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

Bob McTavish missed the 1966 World Championships, as the US Department of State had red-flagged McTavish, a known stowaway, as a deportee and wouldn’t issue him a visa. He also (mostly) steered clear of the contest’s blustering Aussie vs America postscript. In February 1967, McTavish moved from Queensland back to Sydney. He got a job shaping for Keyo Surfboards in Brookvale, and took a room with surf moviemaker Paul Witzig—John’s older brother—in the quiet shorefront suburb of Palm Beach. Four months earlier McTavish had made an experimental board for a friend: a 9-footer with a flat longitudinal middle section on the bottom, flanked by 6-inch-wide bevels along the back and center rails—a configuration that divided the planing surface into three panels. The report back to McTavish was that board was a little unstable, but easy to turn.

McTavish went a step further in March 1967, shaping himself a 9-footer in which he tossed out the flat middle section so the two bevel surfaces met in a V-shape along the back third of the board’s spine. It was a bizarre piece of surfcraft: thicker in the rear than the middle, with a sloping squared-off tail that looked as if it belonged on the back of a yacht. McTavish called it the “deep-vee,” and the idea behind it was simple: the board would tip over onto one panel or the other, so you 

 to keep turning the thing. Paul Witzig saw the board right after it was shaped and, tossing off a bit of spontaneous counterculture argot, said, “Wow! It looks like a plastic machine!” McTavish said “Wow!” back, and rushed off to hand-letter the phrase in huge psychedelic longhand across the bottom.

McTavish launched his new board the following Saturday and rode for nine hours without a break—it was, he later said, “the most enlightening day of surfing I’d ever experienced.” Maneuverability was off the charts compared to what he’d been riding. Even better, the acceleration sweet spot had moved back a foot or so, closer to the turning area, which put McTavish a giant step closer to his Greenough-inspired vision, where speed and handling were both controlled from the same place.

Everything McTavish liked about his new plastic machine, in fact, came from the tail section. He understood right away that noseriding no longer much mattered. The nose itself, in fact, was mostly expendable. Two weeks later McTavish made himself an 8-foot 6-inch board, and two weeks after that he dropped down to an 8-footer. He thinned out the rails, especially in the front end, and used a single-layer of glass on each side, instead of two. The boards were less sturdy, but they weighed just 12 pounds (27 pounds, more or less, was average for a 1966 longboard), which did nearly as much to free up the handling as the V-shape itself.

McTavish did most of his test-piloting in the mediocre but convenient surf at Palm Beach. He often saw Midget Farrelly surfing a peak or two over, on equipment that looked to be just as advanced as his own. It was an inspiring but vaguely uncomfortable little 

. The two surfers had been good friends a few years earlier. They’d double-dated (Farrelly married McTavish’s ex-girlfriend), and in 1963 McTavish moved in briefly with Farrelly and his parents. But in 1966, just before Nat Young won the World Championship, John Witzig had written an article for 

 on Midget Farrelly with the not-so-subtle title, “The End of an Era?” It was the beginning of a lifelong feud between Farrelly and Young, and anybody associated with what Farrelly bitterly referred to as “the Nat camp.” In 1967, McTavish’s association with Young made him something close to an enemy combatant.

McTavish meanwhile was as gregarious as ever, going to lots of parties, always talking a mile a minute, shaping boards for many of Sydney’s best riders, and keeping himself “fired up on the Stones, Hendrix, and LSD.” Farrelly, by contrast, was an antidrug crusader. Convinced that the Australian surf industry had turned on him, he became the most isolated of his country’s ranking surfers. Nonetheless, Farrelly opened a small and succesful boardmaking factory in Palm Beach, and independently came to the same realization as McTavish: shorter equipment was the next thing. Farrelly's boards were progressive and beautifully made—he was perhaps the finest craftsman in all of Australian surfing at the time—and he was riding better than ever. Yet the two surfers barely exchanged a word in 1967. It didn’t really matter. “Midget was my pace-horse that entire year,” McTavish later recalled. “He was passionate and dedicated, and went inch-for-inch with me at Palm Beach. Pretty impressive, for a lone soldier.”

Young reentered the picture in mid-April. He’d been hired as a manager for White Stag wetsuits in Australia and spent much of early 1967 introducing the new line to department stores around the country. The national titles were held that year at Bells Beach, and Young had enough fire left to win the event. But he felt a little stagnant in his surfing. Sam, his world title board, had been left behind in San Diego, and Young couldn’t seem to make himself a good replacement. He mostly kept his mind on business, and briefly fell out of touch with McTavish.

Bored one afternoon with his White Stag office duties, Young drove his new Mercedes 220SE to Keyo Surfboards, just a day or so after the shop had taken delivery on a dozen factory-fresh McTavish plastic machines. Young walked in and froze for a moment at the sight of all those weird-looking 8-footers. He was thrilled, and a little angry, shouting “Why wasn’t I told?” to no-one in particular as he stormed out the door. One week later Young was on a plastic machine of his own design, turning harder than anybody, his reserves of aggression and power and stoke all fully topped off.

American surfers had no idea what McTavish, Farrelly, and Young were up to on Sydney’s northern beaches. Noseriding on 9-foot 6-inch 25-pound signature model was still the hot thing. At a surf contest in April 1967, David Nuuhiwa introduced a new wrinkle as he paddled tail-first into a small wave, stood, and deftly whipped the board around 180 degrees, 

 began his elegant cross-stepping walk to the nose.

The shortboard had a quiet international debut in October 1967, when San Diego’s Windansea Surf Club flew to Sydney to compete against a team of Australians. The visitors, all on conventional longboards, were shocked to see what the Aussies were riding—the latest plastic machines were down to 7-feet 6-inches—and were duly routed in the competition. The event itself had been arranged by Los Angeles filmmakers Eric and Lowell Blum as a hook for what they hoped would be an 

-like travelogue about the Windansea gang. Instead of being fun-loving and likeable, though, the Windansea mostly just irritated the Blums. Meeting the dynamic Aussie characters behind the new shortboard was such a relief to the filmmakers that they devoted the entire second half of the movie to McTavish, Young, and Greenough—abandoning the Windansea plotline in Sydney, without explanation to the viewer—and titled their finished product 

SURFER Magazine ignored the Windansea contest, however, and 

 didn’t arrive in theaters until 1969. The shortboard’s 

 coming out party—the one everybody remembered, with the proper amount of noise and clamor—began just a few weeks after the Windansea event, at the start of the 1967-68 Hawaiian winter.

It was a bizarre piece of surfcraft: thicker in the rear than the middle, with a sloping squared-off tail that looked as if it belonged on the back of a yacht. Across the bottom, in huge psychedelic longhand, McTavish wrote "Plastic Machine." The name stuck.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Plastic Machine

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