Revolution is not a Dinner Party

The Tao of George

Getting Slippery with Bob McTavish

Bismarck with a Tan

Plastic Machine

Enlightenment at Honolua Bay

Panic on the Showroom Floor

Style Takes a Dive

Everybody Must Get Stoned

Surfer Goes Electrical Bananas

No Contest

There Will be Slaps

Kook Straps, Cadillacs, and Sex Wax

Blame it on the Boogie

Country Soul

Higher and Brighter with Alby Falzon

Fresh Blood on the Newsstand

Long Road to Bells Beach

Speed Freaks

Gods of Thunder

The Impossible Wave

Into the Vortex

Gerry Lopez, Pipeline Firewalker

The Rubberman Cometh

Barefoot Revolution

There was a pause in 1968 as the sport seemed to be wondering if it was going to keep up the façade of moving toward a cleaned-up, anti-hodad, mainstream-friendly version of itself. Then the calendar flipped to 1969, and from Hermosa to Haleiwa to Melbourne it was all flashing peace signs, avocado smoothies, and oversized marijuana leaves glassed into the decks of new boards—right where the Hobie and Jacobs labels used to go.

The sport didn't much test the waters of the counterculture. It ran, jumped, and cannonballed into the deep end. Surf magazines ran feature-length articles written in free-verse stanzas: “You are Moses/with a fiberglass snake/entering eternity.” The new O’Neill Wetsuits ad campaign showed a nude model with her short john pulled down to her waist. Revered boardmaker Dick Brewer put on a pair of surf trunks each morning, drove out to a tiny Buddhist temple in the hills of Kauai, sat in full lotus for an hour, then drove back to his workshop and fired up the planer. The sport started to groan beneath the weight of its own newly-added significance and meaning. “Because surfing, in its pure form, deals with an equilibrium involvement between man and his nature,” surf journalist Drew Kampion wrote in 1970, “it becomes, almost by definition, an ecologically pure undertaking. Perhaps even an undertaking so basic that it performs an evolutionary function.”

Fashion-wise, much of surfing’s new makeover was lifted from West Hollywood and the East Village. Attendees at the 

 Magazine Readers Poll Awards banquet in 1969 wore beaded headbands, paisley-print scarves, fringed suede jackets, and half-tint wireframe glasses—the whole scene could have been transported straight from the backstage trailer at Woodstock. David Nuuhiwa let his thick black hair grow to his shoulders, outfitted himself in the latest and finest Melrose boutique threads, accessorized with silver inlaid-turquoise jewelry, and exuded the same shadowy panther-like presence in Southern California surf towns that Jim Morrison did in the bars and clubs of Sunset Boulevard. The simple, no-accoutrement, boom-era “surfer look,” a wholly original style legacy built up over the decades, wasn't erased, exactly. But many surfers now took additional dress cues from LP covers and 

But it was drugs, not clothes, that really put surfing in the countercultural fast lane. In beach towns everywhere, drugs were cheap, available, and popular, and surfers availed themselves with gusto. Nearly everyone involved with the development of the short surfboard was a hardcore stoner. Dick Brewer dropped acid regularly, and Nat Young remembers that he and Bob McTavish “smoked a big fat one” before every Honolua Bay session in 1967. Surfing’s drug culture only expanded from there. Wilken Surfboards in Los Angeles debuted its Meth Model in 1968 with the tagline “For Those Who Like Speed,” and top surfers umbilically attached themselves to a giant ceramic hookah in the popular 1972 surf movie 

. For a lot of surfers, as photographer Jeff Divine recalled, the sport wasn’t just about riding waves; the full experience involved “parking on the beach, smoking, taking acid, putting huge speakers on top of the car and blaring Santana, Hendrix, and the Doors.”

There were holdouts. Midget Farrelly finished his 1969 anti-drug opinion piece for 

 magazine by asking, “Does the beach take dope, do the waves take dope, do the seagulls take dope? Man, if you’re part of that scene, you won’t either.” Fred Hemmings, writing for 

 the same year, reported that a top Hawaiian rider had recently “blown his mind” on drugs, then assured readers that there was “no hope in dope.” But few people were listening. As Hemmings himself ruefully admitted a few years later, the awards banquet following the 1968 World Championships “looked like a Cheech and Chong convention.”

Marijuana was the surfer’s drug of choice, and it fit easily within established surfer culture. Surfers prided themselves on being rebellious—not quite criminal, but not rule-abiding either—and pot was the perfect misdemeanor-level drug. Easy to grow, easy to buy, easy to transport, pot appealed to the surfer’s DIY home-based enterprising spirit. The pot-smoking ritual was a good fit, too. Wariness toward anyone from outside your local break remained the sport’s default setting, and there weren’t many friendly gestures one surfer could make to another. Sharing a bar of wax—that worked. Lighting up a joint and passing it on? That was even better. Finally, surfing and pot were seen by many as complimentary natural highs. As one first-generation shortboarder put it, “The mood of the times made for a really creative period in surfing, and the mood was largely the result of getting stoned.”

LSD was also popular. As with pot, acid experiences were for the most part good. North Shore mainstay Jeff Hakman, decades after the fact, went into a near-reverie describing an afternoon with Jock Sutherland at Honolua Bay in early 1968: “The surf is eight-to-ten-feet and perfect, each of us are on a really nice tab of Purple Owsley; I’d be sitting outside watching Jock’s silhouette go up and down this long wall, then I’m riding myself, both of us screaming. It was a dream! It was incredible! Those were probably the best moments of my surfing career.” The game, as Sutherland recalled, was to see how high you could get without having it affect the way you rode. “We’d pretty much do anything we could get our hands on. But not so much the downers, of course, because that slowed you up. It all tied in to how it affected your surfing.”

But acid was also responsible for surfing’s first round of drug casualties, including former Hawaii state champion Jackie Eberle, who went catatonic after a weekend-long high in Maui and was institutionalized. Photographer Ron Stoner’s prodigious acid use in 1968—dropping three full blotter hits at once, for example, while his friends settled for a quarter-hit each—greased his slide into full-blown schizophrenic psychosis. David Nuuhiwa and Mike Hynson were both involved with the Laguna Beach-based Brotherhood of Eternal Love, nationwide supplier of Orange Sunshine acid, whose founding members (surfers for the most part) all ended up dead, missing, or jailed.

Cocaine didn't much factor into the early years of the shortboard revolution, as the drug itself wasn't yet in fashion. That changed in early '70s. 

 magazine's coverage of the 1972 World Championships, in San Diego, for example, made winking reference to local "snow flurries. Furthermore, coke, unlike LSD, never really went out of fashion. Yet there didn't seem to be a special relationship between surfing and coke—apart from the fact that, as surf writer Steve Barilotti put it, “surfing is a youthful culture and youth will have its party.”

Heroin’s presence in surfing was much smaller but much darker. Because Australia was closest to the Golden Triangle’s opium-producing motherlode, Australian surfers did more and suffered more. “Dealers moved in and were selling on the beach, virtually calling guys out of the surf,” Queensland-born world champion Wayne Bartholomew once wrote, describing heroin’s mid-'70s introduction to his home town of Coolangatta. “I remember walking up to Point Danger one morning to check the waves and seeing a dozen of the hottest surfers all in a line to go into this house and shoot up.” But the misery was spread around. Hawaii state junior champion Rusty Starr overdosed and died in 1971, as did one-time Aussie prodigy Kevin Brennan in 1975.

Surfing’s most vivid drug-related morality tale took place a few years later, when Westhampton golden boy Ricky Rasmussen, winner of the 1974 US Championships, while awaiting sentencing for selling heroin to an undercover police officer, was shot and killed during an early morning Harlem drug score.

Tragedy, though, never extinguished the romance of drug culture—in surfing as in rock and roll. This was made obvious in 2001 with the release of Alan Weisbecker’s autobiographical memoir 

. Every surfer in the late 1960s and 1970s knew somebody who knew a guy who had run a boatload of pot up from Columbia, or traveled home from Europe with a pound or two of blonde Lebanese hash stuffed into a cored-out center of a new surfboard. Weisbecker, from Long Island, was that guy, and 

.” Wholesale drug trafficking, Weisbecker explains, allowed him to finance an “open-ended world surf tour . . . [to] do 

 one better [and] put some Xs on what was in those days a largely blank world surf map.” The guts and confidence required to deal with heavy narco situations, Weisebecker writes, came from surfing itself. Faced with a gang of dagger-carrying ruffians in a Moroccan bazaar during a 1970 hash buy, Weisbecker begins to freak out, then collects himself with the thought, “These bastards can’t do anything to you; they never rode big Sunset Beach.”

The surf world ate it up. Writer Kem Nunn called 

,” and one magazine reviewer described Weisbecker as “a true surfer, rugged traveler, street-smart nomad and wise sage.” Here was a another version of the Miki Dora surf-outlaw phenomenon. Surfers didn’t actually envy Weisbecker’s career as a drug-runner. Weisbecker himself saw the damage he’d done to his own life, and to the lives of friends, family, and lovers. “Abandonment,” he says near the end of 

. “It’s what I do best.” Still, most surfers liked to believe they were cut from similar cloth, that they were living a life less ordinary—even if their version of contraband-running was an open beer between the legs while stuck in traffic.

Drugs put surfing in the countercultural fast lane. In beach towns everywhere, drugs were cheap, available, and popular. “We'd do anything we could get our hands on," Jock Sutherland said.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Everybody Must Get Stoned

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