This may seem like an odd move for someone researching and writing about surfing, but have a good look at a map. The United Kingdom encompasses several islands that are washed by north Atlantic swells. There I had the great pleasure of meeting Brian Page and “Turbo” Tim, who showed me the surf spots in southern England, and Scotty and Aaran Williams, who taught me about surfing on the Isle of Wight. In Cornwall I had the pleasure of interviewing British surfing musicians Ben Howard and Neil Halstead, as well as Roger Mansfield, author of The Surfing Tribe: A History of Surfing in Britain. My spirit benefited from the camaraderie that I experienced in these British surfing scenes.

      At the University of California, Santa Barbara, I am very grateful to Dean David Marshall for supporting my sabbatical leave, and for providing research funds. The Interdisciplinary Humanities Center on campus provided the first forum for me to present my early research on the topic, and subsequently granted me release time from teaching so that I could focus on research and writing. The Academic Senate also generously provided me with travel funds for several fieldwork trips. This project would not have happened with their support. Here at my home campus I also received sustaining intellectual support from my departmental colleagues, notably Stefanie Tcharos, who help me theorize notions of genre. I also wish to acknowledge Dick Hebdidge and Holly E. Unruh, former director and associate director, respectively, of the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, who offered support and insightful comments about popular music in California; and sociologist Jon Cruz, who was a sounding board for ideas throughout the process. Finally at UCSB was a “posse” of surfing professors, staff, and graduate students who formed a core group with which to share ideas: Kip Fulbeck, Hank Pitcher, Stuart Sweeney, Michael Petracca, Judy Bauerlein, Ali Bjerke, John Lee, and Malcolm Guart-Williams. Thanks to you all for creating an intellectually stimulating and supportive community.

      Other institutions that became important locations in my research include the Surfing Heritage Foundation and Museum, San Clemente, California, which welcomed me to their well-stocked library and archives. Barry Haun, Curator and Creative Director, was particularly helpful. The Bishop Museum Archives in Honolulu is a key source for any project involving surfing culture and history. I have already mentioned the California Surf Museum, Oceanside, especially Jane Schmauss. The International Surfing Museum, Huntington Beach, California, was always a welcoming site; I am especially grateful to JoAnn Beasley, who up until her death welcomed me and thousands of others into the museum every year. Goldsmiths, University of London, became my research home when in England.

      I am very pleased that the editors and Editorial Board of the University of California Press saw some merit in this project and agreed to publish it. I am especially thankful for the editorial guidance of Kim Robinson, the Regional Editor, who first provided substantial comments on my book proposal; Mary C. Francis, the Executive Editor of Music and Cinema Studies, who took the book on; Kim Hogeland, the Editorial Coordinator, who was both efficient and personable; and Rose Vekony, the project editor, who appears to have read every word of the book; as well as copyeditor Carl Walesa and indexer Carol Roberts. Editors put up with a lot, and rarely get the credit due them. I feel very blessed to have had such an excellent editorial team. I am also grateful for the anonymous peer-review and Editorial Board readers for UC Press, who provided challenging and ultimately supportive comments on the book manuscript.

      I wish to acknowledge a core group of individuals who were invaluable links to significant communities of people. I thank David Weisenthal, for introducing me to key members of the San Onofre Surfing Club, including Craig Ephraim, three-time president of the club. Both David and Craig helped me sort out who was who in various photos, and they did their best to keep my facts in order. I also thank Bob “Jake” Jacobs, “Honeybaby” Gwen Waters, and Fred Thomas, who each sat with me for long interviews about the history of the San Onofre scene. Dennis Dragon, member of Farm, a band discussed in chapter 3, as well as the infamous Southern California band Surf Punks, has been for years now an affable correspondent fielding many questions, and even guest-lecturing in one of my university classes—much to the delight of my students. Gaston Georis of the Sandals met with me several times to talk about his music since the early 1960s and also graced my university classes. Zach Gill facilitated a number of key introductions, fielded countless questions about some of today’s most popular surfing musicians, and gave generously to me and my students with several guest visits to my classes. Andrew Kidman and Andrew Crockett became essential links to surfing communities in Australia. Finally, Aaron J. Salā, Assistant Professor of Hawaiian Music and Ethnomusicology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, generously organized audio recordings of Hawaiian mele for this book that illustrate key themes in chapter 1.

      Finally I wish to acknowledge individuals who contributed to this project by allowing me to interview them formally, or informally, on the beach, in the surfing lineup waiting for waves, or wherever we may have exchanged ideas, but whom I have not for various reasons named in this book. It is indeed unfair that so many people made this book possible, but that my name alone is found on the cover. Thank you, co-researchers, named and unnamed. All that is good in this book is due to your efforts, while the mistakes and misconceptions remain solely my own.

      Introduction

      Riding a wave—surfing—is a cultural practice. Surfing is a deeply experiential act of playing with the power of wind that has been transferred to water to form ocean swells. Sliding down the face of a moving aqueous mound that is forced upward as it approaches shore, a surfer engages with the forces of gravity and water tension. Using techniques handed down through countless generations of coastal dwellers, the surfer harnesses the wave’s energy to move over water in a dance across that liminal zone between open ocean and wave-lapped land. Surfing is a balancing act on a watery tightrope stretched between a silently rising swell and a thundering breaking wave. Yet no matter how much skill, strength, and grace the surfer displays, no matter how small or large the wave that propels the surfer, in the end surfing leaves no trace on the water’s surface. Wave riding creates no lasting product save a memory, a kinesthetic impression.

      In this way surfing is like music, for sound waves vanish the instant they are heard. Both surfing and musicking¹ are ephemeral cultural practices that have no quantifiable results or functions other than the feelings they may engender, and the meanings given to them by people. Surfing and musicking require much more time and energy than is reasonable if their purpose is to achieve basic material needs. We clearly engage in them for other reasons. Yet even if we believe passionately that surfing and music are imbued with great meaning, we may not always be able to articulate what that meaning is. Let’s sing another song . . . I’m going to catch one more wave . . .

      

      This book is about surfers and the types of music that they create and associate with surfing. But I need to be clear about which surfers I am attempting to interpret and represent. Surfers form a global affinity group, but as with any group of people, no statement or claim can be true for every individual in that group. We could conceive of surfers forming any number of distinct affinity groups globally. The stories I tell here are illustrative of surfing communities that I have access to: primarily cosmopolitan surfers from California, Hawaiʻi, Australia, Italy, and the United Kingdom, with much more limited input by surfers from other points on the globe. These surfers are global—collectively they have surfed at the best surfing beaches around the world—but they still represent relatively affluent cosmopolitanism from North America and Europe more than the cultural sphere on any given beach in Indonesia, for example. To put it another way, dozens of surfers—some of them very influential in my posited global surfing affinity group—have contributed to this book, but that still leaves millions of surfers worldwide whose voices are not represented here.

      This is

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