Cocaine & Surfing, a new tome from the author of Welcome to Paradise and Now Go To Hell delves into the darker side of the California surfer boy image.
Once upon a time, in the golden age of the 1960s and 70s, before the clean-cut images of Kelly Slater and Laird Hamilton dominated the global surfing scene and conglomerates monetised the industry, surfers boys were glamourous bad boys. Not in the inked, leather-bound, hog-riding sense, but certainly hippies-of-the-sea; with their reefer cigarettes, golden tans, bleached bangs, and generally anti-establishment mentality, they were revered and loathed at once – an image of Americana exported across the world by also a departure from the clean-cut image a nation embroiled in an ugly war far from home wanted to portray.
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It was also an image the multinationals selling sunglasses and printed t-shirts didn’t want to be associated with as they penetrated markets far from the surf line. So while the surfer boy image was cleaned up, brushed off and reimagined as a passionate, health-loving environmentalist, the original protagonists descended even further into their subculture, fueled not just by weed and drink but by an insatiable lust for cocaine.
“Surfing, at its core, is an unruly, fouled, smutty disaster. Its past littered with felons, smugglers, addicts, narcissists, and creeps. Its present defined by crusty surf journalists and surf photographers. Its future a certain disaster – but it is our disaster. Our glorious disaster.”
Chas Smith
In Cocaine + Surfing: A Sordid History of Surfing’s Greatest Love Affair, Chas Smith delves into the murky waters of surfing’s dance with Peruvian marching powder – the parties, the dysfunction, the addiction, the consequences. An investigative narrative of the twisted relationship between two fabulously modern addictions, Smith delves into the darker side of the surf scene, it’s insidious underbelly, the rivalries, the cult-like status, the struggle with its own identity.
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From overdoses, surf contests, bar fights, murders, smuggling, and cover-ups, to the coke bust that almost ended the career of one of the scene’s best, this rider’s must-read has everything you need for your beach reading this season.
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