There's so much more to the Rick Griffin story, but first, just for a moment, let us recall the glory of Murphy. In 1961, Griffin, a 17-year-old surfer and aspiring artist-cartoonist from Palos Verdes, penciled out a little bushy-blond wave-stoked grem he named “Murphy,” and got SURFER publisher John Severson to take a look. Within months, Murphy became a SURFER icon. Got the cover in 1962. Severson powered up the promo: Murphy stickers, T-shirts, coffee mugs. Fan letters poured in. For five years, Murphy was the Hello Kitty of surf culture.

A 1963 car accident left Griffin, just 19, in a coma. He recovered, but the left side of his face was badly scarred and his mind was jolted from its sunny Southern California moorings. By mid-decade, Griffin was feeling the pull of San Francisco's rising counterculture scene, and after moving there in 1966, he helped color the era in perfectly-rendered shades of psychedelia: Summer of Love handbills, Fillmore posters, Grateful Dead album covers, Zap Comix features.

Griffin’s drug use spiked and dropped over the years in seismographic patterns, as did the fervency of his Born Again Christianity. He was an intense, imposing, charismatic, mostly unfathomable figure. All over the map, actually. But he always rebounded back to the surf.

In 1991, Griffin, 47, estranged from his wife and kids, living with his pregnant girlfriend, died in a motorcycle accident. It was roiling life, strange and compelling, filled with success, failure and redemption, waves, drugs, and God.

For 20 years, writer Steve Barilotti had talked in vague terms about a “Griffin project.” In late 2012 he finally took the idea to Kickstarter, where he raised $26,00o for a full-blown Rick Griffin documentary. Having pulled off the same Kickstarter feat a year earlier, for EOS, I remember thinking, with an unbecoming touch of schadenfreude, “Pop the cork and celebrate, Steve, cause tomorrow you gotta pick up that three-ton anchor of responsibility and start marching."

That was almost a year ago. It seemed like a good time to check in.

Hey Steve, how long-gone is that Kickstarter money? I plowed through mine in like eight months.

I used the last of it in September to fund a trip up to the Bay Area to interview Ida Griffin, Rick’s widow. After Kickstarter takes its cut, and after mailing out all the backer rewards (warning to future crowdfunders; make sure your rewards are light and easy to ship; insured postage is expensive!), my take actually came to just under $20K. Most of that was spent on buying video and sound equipment, renting lighting gear, hiring camera operators and editors. Plus assorted production expenses like burritos and gas for my truck.

About half the interviews are shot and logged. The $20K did what I wanted it to do—got the film up and rolling. Now I need money to complete production and post-production. The other really important thing Kickstarter did was put me in touch with lots of Rick’s buddies and associates, from all parts of his life. Some chipped in money, others turned me on to Griffin drawings, photos, and home movies. A lot of people have a huge affection for Rick. And of course they want to help tell Rick’s story because it’s their story as well.

A year ago I was shooting for January 2014. More likely a year out from that.

Every wonder why nobody else ever picked up this project and ran with it? It's such an obvious great story.

I've wondered about that a lot, yes. Here's this super charismatic guy who made iconic art for three seminal West Coast subcultures: surfing, psychedelic rock and underground comix. He invented Murphy for SURFER in 1961, did posters and album art for the cream of San Francisco bands during the first flowering of the Haight-Ashbury scene, and was the first artist asked by Robert Crumb to be in Zap Comix in 1968. All three of these one-time fringe cultures are now huge globalized industries and Griffin was a leading image maker for each. A crossover artist at that Ground Zero level is unprecedented. He's the counterculture's very own Forrest Gump. Beyond that, his art is just so appealing and fun. So why isn't Griffin a branded celebrity label, like Von Dutch or Ed Hardy? I honestly don't know. All I know it's a wonderful story about everything I consider cool in my life so let's just say I'm on the bus for the long haul.

You think Griffin would have gone off in the direction he did, toward San Francisco and psychedelia, if not for the 1963 car accident? How did that event change his life?

Hard to know. He was hitchhiking up north to catch a freighter out of Oakland for Australia. In fact he was running away from domineering parents and possibly a high-school romance gone south. So if he'd made it to Australia, who knows, he might have liked it and stayed and rode out the '60s from the other end of the world. Intead, the accident dropped Griffin right back into his parents’ home. In a way, he was a maimed war vet who’d never gone to war. Rick was a really handsome guy, and after the accident little kids would start crying when they saw him. A year after the accident he enrolled at Chouinard Art Academy in downtown LA, which put him in the middle of all that happened culturally at that time; LSD, the Sunset Strip, the music scene. There were opportunities here that he never would have gotten close to if he'd been in Australia. Rick also told people later that, while in a coma after the accident, he had apocalyptic visions, which he later became obsessed with drawing. For sure his artwork evolved dramatically after the accident. So to answer the question yes, the accident was a huge turning point for Rick on all levels.

You've written about Rick a few times over the past 20 years. Any revelations this go-around? About Rick's art? His life?

It just gets richer and more complicated, the longer I work on it. And darker. I’m glad it’s taken so long because as I get older I can relate better to Rick’s life as a creative person and a surfer, and the struggle to stay true to those pure things that get shoved in a box in the pursuit to “succeed” in life. The main thing I've come up with is this: Rick was always questing in a big way, from an early age, whether it was surfing, music, psychedelic drugs or religion. His best work came out of that passion; it was never about money or fame. To me, Griffin looked happiest in the early 70s when he returned to his Southern California surfing roots. He was tanned, fit and smiling, and had a beautiful family. But it all came undone in the end, when his own ego got in his ear, and he wanted rock-star wealth and notoriety. Hubris, drugs and asshole behavior followed. I think he despaired at not being considered a “real” artist. He said once to a friend “No matter how hard I try, everything I do comes out a cartoon.” To me that’s tragic. And right on the verge of him launching into a third chapter of potential mass popularity (note: Griffin was about to go partners on a plush new San Francisco gallery that would finally showcase and sell his work), he’s killed on his motorcycle. It's a cautionary tale, for sure. But I would never use Rick's story to way my finger in people's faces. I’d rather this be a celebration of a guy who might have been the coolest older brother I never had.

RICK GRIFFIN: WAITING FOR THE RESURRECTION

Subscribe or Login

Subscribe or Login

Encyclopedia of Surfing

History of Surfing

Interviews

Features

The Sunday Joint

Videos