Surfin' USA

Reverie in San Clemente

If everybody had an ocean

Across the USA,

Then everybody’d be surfin’

Like Californ-i-a.

There wasn’t much to brag about growing up in my gritty LA suburb of Culver City in the 1950s, where the most exciting events were the occasional smog alerts that kept us inside the classroom on brown days. But the surfing fad made me think that, for once, kids living on the west side of Los Angeles were close to the center of the universe. For our elementary school Halloween parties, we’d dress like what we thought surfers looked like. On our dreary asphalt school playground, kids with older brothers or sisters who had actually surfed basked in the reflected glory. I surfed a couple of times with my older brother and ended up drinking sea water. Alas, I never got to stand up on my brother’s board but that didn’t dampen my enthusiasm for faddish surf culture. To me the Beach Boys were the apex of musical sophistication in an era dominated by the Beatles.

You’d see ‘em wearing their baggies

Huarache sandals too

Bushy bushy blonde hairdo

Surfin’ U.S.A.

It’s impossible for me to wander about this seaside town of San Clemente today and not think of how, in the late ‘fifties and early ‘sixties, my clothes and manner had to imitate what we thought of as the Surfer Look, as shown in surfing magazines and on the trim, tan and blonde bodies of our richer classmates. I was a clueless nerd in a world of cool surfers. I was pasty white, burning before I tanned. I was dark-haired in an environment that rewarded sun-bleached blondes. Worst of all, I was an evangelical Christian in a world of sensual pleasure.

We’ll all be planning out a route

We’re gonna take real soon

We’re waxing down our surfboards

We can’t wait for June.

At thirteen years old I had no idea Brian Wilson, the brains behind the Beach Boys, stole that song I loved from Chuck Berry. Here’s a mash-up of Berry’s Sweet Little Sixteen and Surfin’ USA, that proves how Wilson lifted the music and words straight from the much more talented rocker Berry.

We’ll all be gone for the summer

We’re on safari to stay.

The kids we see zooming down the streets of San Clemente on their expensive electric bikes wear slightly different clothes but still have the same insouciance as the surfer dudes of the early ‘sixties. It says, “I am the center of the universe,” a feeling common to white privileged kids everywhere. In 1968, Tom Wolfe captured that California surf culture in his collection of essays, The Pump House Gang.

Tell the teacher we’re surfin’

Surfin’ U.S.A.

I decided to revisit the San Clemente Surfing Heritage and Cultural Center, but it was closed in anticipation of a move to Laguna Beach. In reverie I could sit through one of those truly awful beach blanket movies from the era, but the prospect of watching skinny white kids try to dance on sand is just too painful to bear. Maybe I’ll just play with my grandkids instead.