To surf well, you want your board loose, to be able to pump for speed. It’s just kind of driving, romantic, apocalyptic, orgasmic-the female vocals in that song.just that rise. And the soundtrack is “Gimme Shelter,” which has that incredible guitar intro.
Honolua had some great swells this past winner. The video stars a local guy-Dusty Payne, who is an incredibly good surfer.
Someone sent me a short video of Honolua Bay in Maui, where I dropped out of college and lived. The essential soundtrack for surfing, especially since shortboards were invented in ’68, is rock ’n' roll. What is it about it rock ’n’ roll and surfing that go really well together? 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.
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. 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. 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.