Kelly Slater - For The Love - (Page 12)

G O C A T G O ! but oddly enough I don’t really remember them playing together much. I think both of them had dreams of singing and playing professionally at some point. My mom definitely had a good voice. I only have vague recollections of my dad singing. He never really belted it out, but he knew some Van Morrison tunes, a bit of Cat Stevens, stuff like that—Jackson Browne, John Denver. He played classic acoustic guitar and Mom had this 1939 Gibson gold top banjo, a pretty amazing instrument. Music was a huge part of our daily lives, but none of us kids played. We had a drum kit that we banged around on, but we never learned to play a beat. Actually, I got the scar on my nose from a cymbal being thrown up in the air. Whether I threw it or my brother, I don’t really know, but from that point on the music was in me, so to speak. When I was about five, apparently I used to sing a lot. One day my mom and I were being driven to the beach by my uncle Big Bob, who was my hero. I stood up in the back seat and started singing Melissa Manchester’s “Midnight Blue,” and I sang it from start to finish. My mom said she looked over at Big Bob, and he was crying. In fact every time she tells that story she starts to cry. I forget the song now, but back then I’d memorized it. 128 Some of my earliest childhood memories are of my dad playing guitar and my mom playing banjo, I didn’t pick up a guitar until right before my high school graduation. My mom bought me an acoustic steel string Sigma, and I started playing. The next couple of winters was when Rob [Machado] and I would stay together on the North Shore, and [surfer and musician] Peter King would come over and teach us stuff. Jack [Johnson] was around, along with Donovan Frankenreiter and Tom Curren. On the fringe was Timmy Curran. He was a little younger, but he was very influenced by Jack. We’d put headphones on Tom and play a song that we liked, and he’d figure out how to play it immediately. We’d all be mesmerized. I found that really moving, that he could just pick it up like that, because I knew nothing formal about music and didn’t realize it could be that easy to play any song. I started to teach myself to read music, but just as I was starting to understand it, I realized you could just read the chords/tabs. So I took the short cut. I think you get that sort of thing happening in sport, in art, fashion, science, where people get together who have similar ideas and develop a path, but it’s not that common for sport and music to form a liaison, except maybe basketball and hip-hop. Surfing seems to go well with the guitar and ukulele, acoustic music. I think that comes from the fact that the culture began with people camping out at the beach and strumming guitars. That definitely became a part of our lives. It sounds clichéd but it’s exactly what we would do. We’d have a fire on the beach and hand a couple of guitars around and play songs we all knew. When you do that enough, the chords and the melody structure just becomes a part of you. Makes it a lot easier to learn. You know, Jack started out playing punk music. Well, originally acoustic, of course, but his first band was punk. It was just his friends from high school. The band was called Limber Chicken. He started to tone it down at college, and I guess he got more comfortable with mellow music. I never got into the punk thing, but Rob kind of did with a band called Sack Lunch, and the Great Outdoorsmen before that. When we were learning to play, we’d drive around in Rob’s car listening to the Great Outdoorsmen, songs about the neighborhood bum . . . whatever. It was pretty funny. PK [Peter King] had a few bands, but the main one was Dakota Motor Company. They made a few albums, and I sang with them a couple times early on.

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Kelly Slater - For The Love

Kelly Slater - For The Love Preface by Kelly Slater Chapter 1: For the fun Intro Chapter 5: For the road Intro Chapter 6: For the show Intro Chapter 9: For the love Intro Back Cover

Kelly Slater - For The Love

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