The 1963 song, "Surfin' U.S.A.," by The Beach Boys, is one of the classic songs of the surf music era of 1960's rock 'n roll. This video is from Gabrielle Marie channel, and features the Hawkeye Girls, according to the watermark.
The surf sound rock of the 1960's spread the California beach lifestyle idea around the world, with The Beach Boys, Jan & Dean, Dick Dale and the Deltones, and others, creating a soundtrack to make backyards and family rooms around the world feel like the beach. Or at least sound like it. The music, and the era's "beach blanket" movies, spread the idea of surfing around the world from California. The surf music was a part of the soundtrack of the later Baby Boomers teen years, and still played regularly on the radio for us Generation X kids coming up in the 1970's and early 1980's.
It wasn't until I landed in Southern California at age 20, and started meeting a bunch of actual surfers, that I realized the song listed many of the SoCal surf spots. Obviously, you get the idea in the song, but when you live in Southern California around surfers, it's different to hear people say, "I surfed Trestles this morning." Those lyrics are suddenly part of your landscape.
"You'd catch 'em surfin' at Del Mar, Ventura county line, Santa Cruz and Trestle, Australia's Narabine, All over Manhattan, and down Doheny Way...Everybody's gone surfin', surfin' U.S.A.." -"Surfin' U.S.A" lyrics
For all of you in the rest of the world, not from Southern California, Del Mar is a city in north San Diego county, and hour and a half south of L.A.. Ventura county is the county north and west of Los Angeles county, the beach at the county line, Leo Carillo State Beach, is just west of Malibu. Santa Cruz is a city in northen California, about 20 miles south of San Jose, and 50-60 miles south of San Francisco. Narabene is an area north of Sydney, on the Southeast coast of Australia. Manhattan is not the island in New York City, there's not a lot of surf there. This Manhattan is an L.A. county beach city, about three miles south of LAX airport, and just north of Hermosa Beach, and Redondo Beach. Doheny State Beach is on the south side of Dana Point, a city in southern Orange County, about 50 miles southeast of downtown L.A.. Doheny is a big long boarding beach, and also known for a blues and jazz festival held on the at the beach every year. Trestles, another surf spot mentioned in the song, is a few miles farther south.
If you grew up far inland, like me, and don't surf, also like me, you may wonder why they mention so many places in a surfing song. The waves you see surfers riding in videos or photos, don't look like that every day. Usually the waves are smaller at most breaks. At any given time, there are weather systems, storms, and even hurricanes, thousands of miles away, sending pulses of energy through the water of the ocean. These pulses are constantly changing, like ripples in a pond when you throw a few rocks in it. When they hit the shore, these swells push the waves up a little higher than the normal waves. Since these pulses, or swells, come from all kinds of different directions, they affect different beaches in different ways. A swell from the west will make good shaped surfing waves at one beach, a southwest swell will pump other beaches, and a north swell will be good at still others. So surfers in Southern California, or any coastal area, are constantly looking for info on where the swells are coming from, and which beaches will have the best waves on any given day.
There's a company out of Huntington Beach, California that leads in this information, Surfline that keeps tabs on swells around the world. When I first moved to H.B. in the 80's, Surfline was a 900 number that surfers would call to find where the surf was good in southern California, and it has evolved in to an amazing place for videos, info, and surf forecasting worldwide.
Since this website is about action sports spots, I had to pay homage to the song from nearly 60 years ago, that taught the world names of several popular surf breaks. Surfing is one of the original action sports, along with mountainering, snow and water skiing, and motocross. While I'm at it, I should mention that the Jan & Dean song, "Surf City," was written about Huntington Beach, my home for the better part of 20 years. This particular video also qualifies as one of the first times skateboarding was ever on TV, as they roll off camera at the end. 43 years later, skateboarding has evolved a bit, here are some highlights from the 2006 Soul Bowl event, built right on the sand in Huntington Beach, during the big surf contest.
What about the surfing? Here's Kelly Slater on one of the rare days in Huntington Beach when there were big waves for the annual U.S. Open of Surfing. Trestles, one of the spots mentioned in "Surfin' U.S.A.," has two areas, called Uppers and Lowers, by the surfers. Here's footage of an epic day at Lowers, while some of the world's best surfers were there. To fill this post out, here's some classic longboard surfing at Doheny Beach, this is the style of surfing made famous in Malibu and other spots in the 1960's. I'll wind up this post with the most epic surf guitar song of all time, Dick Dale's "Miserlou." Did you know this song inspired Quentin Tarantino to write the movie Pulp Fiction? Yep, it's true, so now you know.
For a ridiculous bonus beach song, here's Elvis Presley singing, "Do the Clam." Really.
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