Drew Kampion's interview with Lance Carson ran in the December 1987 issue of Surfing. This version has been slight edited.

Surfing’s back in style coast to coast, Frankie and Annette are back on the beach, and longboards are gathering at Malibu. Is this the Golden Age revisited, or is it different this time around?

I like to think that it’s not nostalgia but the extension of tradition. A lot of people say that longboards are back, but I’ll tell you, I never got on shortboards. When the shortboards came over from Australia, a different style of surfing began that has evolved into off-the-lips and aerials and all the rest of it. I could compare shortboarding with hydroplane sprint boats and longboards to America’s Cup boats. It’s deep, down-the-line channeling versus short skipping and planing maneuvers. But, to answer the question, I think we’re seeing the extension of a trend, an extension of the traditional roots of surfing. Guys who went from longboards to shortboards have come back to longboards again. They’ll surf Third Point Malibu in the morning on their shortboards, then First Point in the afternoon on a longboard.

So there’s a place for everyone out there? 

Right. Today, there are no rules. You can ride anything you want and it’s okay. 

I think so. The contests have opened up lately— longboards, shortboards, tandems, canoes, bodyboards; all facets of waveriding. Anything goes. In the old days, in the days of the surf teams, we got to be surf snobs, I guess. Then when the shortboards came, it blew apart that whole scene. A lot of guys didn’t make the transition; egos got kind of crushed by the Aussies; everything got turned around. But then the shortboarders got snobbish. In the early '70s I was just about the only guy at Malibu with a longboard, and I really got the raspberries. “Hey, get with the times, Lance!” But I let it slide, and eventually it began to come around. 

That’s the one major thing: We’ve got X amount of beaches and X amount of coastline, and as more and more people are lured to these pristine beaches you get localism, competition. And the magazines cater to the advertisers; they follow the trends. And everyone wants to surf. So they bang rails and get competitive. In the old days I’d be driving up the coast and see the surf at Big Rock and the Sea Lion and I’d get all excited and run up the beach to the point and paddle out and be really aggressive. If anyone got in my way it was, “Sorry, Charley!” But now if I paddle out, I smile at all the kids, let the set waves go, and ride the smaller ones. I don’t let myself get too aggro, I tone it down and it works. I guess it comes from an appreciation, from memories of when it was so pristine.

You play drums and sing in your band, what’s the vibe on surf music?

I never did surf music. Between you and me, I hate surf music. My influences have been more along the lines of Otis Redding, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett, Chuck Berry, and Jerry Lee Lewis. We play a lot of clubs and a lot of the longboard contests.

Do you see much of the old Malibu crew, like Mickey Dora?

To tell you the truth, Lance Carson and Mickey Dora are not old surf chums. Outside of Georges Samama, the Frenchman, Mickey didn’t hang with anyone. He was kind of his own guy. He didn’t really consider anyone his surfing buddy at Malibu. He was an entity unto himself. In fact, there was that one Dora quote: “If these guys were really my friends they’d be on the beach watching me surf.” But he was way ahead of his time. He talked about being in tune with the wave and riding in the tube 25 years ago. He talked about shorter and lighter boards. If he had been involved in the industry, he would have cleaned up. He was a genius. He had everything figured out except himself. 

When Dora mooned the beach at the ’66 Malibu contest, what was your reaction? Did you feel like he was punctuating the end of an era?

No. I sat there on the beach and I watched. I’d done enough stupid stuff myself in the past. It did nothing for me. It did nobody any good. I myself got stuck with a bad handle, a bad nickname [No-Pants Lance], and it was a bad thing. It looks like harmless fun on the surface, but when you go through a marriage with a wife and kids, and it's like, “Hey, Dad, why did he call you that name?”—it hurts. It’s not what surfing’s all about. 

Was there a time when you just hung it up as far as surfing went?

I got into music pretty heavily from '70 to '75 and didn’t surf too much; maybe a couple of times a summer. Got into this band in Hollywood, got into the nightclub scene and all that. It was a pretty powerful group. I was looking to it for a career, but disco killed us. But it was cocktail hour every night, boozin’ it. Then in '76 I got back into surfing and shaping, and in '79 I got out of the nightclub scene and quit alcohol altogether. It just happened to coincide with the longboard thing. But if there hadn’t been this resurgence, I’d still be doing it. I’ve never been a trend follower anyway.

What was Malibu like when you first saw it?

I first saw Malibu in ‘49. It was country back in those days. When I first laid eyes on those guys skimming over the water, I knew that was for me. I paddled out into overhead surf, and I didn’t even know how to swim. I remember sitting on the beach under the umbrella with my mom and dad, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, the clean white sand, no crowds, four-to-five foot surf, half-a-dozen guys in the water. I watched those guys skimming in and thought, “I gotta do that!”

When did you ride your first wave there? 

1950. My dad wasn’t a surfer himself, but he talked with the guys on the beach and he asked Dale Velzy, who used to shape in the Pit down there, how to go about it. He bought $5 worth of balsa and built me an eight-footer. That was the summer Mike Doyle showed up. I remember trying to take off going sideways, and one of the old timers told me I had to take off perpendicular to the wave and put my arm out to turn into it. And then I was paddling, and then I was standing up and riding. I felt like Jesus must have felt, walking on water. There was nothing like it. I was the king of the hills! I was seven years old and skimming over the water, looking down on the reef. No crowds, no pushing, no shoving—totally free! 

Surfing for you has always seemed to be about style. Today it sometimes seems that the aesthetics have been thrown out and all that remains are the high-performance maneuvers. 

That’s an interesting point. I think it’s like ballet dancers; it’s not just how high in the air you can go, it’s how graceful you can be. Greg Liddle brought up the idea that previously the point in surfing was to make something difficult look easy. Now it’s the opposite. Kids are riding little mush waves, making it look hard. It’s food for thought. So as far as style coming back in surfing—yeah, hope so.

Anything you’d like to pass on to the next generation of surfers?

The sport by itself, one on one, surfer and wave, pretty much says it all. It’s  the purest, freest sport on the face of the earth, and I was there before the crowds and attitudes became a factor. So I’d come to attitudes: We go to the beach to enjoy the sun, the girls, the pristine waves that are the residual energy terminating halfway around the world from where they started, on our beaches. Surfing is such a pure form of existence and life expression; when we’re dead and gone, the waves will still be washing up on our shores. So, in the face of all the littering, screaming, and threats of the world blowing up, I guess I’d say, “Hey, guys, let’s do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

Lance Carson (1987)

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