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SurfRiders: In Search of the Perfect Wave

(excerpted from Chapter Six: Surforama: the Surfing Culture)

Surf Culture had infiltrated America’s consciousness by 1964. In the March issue of Surf Guide magazine, a full-page ad announced that the Makaha Surf-Skateboard was now available at Broadway, the Emporium, and Macy’s department stores. An upset Surf Guide reader sent in a letter complaining about an “obscene and offensive” photograph that had run in an earlier issue, showing young surfers on the beach dancing the Surfer’s Stomp: “You certainly shouldn’t print photos of half-clothed girls and cigarette-smoking ruffians!” A feature article titled “Surfing Goes Hollywood!” noted with some ambivalence that the just-released Beach Party, from American International Pictures, had earned a tidy $4 million, and that a sequel, Muscle Beach Party, was now in post-production. And finally, in the back section of the magazine, there was a short review of the second annual Los Angeles Surf Fair.

The Surf Fair, co-sponsored by Surf Guide and radio station KRLA, took place at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, 20 minutes southeast of Malibu, on December 27 and 28. Events included a bikini contest, a battle of the surf bands (headlined by the Surfaris and the Surf‑Tones), and a festival of surf movies. Surfing, skateboarding, and skimboarding competitions were staged, along with a car show featuring a “hand‑built, Rolls‑Royce surf‑wagon, complete with leopard skin upholstery.” But the main action was in the Civic Auditorium exhibitors’ hall, where top surfboard manufacturers ‑ along with a few dozen second‑division board‑builders, plus surf clubs, clothing companies, and makers of wetsuits, surf racks, surf books, and magazines ‑ had set up display booths and settled in for a weekend of socializing and light work.

A few hundred surfers had filed through the Civic turnstiles on Surf Fair weekend, most of them dressed in Levi’s and Keds, with white competition T‑shirts underneath wool Pendletons. Their general mood wandered from indifference to mildly stoked. They directed smirks toward the two kooks in ties and cardigan sweaters who sat at the Salt Creek Surfing Society booth, next to a sign that declared them “dedicated to the exchange of ideas in regard to the formation and mechanics of surfing clubs.” On the other hand, everyone thought the Jacobs Surfboards booth was totally boss. Surfer Mike Doyle wasn’t actually there himself, but his board was, and glued to the middle of the board was a picture of Doyle on a heavy‑duty Sunset Beach boomer. Rusty Miller’s board was next to Doyle’s, with a picture of Miller at the Pipeline. A lot of people had Doyle picked as the favorite for the upcoming world titles; Miller had made the finals of the West Coast championships the year before. Yeah, the Jacobs booth was bitchin’, for sure. Definitely better than the Greg Noll Surfboards display, which was kind of hurtin’. Tucked off the main thoroughfare, on the far side of the hall, Noll’s booth featured three surfboards, a few scattered boxes, a plain metal fold‑out table and two fold‑out chairs. A hand‑lettered “Greg Noll Surfboards” banner was tacked to the wall, along with a pair of surf trunks and a droopy length of nylon fishing net. It looked like a 20‑minute installation job. Nothing whatsoever to identify the presenter as one of the top 10 board‑builders in the country.

Then the display strategy was made clear as Noll himself stepped into the 10‑by‑20‑foot area. The surfboards, the banner, and the nylon net were all fluff. Noll himself was the real exhibit, and suddenly the entire Surf Fair show seemed to tilt in his direction. This was partly due to his corporeal mass (at 6 feet, 2 inches, and 220 pounds, he was appropriately nicknamed “Da Bull”) and partly to his untouchable North Shore reputation. He’d ridden the world’s biggest waves. He’d been annihilated by the world’s biggest waves, surfaced, grabbed his board, and paddled right back out.

Everything about Noll was heavy and grounded, yet in many ways he was the Surf Fair’s most nimble exhibitor. As a businessman, he understood perfectly the link between a cleaned‑up image for the sport and improved sales. As a frequent contributor to Petersen ‘ Surfing, he had tacitly endorsed the magazine’s credo, which read in part: “We respect the rights of the community and its members. Our conduct will set a mature and responsible example of the proper respect for people and property.” A few weeks before the Surf Fair, Noll had stunt‑doubled for James Mitchum in Columbia Pictures’ upcoming Ride the Wild Surf, another surfing morality play from Hollywood in which hard work, education, and convention triumphed over recreation and idiosyncrasy.

But the idea of Noll as a paragon of surfing virtue was laughable. His greatest efforts had gone toward the invention of a surfing culture that combined drinking, brawling, and minor vandalism, with great inventiveness in dress, language, and entertainment. Noll was a true representative of his sport, and he constantly walked the line between clever and idiotic. In the eighth grade, he once attended class in a trench coat with a rotting anchovy hidden in a side pocket ‑ just to find out how long it would take to get a reaction. He later painted swastikas on his car for the same reason. Noll’s standing in surf history is a lesson in the importance of time and setting. In another town, in another era, he would have had his moment as the local smart‑ass and vanished. Instead, he’s revered as surf culture apostle.

“Out of everyone in my high school,” Noll says today, thinking back to 1952 in Manhattan Beach, California, “just three of us were surfers. So of course we wanted to stand out. And right about then people were beginning to look at surfers as something different, and maybe a little weird. I remember the vice‑principal called me to his office, sat me down, and said, ‘What exactly do you guys do down there on the beach?’ He understood about the wave‑riding part, but not the rest of it, We had ‘em a little worried. And so we made a game of it. That was the beginning of what I guess you’d call the lifestyle.”

What exactly are they doing down there on the beach? Greg Noll’s vice‑principal, responding in the timeless manner of nonsurfers, wasn’t so much interested in surfing itself as the effects of surfing ‑ the ripples and reverberations, known collectively as “surf culture,” that would soon move from the beaches into recording studios, movie theaters, fashion houses, and advertising agencies. The steady growth in surfing’s popularity ‑ from 100,000 active surfers internationally in the mid‑1960s to perhaps 3 or 4 million today ‑ offers little explanation as to how a coastal subculture could flap its wings and send a tornado across the fields of art, commerce, and the public imagination. And if surf culture will never again be as fresh and exciting as it was during Greg Noll’s era, it has nonetheless been surprisingly resilient and adaptable through the years. A surf culture inventory today might begin with the thousands of warehouses full of surf‑logo T‑shirts and finish with the current wave ‑ Noll must shudder at the thought ‑ of “serious” surf literature.

Because nonsurfers have been vigorous and effective purveyors of surf culture for nearly 40 years, it’s often hard to distinguish between the genuine surf article and forgeries. The public at large, for example, views the Beach Boys as a three‑word definition of “surf music” and assumes that the band’s members and core supporters were rank‑and‑file Southern California surfers. Wrong on all counts. Surf music, precisely defined, is Instrumental‑only, and features a sliding, heavy‑reverb, jack‑hammer guitar sound, along with a strong emphasis on the first beat of each measure. Perfection in the genre was reached with Dick Dale’s 1962 hit “Miserlou” ‑later used for the opening credits in Pulp Fiction. Date’s shows at the Rendezvous Ballroom in Newport Beach in the early 1960s were heavily attended by surfers, and Dale himself was a passable surfer. The Beach Boys were another story. When the Hawthorne, California‑based vocal group released its debut Surfin’ USA in 1963, trendsetters on the beach put them down not just as musically soft but as rip‑off artists. Only the drummer surfed, and he was a kook; and Hawthorne was of course miles east of the Pacific Coast Highway. “Big in the Midwest, big in Japan ... not big at Malibu,” commented 1960s surf icon Lance Carson, a longtime R & B purist. But musical purity can became harder to define with the passing years. “I really didn’t like the Beach Boys at the time; none of us did,” says Surfer founder John Severson. “But now when I hear those old songs, it brings back great memories of good waves and good times. So maybe it is surf music after all.”

While the California beach sound that had much of the free world swaying and stomping in the early 1960s was an all‑male invention, it was actually a teenage girl who stood at the headwaters of surfing culture. Kathy Kohner, 15, just a shade over five feet tall, went to Malibu in the summer of 1956 to learn how to surf, and was immediately given the nickname “Gidget” ‑ a contraction of “girl midget.” Two years later she enrolled in college and quit surfing forever, but the book Gidget, a milk‑and‑sugar version of Kathy’s experiences on the beach, written by her father, Frederick, had by that time become a best‑seller.

Frederick chose the right location. Malibu was the fertile crescent of surf culture. The origins of waveriding are traced back to ancient times, and the public had taken occasional notice of surfers throughout the first half of the 20^th century, but the sport’s basic and lasting character was for the most part created at Malibu after World War II. James Dean, Marlon Brando, the Beat poets, and rock and roll did the essential nonconformist spadework. Then surfers joined in, minus the brooding teenage angst, but often showing real proficiency in outraging the squares. To keep warm on the beach during cold mornings, surfers bought women’s full‑length fur coats for next‑to‑nothing at the Salvation Army. They wore peroxide‑white hair as a badge. They bought $25 cars, splashed the exteriors with colored resin, then knocked out the rear windows for easier surfboard transportation. A well‑known Malibu surfer, posing as Washington crossing the Delaware, once rode through a Winchell’s parking lot on the hood of a friend’s car, wearing nothing but a single, logically placed glazed donut.

Meanwhile, surfers developed their own code of attitudes and mores, elitist beyond measure. Style and appearance ranked higher than money and privilege. Because Hawaii was revered as the sport’s spiritual home, surfers garnished their lives with palm‑frond hats, tiki gods, and bowls of pineapple‑rum punch. Beginning surfers were publicly humiliated. Gidget would eventually find a small niche in women’s studies courses as an Eisenhower‑era feminist, but the sport’s overwhelming maleness ensured that women would be treated badly. “Women were props, nothing else,” recalls former big‑wave surfer Fred Van Dyke. “You took the best‑looking woman you could find, she’d sit on the beach all day, get sunburned and dehydrated, and the guy would come in and get pissed off because she didn’t see his best ride. It was machismo to the nth degree,”

“Malibu Lizards,” a short fiction piece found in the 1960 debut edition of Surfer magazine, hinted at surf‑related adventures in travel, drinking, and sex, and few of the approximately 60 surf magazines that exist today have moved beyond this basic publishing philosophy. But the first Surfer also contained a postscript that articulated perfectly and for all time the solemn, metasport nature of surfing: “In this crowded world the surfer can still seek and find the perfect day, the perfect wave, and be alone with the surf and his thoughts.”

Malibu was often the star attraction in the homespun surf films that annually toured the beach city community centers and high school auditoriums in the late 1950s and 1960s. The movies  (early favorites included Cat on a Hot Foam Board, Angry Sea, and Waterlogged) were formulaic: 75 minutes of whip-turns, noserides, big waves, and wipeouts, with a half‑dozen short comedy sketches spliced in at regular intervals for a change of pace, all set to a tape‑recorded rock‑and‑roll or jazz soundtrack. The howling audience reaction, especially during the opening few shots, was only partly related to what was being shown onscreen. The surf movie was a fuse. The real event was the crowd itself. In coastal town theaters, surfing identity was expressed in a single, ear‑splitting voice, and people who were there still remember such moments as the greatest communal experience of their lives.

Before the Gidget movie sequels, and long before the Gidget TV series, Kathy Kohner, in 1959, sat back in a theater with her Malibu friends Moondoggie and Tubesteak and watched the original Gidget movie. Hollywood would do a lot worse by surfing in years to come with Beach Blanket Bingo, Beach Party, and the other Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon movies. Gidget at least touched on the attraction of a life spent surfing. Kahuna, the main surfing character in the movie, is played by Cliff Robertson and patterned after Terry “Tubesteak” Tracy ‑ who lived for three summers in a shack on the point at Malibu. Kahuna is older than Gidget and the rest of the surfers in the movie. He’s a serious surfer, and Robertson, looking great in a work shirt with torn‑off sleeves, gives his character’s defining line a serious reading: “I’m a surf bum. You know, ride the waves, eat, sleep, not a care in the world.” Columbia scriptwriters allowed this independent notion to live for about 60 minutes before letting slip the dogs of American free enterprise. Kahuna gives up almost without struggle. In the movie’s final scene, he tears down his beach shack, walks off the beach, and rejoins the work force.

The international success of Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer, in 1966 and 1967, was irrefutable proof that the mainstream could, under the right circumstances, pay attention to real surfing. Twenty years later, the sport again rode high on the wheel of trend, fashion, and a billion‑dollar beachwear industry. Then surfing hit a low period in the early ‘90s, followed by another high beginning in the mid‑1990s. By this time, the landscape was dotted with wavepools and surf-theme bars, and pro contests were seen weekly on TV. But surfing’s material cultural output ‑ its paraphernalia, gestures, and effects ‑ would never again radiate off the beach the way they did in the early and mid‑1960s. The surfer‑as‑sportsman makeover didn’t take in the early and mid‑1980s, while urban influences were picked up and discarded in the mid‑1990s. These surfing persona ignored the lessons of The Endless Summer, as Brown’s film was warm, easy‑going, iconoclastic, and soulful to the core. Genuine forms of surf culture almost always are.

Today, surf culture often seems to be little more than 1950s‑ and 1960s‑based nostalgia. Surf memorabilia is collected, traded, and sold. Classic surf movies have been released on video. Reconstructed woodies sell for $50,000 and longboards, nearly extinct in the 1970s, now account for half of all surfboard sales.

But new ground is being broken as well, as surfing for the first time is examined ‑ by insiders and outsiders ‑ in a more considered way. Beach volleyball, not surfing, is the new symbolic activity for the young, blonde, and dumb. Most of what is new in surf culture today has to do with measuring the sport’s significance. PBS in 1995 aired a one‑hour documentary called Liquid Stage: The Lure of Surfing. Art galleries and universities have staged surfing exhibits, and more than a dozen permanent surfing museums have opened up internationally in the past decade. Rhino Records issued a four‑CD compendium of surf music. A 12‑part cable TV series, titled Fifty Years of Surfing on Film, aired in the summer of 1996. In 1997 a documentary on surfing and healthy aging is due to air, and Kem Nunn’s surfing novel, The Dogs of Winter, will be published. Surfing, in other words, is currently being granted a weight and standing unimaginable during the era of Frankie and Annette.

Larger cultural shifts have also lent new status to the sport. Surfing fits nicely into a pro-environmental context. The Internet is continuously (if metaphorically) being “surfed.” Flex time and telecommuting are ideal for a life strongly influenced by the cryptic forces of wind, tide, and ocean swell,

Finally, the image of the surfer ‑ and, by association, surfing itself ‑ is being recast. Daniel Duane’s 1996 memoir, Caught Inside: A Surfer’s Year on the California Coast, offered the longest and most thoughtful look yet at surfing’s still‑evolving place in society. Duane, throughout the book, talks with great admiration about Vince, his surfing mentor. “He was already running‑- not jogging, but outright sprinting‑down the dirt road. Age 45, clean khakis and sun cap, board under one arm, pack on his back, bounding through the fields on a Monday. He surfed every day without fail, and often surfed twice a day. I loved being with him, loved our endless conversations and the unshakable sense that this unlikely use of time mattered.”

It turns out that Vince is married and has a teaching job at a nearby college, but he nonetheless sounds very much like ... a surf bum. Vince as Kahuna, based on Tubesteak: life imitating bad art imitating life.

Ride the waves, eat, sleep, not a care in the world. Surfers once had to grow out of surfing. Now they can grow into it.