The Concert That Created The Wave

After graduating in the summer of 1976, I designed t-shirts to sell to my friends in advance of a Beach Boys concert at Ohio State University. The band’s name, concert date and palm tree-theme I whipped up for the front design was suitable enough (yes, I soon realized it was illegal!), but I felt the back of the tees should also sport something unique and appropriately relevant.

Playing off of the surfing contest t-shirts I admired in my surf magazines (I’m guessing I was the only Ohio subscriber to SURFER and SURFING magazines at that time), and a satirical piece of surfing-related fiction I had written in my high school paper, a couple of concepts were born. One spawned a design saying simply “Surf Olentangy” and featured a posterized bikini girl with flowing hair holding a surfboard. The other proclaimed the “1976 Olentangy Masters Surfing Classic – Columbus, Ohio.” I got a kick out of spoofing the cool surfing contest shirts advertised in my surfing magazines, so I went with the latter design for the back of the shirts.

I grew up in a house that literally overlooked the Olentangy River. It also happens that Whetstone High was just across the Olentangy from our house, so the river played a large part in my childhood adventures. Meandering southward, the river flows by the Ohio State campus en route to its termination at the confluence with the Scioto River in downtown Columbus. The classic, tubular breaking wave I created for this design was of course a far cry from the shallow, silt laden, carp filled Olentangy.

Due to the elementary screening process I was limited by, all these early designs were first sketched and then inked in crisp black-and-white, then screened using my preferred choice of navy blue, air-dry ink, hand printed onto whatever pastel color t-shirts I could buy on sale at K-mart. Why navy? Because a quart of this specialized ink was expensive, and navy seemed to suffice for just about every project I worked on. Sort of like the Henry Ford of t-shirts – you could have any color of ink you wanted, so long as it was navy.

Everyone seeing this Beach Boys concert shirt seemed to enjoy the local reference to surfing the Olentangy. The design looked very official – purposefully, not at all cartoonish – and I was pleased to find that most people, the ones that “got it,” appreciated the visual nod to satire rather than an animated, goofy approach.