I grew up on Colorado and worked / played / lived on the hills for many years in the 80's & 90's. I saw the transition from banned outcasts, to cool new thing. Burton was a huge influence in bringing that sport to the masses. I met him a couple of times and he always seemed really cool. He sponsored one of my good friends who was one of the early guys making money being a professional snowboarder.
He leaves a huge legacy, and will be missed.
I never really thought about who "Burton" was, but wow. Think about the combination of things he had to possess: a snowboarder's goofyness, for one, but the ability to create, promote, sell, design/build, all of that. The article says he "only" sold 300 the first year. That's about 299 more than anyone else in the history of the world could have sold. He's James Naismith and Ray Kroc put together.
And in a super hostile environment. Remember the 80s when most hills banned anything that wasn't a ski? I was in Aspen in 89, and we had a special piece that fit the ski tubes on the outside of the gondola for snowboards and monoskis. It was awkward, there were only a couple, and they were often in transit or lost somewhere, so you had to wait for break in the crowds so you could fit your board (or monoski) inside.
I never really thought about who "Burton" was, but wow. Think about the combination of things he had to possess: a snowboarder's goofyness, for one, but the ability to create, promote, sell, design/build, all of that. The article says he "only" sold 300 the first year. That's about 299 more than anyone else in the history of the world could have sold. He's James Naismith and Ray Kroc put together.
as a hardcore skater in the seventies and eighties i never knew that much about him
his story reminds me of people like jeff ho, peralta, adams, alva (early zephyr team) and eventually tony hawk
I grew up on Colorado and worked / played / lived on the hills for many years in the 80's & 90's. I saw the transition from banned outcasts, to cool new thing. Burton was a huge influence in bringing that sport to the masses. I met him a couple of times and he always seemed really cool. He sponsored one of my good friends who was one of the early guys making money being a professional snowboarder.
He leaves a huge legacy, and will be missed.
I never really thought about who "Burton" was, but wow. Think about the combination of things he had to possess: a snowboarder's goofyness, for one, but the ability to create, promote, sell, design/build, all of that. The article says he "only" sold 300 the first year. That's about 299 more than anyone else in the history of the world could have sold. He's James Naismith and Ray Kroc put together.
I grew up on Colorado and worked / played / lived on the hills for many years in the 80's & 90's. I saw the transition from banned outcasts, to cool new thing. Burton was a huge influence in bringing that sport to the masses. I met him a couple of times and he always seemed really cool. He sponsored one of my good friends who was one of the early guys making money being a professional snowboarder.
Barrie Masters, Eddie and the Hot Rods "It may be difficult to hear (or believe) now, but Eddie and the Hot Rods played a crucial role in the birth of English new wave. If the Rods, sons of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, hadn't been out there playing wild and fast rock'n'roll in the clubs at a time when superstar pomposity was the currency of pop music, bands like the Sex Pistols would never have had the opportunity to join, intensify and broaden that rebellious spirit into a national â and international â musical upheaval." Trouser Press, Ira Robbins
That was a great song; I haven't heard it in years. They were a good band - "power pop" before it was called that.
Don't recall this being covered last week when he passed...
Robert Hunter gave the Grateful Deadâs psychedelic sound quicksilver conceptual coherence and old-timey cred.
Photograph by Ed Perlstein / Redferns / GettyApril Foolsâ Day, 1986. I had just turned seventeen and was on the floor of the Providence Civic Center. The Grateful Dead. Iâd worked my way up to a spot about twenty feet from the lip of the stage and found myself within winking distance of Jerry Garcia, an immensity in a red T-shirt that hung halfway to his knees. (âTrouble ahead, Jerry in red,â the Deadheads liked to say.) Iâd never stood so close. I could see the pearl inlay in the frets of his guitar neck and the ghostly pallor of his skin. Three months later, ravaged by opiates and ill health, he would fall into a diabetic coma, an experience that heâd later recall as being âone of furious activity and tremendous struggle in a sort of futuristic, space-ship vehicle with insectoid presences.â But on this night, despite the power of his guitar, and of his growling tenor and still palpable charisma, it seemed that he might die any minute.
He was playing a song called âBlack Peter,â a bluesy dirge from the bandâs 1970 album âWorkingmanâs Dead.â It is a first-person account of a hard-luck pauper on his deathbed: âOne more day I find myself alive / Tomorrow maybe go beneath the ground.â Garcia, though only forty-three, had deteriorated into the title role, so that a song that had once seemed evocative, almost actorlyâan imagined character conveyed by a man of prodigious giftsânow seemed downright real. Jerry was Peter. The song ends by shifting into the point of view of people thronging to watch him die. In Providence, Garcia sang, with some gruff delicacy, in my apparent direction: âTake a look at poor Peter / Heâs lying in pain / Now letâs go run and see.â After moaning the words ârun and seeâ a few times, he turned away from the microphone with something like disgust. So this is what we were doing, all of us whoâd crammed into that arena, antic with chemicals and adulation: weâd run to see poor Peter, to gawk at the pain. This may seem melodramatic to you now, but the moment was more than a callow teen-ager, mostly unacquainted with death or real pain, could bear. I was transfixed, and ashamed.
The songâs lyrics, like those to most of the bandâs original songs (and certainly the best ones), had been written by Robert Hunter, who died last week, at the age of seventy-eight. He never performed with the band but provided it with the universe of images, ideas, and talesâand all the one-liners, couplets, anthems, and puzzlersâthat gave some quicksilver conceptual coherence and old-timey cred to the Deadâs shambling psychedelic Dixieland. He grounded it, if you can say that, in a phantasmagoric reiteration of American folk legend: drifters, thieves, rounders, jailbirds, horndogs, vigilantes, and roustabouts. âTruckinâ,â âRipple,â âFriend of the Devil,â âStella Blue,â âUncle Johnâs Bandââall written by Hunter. There were very few conventional, charting hits but lots of home runs.
Barrie Masters, Eddie and the Hot Rods "It may be difficult to hear (or believe) now, but Eddie and the Hot Rods played a crucial role in the birth of English new wave. If the Rods, sons of Southend-on-Sea in Essex, hadn't been out there playing wild and fast rock'n'roll in the clubs at a time when superstar pomposity was the currency of pop music, bands like the Sex Pistols would never have had the opportunity to join, intensify and broaden that rebellious spirit into a national â and international â musical upheaval." Trouser Press, Ira Robbins
