Sommaire pour Spring 2020 de Surfer

“WARNING: THIS MAGAZINE CONTAINS SEX, VIOLENCE, DIRTY WORDS AND SIXTY-FOOT DISASTER WAVES. MAY BE HARMFUL TO ANYONE OVER 25.” That was a SURFER cover blurb from the magazine’s March, 1970 issue. SURFER had just turned 10, and then-25-year-old editor Drew Kampion was steering the publication toward its counterculture zenith like a smoke-filled van pulling into the parking lot of a Led Zeppelin show. The blurb was tongue-in-cheek (Kampion only just made the cutoff, after all), but also… screw those olds, am I right? Bunch of squares with their social conventions and rigid ways of thinking. Not us. No way. Surf culture has always felt youthful and rebellious, even if a) we mostly just rebel against school, day jobs and any other prior commitments when the waves are on, and b)…

1. The Too High to Feel My Face Covers Clockwise from top left, the drugs ingested during the creation of these covers were peyote, marijuana, DMT, LSD, magic mushrooms, Quaaludes and, oddly enough, over-the-counter allergy medication (crazy, right?). The counterculture aesthetics of the late ‘60s hit SURFER’s Page One hard in 1969 (top left, illustrated by SURFER founder John Severson), at the height of the Shortboard Revolution and just a few months after the Beatles released “Yellow Submarine”. SURFER covers went even deeper down the psychedelic rabbit hole the following decade, with an image of a shimmering surf messiah and an out-of-focus bottom turn paired with the question that probably comes to every SURFER editor’s mind after seven joints and two cheese pizzas: “what is surfing?” From there, the trippy…

The life of former SURFER photographer Ron Stoner is as tragic a tale as you’ll find in surfing—a heart-wrenching progression from shy kid to superstar lensman to drug-addled schizophrenic in less than a decade. The blink of an eye, really. But for all the darkness that welled up in the man behind the lens, the moments Stoner managed to capture in front of it told a much different story. A lineup of perfect peelers with just a few friends out. Beautiful people smiling on a sun-drenched beach. Everything in richly-colorful compositions. “He did for Southern California surf breaks what artist David Hockney later did for Southern California swimming pools, and to the same effect,” writes Matt Warshaw in “The History of Surfing”, “you didn’t want to just look at their…

PRESENTED BY In our video series, “Surf Shop Chronicles”, made in partnership with O’Neill, we celebrate the most storied shops in America—and perhaps none play a more pivotal role in the narrative of surf history than Dana Point’s iconic Hobie Surf Shop. In the 1950s, when most surfboards were still made out of heavy balsa wood, Hobie namesake Hobie Alter and Gordon Clark teamed up to experiment with new shaping materials. Their R&D sessions led to the industry-shifting mass production of polyurethane foam blanks, which went on to change the course of surfboard design and manufacturing forever. To this day, modern-day shapers continue to experiment with their craft inside the Dana Point location—primarily using foam blanks, of course.…

“The fact that you’re surfing means you’re lucky. Surfing is such a positive and powerful thing to do. It’s medicinal, it’s physical, it’s all sorts of things.” When it comes to good surfing, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. You don’t have to be the best surfer in the world to do what is good surfing for you. The only thing that is going to make you surf better is to surf more, but that’s not about enjoyment, necessarily. If you want to improve, you have to put in the effort and time and have the right equipment. No one can climb the mountain on day one. You’ve gotta take baby steps and have a long-term vision. When I used to go to Hawaii, I used to say,…