SUNDAY JOINT 11-7-2021: STEELY DAN - NOT JUST FOR DADS ANYMORE!

Hey All,

There is a robust social media subgenre based on Boomer love for Steely Dan (look here, here, and here), and at the risk of draining the humor, my take on why the Dan vein is so rich is because it pays off in two directions. Mostly it is about bashing old guys for death-gripping a favorite band from their 1970s glory days. Major dudes who love reelin' in the years, that is—but only if those years fall between "Can't Buy a Thrill" and "Aja."

But dads get the last laugh because the songs are still fucking great. And the kids know it.

I don't often go with the Dan for scoring an EOS edit, but when I do it'll be something from the first three LPs—and oh! the joy upon finding an extended non-karaoke instrumental version of "Do it Again," for this exquisite 1975 Fort Point, San Francisco, time capsule. Yes, the boys were arrested, booked and charged. Read the full story here.

Two things to add before moving on.

One, this Jax Beach '64 edit has an even better cops-vs-surfers scene, with police giving chase on foot. And two, Brian Tissot, one of the Fort Point arrestees (that's Brian pressing his happy-young-criminal face against the rear window of the police car) also shot the footage for that wonderful Hatteras-to-Sebastian video I posted a few months ago.

And now we go hardcore EOS miscellaneous.

Decades before the Brazilian Storm there was the Peruvian Tempest, and while you handsome silverbacks already know about Felipe Pomar and Hector Velarde and maybe even poor Joaquin "Shigi" Miro-Quesada, a limeño who may have slipped under radar is three-time national champ and 1972 Duke finalist Oscar Malpartida. Or if the name sounds familiar, it could be because son Alvaro Malpartida is a high-profile big-wave charger, and daughter Kino "Dynamite" Malpartida was WBA super featherweight boxing champ of the world for five years running. Both kids came from Malpartida's marriage to supermodel and Vogue cover girl Susy Dyson, and while Oscar's sky-diving death in 1994 was tragic, the man packed a lot into his 43 years.

Next up, Santa Cruz. As reported in the Sentinel's coverage of the 1967 Santa Cruz Pro-Am, an entrant in the senior men's division was 72 years old ("senior" in this case meaning 35 and over, or "oldsters" to quote the Sentinel reporter; before Slater we really were ageist bastards). The point being: this unnamed senior surfer was born in 1895. LeRoy Grannis, for comparison, was born in 1917. Snow McAlister was born in 1904. This Santa Cruz competitor, who we may presume was out there banging rails with Mike Purpus during free-surfs and maybe lending a fatherly ear to Margo Godfrey between heats, was born before Coke, during the Klondike Gold Rush, and right the middle of Oscar Wilde's spectacular "love that dare not speak its name" trial.

God, I haven't felt this young in a long time.

I am very much getting my money's worth this week from my newspapers.com subscription, because I also learned, again from the Sentinel, that the guests of honor at the 1968 Santa Cruz Pro-Am were the winning couple from a recent episode of The Dating Game. Freezing your ass off on a cliff at Steamer Lane while Corky Carroll complains his way to victory isn't my idea of a perfect first date, but to each his own. (Remember that Newlywed Game "In the butt, Bob" urban myth? Not a myth!)

Last but not least, and circling smartly back to music, I had a nice email exchange this week with longtime Ventura surfer-bohemian and fellow Lou Reed fanboy Jeff Grimes, and he turned me onto this absolutely incredible, and incredibly weird, 1965 cover of "Little Deuce Coupe" by the Surfsiders, with Lou on lead vocal. If you've never heard someone frog-marched to the studio and singing for rent money, this is what it sounds like.

Thanks to my intense and abiding dislike for Mike Love, I choose the Surfsiders' version over the Beachboys.

Just kidding, but I do for real hate Mike Love and have since before it was cool.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and see you next week.

Matt

[Photos: Brad Barrett, Jose Lavelle, Jeff Chamberlain]