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

Longboarding was ridiculous in big, hollow surf. It could be done, but it wasn’t pretty. Butch Van Artsdalen rode Pipeline the way you’d imagine Buddy Rich would play drums with a pair of small tree branches.

The shortboard changed that. Tuberiding—like noseriding a few years earlier—became the “sport within the sport,” and Pipeline went from being a “Roman gladiator pit” (as Bruce Brown put it in 

) to something closer to the Holy See. Riding inside the tube would always remain difficult, but starting in the late '60s a high-intermediate surfer could expect to make the occasional visit, while advanced riders began to work out the first arcs and lines in what would eventually become a whole applied geometry of tuberiding.

Surfers from Hawaii were again in the vanguard. Bob McTavish’s “plastic machine,” with its broad, clunky, spin-prone back end, was never going to cut it at Pipeline. A narrow tail, lower overall volume, increased rocker, reduced weight—these were the features required of a good tuberiding board, and Hawaii’s Dick Brewer used them in combination better than anybody. He also helped develop the “tucked-under” edge: an egg-shaped rail whose lower quarter was cut off by the bottom surface. It didn’t look like much, but the tucked-under edge was the era’s key design advance, after the plastic machine itself, as it greatly improved both traction and handling.

The first great shortboard tuberider was a tightly-wound 21-year-old 

 Hawaiian named Jock Sutherland. He was runner-up to Nat Young in the 1966 World Championships, won the 1967 Duke event, and then crossed over to the new equipment without missing a beat. Sutherland had a certain old-fashioned quality, even in the late 1960s: he was neatly groomed, with side-parted hair cut above his ears and collar, never sided with the anti-competition movement, and was polite to the squares. He’d been a great admirer of Butch Van Artsdalen, and his favorite Pipeline board, like Van Artsdalen’s, was bright red.

Everything else about Sutherland, however, was new and of the moment. He out-drugged nearly all of his peers, for starters. Friends called him “Spaceman.” LSD was his drug of choice, but as Sutherland put it, he’d smoke or swallow “pretty much anything I could get my hands on.” Even while high, he continued to win surf contests. He used big words and spoke in a tortured syntax that came off as both ironic and nonsensical. By riding a slightly bigger board, he told an interviewer, a surfer gained “elongation from section to section,” and could then “realize the distributive dexterities that are necessary to be truly efficient and ethereally exciting.” Nobody knew for sure what he was saying, but they loved him anyway: 

 named Sutherland the most popular man in the sport for 1969.

In the water, there were times when Sutherland seemed to lose all impulse control. He was the first person to ride left at Waimea Bay, a right-breaking wave, and he once attempted a fin-drift on a triple-overhead mauler at Sunset Beach—the kind of move other surfers did in three-foot surf. (At Waimea he edged out just in time; at Sunset he got destroyed.) Yet Sutherland was first and foremost a control surfer. He rode in a wide, stable, almost rigid stance. Experimental moments aside, he drew his lines with great precision. Sutherland’s ultimate accomplishment as a tuberider, in fact, was to figure out how to control a part of the ride that had always been rushed and chaotic.

Much of what he did was to make a few simple but important changes in body mechanics. He widened his stance to a point where he didn’t have to shuffle forward after dropping down the face and bottom-turning—he could do everything from the same place on the board. While in the tube, he bent at the knees instead of the waist, lowered his butt, and shifted his torso forward. Addressing the biggest mistake made by longboard-era tuberiders, Sutherland kept his head up, rather then tucked, and his gaze leveled down his front arm, which extended out toward the exit like a gun sight. To come out of a tube, he reasoned, you needed to see where you were going.

All of this, however, was built on what Sutherland did by way to setting things up beforehand. If a tube section forms ahead of the surfer, the tuberide depends on a pretty simple high-speed approach and entry. But often the tube shapes up right at the takeoff, and the game at that point is to hold your speed in check, fix a mid-face line of attack while still in neutral, wait for the curl to pitch overhead, 

 hit the gas and race for the opening. Longboarders had used a similar kind of stall-and-trim move to navigate sections in small waves. Sutherland did it in bigger surf, to different ends, and by different means. He’d stroke into an overhead ready-to-tube wave at Pipeline, jump into his spread-out crouch, anchor his back arm into the wave face while dropping, then pivot slowly around to the left, motionless, like a weather vane in a light breeze. Everything up to this point was slow and deliberate, with almost no motion on Sutherland’s part. It was like a marksman taking aim. Blink and he was gone. Blink again and he was shooting out in a fine mist of tube spray, in the exact same crouch, twenty yards down the beach.

Tuberiding generated a cult-like fascination among surfers. Surf journalists, interviewing the day’s top riders, approached the subject broadly (“What feeling do you get while riding in the tube?”) and specifically (“Do you spend most of your time in the tube watching the fringe of the wave?). Tube-themed poetry found its way into the pages of surf magazines: “And soon the wave began to curl / and I, so snug inside / Began to crouch, as child might crouch / in birth through womb-like glide.” Rick Griffin not only made tuberiding a featured part of his 

 cartoons, the tube itself occasionally took on sentient, speaking form. Griffin also put together a 24-page comic book called 

 regulars S. Clay Wilson and R. Crumb. Then there was George Greenough’s 1970 film 

, which gave the public its first inside-out look at the tube—for surfers, the viewing experience was as spellbinding as Neil Armstrong’s recent moon walk.

Greenough—the straw-haired autodidact kneeboarder from Santa Barbara whose radical mid-60s turns and cutbacks had inspired the shortboard revolution—was also an enthusiastic filmmaker. He had enough family money to keep him on the beach, with cameras and a bottomless supply of 16mm film stock, throughout 1968 and 1969. 

 was his first and only full-length movie. Mostly it was a stripped-down, by-the-book effort, but tacked on at the end was a ten-minute sequence titled “The Coming of the Dawn”—Greenough’s moon launch. To shoot from inside the tube, he built a nylon harness with a metal arm that positioned the camera just above shoulder level. The prototype, including harness, camera, and housing, weighed 30 pounds, but most of the “Dawn” shots were taken with a 23-pound beta version. Because the subject matter was so close, Greenough used a 3.5mm fisheye lens. To better savor each moment of tube time, he filmed in super slow-motion. A toggle switch on the housing was used to start and stop the camera, and because it often wasn’t possible to stop shooting when a ride came to an unexpected end, Greenough was the first person to capture wipeouts from underwater—which, oddly, was a weirder, more vertiginous experience from a theater seat than in real life.

The sequence just prior to “Coming of the Dawn” shows Greenough’s friends picking magic mushrooms in a field, and “Dawn” itself, not surprisingly, gets off to a trippy start: in monochromatic predawn darkness, Greenough has the camera aimed backward, to capture the wake of his board as it spins off into the vortex. Then the sun comes up, and the color fills in, and to the ecstatic pleasure of surf moviegoers everywhere, Greenough at last turns his camera around for the first POV shot. It was cinematic group hypnosis. Every unblinking eye in the theater was glued to the see-through curl on the top half of the screen as it stood to vertical, wavered, and at last began to sheet by overhead. The passing bubbles and droplets, all the light-refracted shimmer, every velvety ripple on the water surface—it was all there to be savored, at 100 frames per second.

magazine two years earlier, Bob McTavish went a bit over the top as he recalled a Honolua Bay tuberide. “Thrrrust! Move it out! Up. Under. Curl. Coming over! Right over! Inside! A GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL, AND I AM THERE!” After “Coming of the Dawn,” McTavish’s uncontrolled excitement made a lot more sense—even if you saw the film without a buzz on. It wasn’t just surfers. Art-rockers Pink Floyd projected Greenough’s inside-out clips onto a giant circular screen during concerts. “Echoes,” Greenough’s next film project, was the final segment of 1973’s 

—the only surf film to show at the Cannes Film Festival. Overwhelmed by the “Echoes” footage, a Melbourne film critic compared Greenough’s work to that of Shelley, Keats, and Rimbaud, and described the view from inside the tube as nothing less than the “crystal battlements wherein the Daemon of the Earth entrusted his temple.” It didn’t seem possible, but at that point McTavish’s “GIANT GREEN CATHEDRAL” exclamation was beginning to sound restrained.

Jock Sutherland was the first great shortboard tuberider, and at Pipeline he set up each ride like a marksman taking aim. Blink and he was gone. Blink again and he was shooting out of the tube, in the exact same crouch, twenty yards down the beach.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Into the Vortex

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