IN MEMORY OF
CHRIS BYSTROM
1950 - 2001

I was working on an article for H2o magazine when I heard the news of Chris Bystrom's tragic death in Australia. 

Ironically, if it hadn't been for Chris I wouldn't even have been writing for H2o, because it was Chris who had persuaded me to start writing for surfing magazines again.

Josh Bystom has published a website to "to keep my dads legacy going" and you can get to it by clicking on http://www.chrisbystrom.com .

The website is well worth a visit. In addition to a beautifully written tribute written by Josh, the Chris Bystrom Website  gives you access to a complete list of Chris' films and their release dates, DVD's, back issues of Pacific Longboarder and "The Glide," plus posters and t-shirts.

The phone call came from a mutual friend who lived in Australia, but I still found it  difficult to believe that someone as vital and full of life as Chris could actually be dead. I spent the rest of the day on the phone and the internet trying to get confirmation.

Finally, I got through to Daryl Barnett, manager of Chris Bystrom's Retro Groove Surf Shop. It was inescapable. Chris' car was hit by a truck on New South Wales' notorious Pacific Highway. His car had inexplicably swerved into the truck's path and hit the semi-trailer head-on. According to news reports, he died "instantly."

No longer would I pick up the phone and hear a strange accent, "Dis iss ze prezeedunt uf ze Gggggerman Rrrrepooblish. Iss Count von Fargulstein von Burgerbaum ut ze kassel today?" or "This is the IRS, Mr Feigel. We're calling about your last tax return."

Chris and I never met face to face. Nevertheless we built a strong and lasting friendship over the all too brief time we knew each other.

A friend in California had sent me an issue of Pacific Longboarder magazine with an article about Miki Dora (Volume 3 Number 1). I disagreed with how it portrayed Miki. So I fired off a letter to the magazine's publisher and editor, Chris Bystrom.

A week or so later, I picked up the phone and it was Chris calling from Australia where the magazine is based. Naturally, I expected him to ask me about the letter, but instead, he asked if I was the same Bob Feigel who'd written "Feigel Fables" in Surfguide magazine back in the 60's.

It turned out that he was one of FF's old fans, which immediately made me suspect his sanity. Then he told me something that blew my socks off. "It's said that one of your fables was prophetic, and I agree with that." 

I asked him to explain and he said, "Rip van Nerdwinkle" (which appeared in the "Malibu" issue of Surfguide - November 1964) predicted the shortboard revolution several years before it actually happened ... and I want to republish it."

My first answer was, "No." I explained that, except for my letter about the Miki Dora article, I hadn't written anything for a surfing magazine since Surfguide went down the gurgler and that I wasn't sure I wanted to start again in 1999.

As anyone who knew Chris can attest, "No" was not a word he understood. So I ended up agreeing and a beautifully illustrated version of the original "Rip Van Nerdwinkle" appeared in Volume 3 Number 3 - the same issue in which he published my letter about the Miki Dora article. He also announced that I would be Pacific Longboarder's New Zealand correspondent.

From then on Chris and I spoke almost weekly - often more. Most calls were about the magazine, its direction and the major two part article he asked me to write about the history of New Zealand surfing. But some were personal calls about what was going on in his life and his relationships ... and it was these latter calls that cemented our friendship and trust.

We almost met face to face later in mid-1999 when Chris plugged me into an ambitious project. He wanted to build an "Extreme Sports" theme park that would feature surfing, skateboarding, snowboarding, kitesurfing, etc. He was a walking idea factory.

At the time, my wife was visiting her aunt in England, and Chris wanted me to fly over to Australia to work with both Chris and a young friend of his who was a top management and marketing consultant. Since part of my background was marketing communications, Chris wanted my input in the mix.

Unfortunately, Chris failed to inform me about his plans until the last moment and I couldn't get a visa for Australia in the timeframe he'd set. Nor could I simply leave our small, 7 acre "lifestyle block" and our "mob" of 12 sheep unsupervised on such short notice. 

So Chris arranged for one Stuart O'Neill to fly over to New Zealand and work with me on the project at our place on Vinegar Hill.

For the next few days Stuart and I put in twelve hours days and somehow produced a comprehensive report that came to the conclusion that, while it was a great idea and had lots of potential, Chris' proposal wouldn't be viable without major outside investment. It wasn't the news Chris wanted to hear, because he wanted to retain total control of the project ... but it was the advice we'd been paid to provide.

Stuart stayed long enough for us to become good friends and enjoy a fair few beers, some superb bottles of Aussie red (Stuart arrived with the maximum allowed by customs) and hours of talk story in front of our fireplace.

Stuart had heard the news of Chris' death from his mother, who'd passed the accident scene early that day and recognized Chris' car. Radio news reported a fatality at the same spot and Stuart thoughtfully called me with the news before I could hear it from an impersonal source.

Chris Bystrom was warm, funny, creative, unpredictable, invigorating, challenging and sometimes maddening. And even today, whenever my phone rings, I still hope it might be Chris on the other end. I miss him very much. 

His legacy includes a string of popular surf movies and videos (Blazing Boards, Gravity Sucks, Soul Patrol, Blazing Longboards, Living Long, to name a few amongst many), a classic book on the renaissance of longboarding, 'The Glide', his Retro Groove Surf Shop in Coolangatta and the most elegant and memorable issues of Pacific Longboarder - the magazine he published and edited until its sale the year before his death. 

When I last spoke with Chris just two weeks before his death, he was planning yet another surf film expedition, another trip to California to buy and sell surfing memorabilia and looking forward to riding many more waves. May your generous spirit surf joyously in the hand of God ... and save a few for me.

In Memory of Chris Bystrom © Robert R. Feigel, 2007 - All Rights Reserved

FROM SWELL.COM:

THE PASSING OF A BRAINSTORM
Film-maker Chris Bystrom killed in car crash

May 5, 2001 Northern NSW, Australia: Friends, colleagues, and fans of surf movies generally will be shocked and saddened to hear that Chris Bystrom -- maker of the legendary Blazing Boards video series -- died yesterday in a car accident near Mooball, Australia. He was 51.

Eyewitnesses reported that Bystrom's vehicle was traveling along the Pacific Highway on the far north coast of New South Wales at around 7 a.m. Friday Australian time, when it swerved into oncoming traffic, hitting a semi-trailer head-on. Bystrom was killed instantly.

Business rivals and buddies alike were quick to pay homage to the multi-faceted lensman, who in recent years had dived into the renaissance world of longboarding, kickstarting Pacific Longboarder magazine and making a series of longboard videos. "Everyone's been calling to tell me," said Darryl Barnett, manager of Retro Groove, Bystrom's surf culture store-cum-museum. "It's been a huge shock ... (Chris) was quite a classic."

"He was ahead of his time in lots of ways," said Australian Longboarding magazine editor Shane Peel, who fought circulation battles against Bystrom for much of the 1990s. "He saw the longboarding scene coming almost before it'd started, then he could see the trend toward mid-length boards and nostalgia. He was someone who put a real lot into surfing."

Originally of San Diego, Bystrom had been living in Australia for nearly 20 years, settling in Elanora just south of the Queensland Gold Coast and enjoying what he saw as the country's similarity with an older Californian landscape. Before the move, he'd attended UCSD film school, and was a stickler for shooting 16-mm film stock rather than video. This may have been one reason why the Blazing Boards series was such a hit through the mid-'80s -- along with the fact that it featured some of Mark Occhilupo's and Tom Curren's most dazzling surfing of the time. Great surfers of today, Rob Machado and Shane Dorian among them, were hugely influenced by what they saw in BB and nominate it regularly among their favorite surf films. "He was aware that those guys liked his movies," says Barnett, "and he was proud of that."

Other movies included Madmen '93 and Gravity Sucks, which featured the first internationally shown footage of Maverick's (shot by California's Steve Spaulding).

In the mid-1990s, wanting to try something new, Bystrom began publishing Pacific Longboarder -- the only surf magazine to deliberately base itself around an actual ocean, not a nation. PL ran material from Australia's east coast, Hawaii, California, and anywhere else with a Pacific coastline. It borrowed heavily in format from Steve Pezman's Surfer's Journal, but a hint to its owner's individuality and serious nature could be found in the cover tagline: "A Beacon of Truth, Controversy and Artistic Expression." This was years after Bystrom been given the affectionate nickname "Brainstorm" by media colleagues.

PL blazed some new trails in Australian surf publishing, but ran into money problems in 1999 when the competition began hotting up, and was eventually sold (it is still being published). "After (Chris) lost his magazine he got a little bit depressed," says Barnett. "But he was very happy with the shop." After opening in March 2000, Retro Groove has gone on to become a surf cultural center and a focus for surfboard collectors around Australia.