SUNDAY JOINT, 6-1-2025: ALOHA AND THANK YOU TO JACK MCCOY AND TINKER WEST
Hey All,
Filmmaker Jack McCoy died last week, at 76, after a few years of declining health. Just two days earlier he'd wrapped up a 13-city tour, showing his classic 2004 film Blue Horizon to packed houses from Perth to Nambour.
Carl "Tinker" West, founder of Challenger Eastern Surfboards and Bruce Springsteen's original manager, also died last week, age 89.
Derek Rielly and I shared a few thoughts about McCoy for a BeachGrit post. Derek is in boldface.
Man, I went to the Blue Horizon screening a little over a week back. Had to race home after the Q&A for what was a frivolous family matter, so didn't get to press Jackie's flesh, thank the big guy, etc. Spoke to him a fair bit over the last couple of years. He seemed in a hurry to get his work recognized again. Now I understand why.
Jack didn't avoid talking about his health, but didn't lead with it. I don't remember exactly when he told me his lungs were scarring over. Maybe ten years ago. But I very much recall him Skyping me, shirtless, always shirtless, and before getting into whatever the business of the day was he'd be saying how much better he was doing. In other words, his condition was basically getting worse the whole time, but he'd always say he was feeling much better than he'd been feeling recently, and then it was straight into whatever the new project was. Jack had at least three or four irons in the fire at all times. He was working on a documentary about Val Valentine, a long-forgotten filmmaker and character who lived on the beach at Sunset, Val's Reef is named after him, and I suppose that's never going to come out now, so add that to the loss column.
Culturally, he was a titan.
I posted a clip yesterday of Jack doing the on-camera narration and voice-over for the Quiksilver VHS doc on the '86 Eddie. He holds the screen better than any of the surfers he interviews. Jack looked like a leaner, meaner version of Tom Selleck, spoke well, amazing voice, and above all had unlimited confidence and ambition. Whatever Jack was doing, whatever the project, whatever he was focused on—he'd just tractor-beam you. He'd just pull you in. He was a force of nature. He was a huge bastard at times too, but I don't think anybody, in any field, does that level of work, quality-wise, for as long a time as Jack did, without being a bastard. I remember Munga Barry saying something about how, if you were on a boat trip with Jack, it was half surf trip, half boot camp. He never stopped working. Shoot, re-shoot, try a new idea, try again, keep going, just non-stop. Jack would turn a surf trip into a 10-hour-a-day job, and Barry said he hated it while it was happening, then the film would come out six months later and it would all make sense.
List your favorite McCoy films, one through five.
1. TUBULAR SWELLS (1977)
Nobody my age would choose different, I'm guessing. This is an amazing and pretty much forgotten film. Jack had a really good ear, and I don't know if it was bootlegged or legit, but the Tubular Swells soundtrack is full of tracks that us '60s and '70s kids will hear on our way to Heaven: Santana, T. Rex, Temptations, Wilson Pickett, Allman Brothers, on and on. Free Ride came out the same year and got way more attention, but Tubular Swells is actually more fun to watch. Narrated by Jack. too. Dick Hoole, it has to be noted, was Jack's filmmaking partner at this time, and contributed in a huge way. But even that's to Jack's credit, he was fantastic at finding the best people to work with, that was as much a career hallmark in fact as the gorgeous slow-motion water footage he was famous for.
2. BLUE HORIZON (2004)
If Jack really did know he was heading for the door, and picked this film as his outro, that makes a lot of sense. He was at his peak as a filmmaker in the early 2000s, and of course neither Andy Irons or Kelly Slater have faded from memory. In other words, if Jack had screened Tubular Swells last month, he'd be doing an oldies set. Blue Horizon came out in 2004 but looks and feels contemporary. Jack was 76 and in a wheelchair when he came onstage after each screening last month, but he looked and sounded contemporary.
3. A DAY IN THE LIFE OF WAYNE LYNCH (1978)
The first great short surf film, just 15 minutes long, opens with Wayne in Sydney competing in the '78 Surfabout, interviewed on the beach there wearing a competitor's tee-shirt, even. Lynch finished runner-up that year to Larry Blair, but you can see he's basically on a business trip there at Narrabeen. He can't wait to leave. Next thing, Jack takes us straight up the coast to Victoria, and everything about Wayne's life is so different from the pro tour hustle. Wayne was Rasta 30 years before Rasta—except being "soul" was not in itself a career choice, it just was and still is Wayne's life.
4. BUNYIP DREAMING (1991)
Jack and Billabong had a long-running and I think wildly beneficial to all partnership. Everybody came out ahead on this deal. I don't know how many promos and shorts and whatnot Jack did with Billabong; maybe 10 or 12? Bunyip Dreaming is my favorite, but they're all great. The main thing here is that Jack gave us an alternative to Taylor Steele and all the other pixelated Momentum-type shot-on-digital fast and dirty videos. Jack and Sonny Miller together delivered us from that. Thank god for both of them, both gone.
5. BILLABONG CHALLENGE (1995)
The first in the Challenge series, the one at at Gnaraloo. I remember thinking the waves looked terrifying, with all the steps and gurgles, but the invited Challenge surfers just ripped. Shooting that place from the water, the way Jack did, would have been a Herculean task. The whole thing was, in fact. The organization and planning that went into that first Challenge contest was nuts, way out there in the middle of nowhere, and it could have gone so incredibly bad. Instead the thing was an absolute home run, amazing performances, amazing capture by McCoy and his team, and to this day an example of how to run an elite-level contest—small field, be nimble, shoot everything, let the surfers be themselves on camera instead of pull-my-string talking dolls.
Last thoughts?
I was talking to Jack right after my son was born and said, like I'd been saying to anybody within earshot, that Teddy weighed just over 10 pounds at birth. Jack laughed and said he was a 12-pounder. No reason to think he was bullshitting. Jack always had something like that he'd throw into the conversation, without fail, some detail or story or sidebar thing that you'd never heard before. Jack Shipley once told me he loved Wayne Bartholomew because he "made the whole show bigger." McCoy was the same way. He'd been everywhere, knew everybody, seen more than any of us, and just loved tossing out these bits and pieces, he was bottomless in that regard. And like you say, he was at home anywhere, California, Hawaii, Australia, Indo. Great sense of humor too.
Will McCoy be remembered, cherished, beyond friends and family?
Bud Browne, Bruce Brown, Alby Falzon, Bill Delaney, Jack McCoy, Greg MacGillivray. The first six surf cinema achievement awards would go to those guys, whatever order you want to put them in. Except you'd have to point out that Jack stayed in the game longer than anybody, and literally and figuratively covered the most ground. And looked like Magnum PI while doing it.
* * *
Bruce Springsteen's Facebook post on May 26:
Carl Virgil “Tinker” West who passed away this week at the age of 89 was simply one of the most important people of my young life. In 1970 when I had nothing, nowhere to live, was broke with nowhere to go, he recognized my talent and took me in. We lived together in one tiny room of his Wanamassa, New Jersey, Challenger Eastern Surfboard Factory. His mattress was on one side of the room and mine was six feet away on the other.
He was a natural-born misanthrope. He was not an easy man to know, live with, or be around. He was from California and was an old-school frontier individualist asking no quarter and giving none. If you weren’t being useful he didn’t want you near him. If you visited the surf shop for more than ten minutes he’d shove a broom in your hand and tell you to start sweeping. He wasn’t joking.
I drove across the country many times with Tinker, first at twenty in his 1940s Chevrolet flatbed truck with all our band equipment under a tarp in the back seeking our fame and fortune out west. The truck was old and huge with an unwieldy, grinding transmission and he insisted we drive straight through to Big Sur, our only gig, without stopping, for 72 hours. He also insisted that I, without skills or license, drive my share. That’s how Tinker taught you something. He just made you do it.
We graduated to an old Nomad station wagon in later years and each Christmas we’d find ourselves heading west on I-10 through dry desert and western mountain blizzards. I’d be going to see my folks once a year in San Mateo and Tinker would be headed into San Francisco to see who, I cannot imagine. Did my old friend have parents? I can’t believe so. I believe he sprung near full-grown from the mountains, valleys, and waves of a primitive and unknowable California.
After I became a huge success over the years, Tinker asked me for exactly nothing. He was forever alone, working, off the grid and independent. I was always satisfied when I would be the recipient of Tink’s highest compliment. “Springsteen, you don’t fuck around.”
No, I didn’t and neither did Carl Virgil West. The last time I saw him he was in the hospital, near the end, dying from throat cancer. He smiled when he saw me, and I kissed one of my errant fathers goodbye. I hung out for a while, he pulled me close and his voice raspy and nearly gone whispered “We sure had some adventures didn’t we?” I answered “we sure did."
When I was about to leave, I saw something I never thought I’d see in this life or the next. He cried. I loved him.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Matt
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Tinker West, far right, on the beach with friends in 1968; Mark Occhilupo in Jack McCoy's "Occy: the Occumentary"; Jack McCoy, 2013, photo by Jair Bortoleto; McCoy filming underwater in Tahiti; Tinker West and Bruce Springsteen; Jim Banks at Uluwatu in 1981, from Hoole-McCoy's "Storm Riders." McCoy at Waimea Bay in 1974, photo by Leonard Brady. Frame grabs of Munga Barry from 1991's Bunyip Dreaming. Frame grabs of Wayne Lynch from "A Day in the Life of Wayne Lynch." McCoy portrait by Tom Servais. Challenger Eastern Surfboards, Tinker on the left, 1967. West at his garage, around 2020.]