To be honest, I don't remember whose idea it was, but there was a lot of drinking involved. I do remember that. The Surfers Paradise beer garden after an unseasonal nor'easter had blown Burleigh out and ended a good run of swell. Burgers and beers all afternoon.
With prospects for surf not looking good for the coming days, conversation fell to what we could do to fill the pages of the next issue, due at the printer in Sydney in a bit over a week. Sure, we had plenty of surf shots from the Burleigh swell, but you couldn't fill a magazine with just surf shots! Well, not if we're talking about Tracks in the '70s, you couldn't.
"Why don't we do something that's never been done before?" said Paul "Smelly" Neilsen. "You know, like break new ground."
"Mate, surfing magazines have been around for 15 years now," I responded. "There's nothing that hasn't been done."
Rabbit Bartholomew slammed his pot down on the rickety little table, wasting almost an inch of frothing Fourex. "Mate, that's so frickin' negative. If we all thought like that we'd still be riding slabs of wood with no fins, instead of boards with one fin and now two, and I'd say within the next five years, three, and who knows, probably in the next century four fins or even more!" Bugs didn't actually say anything like that, but I like to think of him as a visionary, even then. What he did say was more like this: "Yeah, let's do something completely outrageous, even by Tracks standards."
Someone – and it might have been your humble correspondent – mentioned that Laura Blears had done some nude surfing shots for Playboy, but that male nude surfing was an Everest waiting to be climbed, so to speak. Someone – and again, it may have been me – hurriedly ordered another tray of beers as the idea developed into a plot, and the plot became a plan.
Neilsen and I woke late and hungover at his bachelor pad in Miami. I made two strong Bloody Marys and we got on the road, taking the fire engine red Tracks- mobile, rather than the shiny silver Brothers Neilsen beast. "Bad for business," Smelly explained. We picked up some girls at Burleigh, then photographer Marty "Meat-axe" Tullemans and Bugs at Snapper. At Tweed Heads we filled the Esky in the back with coldies for the blokes and some sparkling rubbish for the chicks. The Tracks truck was fully loaded, and by the time we found a suitably lonely beach break, so were most of its occupants.
I thought Marty, who was going through a bit of a spiritual jag at the time, would be appalled when I explained the mission, but I was wrong. He loved it. "So we want just a hint of dick, right? Just a sniff? We don't want to rub people's noses in it, right?"
We found a passable little peak at the undeveloped end of Ocean Shores. Not a surfer in sight for a kilometre in either direction. Out with the picnic blanket, into the booze and off with the clobber. The girls thought it was hilarious and were soon totally into the act. Smelly and Bugs paddled out and flew the flag of manhood on wave after wave while Marty clicked away. When Bugs found one with a nice open face, he jammed a wide-legged cuttie that left nothing to the imagination. Click. Click. Click.
But somehow we survived the dirty day at Open Sores, and sales of the Teddy Bears Picnic issue showed a healthy spike. "Exclusive: NUDE SURFING!" screamed the cover, above a pic of bare-bummed Bugs flicking it off the top. The more revealing wide-legged cuttie was big inside.
Rabbit's sainted mum refused to speak to me until 1997, and I don't blame her!
