The Green Room

A small encampment of smiling people lying on beach towels and sitting in folding chairs was the only sign that the biggest bodysurfing event in Northern California was happening in Santa Cruz. There were no sponsor tents, no sound systems thumping out music, no contest announcer. Just an inconspicuous scattering of swim fins and wetsuits on the sand in front of a nice peak breaking at 26th Avenue Beach.

Eric Gustafson of San Francisco, above, looks out from the mouth of a 26th Avenue barrel during a senior men’s heat Saturday.

The Santa Cruz Bodysurfing Association’s annual California Bodysurfing Championships was held in typical low-key fashion on Saturday. The contest, first started in 1983, continues to run relatively unchanged since its inception. That includes the pancake breakfast for participants at event director Tish “The Fish” Denevan’s house, a group barbeque, and no mention of prize money anywhere. The competition aspect remains informal [Denevan walked the beach Saturday asking if anyone wanted to help judge heats while the other judges headed out in the water]. It’s less about a contest and more about gathering the small, scattered tribe of bodysurfers, Denevan said.

“It’s a little bit lonely out there,” Denevan said. “Anytime you see another bodysurfer out in the water, you naturally gravitate to them. If I ever meet another bodysurfer I say, ‘Hey, join our contest!’”

When asked what she liked most about putting on the event every year, Denevan described a “feeling of being connected with everybody” and “the camaraderie.”While stand-up surfing today is featured in mainstream movies, fashion and advertisements, bodysurfers continue to operate under the radar. There are no bodysurfing magazines, no professional bodysurfing tour, and even the world’s most talented practitioners perform their dolphin-like acts to little fanfare or recognition. “Professional bodysurfer” remains an oxymoron.

Aside from wave riding of dolphins and seals, bodysurfing is a rare sight along our coast. The small cadre of lifeguards and water people who regularly partake in the sport are often forced to do so alone.

Case in point: Two bodysurfers at this year’s contest meet on the beach and begin talking about the waves. It turns out they both live in San Francisco and often surf the same spots. Both said they usually go out alone and were happy to find a partner to paddle out with, “especially on a big day at Ocean Beach.”

Nick Harvey shoots out of a large wave off of 26th Avenue on Saturday during the first semi-final junior men’s heat.

One of the men, Eric Gustafson, said that in the nearly 15 years he’s been living in San Francisco, he had only met three other bodysurfers — in a city trafficked by a million people every day. While the small number of bodysurfers around San Francisco may have something to do with the frigid waters and punishing surf of Ocean Beach, most of the bodysurfers at 26th Avenue on Saturday agreed they were something of a dying breed.

“There aren’t many of us,” said bodysurfer Peter Horak, of Santa Cruz. “Look around — a bunch of silver streaks.”

Quinn Sandberg, 17, was one of the few youngsters surfing in Saturday’s event. Sandberg, a senior at Soquel High, said he was one of just a few kids at his school who like to bodysurf. He attributed the underground nature of bodysurfing in part to the lack of commercial opportunities to make money off the sport.

“There aren’t really any products to sell besides swim fins,” he said. “They’re not selling anything with bodysurfing. There’s no magazines or shops or anything like that. There’s a lot more of that with stand-up surfing.”

A small clan of 31 bodysurfers from up and down the California coast — nearly half made the trip up from Southern California — showed up for Saturday’s gathering. They were treated to some pretty good conditions: The sun shone down all day as a fogbank was kept at bay far offshore and 2- to 3-foot green waves peeled left and right before hollowing out onto the sand.

Among this year’s contestants was Judith Sheridan, the San Francisco bodysurfer of underground surfing lore known for her fearless sessions out at triple-overhead Ocean Beach and as the only person ever to attempt to bodysurf Maverick’s. Sheridan said the attraction of bodysurfing is simple: an undeniably smoother, more intimate interaction with the wave itself, without the board as intermediary.

“I don’t like the idea of all this gear,” she said. “[With bodysurfing] there’s nothing between you and the water.”

For nearly 20 years the Mermen have been playing their own unique brand of surf rock.

The band, formed in San Francisco in 1989, has toured with the likes of Dick Dale and the Ventures and been featured on the soundtracks of countless surf movies, including just about every Maverick’s film ever made. They have also been dubbed “the official band of Maverick’s” by Jeff Clark himself.

But to lump the Mermen under the umbrella of “surf music” betrays an ear unfamiliar with the ocean and its many moods. For those who insist on labels, try “ocean music.” Nothing communicates the essence of the sea, particularly the chilly waters of the Northern California coast, as powerfully as the Mermen. When you play their music, you can hear the pounding surf and shifting sandbars of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, the thick bull kelp swaying off the rocky North Coast, and the teeming wildlife of the Monterey Bay.

After 20 years of drawing inspiration from the fog and unruly beachbreak of Ocean Beach, Mermen founder and lead guitarist, Jim Thomas, who composes and produces all the band’s music, relocated to Santa Cruz. With the help of part-time Mermen bassist Jennifer Burnes, he built a recording studio/lair of the avant-garde on the Eastside of town out of an old storage space.

How would the reefs and coves of a sunny surf town like Santa Cruz influence the music? We’ll soon find out. The Mermen are set to release their first new record in nearly eight years. In the following interview at the Mermen studio, Thomas talks about his migration 70 miles down the coast and the band’s highly anticipated new album:

Q: So Jim, you’ve left Ocean Beach for the Eastside. After five years, what do you think of Santa Cruz?

A: I like Santa Cruz. It was hard leaving San Francisco, but Santa Cruz has its own thing going. Me and Jennifer are here, Martyn [Jones, Mermen drummer] is still up there in San Mateo. But you know, I lived in San Francisco for 20 years. I was looking for a place to do a studio. I would have rather not left San Francisco, which was a bad move in retrospect because I didn’t realize how much my community was established there. And once you leave San Francisco, you know, people start to hold it against you. If you’re in Berkeley or San Francisco or Oakland people tend to feel like you’re part of the hometown crew and they support you. But the minute they even see your phone number change, they’re like, ‘What the heck, what’s this 831 stuff?’ you know. I’m not kidding man. But, I figured 20 years there, I’m just gonna try something different. If I was up there I probably would have made three new albums by now. Because I got down here and it was like…

Q: You can definitely surf more often down here. More time getting distracted by waves.

A: You know, this is not San Francisco. Santa Cruz is like a small town where everybody knows what everybody else is doing. Up in SF nobody cares what anybody else is doing, right? And it’s a lot different in regards to the music scene. [In SF] it’s really harsh and intense and real competitive. If you’re into writing or art or whatever, SF is a great place because it’s competitive. It’s like New York City in that respect. Santa Cruz reminds me a lot of a small town. But this place has got some amazing people. Like Barney and Flea for example. I look at those guys and they’re really interesting people. Really soulful. They’re like cowboys, they do scary shit. They just don’t go by the book, you know. When I see Flea riding a wave that big and being so aggressive with it, it’s like what the heck is that?
Santa Cruz is a great town. Having toured a lot all over the U.S., probably to every major city in the country, gone back and forth probably 25-30 times, there is no place like the Bay Area and Santa Cruz. Here we have Big Sur. We’ve got that whole stretch up the coast [north of town] for 70 miles. We’ve got the north coast. And Santa Cruz is an interesting town. A lot of young people, it’s a surfing town, plus this area is one of the premier areas in the world where people are doing ocean science and preserving the Monterey Sanctuary. All the biggest ocean scientists are here. And then there are a lot of people who are … over the top I’ll call it. A lot of freaks, a lot of hippies. Surfer freaks, and surfer punks and surfer gangs, it’s got it all.

Q: You guys have always been very open and encouraging about sharing the Mermen’s music with fans for download. Could you talk a little about that?

A: Right now is a time where it’s so difficult to regulate. What can you do? Once you have music out there, it’s just a virtual world and it just goes everywhere and people get it for nothing. So people want to pay for our music, they pay for our music. They can get it for free if they want. I just don’t care. I’m so much more interested in just making music. I’ve never been interested in making money, to the chagrin of everybody around me. I’ve never been really ambitious about making a lot of money. It’s nice to have it, and I’ve sold music for a lot of money, but I’m just not the kind of guy who’s gotta have a nice car, gotta have a nice house, gotta have all this bullshit. So, yeah, the music’s free. And now we’ve established such a history of providing the live recordings for free, we have to continue to let people have them for free. I was talking to the guy who recorded our last show and we were talking about whether to sell it or to give it away for free. I decided we’ve been giving em away for free for all these years, we just gotta keep giving it a way for free.

Q: Did you surf with Grant [Washburn] and Doc [Renneker] and John [Raymond] and others from that original Ocean Beach/Mav’s crew back in the day?

A: Not really. Grant was in a whole other league. We lived in the same area, so we’d see each other out in the water, but I was never in the same class as those guys, you know. Even though I know Grant and Jeff [Clark] and all these people are my buddies I just… All those years I lived at Ocean Beach I saw days…man, and even days when I would paddle out that were way beyond my ability, where I put two leashes on because I thought if I ever lost my board out there, I would drown. And I’d be paddling over waves and I’d have to blink because I couldn’t comprehend that the wave was that big. And yet I wasn’t getting killed, so that was a good feeling.

Q: I just always think of that photo you guys put on the inside of the “Food for Other Fish” album [of Washburn at the bottom of a heaving, dark, outer bar Ocean Beach wave pushing 20 feet]. That photo is just ridiculous. How do you even get outside on a day like that?

A: Grant has been a huge support to the Mermen. You know, he and I learned to surf in the same town in New Jersey. Lavalette, New Jersey. He’s from Connecticut, but his parents own a house in Lavalette, where my parents used to rent a house in the summer. So we learned to surf at the same beach. Grant and I have had this resonant thing over the years. He loves the music. All the years we’ve known each other, he’s used our music in every one of his films. And Jeff too. It’s been a good relationship. A lot of the Maverick’s guys have always supported the music. Our ties to all the surf music scene over the years have become really strong, you know. I’ve met the guy who screamed at the beginning of “Wipeout,” I’ve met the guy who wrote “Pipeline.” Every surf hit known to man, I’ve met all these people over the years: The Ventures, played with Dick Dale ten times. It’s been an interesting trip. And I’m just from New Jersey.

Q: Yeah, how is that? That’s interesting to me, because I’ve always felt like you’re music captures the essence of the Northern California coast. You hear Ocean Beach in your music. It’s insane. How did you get in touch with that?

A: I don’t know. I think it’s just the fact that I love the ocean and have always lived by the ocean my whole life. I’ve always lived close to the beach and I’ve never felt comfortable anywhere else. I’ve always surfed. I’ve had a good ten years of my life where all I did was surf and travel. Surfed the Jersey shore in the winter in a full wetsuit in the snow and the ice. I think it’s informed by all that. I love surfing, I love music, I love the ocean.
The funny thing was I came to San Francisco from New Jersey with nothing. I came out here with one surfboard and an acoustic guitar. And I was in a real apathetic state. I didn’t care about doing anything. I got a job I hated. I hated it all. But then I saw a job ad in the newspaper in San Francisco for a music store salesperson. I thought, ‘that looks interesting.’ I went through interview and I wanted that job so bad. They gave me the job, I ended up doing really well there. And what happened was I ended up writing all the music for what ended up being “Krill Slippin’” [the Mermen’s first record] in the music store when things were slow. We sold four track recorders and I would play customers the songs I had written while I was showing them how to use the four track. These songs became the demo tape for what would be “Krill Slippin’”. Sometimes when I was selling people on equipment, I would write parts of songs on the spot.

Q: What did the people you were selling this equipment to think of your songs when you played them?

A: Oh, most of them didn’t give a flying [crap]. But you know you did? Allen Whitman [original Mermen bassist] was working there, and there was this girl that worked in the music store. Allen had to be in the band and that girl cared enough to finance our fist record.

Q: You guys are currently working on your seventh album. When can we expect to get our hands on it?

A: Probably a few months still. I’ve been working on this one song and it’s taking me forever. Trying to get a song where you need it to be involves a lot of pushing and shoving, you know. It’s kind of like surfing and trying to get in just the right spot on a wave that just wants to kick your ass.

Q: Is it true this August recording session was really the first new Mermen recording session in ten years?

A: Yeah. We’ve done a lot of playing together in here, but this is the first formal recording with quality tracks where we hired an engineer and we set up a huge amount of mikes and made a lot of noise and pissed off all the neighbors.

Q: How would you describe the music on this new album? What kind of sound were you going for?

A: It’s hard to describe. There are songs that are really ethereal and others, like this one I wrote, that’s like this very epic cowboy disco song. Yeah, go figure. Ever see the movie “The Good the Bad and the Ugly”? Well, Ennio Morricone wrote the music to that. I love doing that type of stuff. Sometimes people will write about us and say that the Mermen are all classic surf music. The Mermen are as far from classic surf music as possible. We get mislabeled all the time. I love all that old surf music and I play it all, but we don’t like to limit ourselves to that.

Q: Anything in particular inspire you?

A: Sometimes, but that usually never really feels right to me. You know how you have dreams? Well, I think of my music as what I dream. That’s what it feels like to me, like you’re dreaming of this perfect form. You can think of it like a perfect wave. So you have a dream where you are in that perfect form of the perfect wave, this resonant form. So the music is like putting a carrot out in front of my donkey, which is myself. I’m trying to move towards that perfect form. And maybe it’s something that will never completely come true for me, and it feels very much disembodied from me, in the sense that it’s beyond my own experience. And it could be really beautiful and resonant and perfect and meaningful to so many people — because I get lots of letters from people describing these feelings from our music — but I use the word disembodied, because it really is outside of me. It really is like a dream. Even though you’re part of it, it’s as if your body and your mind know something that you don’t know consciously. The form that we are as humans, we are evolving things. The closest I’ve really come to explaining it for myself what music is to me, is that it reminds me of dreaming. I can say all my songs are like dreams I’ve had. And I write the dream down as a song. But the dream is a tension between where I am and where I want to be. You’re growing into something greater. It’s like with surfing. As you build your skills through your life you get better and better and you reach a point where, because you have accumulated all these skills you can surf an incredibly heavy wave and deal with it. So dreaming is like grasping for that perfect form you want to get to.

Check out over 100 recordings of live performances by the Mermen available for download at www.archive.org.

It was a milestone event for the Senseless Skimfest on Sunday. The skimboarding contest at 26th Ave. Beach, now in its eighth year, saw its biggest turnout ever — some 55 entrants and dozens more watching from the beach — its first women’s event, and its first premier skimmers show up from out of town.

To top it off, the fog cleared out overnight and skimmers were greeted with a glassy two to three-foot shorebreak under sunny skies. A rising tide all morning helped draw the waves closer to the beach where the skimmers could hit them at full speed and perform a variety of tricks, from aerials and carving snaps to a few short-lived tube rides before being smashed into the sand.

“We couldn’t ask for any more,” said Santa Cruz skimmer Ryan Parola, who organized the event with his mom, Debi.

Among the professionals on hand from out of town was skimboarding legend George Bryan, who made the eight-hour drive north from Laguna Beach. Bryan, 33, is known for skimming into thick barrels at spots like the Wedge in Newport Beach. In Sunday’s professional division final, held during the afternoon peak high tide, Bryan matched up against a trio of Santa Cruz skimmers: Adam Loero, Ben Koscielniak, and Corey Ryan.

Donning a Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey and a baseball cap, Bryan attacked the little shorepound ramps with an aggressive style, pulling big carves off the lip and flowing into 360 spins in the flats. Bryan’s spray was matched only by Koscielniak, who absolutely destroyed a number of unfortunate little waves, but the Santa Cruz regularfoot failed to land his maneuvers as well.Meanwhile, Loero and Ryan took more of a fluid approach. While they lacked the spray of their larger counterparts, the two lightweights pulled off their spins, floaters and airs with more consistency.

Despite the sea breeze coming up during the pro final, Bryan said he felt everyone was able to perform well on the slightly blown out waves.

“It was really fun,” Bryan said of the final. “I love 26th. I’ve been coming up here for 15 years. There were plenty of waves coming through, so guys could get their top two waves easily and try new things.

“I felt good,” he added. “I stayed on my board and was able to pull the tricks I wanted.”

In the end, Loera took first place and the $450 grand prize, followed by Ryan in second [$300], Bryan in third [$150], and Koscielniak in fourth [$100]. Loera, a Harbor High graduate and San Jose State alum, said it was his first victory as a professional rider in a skimboard contest.

“This is probably the biggest contest I’ve ever won,” Loero said. “It feels good. I just came out to have fun and got first place. To win in a final with [George Bryan] is huge. He’s one of the guys I idolized growing up. I’ve been watching skim videos of him ever since I started in ‘97.”

In the first edition of the Senseless Skimbash women’s event local skimmer Ghazal Mowlavi placed first after outshining fellow local Jackie Gollbach and San Luis Obispo’s Lana Dow with big sprays and a few tricky moves in the final.

Gollbach, 19, said she appreciated the opportunity to compete in an all-girls skimboard event in Santa Cruz.

“It’s awesome,” Gollbach said. “There are a lot more female skimmers out there these days, and a lot more girls stepping up and charging. It’s fun to have some competition.”

Asked if she was nervous competing in her first legitimate contest, Gollbach said that the butterflies quickly subsided when she realized she had the entire slope at 26th Ave. practically to herself.

“It seemed like it happened really fast,” she said of the final. “I was really nervous at first, but once I got out there it was just like riding with a lot less people to cut you off.”

Other winners Sunday included: Josh Velez [24 and Up], Taylor Cadiz [17 and Under], and Cameron Corothers [18 to 23].

Many of the top skimmers at the Skimfest, along with a slew of other talented riders, will return to 26th Ave. for the region’s premier skimboarding contest, the O’Neill Skimbash, on Sept. 20-21. The Skimbash is the penultimate stop of the 2008 United Skim Tour, the world’s only international professional skimboard tour.

Held at 26th Ave. Beach

Pro division
1st Adam Loero
2nd Corey Ryan
3rd George Bryan
4th Ben Koscielniak

24 and up
1st Josh Velez
2nd Nick Sutton
3rd Mark Beasley
4th Cliff Voltstorff

17 and under
1st Taylor Cadiz
2nd Cole Kerby
3rd Wyatt Colen
4th Evan Quarnstraom

18 to 23
1st Cameron Corothers
2nd Skye Rose
3rd Mitch Cramton
4th David Haefele

Women
1st Ghazal Mowlavi
2nd Jackie Gollbach
3rd Lana Dow