A Hurricane Benefit Launched Asbury Park’s Sea.Hear.Now

“When superstorm Sandy happened, we were like, ‘Let’s throw a concert, a fundraiser, in Asbury Park at the Paramount [Theatre] and we’ll invite our friend and feel it out and see how it goes,” Danny Clinch tells SPIN. That’s how the seed was planted for the Sea.Hear.Now festival in Asbury Park, New Jersey, way back in 2012.

Jesse Malin, Steve Earle, My Morning Jacket, Preservation Jazz Hall Jazz Band, Nicole Atkins, and other artists showed up to play the show and to support the cause. 

“We realized how much people love Asbury Park and wanted to support it,” he says. “That was our jumping-off point.”

Clinch, a music industry photographer whose work has been featured in Vanity Fair, GQ, and The New Yorker, along with high school buddy Tim Donnelly, a promoter and journalist, founded the music, art, and surfing festival six years later in 2018. The pair saw it as a way to give back to the iconic music and surfing community they’d loved since they were kids growing up in nearby Toms River, New Jersey. 

“Our idea, in the beginning, was always musicians who surf and make art,” Clinch says. “Those were the first group of people we went after. We went after Pearl Jam right away, Ben Harper, Incubus, and Jack Johnson. … These guys, when they showed up, they grabbed some surfboards, Donnelly had some surfboards waiting for them, and they went right into the water.”

Clinch really wanted Bruce Springsteen—who helped make Asbury Park famous—to play during the festival’s inaugural year. After numerous phone calls, Clinch put in one last ditch effort by text with a video he had taken of the first night of the festival—the sun setting over Asbury Park, thousands of people on the beach, with Ben Harper playing a cover of Springsteen’s “Atlantic City.” The New Jersey rocker showed up the next day and jammed with Social Distortion. “It really put us on the map,” Clinch says. 

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