NEW YORK — “Surfing and punk — they’re like birds of a feather,” says Arturo Vega, longtime artistic director and spokesman for The Ramones. It’s Friday night, the New York debut of “Against the Grain,” a traveling showcase of custom-designed surfboards sponsored by Hurley International and Surfer magazine, and Vega is seated, beer in hand, at legendary rock ‘n’ roll haunt CBGB. He’s a mere half-block from his apartment on Bowery and Second Street, aka Joey Ramone Place, but looks quite at home, reclining in a purple velvet armchair, surrounded by surfing’s tools of the trade. “This is perfect,” he says.
To the uninitiated, the punk quartet’s brand of acoustic aggression has but few similarities to the relaxed beach vibe stereotypical of the hang-10 sport. For that matter, neither does it seem to have much in common with the two-fin surfboard, yet the exhibit is here to celebrate just that, “the collision between surf culture and punk music.”
“When the twin fin came out in the late Seventies, it was a response against the hippie surfers,” explains Joe McElroy, director of global branding at the California-based clothing label Hurley. “Versus the single-fin board, it allows for faster turns, quicker response times, more vertical surfing,” he says, noting its parallel popularity with the rise of punk music at the time. Even the title of the showcase, meant to imply how “the twin fin went against the grain when it came out,” McElroy says, is taken from an old Bad Religion song.
So it comes as no surprise, then, that surf took over the CBGB turf this weekend in what was the third stop for the traveling exhibit. (The eight-city tour began two weeks ago in Tokyo and will end in Sydney.) The 17 two-fin boards on display are a collaboration between boldfaced names in the surfing world, who created the boards’ shapes, and iconic artists from the punk era, such as Vega, Winston Smith, The Dead Kennedys’ album artist and Stephen Jay-Rayon of the streetwear line Hysteric Glamour. Shapers include Shawn Stüssy, of Stüssy fame, and Mark Richards, surf veteran who first brought the twin fin to prominence.
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“The collaboration was long overdue,” says Jay-Rayon, who’s currently in talks with Hurley to do limited-edition graphic Ts for the collection. “It’s all about the rebellious attitude.”
It’s a sentiment with which Vega agrees. “There’s a punk precedence here,” he says, recalling a famous old photograph of Joey Ramone with a surfboard. “Punk compels you to act; surfers create their own reality. It’s all about the moment of being in the absolute present.”