SUNDAY JOINT, 9-7-2025: TINGLING YOUR SPYDER-SENSE

Hey All,

Today we put right a few of the not-quite-settled Joints from our bygone Summer of '25. Too often these days I part with a Joint on Sunday afternoon, all done, thanks and nice working with you, only to have it return the following day, tugging on the hem of my frayed Tommy Bahama shorts, asking for further attention.

Last week's Joint on filmmaker Curt Mastalka, for example. You'll recall the Seadreams clip of teenaged Rory Russell flying in a Piper Cherokee at low-altitude over the North Shore on a sunny afternoon. A slightly experimental choice for a surf flick opener, I suggested. Not a lapel-grabber—but tranquil and serene and easy on the eyes. Watch here.

Chris Baker of San Francisco emailed on Monday with a grim follow-up:

I used to fly Cessnas and Pipers before I spent all my money on kids. I looked at the tail number of the plane Rory is in [N774FC], to see if it was still around. Plenty of planes from the '60s and '70s are still flying, no problem. Except that plane apparently was delivered early in 1971, and by late 1971 it had crashed into a lava field near Hilo. Two survived but the pilot was killed. All three were stationed at Hickam Air Force Base. Rory was lucky he didn’t spend too much time in that plane.

Maybe a bit lurid to even call attention here to Baker's postscript, although it is a reminder that death-by-surfing, even for ranking Pipeline incurables, is less likely than everyone thinks; small-plane travel is more dangerous, and, Google AI claims, so is riding a bike or cleaning the gutters.

Equally lurid but hard in the opposite direction, mood-wise, is the poster you see below for the two-night Hawaii Pop-Rock Festival, held at the Waikiki Shell in the summer of 1967, just a week before Mastalka premiered Hawaii's Own, his debut film, at the same venue. Canned Heat headlined, with Country Joe and the Fish and a handful of other acts in support. As with the Mastalka screening, the Pop-Rock Festival got mixed reviews. In fact, Richard Howard, speaking on behalf of the venue, said he would "try to put a lid" on future rock shows at the Shell because he got so many calls from nearby residents about the volume. "Howard turned down the amplifiers when the neighbors starting complaining about the noise," the Star-Bulletin reported. "But the entertainers just turned the volume up again."

The Pop-Rock Festival, in any event, is all but forgotten, except for the poster. The electrified neon color and wavy lettering, designed by Victor Moscoso—alive and well at age 89—is pure acid-dipped San Francisco psychedelia. The surfing image, meanwhile, is a whole art piece within the art piece. The short-john-wearing regularfooter you see with that Rincon curl around his waist is Lance Carson. The photo was taken by SURFER staff headliner Ron Stoner. Nice shot, full style-marks for Carson, but not quite an A-grade image, all the usual greens and blues, taken in the late morning with the sun above and behind Stoner. It was SURFER publisher John Severson who put the Stoner-Carson transparency on the light table a few weeks later and carefully layered it with one of his own slides, a fireballing sun about to dip into the horizon, and the two-for-one trick-shot—the color palette now completely changed; Carson about to surf past the big yellow-white orb—has long been ID'd as one of the very best SURFER covers.

Moscoso got a copy of the mag with the Stoner-Severson cover from his San Francisco art scene pal Rick Griffin, just as he (Moscoso) was sitting down to work on the the Pop-Rock poster. He added the three giant hands, inked the lettering and the green-and-yellow border, and that was that. The poster was slotted into Moscoso's soon-to-be-famous "Neon Rose" series, and a lithograph of the work is in the New York Museum of Modern Art permanent collection. We were so much colder in 1967 compared to 2025—literally colder, as in surfing Rincon in nothing but a shorty. But we were also cooler, 500-times more cool is a reasonable figure, and there is the proof, as our sport moved hither and yon across the counterculture midway arm-linked with the likes of Canned Heat and Victor Moscoso.

We circle back now to the July Joint on surf-themed Kustom Cars. I've had that 1969 issue of Rod and Custom you see above for years and never thought to check who the the surfers are. The guy holding the red Creative Designs diamondtail is writer and paddleboard revivalist Craig Lockwood. The fellow with the squared-off paipo board is somebody whose work you probably know, but whose name—Spyder Wills—is mostly and unfortunately forgotten. 

Wills and film partner Greg Weaver shot footage for Pacific Vibrations, Forgotten Island of Santosha, Big Wednesday, and the Wave Warriors series. Nobody in the sport, or possibly any sport, could follow-focus with a massive telephoto like Spyder Wills, he was a 6'4" human steady-cam. Ten years ago I did a brief EOS post on Wills and Weaver but the two were and remain semi-underground surf world figures. Wills, in particular, was cut from different cloth. I described him as "an ex-Air Force neat freak and flute player with black-belt Frisbee skills." All true. Drew Kampion noted that Wills was among the best paipo borders in California, and that he was "tall, thin, affectionate, and sinister." For decades, and possibly to this day, Wills lived in a walk-in-closet-sized single-room rental near PCH in Laguna, the walls meticulously covered floor to ceiling in photos, posters and memorabilia (surfing, planes, military), and wore a Third Reich Army Officer peaked visor cap. He had a mustache that you'd say he stole from the Village People, except Wills had that thing barber-trimmed and perfected years before we were on the dancefloor arm-swinging to "Y.M.C.A." 

Spyder had a thing for camo. The exterior of his tiny home was painted in the same gray and tan as a Tunisia-bound WWII Spitfire, maybe ironically, maybe not, it can be a fine line with vets. (Surfer's Path magazine said Wills was honorably discharged from the Air Force. Wills himself said, "They decided I was a freak and let me go.") Filmmaker Greg MacGillivray occasionally hired Wills and said that "he's easy to work with and technically his stuff is near perfect. But he can't shoot with crowds around." When Greg took Wills to Puerto Rico to help cover the 1968 World Championships for network TV, "he really freaked out the guys from ABC." 

You see some long-armed guy in head-to-toe camo marching down the beach with a grin and an M-16—yeah, I'd be freaking out. But I think in Wills' case, you'd want to un-freak, walk over and see if he's around later for rum drinks and conversation, the man has not just the finest basso voice in surfing, but a sniper-grade deadpan sense of humor. 

Last stop, returning now to our canoe-surfing Joint, also from July, my runaway favorite post of the summer. This is the one featuring Pennsyvania-born debutante Phyllis Walsh, and if you haven't yet read the ripped-from-the-headlines feature I put together on this red-hot mama and her 1915 surfing-instigated clash with the Altanitc City law, by all means hit pause on today's Joint and click here, you will not regret it.

The Walsh Joint let me to a 1911 LA Times feature titled "Venice Girls Ride Surf-Boards with as Much Skill as Boys," and while we don't learn much about Miss Frances Guihan, the smiling bonnet-wearing "commodore of the surf-board fleet" you see above (she later became a popular Hollywood screenwriter, specializing in Westerns), writer Laurie Johnson gives us this bit of Edwardian Age Surf 101:

To begin with: do you know what is a surf-board?

No?

Well, the best sort are made of redwood, they are from eight- to ten-feet long, two inches thick, and weigh from forty to fifty pounds. The front, or bow, is fully two feet wide, tapering to not more than eighteen inches at the rear—or stern.

Very few people have any idea of the size of real surf-boards.

But there are the dimensions, so the next time you see a gay youth come capering down with mamma’s ironingboard, just don't believe it. It Isn't true.

A finely-detailed half-tone photo just above the article reads "Frances Guihan and her Ocean 'Bronk'," as in "bronco," and that's where we'll steer this outro—to the slangy names we have come up with over the years to use in place of "surfboard" (or "surf-board," in this case). "Bronk" may have been a one-off used only in Johnson's 1911 article, but who knows. Maybe Frances and her girl squad used "bronk" the way me and my middle school surf pals, riding those same crappy Venice waves 60 years later, used "stick" and "machine" and "tool." Maybe, like Spyder Wills, we were a little sinister too, because "blade" was a big favorite as I recall.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week!

Matt

PS: Surf scholar Patrick Moser wrote a fantastic piece on the words we tried out before landing on "surfboard," "surfer," and "surfing." An officer on the HMS Resolution, after a pair of lengthy visits to Hawaii in the late 18th century, described the popular wave-riding craft used by natives as "very light flat pieces of boards, which we call sharkboards." That one was there for the taking and we let it go. The original sin, in terms of frittering away our cool.

[Image grid, clockwise from top left: Spyder Wills paipo boarding in Laguna, 1968, photo by Art Brewer; members of Canned Heat; Jock Sutherland in Pacific Vibrations, shot by Wills; Wills in camo, 1969, by Brad Barrett; 1967 Victor Moscoso poster for the Chambers Brothers; Waikiki Shell. Rory Russell climbs into Piper, on Oahu. Same plane, a few months later, near Hilo. Bob "Bear" Hite performing with Canned Heat. Poster for the Hawaii Pop-Rock Festival. Rod and Custom cover, July 1969. Wills with board and gun, 1969, photo by Barrett. Wills portrait and Wills surf shot, both by Brewer. Newspaper illustration of Frances Guihan, 1911. Venice postcard, early 20th century.]