GETTING HIGHER: THE 11 STONIEST SURF MOVIE MOMENTS OF ALL TIME

Drugs are still very much part of surfing in 2018, if for no other reason then the fact that pot is now (mostly) legal. But our sport is no longer young and rebellious—we are in fact old and settled, or close to it, and cheers to us for growing up—which changes the terms. Drug use has no real cultural cachet in surf, or at least nothing to compare with the late '60s and early '70s. Jock Sutherland night-surfing Waimea on acid in 1969? Crazy, yes, stupid, sure, but wow! At a stroke, the one-time Duke winner, affectionately known to friends as Spaceman, bottled the entire era. A post-dinner sleepytime vape with your wife while vacationing beachfront in San Sebastian? Zeitgeisty in its own way, but Chas Smith won't be putting you in his next book.

For roughly a 10-year period starting in 1968, drugs use, in one way or another, often found its way into surf cinema—usually as a way to signify, "Hey, I'm cool with this, you're cool with this, and here we all are being cool, and let's maybe just get a little higher, there's a roach in that matchbox."

Here are ten such drug-flavored surf cinema moments. And because I haven't vaped this morning, I find myself compulsively bound to rank them.

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11. "And a Carrot Smoothie," Pacific Vibrations, 1970
The moment where Bill Hamilton turns to Steve Bigler, looking for guidance on his sandwich order, then boldly makes the decision all on his own: "Lay it on me." And just how high do you have to be to order a carrot smoothie?

10. Interstitial sequences, The Natural Art, 1969
This should rank much higher, except the whole movie is so murky and woozy and OD-adjacent that it unsettles me, and has thus been penalized. Someday I'll post the Golden Gate Park concert sequence where, as usual, the only naked person is a middle-aged man whose gyrations you can't unsee.

9. Opening titles, The Angry Sea, 1963
John Severson cooks up some proto-psychedelia, dips it in noir and brass, and reminds us that he was a surfer-artist long before he was a surfer-businessman. The trippiest part is John crafted this mind-melter without the benefit of actual drugs.

8. "Rupert's World," Sea of Joy, 1971
At best this is borderline funny, at worst it's straight-up animal cruelty. Then again, who among us, during a vis toit Indonesia or Thailand, hasn't been grossly violated by a monkey? Who doesn't feel that a monkey in the wild always has the upper hand in the monkey-human relationship? And that said monkey will grab your chicken satay, your keys, your phone, and laugh his monkey off ass while pirating said object into the canopy? Little fucker needs to mellow out.

7. "The Deepest Mysteries," Fantastic Plastic Machine, 1969
It's like the movie itself got high. Fantastic Plastic Machine starts off as a G-rated Endless Summer clone, with plenty of fun-in-the-sun shenanigans as we follow the Windansea club across the Pacific, heading toward Australia. But once in Sydney, after having dispatched with the inter-club surf contest, the Plastic filmmakers turn the movie over first to Bob McTavish and Nat Young, and when Nat introduces us to George Greenough we go full-blown audio-visual psychedelic, with split-screen effects and music piped in from the Ninth Circle of Bad-Acid Hell. At what point in this clip, for you, does it go from being "trippy" to an accidental but effective anti-drug PSA?

6. "Karma," Arne Wong, 1974
There was a lot of limp pastoral hippy-dippy animation plugging up surf cinema in the late '60s and '70s. And then there was the great Arne Wong, animator extraordinaire, who dropped this Zap-influenced punchline-perfect beauty (as seen in Hal Jepsen's Surfer Session), as well as Acapulco Gold (which unfortunately I don't have a clean copy of), before moving on to bigger and better-paying things, like Tron and Heavy Metal.

5. Opening titles, Morning of the Earth, 1972
Much more to say about this herbalized surf classic in a few weeks, but for the moment I'll just say that surf movie highs just don't get any higher quality than this. Vape pens up to Alby Falzon.

4. "The Pipe of Peace," Sea of Joy, 1971
Jeffrey's Bay, 1970. Nat Young with the Jesus beard, Ted Spencer in the red turtleneck. The friendly, pedestrian business of getting high. The most amazing part (not seen in this clip) is how incredibly well Nat surfed while stoned. The Sea of Joy footage of him at Supertubes—which for all I know was shot 20 minutes following this little Durban Poison tuneup—is Young at his flowing, powerful, regal best.

3. Topanga Beach party scene, Cosmic Children, 1970
I was going to make a joke about Derek Hynd getting in the groove here with those finless 360s, except everybody knows Derek would drive 75 miles out of his way to avoid a scene like this. Whereas I'd only drive 10 miles out of the way.

2. "I'm So Wasted!" Fast Times at Ridgemont High, 1983
My 86-year-old mom downloaded the GIPHY app last weekend, and lo the GIF fever is hot upon her ancient brow, and it's just a matter of days, possibly hours, before my message alert pings and that timeworn four-second hit of Jeff Spicoli lands once again in my message inbox. Yet is it not a testimony to Sean Penn's fleeting brilliance that, while overplayed like nothing this side of Bohemian Rhapsody, Spicoli still puts a smile on everyone's dial?

1. "Tales of Brave Ulysses," Pacific Vibrations, (John Severson, 1970)
"Tales of Brave Ulysses" gets me high all by itself. Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker channeling their homicidal hatred for each other into three minutes of fissioning molten minor-key beauty; the baroque lyrics that, as a kid in the late '60s, seemed to foretell all the surfing adventures that lay before me. "How his naked ears were tortured / By the sirens sweetly singing / For the sparkling waves are calling you / To touch their white laced lips." God, what a buzz! So is my thumb on the scale for Pacific Vibrations and this bright chunk of surfing psychedelia, because of the song? No. My thumb is on the scale because of the song and because John Severson has left the auditorium. Turn it up.