Surf music has nothing to do with Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly Stone

Sly Stone was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments. 

Sly Stone and Brian Wilson were born just a few weeks apart, and departed in similar one-two fashion, earlier this month, at age 82.

For boomer-age music lovers, it felt like a death in the family. The double blow in fact made the loss feel greater than the sum of the two parts—never mind the fact that both beat long odds to even reach seniority. Unless you’re Paul McCartney, it is just about impossible to burn as brightly as Stone and Wilson did without veering into some kind of implosive black-star coda. The New York Times would have had fill-in-the-blanks obits filed for both men, I’m guessing, as far back as the late 1970s. 

Anyway, the algorithm sized me up right away, the online barrage began, and as of this afternoon, nearly two weeks after the fact, my feeds are still delivering Brian Wilson clips from across the decades—none of which I’ve lingered over; Wilson as a public figure is as flat and immaterial as his music is ravishing. The algorithm is not fully wrong. I am a South Bay Surfer after all, and my ascension to Valhalla, if the gods know their business, will be scored by side two of the Beach Boys’ Today LP.

But surf music, to me—meaning songs to which my formative surfing life was not just soundtracked but shaped, glazed and forged—has nothing to do with the Beach Boys or Brian Wilson and everything to do with Sly and the Family Stone. I Want to Take You Higher” was on the radio and turntables everywhere in Venice in 1969 and ’70, just as I was going full immersion into the sport, and 50-plus-years later the song continues fissioning in my head, there when needed, a command not only to turn the knobs up but to try and do it all—surfing, skating, dancing, walking from one end of the room to another—with flair and style and joy. It must have been the same for Larry Bertlemann, multiplied by 100. Bertlemann was always going to find a place at the top of our sport, but there is no doubt in my mind that he became the exalted and electrified Pope of high-performance surfing in 1972 only because we’d been prepared for such a figure by Sly Stone. 

It means a lot to me here in 2025, too, that the Family Stone was mixed-race and mixed-gender, and that the band, before Sly buried the project under a skip-loader-worth of PCP, was transcendently hip and cool—in a way not wholly unlike surfing in its peak moments. 

Which gives us a nice redirect back to Brian Wilson, because the peak moment in the peak surf film of the 1970s—Gerry Lopez in Five Summer Stories, slouching out of a Pipeline tube while a monsoon of spit blows past his head and shoulders—is scored to “Feel Flows,” a Beach Boys album cut from Surf’s Up, their 1971 comeback LP.  (The title track is also featured in Five Summer Stories, and I’ll say here that while I feel nothing but scorn for all the best-ever ranking of Beach Boys songs, I nonethelsss click on every list, and “Surf’s Up” is the consensus #1. No argument here—if anything ever had a chance at turning me religious it was this song, you could build a cathedral around it.)

One final thought.

Wilson and Sly Stone both, during their most productive and creative years, were always and without fail looking forward and above, and the message there I think is that us listeners should do the same. Nothing grounds me like hearing old favorite songs, especially if they come at me unexpectedly, from somebody else’s car speakers or in a movie soundtrack—the notes hit and lock in and I am flooded with gratitude. But the real thrill, just like when I was a kid, still comes from finding something new. There is an added bonus now, in fact, because I can often tease out a link between the old and new songs and, and when this happens I experience a kind of MDMA-like swoon of connectivity to people, genres, eras. Caroline Polachek’s “New Normal,” for example, is a knockout full-stop and no assistance required, but to my ear it also attaches itself like a strange spiky new molecule to “God Only Knows” and “If You Want Me to Stay.” Something to do with mid-verse tone shifts and the deleted chorus—Brian Wilson could explain it, I won’t even try. 

(Editor’s note: Yeah, this is the fine work of ol Matty Warshaw, keeper of the surf culture flame over at the Encylopedia of Surfing. Warshaw delivers these sexy-as-anything, tough guy prose hit-outs every Sunday afternoon and if you want ’em, and if you want to access the keys to his entire archive, toss a few peanuts his way. Five bucks a month.)