The Sunday Joint

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-17-2022: LONG BEACH FLOOD CONTROL – THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS GIVETH, THE ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS TAKETH AWAY

Hey All, There are no waves to speak of in Long Beach, so for me, as a kid, even though we lived just a few miles to the north, it almost didn’t exist. At some point my mom drove a group of us kids out for a day at the Long Beach Pike, which to us Disney-raised creampuffs was unnerving in its seedy midway decline. My senior prom took place at the Queen Mary. I was frog-marched to a few ASR trades...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-10-2022: THE UPS AND DOWNS OF FEELING ALRIGHT

Hey All, There are songs where the uplift comes straight and true, and I love these songs, and will kick my heels up to “Walking on Sunshine” until I’m strapped into a mobility scooter—and even then I’ll pop a wheelie in appreciation. Then there are songs where the uplift is shifty or ironic or just plain deceitful, and I love those too, maybe more, and one of the best is Buck Owens’ “Together A...

SUNDAY JOINT, 7-3-2022: THE UGLY, THE GRUMPY, AND THE DOOLEY

Hey All, Kathy “Queen of the Surf Guitar” Marshall, mysterious star of last week’s Joint, is alive and presumably well. Click here and scroll down and you’ll find a photo of her from, I’m guessing, around 2008. Along with a lot of other surf music greats, Marshall was interviewed for Sound of the Surf, a documentary that hopefully, eventually will see light of day. This sizzle reel is 14 years ol...

SUNDAY JOINT ADDENDUM, 6-27-2022: WHAT DO YOU EXPECT? I’M A DRUMMER!

Hey All, Apologies for dropping into your inbox unexpectedly, but since yesterday’s Stomp-themed Sunday Joint went out, the Fender Police are all over me for identifying Kathy “Queen of the Surf Guitar” Marshall’s guitar as a Strat when, in fact, as evidenced by the two shots I posted of Marshall, it is clearly a Jaguar. See photo above. Jag all the way. As one of you politely, if maybe a little...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-26-2022: “WHAT IS IT ABOUT SURFING THAT DRAWS SO MANY DIRTY CHARACTERS?”

Hey All, America was a more hopeful and less-divided nation when everybody hated surfers, and that’s just a sociological fact. You could still be against the blacks, pinkos, and libbers, but venom directed at surfers was venom removed from other repressed groups, and you don’t have to connect many dots before realizing that hodads and gremmies gave us the Civil Rights Act. I mentioned attack-dog ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-19-2022: HOLLISTER RANCH . . . OVER THE RAINBOW AND BEHIND THE GATE

Hey All, Most surfers, for different reasons, think of the still-private (for the moment) Hollister Ranch as either half-mythical or past tense or both. “What is paradoxical about the Ranch,” as Paul Gross put it a few years back, “is the place it occupies in our minds.” Gross continues: When it became world-renowned, there were thousands of surfers dreaming about a location that, A) they had n...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-12-2022: BLISSING OUT ON TED SPENCER

Hey All, My first brush with Hare Krishnas, common to Los Angeles-born people of my age, was seeing them at the airport in the early 1970s, bald-headed and saffron-robed, dancing and chanting and banging drums. This was just after the Manson murders and the Krishnas were bad-vibed by almost everybody for being cult-adjacent—which at the time they kinda were, as the movement was attracting plenty ...

SUNDAY JOINT, 6-5-2022: ALOHA AND RIP DICK BREWER, JOEY HAMASAKI, AND WALT PHILLIPS

Hey All, I’ve posted more pages on Dick Brewer than any other boardmaker, by a huge margin (too many links to list, but here’s the “dick brewer” search results page), and like everybody else who has written about the Minnesota-born shaper I have leaned into the “guru” bit and mostly avoided talking about the nuts and bolts of his design work. Brewer, after all, was a mechanic before reinventing h...

SUNDAY JOINT, 5-29-2022: JOHN SEVERSON’S COVER IS BLOWN

Hey All, Red boards were scattered all over the cutting room floor while making last week’s Sunday Joint, including this rubescent 1962 SURFER cover, below, featuring Oceanside regularfooter and Paul Newman lookalike LJ Richards. Earlier in the year SURFER had switched from duotone to four-color covers, but this was the first dalliance with red, and publisher John Severson, as you can see, leaned...

SUNDAY JOINT, 5-22-2022: BLACK IS THE NEW RED

Hey All, I cut way back on the screentime after posting that Make or Break rave last month, and not until yesterday did I get around to the season finale, which of course takes place at Lowers and ends with Carissa Moore and Gabriel Medina crowned as 2021 WCT world champs. I remain a Make or Break fan. But the show did not, for me anyway, build or improve on the first two episodes—in fact it seem...