James Arness Surfing


The Farmer’s Daughter was meant to be his big break, but instead, James Arness opted for surfing breaks. The Minnesota native nabbed a role in the 1947 Loretta Young flick because it was about a Swedish-American woman. Arness had a knack for Scandinavian accents, so he ended up playing one of her brothers.

The towering Arness was new to Los Angeles, having headed west after recuperating from a war injury. A German machine gun had shattered the bones in his leg during the Battle of Anzio in Italy, back in ’44. The wound had left him with a shorter limb, slight limp, and lifelong pain. But his fascinating World War II experience is a story for another time.

After The Farmer’s Daughter hit theaters, Arness found casting calls far more crowded. Eager men were flooding Hollywood after the war. Competition was fierce. Arness retreated home to the Land of Lakes to visit his mom, who had recently married.

Arness drifted back to California, and took a job setting up bowling pins in an alley on Balboa Island, surfing in his off time. This was the summer of ’47. The lure of the waves became louder than his acting ambition. He forgot about booking roles. Instead, the 6′ 7″ guy headed south to San Onofre beach. He picked up odd jobs here and there, and collected unemployment checks that came to him following The Farmer’s Daughter. He slept in his car or on the beach. He followed the waves.

“Our mecca was San Onofre, and we named our fast-growing crowd the San Onofre Surf Club,” Arness wrote in his 2001 autobiography. “We just camped on the beach and spent a few days catching the big ones.”

San Onofre was on the land of Camp Pendleton, and U.S. Marines had beach houses along the shore. Arness and his surfing buddies began squatting in the unused Marine bungalows, dragging in furniture from a dump. Eventually, a Marine showed up and ordered the squatters to clear out in two hours. The Surf Club moved back outdoors but stayed on the beach, being sure to keep tidy. They shared bottles of Muscatel wine and idled.

“Just taking in the sun and surfboarding as we pleased was enough for us,” Arness recalled. “It was beautiful there, an unforgettable experience.”

One day, a car tore down the beach in haste, kicking up a cloud of sand. An old friend of Arness hopped out with a box of letters. He dumped a pile of fan mail on Arness, which had poured in following The Farmer’s Daughter. 

“He chewed me out for wasting my time lying on the beach when I could be having a career in movies,” Arness said. “My beach bum friends had not known about my acting.” 

This passionate pal, Ed Hampel, urged Arness to come with him to an audition. He landed a role in the play. The rest was history.

It wasn’t all for naught. Years later, in 1970, his son, Rolf Aurness (that’s the original spelling of the family name), became World Surfing Champion.

Pictures by Les Gorrie

“Spot” Lockett Dies at 72

From Pitchfork…

Glen Lockett, the in-house producer and engineer for legendary punk label SST Records who was better known as Spot, has died, former SST co-owner Joe Carducci announced. Spot had been on oxygen after his fibrosis impaired his lung function in late 2021, and, three months ago, he was placed in a hospital following a stroke, Carducci revealed in a Facebook post. Lockett died earlier today (March 4) at a healthcare facility in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He was 72.

As the longtime in-house producer for SST Records, Spot helmed the boards for essentially the crux of ’80s American punk rock. He produced more than 100 records, many of which are bonafide classics in the punk and hardcore world and have gone on to influence artists outside of the genre. Highlights from his body of work range from numerous Black Flag staples like Damaged, My War, and Jealous Again to Minutemen’s The Punch Line, What Makes a Man Start Fires?, and Buzz or Howl Under the Influence of Heat. Spot also produced Descendents’ Milo Goes to College, Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade, Misfits’ Earth A.D. / Wolfs Blood, and Saint Vitus’ self-titled debut, along with additional records for those bands and others.

Born Glen Lockett in Los Angeles in 1951, Spot was raised by his Native American mother and African American father, the latter of whom was a Tuskegee Airman who flew British Spitfires. He grew up listening to post-bebop jazz, surf rock, Motown, and whatever music he could find on the AM radio. After learning to play guitar at age 12, Spot tried his hand at clarinet and even auditioned for Captain Beefheart. It wasn’t until years later, when he offered to help with a recording studio build, that he learned about the ins and outs of studio recording.

Before he became an integral part of the SST sound, Spot was a musician, not a producer. While waiting tables at a vegan restaurant, he met Greg Ginn, the future co-founder of Black Flag and SST Records, and the two started jamming together in his band. After witnessing a Black Flag show gone awry, Spot decided he wanted to work the board on their next record, a decision that would result in a lot of “head butting” and, eventually, 1980’s Jealous Again. The rest was history.

“[SPOT] spelled his name in all caps with a dot in the middle of the O,” Carducci wrote on Facebook. “He started in Hermosa Beach playing and recording jazz and he took the primacy of live jazz playing into recording bands against prevailing attempts to soften or industrialize a back-to-basics arts movement in sound.  When approaching the mixing board SPOT would assume an Elvis-like stance and then gesturing toward all the knobs he would say in a Louis Armstrong-like voice, ‘This is going to be gelatinous!’”

In addition to his work as a producer and engineer, Spot was also a published photographer and freelance writer. He wrote record reviews for the Los Angeles weekly newspaper Easy Reader. During shows, Spot would carry his camera around to document punk bands, fans, and the burgeoning counterculture scene, and he began photographing Los Angeles skateboarding circles as well. In 2014, he released Sounds of Two Eyes Opening, a collection of his photography work from that era. 

“First and foremost, I’m a musician and everything else I’ve ever done has been based on that,” Spot told Vice in 2014. “It’s really the basis of all language and if you’re serious about the experience of music, you learn to keep both sides of your brain open and rely upon instinct rather than premeditation. Y’know, using improvisation and gut feelings as frameworks for rhythm and composition. In photography, the viewfinder should not be a limitation—it’s merely one part of a larger vision.”

Several artists have shared tributes in Spot’s honor after learning of his death. “good people, we just lost my old buddy spotski, a terrible blow,” tweeted Mike Watt. “he recorded the minutemen’s first stuff, I go way back w/this man. brother matt took this shot six years ago when spotski came to visit our pedro town… man, this is a terrible blow. I love you spotski forever.”

“SPOT always encouraged free expression and experimentation, even as those recordings were made as expeditiously as possible,” Hüsker Dü’s Bob Mould wrote on Twitter. Mould added that the producer “was a wonderful soul who loved making music, documenting the scene, and unconditionally supporting all the projects that bear his name.”

Album Review: Whatitdo Archive Group – The Black Stone Affair

By: Pat Carty

Link to the original

If there’s one thing that cooler-than-thou vinyl collectors love pulling out of their man bags at a vinyl show-and-tell, it’s a battered old soundtrack to some obscure movie you’ve never heard of, and all the better if it happens to have the words ‘Ennio’ and ‘Morricone’ on the front. “What do you mean you’ve never heard of La Spia Che Ha Scopato?” they’ll scoff, and it is down their noses they will look when you offer a blank stare to their assertion that Grandi Palle McGraw features some of Il Maestro’s finest work.

The next time this happens to you, suppress the urge to slap them in the face and instead send their jaws to the floor by casually mentioning The Black Stone Affair. As they start to sweat, take a sip of your drink and explain how the dark adventure movie was the one that was supposed to put the young Italian director Stefano Paradisi right up there with the greats before it was mysteriously lost, and the soundtrack, by the shady Whatitdo Archive Group, has only recently been rediscovered.

As they log on to Discogs in a flap, chuckle away to yourself in the knowledge that this excellent record has been painstakingly constructed to lend credence to the tall tale related above. It’s really the work of three American musos who are probably no strangers to dusty record fairs themselves. The back ‘story’ is one thing, and the cover art is as ridiculously cool as you might expect, but what of the music itself?

One listen to ‘Main Theme’ will have you dressing better, possibly in a pair of aviator shades and an open necked shirt, as you make your way through a seventies airport while endeavouring to evade the attentions of Interpol. Imagine yourself waiting for a connection at some street-side Euro cafe as ‘Blood Chief’ plays, before it all kicks off and you have to make a run for it. The horn-driven, wah-wah groove of ‘Ethiopian Airlines’ should have its own clothing line. You can picture Shaft following a few leads as ‘Il Furto Di Africo’ plays in the background. The bossa nova of ‘Italian Love Triangle’ was designed for a day out boating with La Contessa, and you could, quite easily, shoot a few louses for laughing at your mule during the marvellously authentic Spaghetti Western stylings of ‘Beaumont’s Lament’. In fact, I’m seriously considering changing my name to ‘Beaumont Jenkins’ and pulling off just one last big score before I retire to the islands.

This is the soundtrack that Quentin Tarantino’s dreams are made of. Buy it for the snob value – it’ll look good under your arm; enjoy it because it’s very, very good.