William Finnegan on the Sounds of Surfing

On the occasion of New Yorker staff writer William Finnegan winning this year’s Pulitzer for autobiography for his memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, he schooled us on the myth of surf-rock and the sounds you hear when you're inside a wave.
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Photo courtesy of William Finnegan

In April, it was announced that journalist William Finnegan won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for autobiography for his memoir, Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life, which follows a life spent wandering the world looking for waves. Finnegan has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1987, covering culture and politics, but Barbarian Days is almost entirely a personal account, detailing his childhood in California and Hawaii, as well as surfing expeditions in Africa, Asia, and Australia. Finnegan began to surf as a young boy in the 1960s, and he takes particular note in the book of the ways in which the sport he grew up with—an insular subculture that required total devotion—was thrust into mainstream culture by bands like the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, who, it turns out, popularized the surfing lifestyle with California-lite songs that had little to do with the often intense lives of real surfers. We spoke to Finnegan by phone about the true sound of surfing, which, no surprise, is in every way more majestic when you’re inside a wave than anything you could hear on the radio on dry land.

Pitchfork: You make clear in the book that it was music by bands like the Beach Boys that brought surfing into the larger public consciousness in the 1960s, almost more than surfing itself.

William Finnegan: The stuff that people heard all over, like the Beach Boys, and/or Jan and Dean, was not revered by surfers. It had nothing to do with surfing, as far as surfers were concerned. The music that was popular among surfers changed through the years, and with different groups of people. But when I was little, just getting ready to start, in the early ’60s, there was a kind of underground surf music, that I was quite aware of. There were ukuleles on the beach, at the place where I very first surfed at San Onofre—a beginner wave—which had a real kind of local, local beach culture with different kinds of folk music—some traditional folk music, some connected to a more hipster scene.

But this underground surf music was really happening in Newport Beach, where I used to spend summers, way down the Balboa Peninsula, at a place called the Rendezvous Ballroom. Dick Dale and the Deltones. They would sell [out the venue]. There was “Let’s Go Tripping’,” which I think was their first hit. Then there was “Misirlou.” It was really just this liquid guitar. And [there were] a bunch of other instrumentals at the time. There was a song called “Wipe Out,” and “Pipeline”—those [instrumentals] felt like surf music to a kid becoming enchanted by surfing.

And those were pop hits, but they were not by the Beach Boys. The Beach Boys were kind of cashing in on something that was happening. Dick Dale—I don’t know if he surfed. He didn’t look like a surfer. He was this greaser looking guy from Massachusetts or somewhere. And yet there was this music. To me, as a kid, it was really exciting. It was pretty subversive and sexy.

What do you remember thinking when the Beach Boys blew up?

They were not exciting. Let’s go surfing now/Everybody’s learning how—Bob Dylan was coming into view. There were much more exciting things coming on. Surfers are insular and don’t want everybody to be in on their thing, specifically, they don’t want people to know where the waves are good. They want them to themselves. Nobody enjoys crowds. Actual surfers really kept all that stuff really at arm’s length and kind of hoped that that fad—which was in the early ’60s—wouldn’t create some tidal wave of popularity. Which unfortunately it did. I don’t mean that the Beach Boys stampeded people towards the waves—a lot of things made surfing look alluring, including the movie Endless Summer. And it’s never stopped. It’s ebbed and crested again, but it just goes on and on and on. Every year, worldwide, X million number of people more seem to be surfing. And it’s an entropic horror story for surfers.

What is it about it rock ’n’ roll and surfing that go really well together?

The essential soundtrack for surfing, especially since shortboards were invented in ’68, is rock ’n' roll. That’s what it is. Someone sent me a short video of Honolua Bay in Maui, where I dropped out of college and lived. The video stars a local guy—Dusty Payne, who is an incredibly good surfer. Honolua had some great swells this past winner. And the soundtrack is “Gimme Shelter,” which has that incredible guitar intro. It’s just kind of driving, romantic, apocalyptic, orgasmic—the female vocals in that song...just that rise. It was absolutely electrifying. That music was just so right.

To surf well, you want your board loose, to  be able to pump for speed. When you’re surfing well—and Dusty Payne is a transcendently good surfer—it’s not a guitar solo exactly, but you’re just absolutely pushing it, but you’re trying to do something beautiful at the same time. So it’s this combination of aggression and control and finding a passage. In this Honolua video, Dusty gets a huge barrel. The sun is going down, and he makes it, and he comes out with his hands behind his back, kind of clasped, sort of a flex position, but also sort of a prayer position, his head dropped, his hands behind. There’s this moment where people come out of great barrels, where he just has this absolutely humbled look. "There’s nothing I can say, there’s nothing I can do, I just have to acknowledge what that wave was." And that’s a bit of a rock ’n’ roll moment there. A pause. But it’s this combination of virtuosity and—not rage—but just blowing out the jambs. The knowing when to go passive when you are now in a great riff. Just ride it out. Sometimes you think, "it’s so beautiful out here, it’s Bach, Mozart, sacred music." But when it comes to the surfing part, it’s rock ’n’ roll. It’s all rip, shred—all the words are transposed to hard rock to me.

There is a beautiful passage in the book about Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl,” which you describe hearing before it became a phenom played a million times, before it became Muzak.

That was the song on the radio. It just completely captured and enraptured me. I couldn’t tell later how much was memory, but it was all wrapped up in my feelings about a certain girl, and a certain boy that she went with, a Hawaiian surfer, who I also idolized. That period was just saturated with that song. That song had this Gaellic poetry that overlapped somehow with Hawaii to me—there was something tropical about it, too. With a terrible sadness. It’s looking way back: So hard to find my way/Now that I'm all on my own. It’s an adult looking back at adolescence, almost a wiped out, saddened adult. And in the moment of youthful joy, there is that sadness that you can almost feel. You don’t know what’s true.

This is that sort of Proustian universe full of mirrors and delusions. But it seems to me there was a sadness then. I already knew. I felt sad because I felt excluded by a kind of love affair that I was living by proxy. I wanted her to myself, but I couldn’t have her. But I felt the sadness of them losing what they had. Glenn, the Hawaiian guy, was by that point homeless, I think. He was maybe 14. It was the flower of youth, and then he was already struggling in a world that was coming at him. [“Brown Eyed Girl”] had all of that in it. The world we lived in of rendezvouses and parks and Honolulu and the water had lots of that kind of shimmering-behind-the-rainbow-wall kind of quality.

What does being out in the water sound like? What is the sound of surfing?

Well, senses come into it very strongly. Including smell. Like low tide at different spots has a very powerful sea smell, which really bothered me as a kid. It’s rank. But I’ve kind of grown to love it. Some of the spots I surfed as a kid had sewage outlets, and I learned to love that smell. I recently surfed one of my childhood spots in California and it had the same old sewage outlet. I couldn’t believe it. It still stunk.

But the sound, a lot of it depends on the wind. Which way the wind is blowing. As you’re starting out, as you’re getting into the water, starting to paddle out, the wind is blowing hard off-shore, which is what you want—that’s the magic wind—there’s no sound. It’s blowing the sound back out to sea. You see these beautifully wind-sculpted waves, and you hear no sound and that is really alluring, because you know that’s because the wind’s just right. So it’s like watching a film with no sound. It can’t be real. Look at that thing. You know it’s roaring but you can’t hear the roar. And then as you get closer, the noise comes up as the wind comes towards you. If somehow you get outside where the waves are breaking, then suddenly the roar of an offshore wind is coming straight out of the waves to you.

And then famously there’s what happens when you find yourself in the most desired place on a wave, which is to say in the barrel. It happens so fast, getting barreled, that you don’t really know what the hell happened in there, but I have sometimes been struck in some of the more profound barrels I have been blessed to traverse that in memory, at least, things go silent. Everything is quite noisy in a hard-breaking bigger wave, and you’re paddling over the shoulder of such waves, and the noise can just be horrendous. It can be upsetting and you wish you were not hearing it. Just the violence of the wave. It sounds like a car wreck, or something. But if you’re in the barrel, my experience has been that you’re very, very silent. There’s something about that cavern and the kind of spill of it that, perhaps because your concentration is so ferocious, you are unaware of anything except that track. You are trying to follow the line, you are trying to exit, to get out in one piece, still on your feet.

My memories of it include a lot of kind of slow motion moments where it seems impossible. You’re headed toward a falling curtain of water, you think you’re going to hit it, but as you come at it, the wave actually swings and the curtain moves out of your way—this is the best case—and you come slipping out into the light. You made it. And then it’s like: The sound comes back on. And you’re suddenly back in the world under the sky rather than inside of this watery cavern. And suddenly you can hear things again, including, you hope, your friends screaming from the shoulder.