WAYNE LYNCH, BELLS BEACH, 1968.
Bummers and Bad Vibes in California
By the early 1970s, California surfing had taken a sharp, dramatic tumble in the eyes of wave-riders everywhere—including Californians themselves, many of whom now regarded their own state with a disapproval that ranged from mild to masochistic. In part, it was leftover embarrassment over the war of words following Nat Young’s win in the 1966 World Championships, compounded by the state’s late arrival to the shortboard revolution. Southern California surf breaks also endured a string of misfortunes in the late 1960s, both planned and unplanned, including a massive oil spill off Santa Barbara, a post-storm sandfill that turned Malibu into a closeout shorebreak, and a nuclear power plant opening on the cliffs above San Onofre.
But for most California surfers, the bad feelings stemmed from guilt over the fact that their state had commercialized, industrialized, and popularized the sport—which in surfing’s Age of Aquarius translated to a mile or more of bad karma.
In the early 1970s, the optimism that had long been a West Coast surfing hallmark was gone. The trendy viewpoint, in fact, was that the sport here was headed toward the apocalypse. “In ten years, surfing in California will be choking out its death gasp,” Petersen’s Surfing magazine noted. “In another ten years it will be completely dead.” A lot of surf moviemakers agreed, none more so than John Severson, whose last film, 1970’s Pacific Vibrations, turned Southern California into surfing’s version of The Inferno, with baton-twirling policemen standing in uniform on the beach at Huntington, fast-food joints lined up like dominoes on Pacific Coast Highway near Malibu, and runoff gushing from open pipes into the Ventura shorebreak.
LOCALISM OCCASIONALLY TURNED VIOLENT; SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, 1973.
VENTURA COUNTY.
California was still home to some excellent surfers. David Nuuhiwa effortlessly remade himself as a shortboarder, losing none of his feline artistry. Corky Carroll was energetic and fun to watch. Mike Purpus was the same, only more so, and had the world’s best cutback in the bargain. A San Diego knee-boarder named Steve Lis invented a wide split-tailed board called the fish, and was going faster down the line, and riding deeper in the tube, than any stand-up surfer. But for the most part, in what seemed a kind of atonement for the past sins of West Coast surfing exuberance, Californians now rode in minimalist fashion, on narrow Hawaiian-style boards—a great look in thundering eighteen-foot Sunset Beach, but ridiculous in the shoulder-high rollers at Newport or Windansea. Meanwhile, the state suffered a giant talent drain as hot young riders like Bill Hamilton, Owl Chapman, Sam Hawk, and Margo Godfrey all moved to Hawaii. Each surfer phrased it a little differently, but always the idea was to escape from the “California plastic trip.”
Those who stayed behind found themselves involved, in one way or another, with a new and more-muscular beachfront aggressiveness, which came to be known as localism. Most of it was simple turf-marking by resident surfers: spray-painted graffiti (“If you don’t live here, don’t surf here”) or rubbing surf wax across the windows of a visiting surfer’s car. Locals themselves viewed it differently. If the sins of modern surfing—the crowded lineups and overhyped competitions, the rampant selling of the sport—had originated in California, then perhaps it was time to set things right. Or at least, to safeguard the good that was left. This was the thinking. Localism, always, was defined as a kind of return to purity.
There was nothing new about resident surfers harassing outsiders. At Waikiki, Malibu, even some beaches in Sydney, visiting surfers had to watch their step or risk confrontations with the locals. But surfing’s territorial acts prior to the late 1960s all had a generic quality. Heavy stares, shouted insults, fighting—none of it was particularly surf-specific. Rather, it was the kind of predictable outbursts that result from any semi-exclusive gathering of young adult males. In California during the early seventies, localism began with a uniform: locals wore all-black wetsuits and rode color-free boards, slightly retrograde in design, with either the smallest available maker’s label or no label at all. The surf leash was frowned upon, but used when necessary. Surf magazines were mostly disparaged for being too commercial. Because the surf movie genre didn’t wear its commercialism on its sleeve, the way ad-filled magazines did, it was for the most part given a pass.
For hardcore locals, surfing competition was the ultimate evil, and it was the Smirnoff International Pro-Am, held in Santa Cruz, that provided localism with a coming out of sorts in late 1969. Contests looked different than they had just two years ago, when they were defined by nose-riding and competition-stripe trunks. Top-ranked surfers now had long hair and wore black felt Indian hats, and in Santa Cruz they strolled around between heats gobbling handfuls of dried fruit and granola. Speaking over the PA, the contest announcer reported on conditions at nearby Pleasure Point: “Eight feet, perfect shape, naked girls, dealers.”
Santa Cruz surfers had already proven themselves less than welcoming to outsiders. At the Smirnoff, they took things to a whole new level. A judging stand had been set up near the Steamer Lane cliffs, and at some late hour the night before the contest began, the entire structure, along with an empty VW bus—presumably belonging to a visiting surfer—were pushed over the edge, twenty feet down into the water. Five boards were stolen from the Hawaiian team. On the last day of competition, a group of local surfers refused to clear the water, and shouted up to all the “goose-stepping pig” contest officials that “surfing is a free man’s art.”
It didn’t take many incidents like this before much of the West Coast got a reputation for localism. In actual fact, there were never that many genuinely hardcore localized California surf breaks. At the top of the list were Newbreak and Windansea in San Diego, Lunada Bay in Los Angeles County, Oxnard’s Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Hazard Canyon near San Luis Obispo, and Seaside Point in north Oregon. Acts of physical violence were usually limited to shoves, slaps, and punches. Weapons were unheard of. Intimidation was the locals’ real stock in trade—hard looks, repeated drop-ins, verbal abuse—along with car vandalism that ranged from tire flattening to smash-and-grab stereo rip-offs.
Locals went about their business with little or no fear of reprisal. Beachfront police presence was almost nonexistent, and local groups usually weren’t organized or named, which meant their profile outside of surfing was invisible. Rarely did a victimized surfer file a crime report. Running off to “the Man” just wasn’t cool—better to take the hit, surf some other break next time, and warn your buddies to keep away.
And nonlocals did keep away from what were called “localized” breaks. Reputation and notoriety, far more than regular doses of violence, made localism an amazingly effective anticrowd tool. Was there really some lunatic Oxnard dude with a huge galvanized nail resined bayonet-like to the nose of his board, ready to put a hole in any “souther” who dared to paddle out at Hollywood-by-the-Sea? Didn’t matter. Every day-tripping surfer heading north from L.A. County had heard the story, and 99 percent chose to drive right past Oxnard to the less-fraught beaches of North Ventura or Santa Barbara.
Localism traveled well. In Hawaii, especially, it flourished. A loosely structured group called the Hui (better known as the Black Shorts) established a thuggish presence on Oahu’s North Shore. The entire island of Kauai was understood to be off-limits to visiting surfers. At Narrabeen, in Sydney, hardcore locals went against type by being active (and very successful) in competition. They also showed a real flair for harassment. The break was too good, and too close to the nation’s surfing population center, to keep outsiders completely away, but a ranking member of the Narrabeen Boardriders Club (which in later years proudly if mistakenly credited itself with having “invented localism”) would literally blow holes into a crowd by methodically driving a bucket of golf balls from the water’s edge into the lineup. A handful of older, grizzled surfers from South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula had their moments as well. One out-of-towner, crawling over the nearshore rocks after an ex
hausting swim in through heavy surf, looked up and found a bearded local holding his board under one arm. The Eyre surfer placed a foot on the visitor’s head and calmly explained that he could have his board back “if you buy an ounce of mull”—pot—“off me.”
Localism eventually dropped most or all of its before-the-fall pieties—some next-generation locals would even use the latest equipment, bright colors included—and offered itself instead as a rough but necessary form of stewardship. Crowds were only getting worse, and vigilant locals were the only thing preventing total lineup chaos. Or so the argument went. Meanwhile, some heavily localized spots became more visitor-tolerant (Hollywood-by-the-Sea and Narrabeen among them), while other areas grew less so, including breaks in developing countries that had previously been surfed only by visitors.
WINDANSEA, SAN DIEGO, 1971.
The surf press struggled with localism. Editorial pages occasionally railed against it just as they had railed against the “hodad problem” in the early 1960s. “Jesus, what’s happening here?” Surfing asked in 1972. “Do the waves only belong to the aggressive strong guy? [Not long ago] it was all brotherhood and nature. Now it’s ‘don’t come to my beach, brother, or I’ll bust your head.’” As the editors saw it, a few bad apples were ruining things for the surfing majority. Membership in groups like the United States Surfing Association or the Australian Surfriders Association had been the catchall solution to hodadism. This new problem was trickier. The best Surfing could offer in 1972 was to ask that we all “think about the Golden Rule.” Other magazines made appeals that were just as earnest and just as feeble.
Unmentioned by surf editorialists was the fact that localism’s benefits extended to all local surfers, not just a relatively small group of surfing badasses. There was a lot of complicity. At any given localized break, there were usually dozens of regulars who didn’t confront outsiders, or break into their cars, but knew the guys who did—and everyone enjoyed a less-crowded lineup. There was also a generally accepted notion that resident surfers actually do deserve more waves than nonresidents. Locals often pushed things too far, sure. But maybe that was preferable to complete nonregulation, where you ended up with a Malibu-esque free-for-all. Surfing proudly had no oversight, no rules or penalties. This rough form of “stewardship,” at least in concept, actually made a kind of sense.
In practice, though, localism often wound up as nothing more than a cover for beachfront vigilantism. Locals weren’t necessarily wrong about things like overcommercialization and the need for lineup hierarchy and a semblance of order in the water. But greed and power, not fairness, was always localzism’s driving force. This was epitomized in 1980 by a Southern California novelty band called the Surf Punks and the song “My Beach,” their anthem to localism. Whether it made you laugh or cringe, the band got right to the simplicity of the whole enterprise with a punishing two-chord melody and a lyric made up of nothing but barked-out single-syllable words: “My beach! My waves! My chick! Go home!”
Made in California
Whatever problems and changes California surfers were going through in the 1970s, the state continued to do a few things well. It remained the sport’s design and manufacturing center. It produced the best surf films. Surf-related ideas in general flourished between San Diego and Santa Cruz. One of the most popular was introduced in 1972, when a bearded Santa Barbara surf shop owner named Fred Herzog packed and shipped out his first case of Sex Wax, the best-branded surf product of the age. It was just surf wax, like any other kind of surf wax, except it was round instead of square and came in more scented varieties. But people loved saying “Sex Wax,” and Herzog made a fortune selling the item itself, plus Sex Wax T-shirts, which were racy enough to get banned from some school districts—making them even more popular.
Feature-length surf movies were now being made in Australia, New Zealand, Florida, and England, but Southern Californians produced nearly all of the era’s signature titles, including 1970’s Pacific Vibrations and the roughhewn Cosmic Children. Bud Browne, now in his early sixties, came out of retirement to make 1973’s Going Surfin’. Greg MacGillivray and Jim Freeman released their massively hyped Five Summer Stories to a standing-room only crowd at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium (the Los Angeles Times called Stories the “Endless Summer of ’72”), and devotees paid to see updated versions of the movie for another six years, when it was finally retired. None of these movies broke new ground in terms of format. There were no plots, or worthwhile character studies, or probing insights into what made wave-riding so special. On the other hand, surf movie photography and editing had greatly improved compared to the films of the 1950s and 1960s, and audiences, even while stoned to the eyeballs, remained just as loud, rude, funny, and deeply involved with the film-going experience.
Surf movie soundtracks also got better, with huge speaker cabinets on either side of the screen vibrating with bootlegged music. Santa Monica filmmaker Scott Dittrich turned Fluid Drive, his otherwise mediocre 1974 debut, into a minor surf movie classic with an amazing all-purloined soundtrack that included the Beatles, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, and Santana. Paradoxically, the best and costliest surf movies had less interesting soundtracks. The makers of Five Summer Stories, Morning of the Earth, and Pacific Vibrations—the era’s most ambitious films—were all looking to become an Endless Summer–style crossover hit, which meant the music had to be paid for. Some of it was good, but it wasn’t Hendrix or the Stones.
Skateboarding was up and riding again in the early 1970s not long after a tiny San Diego startup called Cadillac Wheels introduced an all-urethane wheel. This was skateboarding’s version of the shortboard revolution. Used in combination with a new steel-encased ball-bearing system, urethane wheels rode as smooth as buttermilk, especially to anyone who remembered riding on those stone-age clay composite wheels from the previous decade. As in the sixties, skateboarders at first copied surfers. But as skaters began flying through the open air above swimming pools and U-shaped plywood ramps, it wasn’t long before surfers were copying them.
California also produced two of the era’s must-have surfwear items: the laminated neoprene flip-flop, or “surf slap” (cheap, durable, with a black top layer that hid your foot-grime); and the corduroy “walkshort,” made by an Orange County–based company called Ocean Pacific. Op shorts were cut almost obscenely high, giving the perennially unattractive male upper thigh way more exposure than it deserved, but they sold by the truckload. Hang Ten had already proven that a huge amount of money could be made in beachwear, by moving strongly into the vast inland market. Of course, Hang Ten had also shown that crossing over meant losing hardcore surfers, who would rather go to back to cutoff navy whites than be caught wearing the same pair of trunks as summer vacationers from the Midwest. But what surfwear outfit could resist a big contract with Macy’s or JC Penny? Not Hang Ten. And not Op. The company crossed over, surfers laughed at how totally uncool their stuff was, and Op laughed its way to hundreds of millions in annual sales.
* * *
The decade’s most controversial new product was the surf leash. Pat O’Neill of Santa Cruz, son of wetsuit magnate Jack O’Neill, introduced it in 1970 after becoming sick and tired of losing his board into the cliffs at Steamer Lane. The original surf leash looked like a dime-store novelty item: a big suction cup fixed to the deck of the board a few inches back from the nose, attached to a rubbery six-foot length of surgical tubing, which looped around the surfer’s wrist. O’Neill called it a “shot cord,” but riding down the line at Steamers it looked as if he were taking his board for a walk, and the less-commercial “surf leash” tag was unavoidable—and it stuck.
Purists were disgusted. A wipeout was something you paid for, the reasoning went, with a swim to the beach and maybe even a damaged board. Skill and experience got you access to breaks that were rocky or hard to ride. But now, any squidlip dorkus with a goon cord (or kook strap, or ding string) could paddle into the lineup, eat his lunch on ev
ery takeoff, bail out on every set, and reap no consequences. You just popped up, and your stick was right there, floating nearby.
GREG WEAVER, SAN DIEGO COUNTY.
It didn’t seem fair, and a lot of surfers were angry. Some were really angry. “I realized the evils of a cord before it was too late,” one said in a surf magazine letter. “I’ve invested in a knife, and now cut goons’ cords off.”
But just as many people were ready to give the leash a try—especially after it was modified so that it went from the board’s tail to the rider’s ankle—and soon the leash became the breakthrough surf product of the decade. The benefits were obvious. No more loose boards meant fewer dings and a safer lineup. (Leash-related injuries were more than offset by the absence of boards caroming through the wave zone.) Swimming time was reduced, and wave-riding time was increased. By the midseventies, the majority of boards were leashed, and the issue almost disappeared as topic of public debate.
Boogie Down: Tom Morey and the Bodyboard
The bodyboard was invented by longtime Southern California surfer Tom Morey, a charismatic USC math grad who’d worked as a Douglas Aircraft engineer before opening a Ventura County surf shop in 1964. Equal parts scientist, futurist, and carnival barker, Morey spent the rest of the sixties bringing strange new products to the surf marketplace. First was the Trisect, a three-piece travel surfboard that fit into a suitcase. Then Slipcheck, a liquid board traction sold in a ball-rattling aerosol can and available in bright colors that Morey waggishly promised would “give you the mind-power of a genius” and provide “the key to unlocking your buried potential.” Both were noble failures (the Trisect weighed too much, Slipcheck was too gritty), but Morey’s W.A.V.E Set removable fin system was a hit.
The History of Surfing Page 41