Classic surf music from the Hi Tide Recordings label and the The Volcanics latest release Concrete Carver. This is not an advertisement, I just happen to enjoy some surf music mixed into my library. During covid I discovered thier label mates the Surfrajettes and have been listening to surf music a little more than usual lately. Album art and music video after the jump.
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This is less than brand new, but I just had fingerboard fatigue, or maybe it was Tony Hawk fatigue, or maybe it was both. Mattel is selling fingerboards, and although they don’t appear to be branded as a Tony Hawk product he appears in a commercial and theHawk name is sprinkled on the products in a sort of innocuous manner. It almost like they are trying to downplay it, which makes no sense unless they are only hoping for an initial boost and don’t want to have to keep paying him down the road. A big point of sale on these is the inclusion of shoes for your finger, which itself is not new if you remember Mattel’s Real Men series from the 80’s. Hang on… why cant I find a link for that on S&A? I actually have one them… I can’t believe I haven’t posted that yet…
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As a kid I can remember seeing ads like this in the back of comic books and other publications aimed at adolescents. The gas is, you send away for some sort of sales kit, most likely a catalog and some motivational text, and then you could sell greeting cards and who knows what else to all your neighbors and extended family in hopes of earning enough credit to get some free stuff from the advert. It was your job to take the orders, collect the money, send it to the company and then deliver everything when they mailed it to you. This scheme for using a child labor farm sourced from comic books has been around for a long time, probably dating back to the 40’s with Grit, which amazingly, is still a thing. The practice of bribing kids with the potential to earn prizes probably had it’s heyday during the 60’s and 70’s. Here are 2 examples from the late 80’s and early 90’s in which you can earn a Nash or Variflex skateboard.
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Happy Halloween bummer. D.H. Peligro passed away this weekend. Plastic Surgery Disasters had a major impact on this editor and his world view… The impact has not worn off. All those parents groups were right, punk rock does poison your mind!
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I had planned on adding a few pics of a slight color variation to the last Tres Assi post I made, which was a follow up to a 9 year journey, but int the process I stumbled on a third color variation that I had never seen. And so here we are at a 3rd post, this time adding a less translucent yellow model, some alternate pics of another red board, as well as the new-to-me black variation.
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This is a good one. Lyons Maid is an brand of ice cream that started in 1925 and was retired in 1998, only to be revived a decade later. During their heyday in the 70’s they used to have all kinds of collectable cards and wrappers, including the Junior Champs Supercards seen here. These are easy to find for sale at anywhere from about $10-$70 for this particular card, or $20 for the complete set of 10 differnt cards, so go figure. The interesting thing is that almost every listing dates these to 1983, which seems unlikely given the content of Tony Alva’s card, and the inclusion of Pele in the set (retired in 1977) as well as some other athletes who were also at their peak around 1976-77. One possible explanation is that these might be reissues of a Tonibel series from 1979, in which case, wow… super lazy. By 1983 the “Yellow Betty” was no longer brand new and was called just a plain old frontside air. Makes you wonder if Tony was actually interviewed about this, and if so was he pulling their leg or was it actually briefly called the Yellow Betty, or was it a prank by someone in the art department?
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There’s a lot of staged vintage celebrity skateboarding photos, but somehow this one was new to me. It’s a 1977 picture of Runaways drummer Sandy West taken by Michael Ochs. Sandy was known as the Runaways Wild Thing. She died in 2006 from lung cancer. An alternate shot, plus a bonus pic of bassist Jackie Fox on a balance board after the jump.
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You’re looking at a cartoon by B. Kliban that was featured in a 1982 edition of Playboy Magazine. The old gods are not impressed, but can be easily bought. Eat me, indeed.
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Friend of the site and undervalued hero of the skateboarding and surfboarding historical community, Scott Starr passed away some time this month. Scott put a tremendous amount of effort and his own money into collecting and preserving old skateboarding and surfing films, which included having them professionally digitized when his finances permitted. His numerous accounts on Youtube wouldn’t last long due to obscure, questionable or pointless copyright claims. The only thing that seemed to matter to him was preserving these films and TV appearances, some of them dating back to the 60’s. I used to email him fairly regularly about things I’d seen or heard about, and he was a willing fountain of knowledge. I also bought a handful of 60’s era comic books from him that featured skateboarding content, you can find many of these on S&A. Scott had some health and anxiety issues he battled with, keeping him out of the public eye and probably contributing to that fact that he is not more widely known to later generations of skateboarders. I consider him an important person in the lexicon skateboarding in popular culture. I don’t know that there is anyone else out there doing the kind of work he was, and I hope that his library is received with the proper amount of respect that it deserves. A Scott Starr memorial collection in the Smithsonian perhaps… There is a celebration of his life happening this Friday, including the appropriate paddle out.
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