Hey All, We think of Pam Burridge as being one of those late-career half-geezer world champions, like Joel Parkinson or Sunny Garcia, but in fact Pam was just 25 in 1990 when she won her first and only world title. Margo Oberg was an older champ than Burridge. So was Phyllis O’Donell. On paper at least, Pam was still young in 1990. Then again, she’d been a pro for 10 years—and they were hard yea...
Hey All, My James-Bond-Meets-Leif-Garrett prom pic from last week’s Sunday Joint was meant to honeypot you guys into sending your own best-worst formal dance photos, and in fact I was going to run a little gallery of those shots at the bottom of today’s Joint. I got one response. The rest of you kept your scrapbooks closed and firmly on the shelf, so here I am this Sunday feeling less Bond and ...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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 ...
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...