SUNDAY JOINT, 2-9-2025: THE 100-PROOF SERENITY OF LANCE CARSON
Hey All,
Future surf historians, brain-surfing the 4D zettabyte edition of Encyclopedia of Surfing Archive, will at some point come across Lance Carson and marvel at the discovery. They will likely think Carson never made it south of Hermosa or north of Santa Barbara. They will also think he never went left. Heck, I'm not sure if Lance ever went left, and I know this stuff front and back off top of my leathery-but-still-high-functioning head. Every photo of Carson that comes to mind, he's hanging ten at Malibu or stomping a turn at Rincon or vice versa. He is a surfer of tremendous no-frills working-class grace and power. Give Lance his own nook in the Pointbreak Hall of Fame. But nobody would say he's a surfer of great range.
Unless we lean into the metaphorical, and why not, because then we find Carson has more range than Minnie Riperton. For 65-plus years, he's been remembered not just for his wave-riding, but for the grinning beer-breathing over-the-top legend of his youth. Lance loosening up for the afternoon go-out at Malibu with a six-pack of Miller High Life. Lance playing matador with cars speeding by on PCH. Lance ready to liven up a party with a spontaneous burst of public nudity. "He loved bizarre and outrageous situations, and if he couldn't find them he'd create them," fellow Malibu surfer Mike Doyle said. "It was almost like performance art. I think Lance might have been the first punk rocker."
Is the extravagant cape-wielding dipsomaniacal version of Lance Carson funny? It is, yes. Do I judge, or cast aspersions? I do not. But you gotta let the crazy go, sooner rather than later, and Lance did not let go, and eventually, as he told surf writer Paul Holmes, "it made me a second-rate person." Carson lost his wife, quit making surfboards, blew a sweet Big Wednesday gig, added 25-pounds of beer gut, and wound up hanging drywall with bloodshot eyes and with a semi-permanent headache. He bottomed out in 1979. Got sober. Trimmed down spectacularly. Then he helped launch the Surfrider Foundation, went back to making boards, and was arguably the best longboarder at Malibu throughout the 1980s—best style, for sure. Still sober today, still making boards.
In the two or three conversations I've had with Carson over the years, and even more so in Holmes' 1999 Longboard magazine profile, I've found him to be one of the most compelling, charismatic people in the sport. Smart and funny, blunt but never cruel. Straight-shooter. The straightest. Carson has an amazingly common touch, very much flesh-and-blood (inappropriate to say, but there's nobody you'd rather have a beer with), and can tap into a mile-wide reservoir of wisdom, much of it hard-won. Lance never bought into his own legend, which is about as attractive a quality as you can find in a surfer of his stature. "I hate it when the surf media uses that word," Carson told Holmes. "Legends? Really? We were just a bunch of guys who happened to be in the right place at a special time."
And he really hated surf contests. "Sitting out there in conditions I normally wouldn't paddle out in, trying to do my best in this totally artificial setup, with time limits and everything. Yeah, I had a hard time with that."
The text above posted on EOS in 2016, and a few days later Carson emailed to set a few things straight.
LANCE NEVER SURFED HAWAII? WRONG.
People claim that all the time, because I was never seen or never filmed. You mentioned yourself that I didn't like contests. Well, I never really liked the camera either. Every time a swell would hit Malibu in the '60s, all the photographers and moviemakers would show up, and of course once the locals saw the cameras, they'd all paddle out hoping to get their mugs in a surf film. Which seemed childish to me. So I'd pack up my stuff, leave, and wait for the tail end of the swell when everyone else was burned out. With that in mind, you can understand why my surf trips to Hawaii, over a half-dozen or so, were always planned on the sly. I'd usually go during the off season. Paul Strauch and I surfed epic days together at Haleiwa. As a matter of fact, the same year that Paul got all those pics on the nose (most of those stretch-fives he did were at Haleiwa) I WAS THERE. Everybody else was heading off to Sunset Beach. That was fine!
LANCE NEVER WENT LEFT? WRONG AGAIN.
People who didn't surf Malibu in the '60s don't remember the unbelievable high-tide lefts that used to work off First Point. And what was great about that era was so many people didn't know how to go left. Some afternoons, Rick Kreisler and I would be chuckling about how great it was to be right in the middle of a massive crowd of surfers on a fairly good swell, and yet we had the lefts all to ourselves!
ALL THE CRAZY-FUNNY DRUNK THINGS LANCE DID WAY BACK WHEN? LET IT GO, FOLKS
People ask me all the time me, "Why don't you write a book?" The answer is that I am, believe it or not, a very private person. As regarding those antics—which by the way only lasted a couple of summers—all these decades I've spent moving away from depravity towards dignity, the surfing world will not let me forget the stupid things I did as a kid. Things that I really regret. It's like having a piece of gum stuck to the bottom of your shoe that you can't scrape off. I've been paying for it for 50 years. It's been an embarrassment to my family and close friends. What can I say? We were young and stupid and looking for attention. We never thought ahead; we never thought about the ramifications. And that's a good part of why I don't like going to surfing events to this day—there's always some clown in the crowd that has to yell something. And many of the guys who do that aren't young either; they're older, respectable-looking guys. Go figure! But in a way, I'm my own executioner. So now you know why I'll never do a book. You do something like that, write a book, and you've got to tell the truth. But if the truth is too painful, then leave it behind.
Thanks for reading, and see you next week.
Matt
PS: The house Lance Carson lived in for over 50 years burned in the Palisades Fire. He's 81, and will probably land on his feet—his Point Dume shaping room and all his tools made it okay—but it is a good time for anybody with even a passing interest in surf history to give some attention and appreciation and maybe a few bucks to this wave-riding legend, even if Carson himself rolls his eyes at that word.
[Photo grid, clockwise from top left: frame-grab of Lance Carson by Dale Davis; surfing Rincon in 1966, by John Severson and Ron Stoner; Carson in 2020; Jan-Michael Vincent as Matt Johnson as Lance Carson, in Big Wednesday; Miller High Life six-pack; Carson at Malibu, age nine. Carson noseride, photo Severson. Carson dry-land cutback. Surfing Malibu in 1988, photo by Ken Seino. On the beach at Malibu, around 1990. Carson going left at Malibu.]