This album might raise some eyebrows across the Goodboys Nation weblog landscape, but it shouldn’t: after all, one doesn’t undertake a “treasure hunt” like I did back in 2010 for an artist whose work was inconsequential to the The Great White Shank’s canon.

I can’t remember how my brother Mark and I came upon The Sandals and their soundtrack album to Bruce Brown’s iconic surf movie. I do remember it was somewhere around 1973 or ’74 – nearly a decade since its original release. I don’t think we ever saw the movie, but maybe we did, who knows? Otherwise, why would we have gotten the album to begin with, right? Forty years after the fact things get kind of blurry. What I do know is that, for some reason, we had the album and we both loved it. After a while, we both outgrew it in favor of other stuff, but I remember coming upon it while Tracey and I lived in Louisville around 2000 and falling in love with it all over again.

Since then, this album not just remained one of my favorites, but, more importantly, became a springboard to other surf music: originally, classic surf from around the same time as The Sandals’ short heyday, but gradually, to surf music as a genre spanning bands from around the world trying to capture the same youthful spirit as the originators from decades since. My “Zen Surf” collection I’ll put up against anything anyone has ever compiled.

But back to this particular album. The music is simple and straight-forward, the album recorded over just two nights by a group of teenagers who could have never imagined the impact a single song would have in relationship to not just a sub-culture, but a generation as well. You listen to the “Theme From The Endless Summer”, and it’s wistful, breezy, almost jazz-like vibe creates the perfect image of two surfers in shadow against a setting sun. The iconic poster created by John Van Hamersveld serves as the perfect artistic complement to the song itself: keyboards player Gaston Georis’s and guitarist John Blakeley’s response to Brown’s request to, in his own words, “create me a sunset”.

While the rest of the album is a hodge-podge of well-rehearsed and tightly-performed (though not altogether memorable) surf originals, it really doesn’t matter: The Sandals’ album recalls a time when life seemed a whole lot more simple and innocent. It’s #10 on my list not just for the title track – one of my favorite tunes of all time – but for the impact it has had on my life, music-wise, and because it introduced me to so much more than I ever could have imagined when Mark and I first gave it a listen back in the early ’70s.

Other cool tunes: “6-Pak”, “Wild As The Sea”, “Lonely Road”, “Decoy”.