SURF BY DAY, JAM BY NIGHT
The glorious double life of surfing musician Ash Grunwald and the search for the flow state.
By Tim Baker
When surfing musician Ash Grunwald was approached by a publisher to write a book, he didn’t have to ponder for too long what it would be about.
“What is the thing in the world I know about?” he asked himself. The answer was obvious. “I’m a professional musician who dedicated my life to surfing whenever I can … I had dedicated my life to my lifestyle.”
Ash embarked on a mission to speak to the world’s most accomplished surfing musicians, many of whom are close friends of his, to explore the synergy between the two art forms and how these inspiring folks have manifested their dream lifestyles. The roll call of names Ash interviewed is like a who’s who of the surfer/muso community – world champs Kelly Slater, Stephanie Gilmore and Beau Young, Hawaiian mega-star Jack Johnson, free-surfer Dave Rastovich, Indo legend Jim Banks, pro surfer Conner Coffin, and air punk Ozzie Wright, among others.
“I was asking people questions about that, can you manifest your dreams? You ask Stephanie Gilmore that and it’s not pie in the sky, she’s used it to win seven world titles,” says Ash. “There was a theme of life change and a lot more of a personal development theme than I had planned. They (the reader) get a bit more than they bargained for. I called myself a lifestyle scientist.”
The resulting book, Surf By Day, Jam By Night, came at a pivotal point in Ash’s own life and career, as he balanced the life of a touring musician with a young family and the surfing lifestyle. “I also was coming out of the funnest mid-life crisis ever, a mid-career crisis. I quit drinking when I started the book, then a whole lot of things turned around in my life,” he says. “I spent my whole life being grateful. I’m living the dream, this is awesome. I wanted to play music, party like a maniac and surf. The party bit caught up with me. You take the partying out of the equation and you leave room for other things. Music’s the bit I’d taken for granted.”
Ash grew up in the eastern suburbs of Melbourne, a long way from the beach, so had missed out on a coastal grommet-hood, but took to surfing with the late-starters’ boundless passion and appreciation for the ocean. “I’m not a great surfer but to me it’s really important. The further you grow up away from waves in your childhood the less you take it for granted. I’ve been on countless boat trips and made decisions around surfing and that’s been great. If you have a good session, it’s an investment and no one can take it away from you. It can’t be repossessed.”
As his career took off, and his blues and roots style of music found an eager audience and regular gigs playing the festival circuit, he could become more selective about where he toured. “My old record company wanted me to go to inland country towns where no one else was touring. I just want to be on the coast,” he says. “Living a life where I was surfing during the day and playing at night was like an insurance policy because it meant I was living my dream no matter how the gig went.”
He and his wife Danni moved to the NSW north coast when they had their first daughter Sunny, and he naturally gravitated towards like-minded souls in a region awash with surfing musicians. He jumped aboard Dave Rastovich’s ambitious Life Like Liquid project, in which Dave installed a cast of talented surfers and musicians into a rented beachfront house, filled it with instruments and recording equipment and a film crew and let nature take its course. The result was a wildly idealistic weeklong surf and jam session that was documented meticulously, resulting in a feature-length documentary and album.
“Dave Rastovich was on to it when he did Life Like Liquid,” Ash says. “That was pretty ahead of its time. That was really cool to be a part of, something genuinely spontaneous that ended up on video and CD. You would go surfing when you felt like it and come in and start jamming and find a microphone in front of you.” Perhaps the seed of the book was planted right there and then, as if he’d found his tribe.
“I learnt a lot from doing that book. These surfing musicians, Jack Johnson, Stephanie Gilmore, Rasta, Beau, Banksy, they’re really nice people, the people who are in the middle of that Venn diagram,” he says.
He also noticed the way people’s surfing style mirrored the way they approached their music. “Ozzie Wright surfs how his music is,” Ash says. “Jack (Johnson), we were taking about style and he said to watch Tom Curren is like a B.B.King guitar solo. It’s not flashy but everything is in the perfect place. I saw Conner Coffin surf before I saw him play guitar. The way he uses his rail, I thought, this guy’s soulful, and he’s into soulful music too. Carving is like bending notes in a blues solo. Playing in that blues style is all about that tension and release you have when you’re surfing.”
His explorations led him to an appreciation of what psychologists calls “the flow state” in which you are completely absorbed in an activity, swept along as if by a current, oblivious to the passing of time, with a sense of being absorbed into something greater than yourself. It’s a condition familiar to most surfers and musicians. “Humans chase that in anything they do. People who don’t have a specific activity might need to meditate. When you’re locked in a barrel you can’t think about anything else,” he says, before reflecting on his morning surf session.
“This morning was so awesome, and to me I saw a few things come through that were like something out of a surfing magazine. On this coast it happens so much, the opportunity to find these little slices of heaven is so amazing. Surfing provides that awe and wonder. And you can get it through music. I call it lift off.”
While 2020 has curtailed the touring lifestyle, Ash has been more than content at home, jamming, recording, honing his craft, chasing waves and hanging with his family, wife Danni, daughters Sunny and Aria. He and Danni also run a business, Earth Bottles, producing environmentally responsible, re-usable stainless steel drink bottles, coffee cups and lunch boxes, initially launched so that he could have ethical merchandise to sell at his gigs. They donate a percentage of sales to charity and run beach and waterway clean-ups – in 2019 they removed 1700 kg of rubbish from Australian waterways on their Clean the Coast Tour.
The book project had positive spin-offs that Ash hadn’t anticipated in his own life and music practice. “When I finished that book I came out of that and I was so hyper-efficient. For a guy who thought he was lazy, I was so disciplined to get that book out,” he says. “It’s put me on a trajectory that I hopefully never leave. Guitar playing, I’m working on it all the time, and it makes me feel like a 15-year-old kid again. I realised that’s the definition of getting yourself out of a rut, is to be learning. If you’re not learning anything new you get stale. Even if we’re living our dreams we’re sort of on auto pilot. You’ve got to keep feeding it.”
