Trader Joe’s stocks a bottle of seasoning powder with seeds, spices and the flavors you’d find on an “everything” bagel. They call it “Everything But The Bagel.” The new book Pop Surf Culture: Music, Design, Film & Fashion from the Bohemian Surf Era by Brian Chidester and Domenic Priore does the same for surfing. This is not the place to find statistics on tube rides and wave scores. The book is about as far from a book about the sport as you can get, but explains the impact surfing had on popular culture.
The pair brilliantly explain how in the 1960s the idea of surfing infiltrated the culture, giving Americans a new lens to view an ascending counterculture without actually getting wet. The big new coffee table book is richly illustrated with both familiar photos from the era, like Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys, but also includes outré images from far-out artists you’ve likely never heard of.
After World War II, a new wave of movies, literature, cartoons, record albums, fashion and art suddenly sported themes of teen love at the beach complete with colorful dance parties filmed near Malibu and borrowed from the avant-garde artists hiding out in coffee houses in Venice Beach.
“The surfer aesthetic became a paradigm from which everything else grew,” co-author Chidester explains in a recent documentary. “It was the bohemian version of surf in the 1940s and 50s in both California and Hawaii that was really repackaged and kind of amplified and maybe kind of phantasmagorized into the sixties pop culture but its roots are unmistakably bohemian and beatnik in their origin.”
Chidester of New York and Priore of Tujunga spent nearly two decades updating their previous version of the book with ever-rarer photos and stories from the world of the waves and include forewords from the real-life Gidget (Kathy Kohner) and Moondoggie (Billy Al Bengston). “There’s a lot of images and facts and knowledge that we found,” Priore says. “That expanded the basic concept.”
The pair note that films like Beach Blanket Bingo and the surf movies made by Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello in the 1960s are hugely unpopular with actual surfers but a major influence on how the world interpreted this American phenomenon. The films, Chidester says, “capture all of the teen and rock ‘n roll Southern California vernacular culture in the most wild and bacchanalian way possible.”
The post Explore the World of Southern California Surf Culture in the 1960s appeared first on LAmag.
