Reading Time : 4 minutes
***
A lot has been written about how the kids of today missed out on the rush of seeing surf movies on the big screen. But it wasn’t just about the big screen versus the TV or computer screen. The key difference was access.
Pre-social media era, pre-DVD/video days, we just didn’t see any surfing footage at all, for several months to even a year at a time. Apart from surf mags, the only surfing we saw was our mates or the local big knobs at the beach.
So whenever a surf movie poster went up on some local telegraph pole, we’d just about lose our shit with anticipation. We hadn’t been numbed by the sensory overload of today, where a proliferation of 20ft tubes and dizzying tricks on social media elicit not much more than yawns, and 4 seconds later they’re largely forgotten.
In late 1977, there was a huge gush in the mags about this amazing new flick called “Free Ride”. Directed by Bill Delaney, it was spruiked as a revelation, featuring unequalled water footage shot deep in the barrel with Shaun Tomson and his Aussie confederates, Rabbit, MR and the rest of the elite at that time. Shot on 35mm motion picture cameras (even the water footage, handled by stills legend, Dan Merkel) the quality was said to be on a different level to anything shot previously, which had all been done on 16mm, or even 8mm in some gritty, underground movies.
To say that my main surfing partners, Fozzie, West and I were frothing was an understatement. We were counting the hours, and when the opening night came at the Music Room of the Sydney Opera House, we had butterflies the like of which you’d normally expect when paddling out at 10ft Pipe.
Surf movies in those days were a major event for the still subversive surfing mob. As a 15 year-old flea, I was in awe at the scene of hundreds of hardcore surfers milling around the front entrance. The word was out that something special was about to go down. The haze of smoke from the numerous spliffs being incinerated created even more atmosphere, and you didn’t even have to be toking on one to get the full effect and thus be put in the perfect mood for the show.
The foot stomping full house was rocking the Opera House to its very foundations when the screen finally lit up with those first, staggeringly crisp, ultra saturated shots of colour. The scene was utter astonishment, as cool surfers morphed into squealing girls at a Beatles concert. I marvelled at MR swooping on a double life sized, 8ft Honolua bowl, arcing his Reno Abellira 7’8” pintail through those soon to be famous, sustained carves out of the lip. Or Dan Merkel’s unbelievable hook ups with Shaun Tomson in crystal clear Off The Wall tubes that looked like Hollywood studios. Rabbit blew people’s minds, as much for his crazed performance standing and cross stepping on a deadly looking, oscillating playground swing as for his radical surfing.
The sublime soundtrack worked in concert with the footage, a wonderfully slick selection of jazz, R&B and country rock, music that made every shot shine even brighter. Even the narration by Jan Michael Vincent managed to never get corny or state the obvious, quite a feat for an American film viewed through a 1970’s Australian psyche.
Talk about a paradigm shift.
“Morning of the Earth” had been the gold standard prior to this, at least in Australia, but Free Ride was something altogether different. “MOTE” was impressionist art, but “Free Ride” was ultra polished, ultra realism. It changed our lives, and we didn’t even think about sleeping that night.
When we got home sometime around midnight, we grabbed boards and wetties and went straight down to 3rd Ramp, our hanging spot at the local beach, Bondi. You could still get away with little bonfires on the beach back then, and in that flickering orange glow, we post mortem-ed the shit out of what had just happened. I couldn’t get MR’s Honolua sequence out of my head (46 years later, I still can’t) and when it was finally light enough to surf, we hit 3rd Ramp Rights and surfed our brains out. On every wave, I was MR at Honolua, swooping up a storm and even trying to get a bit knock-kneed when I remembered to. Fozzie was Shaun, and West was Rabbit, and that incredible soundtrack was in our heads the whole time.
When I got home, I started scraping together every cent I could find, even raiding mum’s purse. There was another showing of the movie that night, and I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.
***
