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

You've just left the theater after seeing 

 in 1968, brain afire after seeing Nat Young and Bob McTavish at Honolua Bay, and the only question is: How fast can you get a new board? Right away. Tomorrow. And at a discount price, too. But only if you want a 9-foot 6-inch 28-pound noserider—which by the spring of 1968 was the Edsel of surfing manufacturing.

The major labels were in trouble right from the beginning of the year. The surf boom was cooling even before the shortboard revolution got underway, but boardmakers had nonetheless warehoused hundreds of new units in early 1968 with an eye toward the annual summer jump in sales. Thus, when customers began marching wallet-first into showrooms ready to buy a new V-bottom or mini-gun, there was nothing but rack after rack of fossilizing longboards.

Backed-up inventory could be marked down and sold. The larger problem for boardmakers like Hobie, Weber, Jacobs, and Noll (and to a lesser degree Sydney’s Brookvale-based Big Six companies) was simple industrial-level slowness. The plastic machine triggered a design free-for-all, with board specs changing by the week. When manufacturers submitted their latest magazine ads, they had to grind their teeth for two months until the issue hit the stands, by which time the featured boards had reached their sell-by date. The same thing happened on the showroom floor, where the first whiff of decay began floating off any display model after just a few weeks.

But it was more than just outdated equipment. Because longboards were no longer cool, any company that had made its reputation during the longboard era, by association, wasn’t cool. For teenagers, buying a new Hobie in 1968 was like buying the latest Herman’s Hermits record. (There were exceptions. Surfwear giant Hang Ten was doomed, but function-first companies like O’Neill Wetsuits and Clark Foam came through the shortboard revolution stronger than ever.)

Big-label boardmakers didn’t go down without a fight. Their first response, after realizing the shortboard wasn’t a fad, was to lean on 

 publisher John Severson—first as surf buddies, then as boycott-threatening advertisers—to keep the magazine from doing any in-depth reporting on the shortboard. Severson grudgingly complied; it wasn’t until the September 1968 issue that the magazine published its first comprehensive shortboard design feature. 

 wasn’t so constrained, and the April 1968 issue opened with a revved-up editorial titled “There’s a Surfboard Revolution Going On!” The new equipment was described as “the best thing that ever happened to the world of surfing.” (Aussie-published articles on shortboards, meanwhile, had been running constantly since McTavish turned out his first run of plastic machines in mid-1967.)

Boardmakers then fired off a desperate barrage of new models, hoping that 

 would stick to the marketplace. The Brotherhood model tapped the groovy new counterculture lingo, looking for a promotional contact high, as did the Aquarius, the Blue Morphos, the Crystal Ship, and the Deadly Flying Glove. Most new boards just wanted to be identified as smaller and lighter: first the Mini, the Micro, and the Feather, then the Super Mini, the Mini-Feather, and the Micro Roller. There were dozens more, each one sounding like something you could fit into your shirt pocket.

Design-wise, boards were all over the place: blobs, disks, and mini-guns; squaretails, pintails, roundtails; 12-pounders, 10-pounders, 7-pounders. Plastic machines got up to 24 inches wide. Hardcore “pocket rocket” mini-guns were slimmed down to just 16 inches. In just over two years, Nat Young went from riding a 7-foot 6-inch roundtail to a stubby 5-foot 10-inch to a narrow 7-foot double-ender. Fin design was its own complex and fast-evolving field. There were flexible fins and ultra-rigid fins; towering high aspect ratio fins, miniaturized “finger” fins, and long, low-profile keel fins. They were made from laminated wood, or mold-injected hard plastic, or hollowed-out fiberglass. An early version of the tri-fin came and went, as did an early version of the twin-fin. Most boards had a fin box; a “long box” was introduced that let the surfer adjust his fin a few inches up or down the centerline—all the way forward, and the board turned easier; all the back, and it was stiffer, but with more bite.

Regional differences remained pronounced. Hawaiian boards were longer, narrower, and thinner. Australian boards were smaller and rounder. East Coast boards were thicker, as well as small and round. California boards were in-between those from Australia and Hawaii, but leaned Hawaiian. Aussies tended to keep their boards clean and white, the Hawaiians liked single colors (red and purple were favorites), and Californians, almost as if to make up for their last-to-the-party arrival to shortboard design, furiously decorated their boards with swirling multicolored “acid splash” tints.

The new models and designs did little or nothing to improve the major boardmaker’s profit-and-loss statements. In 1966, roughly nine in ten surfers were on name-brand boards. By 1970, it was probably one in two, with a majority now either shopping among dozens of newer, smaller, nimbler companies or trying their luck in the growing backyard-builders network. The latter choice offered a big financial incentive: $130 was the going rate for a new board at the local surf shop. With a pair of sawhorses, a Surform, a few sheets of 60-grit, and a sanding block, you or a boardmaking buddy working out of the family garage could build the spacestick of your dreams for just $65 in materials. Magazine editors tried to herd everyone back to the showrooms of the companies that made up their publishing ad base. “The garage-soul program isn’t hurting anyone—except the surfer,” 

 warned, adding that the sport was heading for “the dark ages.” The backyard trade nonetheless exploded—until the best of the backyarders went on to found a new generation of surfboard companies.

Surfboards were in fact the last boom-era product to crash. Surf music, beach movies, skateboards—all were dead or dying by late 1966. Hobie Surfboards meanwhile sold seven thousand boards that year—the company’s best-ever annual sales figure—and did it again in 1967. Gordon Woods Surfboards, atop the much smaller Australian market, peaked at the same time.

But by 1970, virtually everyone was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Greg Noll liquidated in 1971. Hap Jacobs sold his company; Bing Copeland licensed his. Dewey Weber watched his business shrink from a thriving five-store operation to a single midsize outlet in Hermosa Beach. Gordon Woods and Denny Keogh, fierce Brookvale district rivals in the 1960s, both launched boat-making companies. Hobie Alter had been paying more attention to boats than surfboards since marketing the twin-hull Hobie Cat in 1967. He guided Hobie Surfboards away from board manufacturing to beachwear and accessories, turned the business over to his sons, and moved to Idaho.

In 1968, when customers began marching wallet-first into American showrooms ready to buy a new V-bottom or mini-gun, there was nothing but rack after rack of fossilizing longboards.

Chapter: 5

Barefoot Revolution

Panic on the Showroom Floor

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