Milestones in Surf History Part Eighteen (#112 - #118)

Milestones in Surf History Part Eighteen (#112 - #118)

by Sam Bleakley

#112 : 1968 Reno Abellira Surfs into the Future at the Puerto Rico World Champs : The fourth World Championship event was held in Rincon, Puerto Rico, won by Fred Hemmings and Margo Godfrey respectively. The final day delivered perfect clear blue right peelers. Surfers from as far a field as Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, Japan, Panama and India were among the 16 nations represented. Surfing had changed radically since the last World Contest. Matt Warshaw explains "Crew cuts and competition-stripe T-shirts had been replaced by bushy sideburns and collar-length hair, beads, granny glasses, bell-bottoms, and paisley-print shirts. The shortboard revolution was in full swing, and the new boards were two feet shorter and five pounds lighter than those used in 1966. Surfers were now carving up and down the wave face, whereas two years earlier they'd been stalling, trimming, and noseriding." Key standouts in the new progressive style included Wayne Lynch and Reno Abellira and Margo Godfrey. Abellira was the event's most exciting surfer, as he consistently rode in the speeding pocket just beneath the curl on a slick toothpick-like board. "It was a skateboard," California surf publisher Dick Graham wrote, marveling at Abellira's radical new equipment, "and he rode it like a god, because he is one." Reno is pictured here in Puerto Rico by Leroy Grannis.

#113 : 1969 Rip Curl and Quicksilver : In 1969 it must have felt like anything was possible. Surfboards were enjoying a craze of radical experimentation and the crew of Apollo 11 videoed the first lunar landing as Neil Armstrong proclaimed “One small step for man, a giant leap for mankind.” At the same time a hardy culture of wave-riding had developed in coldwater Torquay, Victoria, close to the prolific Bells Beach. It was here that Doug Warbrick and Brian Singer founded Rip Curl, making functional boards for local surfers. The name ‘Rip Curl’ was taken from a vee-bottom board upon which Warbrick had written ‘Rip Curl Hot Dog’. He later said that the words didn't mean anything, “Except ripping was groovy; surfing the curl was groovy; we wanted to be groovy – so that was it.” In 1970 Warbrick and Singer figured that surfboard making competition was ripe, but wetsuit production was lacking. Seizing the gap in the market, Rip Curl took over an old house in Torquay and invested in a pre-World War II sewing machine. Their aim was to transform diving technology into a wetsuit suitable for surfing. They put together a crew of locals and went into production, cutting out the rubber on the floor and handing the pieces to a machinist. Rip Curl grew like wildfire. Alan Green (co-founder of Quiksliver with John Law) was a Rip Curl employee in 1969 and developed the first Quiksilver boardshorts at the Rip Curl factory. Green soon left Rip Curl to produce his own wetsuits and launch a brand of sheepskin boots for surfers. Then he started the Quiksilver company with John Law. Their first product was the boardshort. The name Quiksilver is derived from the ancient alchemists’ term for the turning of base metals into gold. Green explained that his wife was reading a novel when she came across the word, and he loved the description of something as elusive, liquid, mercurial and changing readily. The logo (of a large wave with a mountain on a red background) is of course a pastiche of Japanese painter Hokusai’s woodcut ‘The Great Wave off Kanagawa’ (a previous milestone in our series). 1976 saw the first licensing of Quiksilver to the US as Jeff Hakman left Torquay with a prestigious Bells Beach contest competition trophy and a lucrative agreement to distribute Quiksilver, which he established in the US with Bob McKnight. The launchpad of all these surf industry rocket ships is arguably the restless waves at the enigmatic Bells Beach, pictured here by Joel Coleman.

#114 : 1970 The Leash : Although an early version of the leash was invented in the mid 1930s by Tom Blake when he attached cotton rope from a belt to his board, and a variety of homemade leashes were tested in the '50s and '60s (most famously by French surfer George Hennebutte who connected the tail and the ankle), the first big advocate of the surf leash was Pat O'Neill from Santa Cruz. In 1970 he fastened a length of surgical tubing to the nose of his board with a suction cup, and looped the other end to his wrist. It was initially thought that this could help lever turns and cutbacks, but was ridiculed as a “Kook Cord”. Early promoters of the leash included kneeboarder Steve Russ and Gary Moreno, who had been surfing on the east coast of Barbados and got fed up seeing lost boards smashed on the reef and trapped in caves. By late 1971 the leash was connected to the ankle (often tied around an old sock to prevent chafe) and the board's tail section (in the system first credited to Hennebutte), or fin base, and many riders started making leashes from bungee cords. This was the archetypal leg-rope, but it was heavy on joints because of the tension in the cord. They could be lethal after a wipeout. Pat’s father, Jack O'Neill, permanently lost the sight in his left eye in 1971 after his leashed board snapped and hit his face. "To Leash or Not to Leash, That is the Question" was the title of a 1972 ‘Surfing’ magazine article. "Leashes are for dogs" was the motto of the no-leash group. Leash advocates said it was safer and more fun to surf than swim, and that leashes promoted a freer, more progressive performance. Two of the many pioneers of leash production included Australian David Hattrick and Derek Thomson who started producing Cosmic leashes in the UK in 1973 with strong rubber tubing and an internal nylon restraint cord and soft Velcro ankle wrap. As leash technology advanced in safety and comfort (namely the introduction of urethane in 1978), by 1980 it was rare to find a surfer not using a leash. While the legrope has saved billions of minor injuries, long swims and board dings, Mark Foo drowned at Mavericks in 1994 when his leash became tangled on an underwater rock. However, many big-wave riders claim to have saved their own lives when they were able to use their leash to climb to the surface. Leashes have certainly helped shortboarders to push the limits of aerial performance (rather then swim to shore, or into the rip current, following another failed attempt) captured in style here by Nate Smith.

#115 : 1970 The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun : Californian kneeboarder, inflatable-mat-rider, designer and filmmaker George Greenough has been tagged the ‘barefoot genius’ and he was arguably the most influential surfer in the early shortboard era. In 1968 Nat Young stated Greenough to be "the greatest surfer in the world today." He was also a groundbreaking photographer, his 1966 image of Australian Russell Hughes evidently the first watershot of a rider fully inside the tube. Greenough’s epic film ‘The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun’ builds up to a spectacular sequence. It was a sensation. Greenough had strapped a camera to himself and shot the first genuine in the tube footage. The viewer was taken deeply and hypnotically inside the tube. Pink Floyd were so impressed that they donated music to Greenough’s ‘Echoes’ (1972), a 21-minute short, filmed at 200 frames per second, that further explored the textures and patterns of the breaking wave from deep inside the tube and below the water surface. At the time, three Cornish surfers (Simonne Renvoize, Paul Holmes and Alan ‘Fuz’ Bleakley) who were running both ‘Surf Insight’ magazine and ‘Aqua Gem Surf Flicks’ showed Greenough’s ‘Crystal Voyager’ (1973) and ‘The Inner Most Limits of Pure Fun’ at the Electric Cinema in Portobello Road in London, where they had packed audiences at the international capital of a cultural revolution. 

#116 : 1970-72 Tracks to Morning of the Earth : Following the radical reduction in board length from nine to six feet, by the early ‘70s what came from Australia was an animal arrogance, a slash ’n’ tear approach that had not existed in surfing before. At the 1970 World Championships in Victoria goofyfooter Wayne Lynch performed the finest backhand surfing anyone had seen. But the aggressive Australians soon cooled out, retired to the country, discovered Byron Bay and the exotic Indonesia travel experience, showcased in Alby Falzon’s groundbreaking travel film, ‘Morning of the Earth’. Alby had also started an alternative surf paper (in 1970 with David Elfick and John Witzig) called ‘Tracks’, based on the highly successful American music and politics paper ‘Rolling Stone’. Well written articles focused on environmental issues, anti-Vietnam campaigns, organic recipes, quotes from Yogis, treehouse building, and defense of marijuana use and Aboriginal rights, promoting a surfing lifestyle, family values and anti-surf-competition attitudes. Falzon secured a large grant from the Australian Film Development Corporation to shoot ‘Morning of the Earth’, and backed this up with a creative and beautiful approach to filming and editing, and a winning recipe of surfers, from Michael Peterson at Kirra, Terry Fitzgerald (the Sultan of Speed) in Hawaii and Nat Young in Byron Bay at the founding of the ‘country soul’ movement. The soundtrack, including G. Wayne Thomas's ‘Open Up Your Heart’, was also a hit. Famously Falzon showcased Bali's aquamarine Uluwatu ridden by Rusty Miller and Stephen Cooney. The Balinese considered swimming in the ocean a religious taboo. Uluwatu was ‘the place of the living dead’, populated with evil creatures and unsettled spirits. To enter the water was sacrilege. When the taboo was broken, a long-standing cultural tradition was broken by an outside force: surfing. Almost overnight, Indonesia became the Shangri-la for adventurous surfers and a local scene challenged folklore and flowered.

#117 : 1972 Five Summer Stories : Jim Freeman and Greg MacGillivray’s ‘Five Summer Stories’ is a superb and sparkly, detail-obsessed cult classic with an original soundtrack composed by Southern Californian band Honk. Hawaiian tube-riding specialist Gerry Lopez (a model of elegance) is the surfing star, supported by titans Jeff Hakman, David Nuuhiwa, Margo Oberg, Terry Fitzgerald, Billy Hamilton, Angie Reno, Corky Carroll, Eddie Aikau, Sam Hawk and many others. ‘Five Summer Stories’ cost $24,000 to make (double the normal investment for a surf film at the time), and showcased stellar production across the board. The film also features original animation by John Lamb, among the first to animate surfing and skateboarding, winning an Academy Award in 1980 for the invention of the Lyon Lamb Video Animation System. Rick Griffin was commissioned to do the film's poster, inspired by a newspaper ad for the 1971 ‘A Clockwork Orange’. He later re-worked the poster (in the late 1970s) to create the iconic surfer offering wax. MacGillivray was from Laguna Beach, his first full-length film ‘A Cool Wave of Color’ (1964) followed by ‘The Performers’ (1965). Freeman was from Santa Ana and had produced ‘Let There Be Surf’ (1963), followed by ‘Outside the Third Dimension’ (in 3-D) and ‘The Glass Wall’. He was 22 in 1966 when he met MacGillivray. They formed MacGillivray-Freeman Films and had a perfect balance of expertise and creativity, while meticulous and hardworking. Matt Warshaw explains, “Technically and artistically, the MacGillivray-Freeman team had no rival within surfing. They invested in the best equipment, worked harder and longer than anyone, and were both fervent students of the craft; their movies were better framed, better edited, and more colour-saturated than anything produced at the time.” ‘Free and Easy’ came in 1967, ‘Waves of Change’ in 1970 (re-released as ‘The Sunshine Sea’), and ‘Five Summer Stories’ was their swan song before they began working in Hollywood in the early '70s. Sadly, just two days before ‘To Fly!’ debuted in 1976, Freeman was killed in a helicopter crash in the Sierra Nevada. MacGillivray’s impact continued, including the lead role as a cameraman on ‘Big Wednesday ‘ in 1978, another milestone to come.

#118 : 1972 Tales From The Tube : In the February 1972 issue, ‘Surfer’ magazine included a 20-page comic book insert, featuring the work of San Francisco underground cartoonists (and Zap contributors) Rick Griffin, Robert Crumb, Robert Williams and S. Clay Wilson. ‘Tales from the Tube’ was conceived and developed by Griffin, who created ‘Surfer's’ Murphy cartoon legend, then moved to San Francisco where he became one of the so-called ‘Big Five’ posters artists, doing soon-to-be-legendary work for ‘Rolling Stone’, The Grateful Dead and Bill Graham. Other Tube cartoonists included Bill Ogden, Jim Evans and Glenn Chase. The strips ranged from performance and travel fantasy (Chase's ‘Cosmic Shangri-La’) to a gritty challenge of the largely Caucasian-dominated American surfing population (Crumb's ‘Salty Dog Sam Goes Surfin'!’). In Griffin's own strip, Murphy gets swallowed whole by the Tube Monster, only to be regurgitated and spat out onto the beach just in time for the next showing of the Jumbo Stoke-a-Rama surf flick. Griffin also did the magazine's cover art: an inspired vision of the kind of tuberiding skills, water photography and film that surfing would soon produce. Other strips in the inaugural issue included ‘Surf's Up’ (S. Clay Wilson), ‘The Tides that Bind!’ (Robert Williams) and ‘The Bushongo Brothers Match Wits with Mocambo the Mighty’ (Jim Evans). In 1973, Griffin added 12 more pages to Tales and Print Mint published it as a smaller-format 32-page stand-alone comic. Both versions are collector's items. ‘Tales from the Tube’ is also the title of a slick 1975 surf film by Bob Cording and Jerry Humphries. Griffin did the poster art, an incredible airbrushed behind-the-barrel-perspective takeoff.