Rowan Chernin

Chairman Of The Board – Surf Soundtracks 1964-74

Never mind the Beach Boys, Dick Dale or the sand stomping legends of the surf guitar. Chairman Of The Board is a compilation of surf soundtracks that have fallen between the gaps of both psychedelia and the modern commercial world of professional surfing. Between 1964 to 1974 was time when independent surf film directors gave surfers a soundtrack that reflected the barefoot roots of their alternative lifestyle. From 60s beats to stoner rock, to a psychedelic pulse breathing energy into giant screen sized tube rides, little known bands were commissioned and let loose in front of the screen to create new music. Chairman Of The Board – Surf Soundtracks 1964-74, has 18 tracks from 6 classic films. Some of this music has never been released or vanished into the vinyl vaults of obscurity.

Using Bruce Browns’ classic 1964 surf-art film The Endless Summer as a benchmark with its clean-cut longboarding heroes and sweetly stoned sunset instrumentals, look ahead ten years and the soundtracks of the surf film head for the next-level. The mind-blown Zepplin-inspired acid rock on the 1974 film Super Session shows how far the lifestyle of surfing had immersed itself in the lores of counter culture. Hair had got longer and boards had got shorter. The harder music reflected a new wilder expression on the face of a wave. The highs of the alternative lifestyle surfaced in the lyrics about “time” and “space” that complimented the gentler hippie-rock on the film Crystal Voyager and its underlying ode to exploratory world travel. Morning of The Earth, a film by Albert Falzon, took all of the above showed just how far a film maker would go to compliment the stoned minds of his audience. Lovers of the vintage surf film will be familiar with all of these and more but for the rest, this is the soundtrack to Golden Era all but lost to the genre that created it.