Not up to Kelly Slater’s musical standards, apparently. Photo: Sterling Spencer // YouTube
Kelly Slater once cut Jack Johnson from his band. On a recent episode of Sterling Spencer’s podcast Pinch My Salt, the North Shore crooner retold the story of one epic gig he played with the short-lived band, just before they released their debut album without him.
The Surfers is perhaps one of the stranger Kelly Slater side projects. Formed in 1998 during a brief competitive hiatus for the GOAT, it was a band consisting of Slater, Rob Machado and Peter King. They released exactly one album, the imaginatively titled Songs From The Pipe. As I’m sure you have already guessed, it did not catapult the trio to successful musical careers.
However, according to Jack Johnson, a much more successful musician who also has a serious surfing pedigree, maybe it could have all been different. “I was a part of that original band. I got cut out of this situation,” quipped Johnson on Pinch My Salt. “Curren got kicked out, too.”
As he explained, it all began with the purchase of a four-track recorder. “Kelly bought it,” he recalled. “Peter King knew about them and he told Kelly which one to get and taught us how to use it. So me and Kelly would record with it a lot and Rob Machado was there. There was this one recording I got to play bass on. It was basically The Surfers with me – Rob, PK, and Kelly. They played guitar and sang and stuff. And then they let me lay the bass on there. There was no drums or anything.”
However, things got even better from there, when yet another surf legend got added to the lineup. “Then we did this one little North Shore event, like a little fundraiser for the school or something,” continued Johnson. “Tom Curren was there and played drums. It was me playing bass, Tom Curren playing drums, Rob and PK playing guitar and Kelly singing. That was it. We only had one gig. That was the original band.”
That supergroup was even shorter lived than the actual Surfers, though. “Then, all of a sudden I heard about the record. They made the record and they didn’t call me or Curren,” continued Johnson. “They didn’t kick us out. They just never gave us the call. That’s all.”
Still, the moment was a fond memory for Jack, who recalls being a little starstruck playing music with Curren. “It was a trip. I mean, I was in high school, still. I was looking over at Curren and just trying to bob my head like the bass players do,” he reminisced. “We kind of connected on that. I was probably 16 and he was Tom Curren.”
