One Saturday night in the mid-60s in the old Melvic Picture Theatre in Belmont, NSW, a group of young Newcastle musicians and boardriders were watching the latest Bruce Brown surfing movie on the big screen. From that screening came the inspiration for surfing’s most powerful rock song of the 70s… and way beyond.

They were all members of The Four Strangers who had recently renamed themselves as The Sunsets and Lindsay Bjerre had recently joined as the youngest member to take on the key role as singer and rhythm guitarist.

 With him at the Melvic were lead guitarist, Alex ‘Zak’ Zytnic, drummer Dannie Davidson, and Eric Connell on bass.  Young Eric was old enough to have a licence to drive his surfie/muso friends to the movie that night, but the car broke down, right in front of the Saturday night cinema crowds, and they all had to get out and push, much to Bjerre’s embarrassment.

“The soundtrack was Bud Shank, the great Bud Shank, and I went ‘wow’, such beautiful jazz and the haunting saxophones and these guys just dancing across waves,” says Bjerre during a recent coffee catchup with Tracks in Avalon.

Bud Shank was one of the great saxophonists of the West Coast jazz scene from the late 50s onwards and contributed his highly atmospheric work to two Bruce Brown surf movies ‘Slippery When Wet’ and ‘Barefoot Adventure’.

(More so than Shank’s cool sax blowings, many millions of music fans will have heard his famous flute solo in ‘California Dreaming’ by the Mamas and the Papas — tragically for such a jazz master this solo is probably his most listened-to work from that brief period when rock music discovered the flute).

“All of us ...