"Our first and last and greatest shaping guru."
Yesterday, news from Princeville, Kauai, that Dick
Brewer, the eighty-five-year-old designer and shaper of “incredible
North Shore guns” was facing his last days on
earth.
Before he climbs the golden stairway, pushes open the gilded
gate and squeezes into God’s loving arms, I figured, good time to
hit Matt Warshaw, he of the Encylopedia of Surfing,
for a take on Dick’s wild, wild life.
Following a series of posts from his wife Sherry warning of
his imminent passing, Dick Brewer has just posted a farewell to the
world on Facebook. When he does ascend to heaven, it’s gonna be a
real big hole in the shaping game. For those who came in late, what
did Dick Brewer bring to the table?
Incredible guns, just Sabrejet-level equipment for North Shore
surfers in the ’60s and ’70s. On top of that, and maybe even a
bigger deal in terms of his place in surfing, was the Brewer
character. He was the guru, the man on the mountain, the shaper
everybody knelt down before. Figuratively, mostly, but I think
maybe literally too!
How good are his boards?
Tom Parrish of Lightning Bolt fame and the post-Brewer gun king,
said this about Dick. “He stands alone in just about every regard.
If you go back to the early ’60s and see how advanced his designs
were, then add in every single change for the better, from fixing
the deck rocker, to coming up with that three-stage bottom rocker,
to miniguns, full guns, and much much more—there is just simply
nobody who did what Brewer did. Now, here’s something else about
Brewer. He was a huge natural talent when it came to design. But he
wasn’t all that interested in finishing his boards nicely. Contrast
that with Diff [Mike Diffenderfer], who probably shaped the most
beautiful boards ever made, but who did not have that kind of
innate sense. We’re splitting hairs, a little, because Diff’s
boards were really good too. Nobody touched him when it came to
fine sanding. But if you’re talking about pure design, then it is
Brewer, hands down.”
Gimme a little background, he’s from the mid-west, yeah?
Minnesota or somewhere? Split his crummy life in his twenties to
become a legend in the Islands?
Born in Minnesota but moved to Long Beach, California, with
his family at age three. Dick was meant to be an engineer, like his
dad and grandfather, and he worked on dragsters before surfboards.
Then in 1960 he went to Hawaii for the first time, loved it, moved
there for good and almost immediately was working out how to build
better guns. His reputation later was for being kinda spacy, but
originally and for quite a few years Brewer was coming at board
design from an engineers perspective, kind of like what Bob Simmons
did in the ’40s and early ’50s.
There’s conjecture on Brewer’s contribution to the shortboard
revolution, when boards were losing six inches in length every
session until the logs were whittled down to seven-foot blades.
What’s your take? Did he simply refine what was being done by
McTavish and co or was he a revolutionary?
Brewer was already trimming down the longboard into something
closer to what we’d recognized as a gun. But where he was basically
improving on something that already existed, McTavish and Nat
showed up with those hideous but game-changing deep-vee
boards, and those things I think forced Brewer to re-think the next
move. He would have got where he was going either way, but the
vee-bottom sped the process up.
He had a wild, and not always happy life, junkie, infant died
in a car wreck, which he survived. Can you describe that
mid-seventies period?
It’s murky. Drew Kampion’s take is
probably the only one we’ll get, and I think Drew did his best, but
I think the whole deal was more crippling and permanent than what
we get there. Brewer was still the guy for Waimea boards, for a
long time—Bugs had a big yellow Brewer in his quiver, all the way
into the 1980s—but for the most part, Waimea aside, Dick wasn’t
really a force after about 1973. Bolt took over the space Brewer
had owned for 10 or so years prior.
Few lawsuits in there, too, yeah? What’s the juice on
those?
Drew’s article gets into all that, and again Drew I think wants
to paint Dick as the victim, and maybe there is some truth to
that. But my take is that Brewer was a terrible businessman. Great
shaper, but not the guy you want reading and advising on the
contracts.
From memory, he was pulled out of obscurity in the nineties
when surfing got hit by a wild nostalgia streak and enjoyed a
second wind for his harvest years. What happened there?
No, I think it was that he made some amazing tow boards for
Laird Hamilton. Which makes sense, in terms of Brewer getting back
to engineering high-speed equipment.
And, now, Dick ain’t here. What’s the sum of his
life?
Apart from the boards being gold-standard, and apart from being
our first and last and greatest shaping guru, Brewer’s contribution
was to look outside of surfing. His engineering background,
everything he knew about cars, about machining, about speed and
drive and torque—he brought all of that to bear in the shaping
room. Lucky for our sport, he wasn’t born and raised on the beach.
He loved surfing best of all, but he was smart enough to look
beyond surfing. To our great benefit.
(You like this? Maybe time to subscribe to Warshaw’s
Encyclopedia of
Surfing, yeah? Three bucks a month, can
y’believe.)
