This is the first Surfer magazine that I have bought in a long time. February 2005. I was crushed after I learned that the Surfer’s Journal is printed in China! No? Look at the credits page for yourself… Printed in China.
The new Surfer magazine -180 pages, with maybe 30 (?) pages of the written word - the rest is ads… 8 Full-page spreads before Contents… 5 more before Intro… 8 more then Post… 5 more then Sections and Pipelines - interspersed with single and smaller ads… The Interview of Kalani Robb starts on page 82! Then Travel - stickered boards in paradise… Then a story on the new Quicksilver seaplane… but wait a minute, what’s this? The most incredible story I’ve read in quite awhile, written by David Parmenter…
Check it out. Retyped without permission, by me.
DAWN OF THE MORNING OF THE EARTH
Is the Retro trend a trip back to the future, or just back to the 70’s?
By Dave Parmenter
In 1970 Nat Young turned his back on organized competitive surfing and retreated into the Australian hinterland to eat organic homegrown vegetables and shape and ride organic homegrown surfboards. Most of the Australian surfing community followed him back to “the farm,” resulting in a dynamic era of experimentation in surfboard design, endless articles in Tracks about composting and “negative vibes in the flesh of dead animals” - and one of the greatest surf films ever made: Alby Falzon’s Morning of the Earth.
Now more than thirty years later, surfers are once again grabbing guitars, splashing psychedelic swirls onto lopsided single-fins, heading off barefoot and bearded into the bush. And they’ve all brought their video cameras.
What do we make of the byproduct, the growing number of “retro” surf films inspired by Morning of the Earth? Despite the range of theme and quality, movies like Sprout, Single Fin Yellow and Glass Love share common tendencies: all find their roots in the '70s, are somewhat pretentious, and most prompt the seasoned viewer to ask, “Have Ewoks broken into Allan Seymour’s antique surfboard collection?” For aside from the requisite halo of unkempt hair, it is the use of outdated surfboard designs that lies at the heart of each of these movies.
Once they have been digested, it is tempting to dismiss the “retro” trend as little more than boilerplate “soul.” where overpaid surf stars dabble in the '70s fashion revival by posing on garage sale single fins as a sort of foreplay to fireside guitar jamborees somewhere in Middle Earth, Stage Left. Nowadays, with technology providing for easier, cheaper and faster filmmaking, anyone can produce and distribute a passable surf film. The result is an immense surf video mill that has become surfing’s vanity press, in which - like the little old lady who pays to publish 150 volumes of poetry about her Pekinese - anyone with Final Cut Pro on their Mac can portray themselves as a “soul surfer” whose deep artistic sensibilities would bloom if only he could throw from his neck the albatross of free money and endorsement contracts.
But if we are to clearly examine this migration back into the '70s, we must first separate the beavertailed poseurs from the growing number of surfers and shapers who are building and riding out-of-date designs for largely functional purposes. Because tangled up in all the refried grooviness is an honest-to-God design revolution, which, like Gandhi’s “homespun rebellion,” could emerge as a grassroots backlash against the alarming tendency toward depersonalization in the manufacture of our surfboards.
For the major board labels, it may be that the chickens are coming home to roost. During their enormous growth in the late '80s and '90s, the big brands parlayed most of their momentum into logo placement, clothing lines, huge teams and promotional budgets, while at the same time ignoring research in design and materials - and after bloating the price of new boards by $80 to $100 (shunted into callus-free hands), then turned around and blamed the small or backyard builder for undermining the value of surfboards.
Yet is the retro trend a revolt against how big-label boards are made, or how they perform? Or is it merely a hollow fad made of wanna-be-soul-daddies tripping out on $150 worth of pigment decorating obsolete tubs? Or is history repeating itself - is it indeed the Dawn of the Morning of the Earth - or are we merely stumbling toward the dustbin of history, like other cultures and nations that lose their way by wallowing in nostalgia? Let’s stir up the petri dish, turn up the Bunsen burner, and see what bubbles to the surface.
If we follow the path of the present trend back to it’s beginning, we almost certainly find wandering at its trailhead the lone figure of Tom Curren. After going walkabout from the ASP tour in 1991, Curren became “The Accidental Purist,” surfing in Hawaii on a logo-free Maurice Cole gun - though in truth it was less a soul statement than absentmindeness on his part. It is unclear whether Curren, in his renunciation of his role as a comercial entity, fit more in the role of Rolf Aurness (the 1970 world champ who quickly dropped off the scene entirely) than Nat Young (who’s still knocking 'em down). But as he drifted away from the big top, Curren left behind for his opponents (like archrival Mark Occhilupo) a vacuum equal to what a Masai warrior would face upon extinction of the last black-maned lion.
A few years later, in 1993, Curren materializes from the ether at an ASP contest in France armed with a 5’5" 1970 Rick twin-fin he’d bought secondhand at a New Jersey surf shop. In his second-round heat, held in onshore slop, he paddled out on the stubby 4-inch-thick board and demolished poor Matt Hoy, then number 8 in the ratings, with an astonishing display of jazz-like improvisation, fusing together speedy runs with shell-burst tailslides. After the heat, a stunned Hoy could only beg Curren to let him try the board, while grumbling, “…but why did he have to do that to me?”
Soon everyone on the circuit was scouring used board racks, garage sales, and local tar pits for any short, wide slab of a surfboard. When the supply of relics was exhausted, silverback foamsiths were frog-marched off the golf links and dragged into the shaping bay to replicate the old designs. And here’s something that had them dabbing a welling tear from the eye: After decades of idiling on the back paddock, the older shapers were astonished to find the younger guys hanging on their every word. Curren then continued expanding his mass of manuevers by having Tommy Peterson (Michael’s brother) shape him a hybrid/fusion Fish called the “Fireball Fish,” on which he shocked the surfing world by carving cartoon squiggles all over the faces of giant surf in Indonesia. Within months, nearly every surfboard manufacturer had some facsimile of Curren’s brainchild in the racks.
The crucial point to keep in mind here is that none of this would have happened if the original Fish species didn’t possess considerable - though overlooked - merit as a surfboard design, and, like Simon Anderson’s initial demonstrations of the Thruster, it is certain that Curren would have been dismissed in a hail of jeers if he hadn’t absolutely ripped on his recycled or retooled boards.
Reaching back into the past in order to spark some progressive recombination of design components is one thing, while it is quite another to lag behind the curl on a Volan-wrapped round hull as your beavertail flogs your rump. The validity of the retro movement lies here: To determine whether we are moving forward - whether “retro” becomes “now-tro” - we must clarify the intent of each aspect of the trend.
There are many reasons why ever increasing numbers are clamoring for replicas of old designs. Many pros, influenced by surfer/writer/filmmaker Andrew Kidman’s re-discovery of Morning of the Earth, are tripping on wholly new-to-them-sensations radiating from their experimentation with single-fins, Fish, and egg shapes.
Other “Children of a Lesser Board” are relieved, after years of struggling on contemporary shortboards, to finally bloom on wider and thicker surfcraft that are both functional and “cool.” For it could be said that undersized surfboards have crippled more surfers in the past decade than ever were hobbled by LSD in the '60s and '70s. There is also a vast tract of middle-ground surfers who embrace the retro board as a way to flower amid the choking weeds of sameness, to distinguish themselves from the flocks of dilettante newcomers to the sport, all the “Blue Crushers” and tech-boom dabblers with their Asian-made pop-outs. And, of course, some veteran surfers are just plain nostalgic for the boards they rode in their youth - they miss the smell of polishing compound, the tart pigments and crisp decklines and thick foiled fins rooted to the tail with thick fiberglass rope. It’s safe to say that 20 years from now, we won’t be reading articles in the Surfer’s Journal wistfully looking back at Cobra’s vacuum-bagging in the same way contemporary pieces pine after Danny Brawner’s Hobie pinlines of the '70s
But whether one chooses a retro replica for a “feeling,” a “look,” or simply for unadorned function, there stand certain absolutes in board design: Narrower, curvier boards are slower but looser, and wider, flatter boards are faster but stiffer. In each board he shapes, the sensible designer will broaden its range of performance if he pulls for the temperate zones between those two poles. Aside from a certain type of round-hulled eggs, which should be assiduously treated with Snarol, any shift from the present norm toward more width and flatter rockers will likely improve the day-to-day surfing experience of the average surfer. Here is where the retro revival shifts into forward gears, for the keen observer will note that the most finicky young fashionista, while he wouldn’t be seen dead in a ditch with some sort of supremely functional hybrid, will happily parade through the parking lot with the much wider and thicker psychedelic '70s Fish replica.
The rush to add vintage boards to the quiver is thrusting a diverse collection of veteran surfboard designers onto center stage. Shapers such as Skip Frye, Wayne Lynch, Mark Richards, Terry Fitzgerald and even Pat Curren are confronted by a growing demand for replicas of the boards they shaped and rode in their heyday. While it is interesting to note that at the recent Quicksilver Masters event in Hawaii none of the free Ride generation rode anything but the most up-to-date designs; we can only assume that an infusion of their ideas and energy will be a boon to the bloodlines of today’s increasingly anemic surfboard industry. Perhaps a transfusion of more surfer/shapers into the system will help us whack up the ginger to overcome and break free from two decades of refining the tri-fin merely by shrinking it - and then by pastuerizing the resulting splinter of foam with widespread use of xerox shaping machines.
Perhaps we should tolerate the faddism and syrupy nostalgia of the retro trend in exchange for a gain in sensible surfboard design. In a perfect world, everyone would ride the most functional board for their local conditions, but in a sport composed of so many free spirits, crackpots and copycats, it would be a refreshing change to observe surfers choosing surfboards for a “feel” rather than a “look.” And it is here that we must tip our hats to the Australian sector of the retro revival, as they appear to be far more dedicated to following the passion for a different “feel” forward into progressive recombination of design components - whereas the California trend seems to be largely an infatuation with its cosmetic aspects; the pigments and tints and psychedelic art. What would you rather watch: A Dave Rastovitch looping his neo-Fish into parabolic rollercoasters so fast and smooth that he seems to be channeling Nat Young at 78 rpms, or the beavertailed retro log-jockey prancing into a Congress of the Crane pose as he chugs through the soup at San Onofre?
“Every once in a while surfing goes back to the Fish,” Curren wrote soon after his rediscovery of the design back in '93. He went on to point out that when surfboard design comes to a standstill, the Fish is revived and explored until its limitations, once again, become obvious. Then the tinkering begins, and “boards then get stretched and pulled and refined again until, for instance, there’s hardly any foam left. Where does design go from there? Either back to where it was a few years previous, which is indeed going backward, or we compress the data into a more modern Fish.”
Since the Fish seems to be the flagship design of the current retro renaissance, and since that design was at its inception at the center of the original Backyard Revolution of the late '60s and early '70s, could we again be heading into garden sheds and garages for our next Great Leap Forward? Will all the surfers who are tripping out on recast singles and twins set down their guitars and iPods and pick up a power planer? Will it again be “cool” to shape and glass a board, and then run down to the nearest surf still covered in fiberglass dust, like “Baddy” Treloar in Morning of the Earth? There are now 10 blanks available from Clark Foam, the world’s largest surfboard blank manufacturer, that are specifically designed for the building of retro class surfboards. And when they are described in the normally staid catalog as being offered for the increasing number of “surfers revisiting the Dance,” or designed to “open the door to a new level of performance and self-expression for all shapers and designers,” well, you know something is up. Anyone who knows how much time and money is invested in the design and manufacture of new blank molds has to realize that when a trend is minted in foam, the vanguard has already swept past the front lines.
All revolutions, it is said, begin with one man and an idea. But so do fads. One of the greatest surfers of our time has pointed us in the right direction. Right now, as the modern surfboard teeters on the brink of becoming little more than a retail unit made in distant lands by cheap, non-surfing labor, we desperately need a revolution, not a fad.
