Needle Drop

It was, perhaps, the most exciting night of my young life. I had never seen Robin Trower play San Francisco’s Longshoreman’s Hall, nor The Allman Brothers at the Fillmore West, nor The Dead at Winterland. But on this chilly summer evening in 1973, I did find myself standing amid a seething horde of Bay Area surfers outside of the Scottish Rite Masonic Temple on the corner of 19th and Sloat Avenues almost beside myself in anticipation of the S.F. premier of MacGillivray-Freeman’s Five Summer Stories. I can clearly remember the vibe of collective excitement as the temple’s 760 seats filled, followed by the stomping of 1,520 flip-flopped feet rocking up through the butt of my white, straight-leg cords. Then the lights went out, the music started, the hooting began and, for me at least, neither has stopped since.

Surfers have always enjoyed a very visceral relationship with music. No written records exist of the sort of Polynesian, split-log drum accompaniment that no doubt inspired ancient Hawaiian alaia sessions. But as far back as the 1950s a very tangible, very unique bond was forged between the act and the score. Give most credit to early surf filmmaker Bruce Brown, who obviously saw a parallel between contemporary jazz artists of the period and the freestyle expressions of his surfing subjects. Slippery When Wet, for example, from 1957, featured the surf stylings of the incomparable Phil Edwards set to the jazz stylings of renowned alto sax and flautist Bud Shank, a potent combination of artistry that would eventually have a profound affect on surfing music (not to be mistaken for “surf music,” a separate, oft-disparaged genre of its own). Because of Slippery When Wet, and thanks to so many of the surf films that came after, surfing has enjoyed a soundtrack unlike any other sport in modern history. Baseball has “Take Me Out To The Ball Game” and that’s it. The NFL has its gladiator music, the Olympics its soaring fanfare. Surfing, on the other hand, has long been visually presented with a diverse, dynamic musical score that reinforced a perception that surfers weren’t just listening but performing. This aesthetic came to its full flower when, almost a decade after the Shank/Edwards collaboration, surf filmmakers would again begin scoring contemporary action with contemporary music. 

Australian filmmaker Paul Witzig was one of the first to build on Bruce Brown’s musical legacy. In his 1967 film The Hot Generation, Witzig, much like Brown and other surf filmmakers in the 1960s, set most of the action to uniformly terrible music, defining “elevator” long before the derisive term was coined. But in the midst of Muzak versions of various Beatles hits (what “Penny Lane” and perfect Burleigh Heads had in common is hard to fathom) Witzig included a smattering of pop and psychedelic rock cuts from a groovy group called Tamam Shud, including the title track “The Hot Generation.” This contrast, while a bit dizzying, actually helped to highlight the stylistically schizophrenic tone of the film, which was perhaps the first to capture the late 1960s transition between longboards and short in the Sunburned Country. 

Meanwhile in the Northern Hemisphere, another more transformative trend was gestating, one that can be traced back to a single sequence in the film Waves of Change, which was shot and produced in 1968-1969 by the Laguna Beach team of Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman. Though not released until 1971 under the title Sunshine Sea, the film, which otherwise featured an embarrassingly mainstream Muzak-style soundtrack, inexplicably set a fast-paced French beachbreak session to “Ride My Seesaw” from the 1968 album In Search of the Lost Chord by The Moody Blues. It was, in fact, a glimpse into the future, with surf stars Mark Martinson, Keith Paull, and Billy Hamilton riding some of the period’s very first shortboards, underscored by a hit song from a chart-topping group that was at the same time playing in thousands of college dorms. 

This synergistic relationship between art forms—defined, at least, from the surfer’s point of view—reached its full flower in the 1970 film The Cosmic Children, by Hal Jepsen. Rather than an anomaly, as was MFF’s use of “Ride My Seesaw,” Jepson seemingly cut his entire, crudely-shot 16mm mash-up to whatever eight-track tapes he had rattling around the passenger-side foot-well of his VW Bug, apparently giving little thought to any potential copyright infringement. The result was a heady dose of innovative, cutting edge surfing scored by the same, musically: Jeff Hakman ripping Honolua Bay to The Chambers Brothers’ “Love, Peace, and Happiness;” Jock Sutherland tube-slotting Pipeline to Cream’s “Tales of Brave Ulysses;” and David Nuuhiwa’s south-side H.B. Pier act to Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

It was during this surf film zenith that Greg MacGillivray—pioneer of the “needle-drop” song selection—began planning to score what he was calling “The Last Surf Movie.” The film, Five Summer Stories, was to be MacGillivray’s last entry in the surf genre, before moving on to much more mainstream cinematic heights, including innovating the oversized IMAX format (by doing so, eventually becoming one of the most successful documentary filmmakers of all time). With Five Summer Stories, MacGillivray went all out, creating the most ambitious surf movie soundtrack ever recorded. To start, the very persuasive director convinced The Beach Boys, one of the biggest acts in the world at the time, to contribute several lush tracks from their popular 1971 album Surfs Up, including “Feel Flows” and “Long Promised Road” written by Carl Wilson, and the title “Surfs Up,” originally written by the enigmatic Brian Wilson for his legendary, much-anticipated-yet-never-released opus Smile. These critically acclaimed cuts from an iconic band provided Five Summer Stories with considerable artistic credibility, and yet MacGillivray wasn’t going to settle for simply sprinkling a few needle-drop cuts throughout. His plan was to have a complete score composed for the entire film, and to this end he contacted a local Laguna Beach country-rock band, fresh off a sold-out week at The Troubadour in Hollywood. The group was called Honk, and two of its founding members, Steve Wood and Tris Imboden, were lifelong surfers. 

Fast-forward to March 24, 1972, and the premiere of Five Summer Stories at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, destined to be the most acclaimed surf movie bow since the improbable wide-screen success of The Endless Summer in 1966. Writer Eve Babitz, in a three-page review for Rolling Stone magazine, would later gush: “The audience went crazy in transported ecstasy…we were silenced in disbelief…dazzled…stunned…awesome beauty…beautiful music.”

Despite stories that surfers Imboden and Wood helped to compose the score while watching the raw footage, in fact none of the band was shown a single frame of the film during the entire post-production process. Director MacGillivray simply described the sequence and mood he had in mind, leaving it up to the musicians to compose the tracks right there in the studio, the challenge being to translate emotion into melody for an audience that, in most cases, had never been in the tube at Pipeline—nor ripped Honolua Bay, nor surfed The Ranch. 

But Imboden and Wood knew the spots, and the surfers and the lifestyle, and along with the rest of the band, they eventually emerged from the studio with an original soundtrack of remarkable diversity and energy. From Craig Buhler’s rollicking, Chicago-R&B sax riffs on “Made My Statement” (which accompanies a sequence of Barry Kanaiaupuni absolutely ripping medium-size Honolua Bay), to Tris Imboden’s tension-building double-16th note on the high-hat cymbal that kicks off “Pipeline Sequence” (which actually topped the AM charts on KPOI Honolulu for a number of weeks), to Steve Wood’s sensitive keyboard work on “Lopez” (which so effectively defined that Pipeline master’s mythical cool), the Five Summer Stories original score seamlessly supported action on the screen in a manner matched only by The Sandals seminal—and sacred—“Endless Summer Theme.” 

Five Summer Stories was beautifully filmed and edited—to this day one of the finest cinematic depictions of surfing and surf culture. But for a lot of surfers like me—those who first saw the film in a theater seat or folding chair—the experience was more of an acoustic one: whether you even liked it or not, it was the score, even more than the footage, that would have an indelible effect. A lot of good surf movies would use a lot of good music in the years to follow. Videos, too, once the era of Scottish Rite Temple screenings had passed. But on that chilly night in 1973, in that temple of enthusiasm, the fact that Five Summer Stories was scored with music specifically created for the action on the screen meant that the music was meant specifically for us. For me. The message was clear: my summer stories deserved a soundtrack, too. And I don’t think I’ve ridden a wave since without some sort of song playing in my head.