SUNDAY JOINT, 1-19-2025: MIKE HYNSON TRIMS INTO THE GREAT HEREAFTER
Hey All,
Mike Hynson died last week at 82, and somebody had to go first, Mike or Keith Richards; both have been outrunning the death pool odds since the 1970s. Hynson going first seems fair—he's six months older than Richards.
Years ago, while I was writing a book on Ron Stoner, boardmaker Steve Kroll told me that Ron had style mostly because "he ran with the style guys," by which he meant Skip Frye, Bill Hamilton, and Mike Hynson. Nobody out-styled Hamilton in the water, Kroll explained. But nobody out-styled Hynson on land, and while every Boomer-age surfer this week has no doubt spent a few appreciative moments remembering Hynson's transcendental trim at Cape St. Francis, as seen in Endless Summer, I can't be the only one who thinks that Hynson's legacy is built less on the wave-riding and more on the whole louche but sharp-edged package—the clothes, the rap, the street-urchin-made-good hustle.
Mike Hynson was the second-most polarizing 1960s surfer, after Miki Dora. Those who would kiss the ring on Hynson's well-manicured hand were equal in number to those who wanted to see his privileged little ass get kicked from Windansea to Big Rock and back. Hynson's Endless Summer-era peak in popularity was a few years before my time, but given a choice I would’ve sat in the bleachers and watched the ass-kicking. He was too good-looking, too rakish, too entitled for his or anybody else’s good. His famous grin moved easily into smirk, and it is no strain on the imagination to think of Hynson, had fate aimed him just a half-degree to the right, lazily tormenting pledges at a house on Frat Row.
But I also find it incredibly easy to work around all these thoughts. There is so much about Hynson that pulls you in. He surfed like a welterweight Phil Edwards. He was a gifted, innovative board designer and immaculate craftsman. And, again, the fashion sense—off the chart. Hynson was the best-dressed surfer of the 1960s, hands down: Ray-Ban beach-casual perfection during the Endless Summer shoot; paisley-and-fur flights of fancy by the end of the decade. Mike's surfworld style challengers rarely made it higher than the tops of his calfskin-suede ankle boots. He then went through a decades-long period of drug use, repeated short-term prison stays, and homelessness—and somehow made it to his senior years looking like a million bucks. Neat and trim. Great head of hair. Sharp blue eyes peering out from that handsome but still-smirking antique-leather face.
There is something to be said, too, for the way Mike modulated his way of being in the world, yet retained the essential part of his Hynson-ness. He found God in the late 1960s, and would say things like "I'm totally enjoying myself playing in His musical bath of cosmic energy." Then a few minutes later he'd start messing around, hit you with the grin, and say his plan to exit this earthly world was to "fade left into the hook at Sunset and never come out."
Or consider his long and mostly-fraught relationship with Endless Summer filmmaker Bruce Brown. Hynson originally loved the star status that Brown, through Endless Summer, conferred upon him. Then Mike went rogue (“The whole ego trip from Endless Summer was pushed off a cliff as soon as I dropped acid”), and eventually sued Brown for a share of the movie's profits. The case went nowhere, and rightly so.
But Hynson had reason to be at odds with the filmmaker. Brown is often credited as the one who discovered “the perfect wave” at Cape St. Francis, for example, when in fact it was Mike. His version of events during the Endless Summer shoot, in many places, strays from or is considerably at odds with the family-friendly version presented in the movie, and with all due respect to Brown, I tend to believe Mike.
He was on the run from the US Army draft board during the 1963–'64 Endless Summer shoot, for starters. He was also speeding on Benzedrine and getting laid in every port of call. Jump ahead two years: Endless Summer is billed as a documentary, makes millions, and Brown is lauded as the family-friendly barefoot auteur. All good so far. But jump ahead a few more years, with Hynson on his way to obscurity and worse, and now the blond-haired star of the movie is saying the whole thing is basically fiction. Nobody wanted to hear it, of course, and Mike fumed over this fact for decades. Finally, realizing Bruce had won—moreover, that Bruce had the right idea; Endless Summer was always meant to be a kind of easygoing surf-travel parable, not Grey Gardens—Hynson did the right thing and let it go.
More or less.
Reading Hynson's 2009 autobiography, Transcendental Memories of a Surf Rebel, I laughed out loud as he recalled his first visit to Bombay, India, in 1967. “Every street corner was filled with holy people meditating, and each god had a different origin. Cows and lambs, cats and dogs, you name it, India has a god for it. I walked away with the knowledge that God comes in many forms and not one of them looks like Bruce Brown.”
Brown himself, I'm guessing, would have enjoyed that line.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Matt
PS: Steve Barilotti wrote a fantastic article on Hynson for a 2007 issue of SURFER, and afterward the two men, both San Diego area divorcés, stayed in touch. Steve sent this email last Wednesday:
"I visited Hynson in the hospital here in Encinitas two days before he passed. Basically reduced to a breathing skeleton (albeit with great hair), and unable to speak due to painful mouth sores, but still aware of who I was when I held his hand. Told him how his Uber-cool surfer persona in Endless Summer inspired a chubby 10-year-old parochial school kid growing up in the suburban wastelands of Ontario, California, to somehow escape and make an adventure of his life. And how in later years he became a friend, neighbor and an interesting cat to shoot the shit with from time to time. Mike was an acquired taste, but super creative and eloquent once you synched into his jailhouse-jive. At heart, he was a big kid who loved to laugh and hang out with the people he liked. Of whom there were a lot. My favorite memory of Mike is him chasing down the Mexican ice-cream truck outside his house and coming back loaded with a week’s worth of psychedelic colored treats. He was 76."
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: Mike Hynson in Laguna Beach, 1970; at Oceanside Pier, 1965; at LAX during Endless Summer shoot, photo by Bruce Brown; running down the dune at Cape St. Francis, photo by Brown; Hynson-shaped board, early 1970s; Hynson at Pipeline during Expression Session II. Miki Dora (left) and Hynson at Haleiwa, 1964, photo by Peter Dixon. Hynson in shades by Ron Church. Hynson getting high in the 1971 movie Rainbow Bridge. Hynson and Bruce Brown in Hawaii, 1963. Hynson at Haleiwa, 1962, photo by LeRoy Grannis. With a set of Hynson-shaped boards in 2024, photo by Grant Ellis.]