A retrospective tip-toe through Stab's world firsts...
This magazine was only made possible through the availability of easy, affordable credit. There's a fabulous company, y'see, called American Express and they've got this product called a charge card.
You've seen the Amex sales crew at airports, right? Those spruikers who shove a form under your face? Don't push em away, man! Fudge your income on the form (100k plus min), sign at the bottom, and you'll get a golden rectangle of plastic that has almost no limit - unlike the traditional credit card that has a pre-arranged ceiling. Thus armed, you can hire helicopters, wavepools, commission golden surfboards, dine at the best restaurants and annihilate your septum and perineum in Brazil.
Following are the stories behind the Big Ideas that formed Stab. Ideas brought to life only because of the existence of cheap credit..
Taj and the Bird
So we've got these gold cards, right, and we've committed ourselves to launching a surf mag. We've quit our jobs, told our friends, sold 50 gees worth of ads, told plenty of random chicks in bars. But, we needed a gimmick to launch the first mag. A major feature that'd make em pick Stab out of a newsstand filled with surf mags swollen with free(ish) DVDs.
At the time, late in 2003, we had this mad crush on Danny Way's chopper drop (which'd later influence issue nine). And running with idea of creating our own news, we hit on the idea, How High Can A Man Fly? We'd find the perfect beachbreak, the perfect surfer (Taj) and submerge a measuring stick in the drink. For the first time in history, we'd quantify how high a surfer could actually fly. Then Tracks came out with a version with Craig Warton as the Gun Aerialist. Loose lips sink ships, as they say. Thus sunk, out came the chopper idea. Birds had been used to shoot big-wave surfing and only in Hawaii, but never the high-performance ramblings of a surfer like Taj. We thought, how about a super session down there in the south-west? And photographed by hot upcomer Dustin Humphrey (we'll fly him in from Bali) and Taj's best friend, Twiggy. It might not be a stick-on DVD (though it'll form the nucleus of Taj's third profile movie Fair Bits), but how could it fail to blow minds - and move cuntloads of Stabs.
This is October 2003, right. Taj is third in the world coming into Brazil - an event he's won twice and never got worse than a third. Perform as usual and he'll lead the race going into Hawaii. The little fucker wakes up in Brazil choked by influenza. He's stiff, weak and can barely lever himself out of his bed. He loses in his third round heat to wildcard Renan Rocha, wraps a favourite 5' 11" around a pole, and Kelly wins the event eliminating TB from the title race. He flies home (50 hours) to WA and straight into a six-foot offshore fanned swell at Supertubes, just south of Yallingup. We hire a bird for two days (15k) with ex-Nam pilot Joe Driver on the sticks. Jackie Ffcrterson mans the ski and the spectacular images and film from two days of shooting fill Stab, Transworld Surf (who we've syndicated the story to) and the rnovie Fair Bits as well as various news feeds around the country.
World title? Lost and forgotten. Here was something that would linger in memories longer than any name on a cup.
JP for Champ
In 2004, neither of the editors watched one heat of professional surfing.
Therefore, we were eminently qualified to claim Joel Fttrkinson as the man most likely to win the world title in 2005. Joel, a new father and owner of a contract that had just turned him into an instant millionaire, had other ideas. Despite flying a high-profile photographer from Sydney to shoot him, running Joel on the cover and with a massive publicity blitz inside, Joel rewarded our bold claim by finishing a distant 12th.
Andy and the Cigar
Another stolen idea, this time from GQ (US version). Years back, they ran a headshot of Jack Nicholson chomping a cigar with the big coverline: JACK.
It was so fucking good that I vowed to recreate it for the surfing world. Because Kelly turned on us about the cartoon in issue one and refuses to talk to us unless we were in a headlock or bleeding from the eyeballs, it was a godsend "when AI started collecting world titles. The idea was: Andy, cigar in mouth, engulfed in a halo of smoke, page one. Steve Sherman, lifelong friend, genius with a Blad and current photo editor of Surfing, came, shot AI in an underground carpark at the Hyatt in Huntington, and produced the goods.
Then, as we crowed over our brilliant cover, out came the same shot in Surfing. Double page. We were such amateurs we didn't get an exclusivity agreement. So it ran on the flap with a man's ass page one.
Dorian's Golden Board
We had thing in our heads at the start where we had to have a gimmick every issue. This one was our most dubious. To front our luxury issue, we flew to Ball for a week with Shane Dorian, ostensibly to have the kid ride a golden surfboard. A couple of tins of gold spray paint, a few tow-seshes at Karamas on Bali's east coast later and we had a feature and a cover. The interesting back story to all this was it became the issue where we lost our designer. We'd been butting heads for a while about the readability of features and coverlines and when he produced coverlines in what looked like Arabic and refused to run any of the portraits of Doz and his stick cause they were "the worst portraits I've ever seen in my life" and when he decided a crude pencil drawing he'd done of Doz should run full page, we pulled the pin. Or he pulled the pin. Depends who you ask.
Wavepool Tow-ats
Little Wheels Mclntosh, producer of Stab, is the sole proprietor of the idea of jetskis in wavepools.Wheels' idea was he wanted a four-wheeler to roar up and down the sides of the pool with a 30-metre rope draped over the fence of the pool, whipping high-end pros into the chlorinated ramps. I couldn't see it working, but I'm a cunt like that. Brandy balloon half empty, all clouds, no rainbows etc. The feisty little bastard persisted, however, and when the bike didn't work he wrangled an ancient ski from a ! wavepark next door the pool. Because of his close ties to Taj Burrow (Wheels is President of the Taj Burrow for Champ fan club and website www.tajburrowistoobeautifulforthisw orld.com), we got TB whose presence lured Trent Munro and Joel Parkinson.
Again, like issue one, the images fuelled 20 or so pages, including a cover and a massive poster, plus a little movie called Swimming Pool that we finally released to the world last issue, and we got to sell it all to Surfing magazine who also put it on page one.
The Air Guys go to Malaysia
The second trip to the wavepool was really to just confirm our ownership on the concept. Like the chopper gear from our first issue and pool in three, the whole thing fell out of our hands and other mags were getting kudos for the kiff we'd organised. This time, we invited four air guys - Christian Fletcher, Josh Kerr, Wade Goodall and Jamie O'Brien. Christian only made the last day and Jamie was only around for a day and a night, so the pool was owned by Josh and Wade. But it was the arrival of Jamie late at night on day two of the three-day trip that set things off. He came in a black cab at nine pm which had somehow got into the theme park and navigated its way to the water's edge. Out stepped Jamie, looking like the rock star freesurfer he is: sticks shoved in the back seat of the cab, six feet, all flaxen mane. He waxed up, took one look at the set-up, and on his first wave nailed a huge grab. The level of all three surfers went way up. When the photos came back, it was a stretch not to run a 10-page spread just of O'Brien.
Koby & Bruce
We get a lot of crushes on magazines/people/ideas. We got a few original thoughts, but most of the cool stuff is stolen from other sources. Some call it inspiration; we're happy to admit that it's straight-out theft.
Anyways, there was an issue of Esquire (the US version) where George Clooney and Julia Roberts met up for lunch, Esquire supplied em with a tape recorder, and what followed was a loose, intimate and generally funny interview. Way more there than anything a celebrity interviewer would've got.
At the time, Kobes was headed for a cage at Long Bay and Bruce was the most exciting surfer in the world (How times change - that title now jointly owned by Dane Reynolds and Jamie O'Brien). Then, Bruce and Koby were the Two Most Talked About Men In Surfing. So we took em to dinner, although the concept differed from the original in that Bruce's girl Mia and his minder Kai Garcia came along for the ride - and the putrid dinner at Centrepoint tower (prior to its latest reno and image change).
As the room spun 360 degrees, the pair talked about the miniature of their lives. I thought it was cool; some thought it took pointlessness to new levels.
Ike's 270° Rig
Scott Aichner is a great water photographer who spends every waking moment either in the drink or humping iron at the Butch Bodies™ male-only gym in Honolulu. When he's not - which obviously contradicts the "every waking moment" line - he's cooking up various innovations to apply to his water photography.
The latest is his 270 camera rig. Ike thought, what would happen if you had two cameras, both with 15mm fisheye lenses and in the same housing, and you fired them simultaneously? Together with Hawaiian waterhousing maestro Taro Fascual, the pair cooked up the 270 rig.
Good results are rare with the big rig. But, given the right conditions, maybe four foot and clean, they can be spectacular. To make it work on the page, Ike gets the two frames from the film cameras - he can't afford the 10-gee sting for two digi bodies - and cuts em together on-screen, removing about 25% of the overlap from the image size.
Taj and the Chopper Jump
Choppers and TB, like Camparis and Sunday afternoons on a deck overlooking beachbreak filth, are the sweetest mix. Just as in issue seven's Doz golden board feature, we did this in Bali to take advantage of, a, photographer Dustin Humphrey's geographical location, b, the empty beachbreaks on the east coast and, c, the cocktails and cougars, specifically the espresso martinis, at Ku De Ta, a high-end beachfront cocktail bar in Seminyak.
TB coulda done his spleen on this one. But he was a good sport and despite a pilot that didn't really get how waves break and who kept on tracking too far behind the swells, nearly made a couple of acid drops. He didn't, and will probably never try again, cause, really, it's kinda stupid.
