“I’m cursed with this thing where I’m constantly seeing these moments going on—like right now—that drive me crazy, because I have to stop and take a photo,” said Trace Marshall. He aimed his vintage Canon SLR at the car parked next to us, a black Tesla with four fresh Wavestorms strapped to the roof. He snapped a few pics and continued. “I’m less interested in the surf than the stuff floating around it—the people, the scene, the beach, the parking lot. My goal is to capture the wider spectrum, not just the same boring waves.”
Trace and I sat in the front seats of his white Sprinter van. With salt-matted blond hair, blue eyes, and an impish grin punctuated with a gold tooth, he exuded a court-jester vibe that suited our whereabouts. We were parked directly across from the entrance to First Point—the pearly gates, as we like to call it. It was high summer, a Sunday. The melting pot of greater LA moved past. It felt a little like a stakeout, Trace with his camera, me with my pen.
*
In the Malibu parking lot, there were rules. Rule #1: Don’t drop in. Rule #2: Share your wax. Your weed. If you have a second beer, pass it. Tomorrow, you’ll be thirsty. Rule #3: Acknowledge Malibu Carl. Say hi to Parking Lot Teddy. Rule #4: There is no problem so big or complicated that it cannot be run away from. (Not so much a rule but an understanding.)
*
“I’m pretty illiterate,” Trace told me. “My form of communication is through visual language. I always shot photos as a kid, with my mom’s camera. Then I took photography in high school and spent time in the darkroom. Growing up, there was always a camera in my hand.”
I first met Trace and his brother, Chad, in the mid-aughts. I was charmed by their witty, contrarian take on the world. That they tore it up on longboards seemed just a bonus. One day in 2006, I brought my friend Jack McCoy to Malibu. Jack was doing research for his film-in-progress, in which he wanted to feature Malibu and its lineage of innovation and colorful characters.
At the Malibu wall, we met up with Christian Beamish, TSJ’s associate editor at the time. While checking the waves, we ran into Trace and Chad, longboards underarm, ambling out to the fun, head-high waves. I introduced everyone. Trace and Chad went out and shredded.
By the end of their session, Jack was convinced he needed them in his film (see the Brothers Marshall part in A Deeper Shade of Blue). A few days later, I got a call from Beamish: “Those Marshall brothers are really something. Would you be up for writing a profile of them?”
I tell this story to illustrate how Malibu’s a stage, and to surf there is to be a dancing seal of sorts. (In the opening scene of my profile of the brothers, titled “Terroir LA,” Trace and Chad ride tandem, simulating oral sex on each other.)
I tell this story also to say that while I knew of Trace as a top Malibu surfer, clothing designer, art director, provocateur, fount of creativity, and lover of happy hour at Islands restaurant in Agoura Hills, I had no idea he was so skillful with a camera. Instead, I came to that through an accumulative awareness: The more photos he posted, the more his distinct style leapt out at me. There were the tight crops, the funny and the sad details, the outcast and the downtrodden. There was a jolly, cinematic brightness, achieved via warm fill flash. Most of all, there was Malibu, with which Trace and I share a mutual fascination.
*
In the shimmering waters of Malibu, my mascara ran, my lipstick sprinted, my facelift pole-vaulted, my raw and unvarnished self stood soft and vulnerable across the 3-foot peelers. The afternoon sun was a French kiss. The light onshore wind carried the wisdom of the ancients. Neptune three-pronged me the way a cattle rancher brands his cow. Magellan slapped me and said, “Not a 50-foot noseride but a 360-degree odyssey, an entire life. So less of the rum and more of the captain’s log, if ya know what I’m sayin’.”
*
“First Point Malibu is the epicenter of the universe,” said Trace, camera on his lap, lens aimed phallically up. He wore navy blue shorts and a gray tee emblazoned with a yin-yang symbol—on one side, “Valley”; on the other, “Malibu.” The tee’s from the clothing label he runs with Chad, Brothers Marshall. They grew up in Agoura Hills—the Valley. “I’ve been at Malibu long enough to know who’s who and who not to snake,” he said. “But as far as being at Malibu and being a local, I’m a Val till the day I die, and I take pride in that. There’s something about having to fight to get to the beach every day when you don’t have a car, driving through the canyon, getting that first glimpse of the light bouncing off the ocean—it’s like falling in love for the first time.”
I asked about his signature hashtag: #thatmalibulifethough.
“It’s the sarcasm,” he told me. “When you think of Malibu, what do you think of? It’s the Kardashians, Pamela Anderson, Baywatch, Gidget. It’s every cliché. #thatmalibulifethough is just this one-liner to say, ‘This is the real Malibu.’ It’s some cholos hitting NOS balloons, the European couple down by the pier, the surf bum BBQing and smoking the joint in the lot, people fighting, yelling, loving, pissing, drinking, whatever it may be. It’s just an endless source of inspiration. The energy at Malibu is unmatched.”
*
There was a line from us (wet, barefoot, barreling down the line on curling wave) to them (cowboy-hatted, spurred, galloping, bouncing, yeehawing across prairie on flesh and blood). But big differences, too. In our mouths, at the ready, ‘Hey, hey, you, you, get off of my wave.’ In theirs, Skoal, resolve, taciturnity (is that even a word?). In fact, no, now that I think of it, very little in common: the hedonist surfer; the American cowboy.
At the Malibu wall, we hid behind dark sunglasses and spoke with our hands. We traded sex for a chocolate shake, large fries, and a double cheeseburger. It happened in the men’s room. Parking Lot Teddy guarded the door in exchange for half the shake and a couple bites of the cheeseburger. We didn’t use fancy words like “transactional.” We were hungry. And we ate.
In the Malibu parking lot, the rear hatch of a ’77 Econoline popped open. Out flew a Nike. Then a wetsuit. Then an MSA jacket. Then another Nike. Then an 8-foot Liddle displacement hull, which landed nose first, making it something like a 7’9″ or 7’8″. “We’re breaking up!” shouted Ashley. I crawled out the passenger-side door, retrieved my things, and made my way toward the pier.
*
I’ll tell you how it went for me. In the early 1990s, slightly bored by the one-dimensionality of the pro surf life I was living, I found myself ending long, hot summer days at Alice’s, the restaurant on the pier. Huddled at the bar was a crew of regulars who bore similarities to Walter, Donny, and the Dude in The Big Lebowski. We’d get sloshed not on White Russians but Andy’s Candy, a rum concoction served by bartender-surfer Andy Lyon.
There was witty banter, there was the afterglow of flying across the racetrack waves in the hot sun, there were things inside of me that needed to find expression, and the drinks helped. After two or three I’d borrow a pen, grab a stack of cocktail napkins, and start scribbling furiously, a stream of words, often clunky and nonsensical, and so began my efforts to capture, document, bottle.
I asked Trace when it started for him.
“Around the early 2000s, I started hanging out with Rick Klotz, owner of Freshjive, and we’d party in Hollywood all night and surf Malibu all day,” he said. “We started doing our clothing brands, Warriors of Radness and Gonz, and we got this Sony Cyber-shot digital camera, and I started shooting the Malibu scene, and it just clicked. At the time, I was educating myself about art, and feeling insecure about putting stuff out there, and I approached the photography more as a conceptual art piece. Yes, it was documentarian and journalistic, but I just thought of it as an experiment. I was a clothing designer and an art director, and photography was a way for me to try to find my voice. And I got this feeling from Malibu that I wanted to convey, and shooting photos was a jumping-off point for me to start attempting to do so.”
Trace told me how, with Warriors and Gonz, they’d hire photographers to shoot their collections. He liked the look they were getting—even, diffused, warm light—and wondered how he could bring something similar to his Malibu pics, minus the assistants and gear.
“I hit this peak with the natural light where I felt it wasn’t honestly conveying the way Malibu feels,” he said. “And it was through running around with a digital camera, shooting thousands of photos, and playing with the synthetic pop of flash that I managed to capture something a little different that achieved that feeling. This was at the peak of the Super 8, nostalgic trend in surf films, and I went against the grain of that. I wanted synthetic light and that crispy, digital look.”
I wanted to hear more on the technical side of things, but the circus kept distracting us. Malibu Carl came over, asked what we were up to.
“I’m writing a story about Trace,” I said.
“Why don’t you write about me?” said Malibu Carl.
Trace is a beloved figure at Malibu. When he hugs his friends, he brings the side of his face to their chest, like a teddy bear. He veers ADHD—scattershot one minute, surgically focused the next. A couple years back, over drinks, I told him the details of a bad breakup I’d gone through, which had climaxed with harsh words on a downtown LA street corner.
“Let’s go back there and reenact it,” said Trace. “We can shoot it for Brothers Marshall.”
By the end of the hour, we’d come up with an entire ad campaign, “Reenactments of My Breakups Around Los Angeles.”
Has it happened? Not yet.
*
In the Malibu parking lot, they set up CCTV cameras, confirming what we’d known all along: that at First Point we were all actors, that some of us were working for SAG scale while others were on big retainers, creating speculation, rumors, jealousy, paranoia.
Was Malibu Carl really the star of the pilot? What did Parking Lot Teddy do to earn an executive producer credit? Did the Season 1 finale involve fisticuffs at the top of the stairs between Andy and Ben, or the board-burning love scene between Soul Mama and Ned?
Reality and In the Malibu Parking Lot blurred. Trace started referring to himself in the third person. I got into a shouting match with Grossrider, who two days later had no recollection of the incident.
“Oh, that was probably my stunt double,” he said, “the angry drunk with the black belt.”
*
“Our dad started bringing us to Malibu around ’94, ’95,” said Trace. “He was working undercover for Hollywood vice. He’d work nights, and in the morning he’d bring us to the beach and let us roam free. It taught us to talk to all kinds of people. And you really felt that the older guys were watching out for you. It was a tribe, and we became a part of that tribe, and it gave us confidence and independence.”
I relate. I grew up with my mom taking my brothers and me to First Point, she on the beach, us out in the water, enraptured as much by the characters as the machine-perfect waves. Between surfs we munched sandwiches, watched, listened. Various languages were spoken within a 100-yard stretch of sand. Many ethnicities and socioeconomic stripes. Mickey Rat surfed naked, wearing boardshorts around his neck like a cape. Watermelon slept in the bushes. There were fights over waves. One dude punched the fin out of his board and tried to stab the other dude with it. Malibu felt mythical, the greatest show on earth.
“I have this routine where I’ll jump out in the water and surf, come in, and then just sort of suss out what’s going on,” said Trace. “I’ll maybe go to the pier and have a beer, and then slowly creep back in and start taking photos. I flip into this mode where I’m seeing it all as a photographer, but at the same time I’m connected with the community. Lately I’ve been into the random tourist who’s maybe there for the first time. I like asking people if I can take their picture, then sending it to them. I’ve made new friends that way.”
Trace said he delights in the comments his photos elicit.
“I post photos of everyone—whether they’re Black, Asian, Hispanic, white, gay, straight, trans, whatever it may be. I’m never editing for that. I’m just looking for the good photo. But let’s say I post a photo of a Black person, I’ll get people commenting, saying, ‘Oh, you’re so woke.’ And then if I post photos of, whatever, white surf kids, it’s the opposite, like, ‘Oh, great, another Aryan Nation[s] surf cult.’ But I find it playful. I don’t take it too seriously.”
We stepped out of Trace’s van, made our way to the wall. The surf was waist-high and glistening, tons of surfers. The beach was packed. The smell of sunscreen and cannabis.
“It’s like a studio,” said Trace. “You have the light bouncing off the pier, you have this elevated beach looking down at First Point as this gauntlet, and then you have this eclectic group of people. My goal is to capture the subject in the most relaxed, natural state. It can be tricky with this practice. The synthetic light freezes that emotion and exposes every crack of beauty.”
*
At the pearly gates of Malibu, I poured out confessions: hiding six-packs in my backpack, not sharing joints with Malibu Carl, borrowing Grossrider’s prized 9-foot Yater without asking.
There was a tribunal of sorts involving Fruit Loop, Trace, and Parking Lot Teddy. They told me to hold tight, disappeared into Teddy’s van, shut the door, reemerged 20 minutes later.
“Carton of cigarettes for Carl, bottle of tequila for Teddy. I’m on the wagon this week, so basically I get to drop in on you every chance I get,” said Trace. I nodded compliantly. He pointed seaward. A sparkling head-high set peeled across First Point. “Carry on,” he said.
*
There’s a lineage here. Photographically, there’s Joe Quigg, Bev Morgan, and John Larronde in the 1950s; LeRoy Grannis and Ron Stoner in the ’60s; Grant Rohloff, Pat Darrin, and Jeff Divine in the ’70s; Ken Seino, Bill Parr, and Doug Avery in the ’80s and ’90s.
There’s Craig Stecyk’s seminal article, “Curse of the Chumash,” published in Surfer in 1976, which captured the staccato, bustling energy of Malibu. And there’s the feature film Big Wednesday, inspired by Malibu, which managed to serve back to us surfers home truths we may have been in denial of.
“In high school, I was obsessed with Lance Carson,” said Trace. “I wanted to surf like him. It was hard to find films of him—you had to treasure-hunt—but I found them, and I also found the old surf mags. Then I became infatuated with surf history, LA history. And as I went deeper, I started to realize the crossover, how the urban overlapped with the beach, how these important LA artists like Billy Al Bengston and Ken Price were also surfers. I appreciated their irreverence. I studied Miki Dora. I look back now and realize that we were poking fun at the ones poking fun.”
I was reminded of a sticker and T-shirt Brothers Marshall did a few years back: the GLSA (Gay and Lesbian Surfing Association), featuring a rainbow-colored wave and the tag line “Come on out, the water’s fine.”
“The GLSA became this cute joke just to fuck with surfers, but at the same time we had gay friends who surfed, and who were in the closet and didn’t feel safe,” said Trace. “It disarmed the jock, homophobic dudes, but it also put a smile on people’s faces.”
*
In the Malibu parking lot, I spilled oil, blood, ink, semen, Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax. In the Malibu parking lot: ghosts. The ghost of Miki, Moondoggie, Tubesteak, Lance, Dewey, the Enforcer, Fruit Loop, Head and Shoulders, Seaweed. In the Malibu parking lot, facts were muddled, beer was consumed, words were slurred.
*
“I’ve seen so many people get eaten alive by this place,” said Trace. “But that’s kind of the beauty, the way the high and low, light and shadow, hope and bitterness all converge here.”
A set of waves peeled across the point, sparkly, majestic, with many riders.
“I’ve been hooked on this beach for almost 30 years,” he continued. “I’ve built my life around it, I’m inspired by it, and I’m constantly trying to capture it. And I’ll probably be trying to capture it for the rest of my life.”
*
In the Malibu parking lot, a dead seagull on the sand between the wall and the water, as if to say, “Before frolicking like dolphin across zippering wave, you must ponder death, mortality, finite number of hours on earth.” In the Malibu parking lot, we were believers, optimists. Yes, the swell was coming up—it was always coming up, if not tomorrow, then next week. That was the chant, the code. The world was going to hell. The game was rigged. Fuck that pouty-faced nepo baby on the cover of the latest Vogue. But 3- to 4-foot swell was on its way. And what that did for the spirit, the soul, the collective psyche of the Malibu parking lot and its adherents…
You’d think it’d be enough: the waves, the sun, the shirtless, board-wielding tribe all huddled together in the glimmering lineup. But the hole still needed filling. That was what we shared.
Outsized holes. Which we never talked about in the literal sense, but never stopped talking about in the constant chatter, both external and internal. “Lemme get a sip of that” a stand-in for “My innards are ripped open and spilling blood all over the pavement, you got a tissue or somethin’?”
*
“Kind of intimate,” I said to Trace. “Your pics, my words, bouncing off each other on the page.”
“Kind of like banging rails,” he said.
[All captions by the photographer.]
This story was photographed and written before the devastating fires in Los Angeles, which broke out after the feature went to press. The California Fire Foundation’s wildfire and disaster relief fund is actively providing financial support to the victims. To learn more about how to help the affected communities and to donate, please visit cafirefoundation.org.
