A 90-year-old man who built a western wear empire | Hacker News Reader

A 90-year-old man who built a western wear empire

thehustle.co

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Jerry Garcia:

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/DaDoCUT4ML8/maxresdefault.jpg

Gram Parsons and the Flying Burrito Brothers:

https://www.udiscovermusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Fl...

Nudie and Gram:

https://cmhof.imgix.net/content/uploads/2021/03/01231732/Gra...

Hippies and rednecks? Like dogs and cats, right? Or maybe both are just a little rough around the edges and misunderstood. Willie Nelson sure figured out that market pretty well!

Cool! Without Grateful Dead, would there even be a Silicon Valley!? (I’m only half-joking…)

Greatly interested, please expand!

Jerry Garcia met Bob Weir at a music store in Palo Alto where Jerry was giving banjo lessons.

Bob Weir’s lyricist, JP Barlow, was a founding member of the EFF.

There’s a lot more than just that, but I got some code to review!

There's a great autobiography written by Barlow, "Mother American Night". Highly recommend

I often wonder this.

I play bluegrass and other traditional music at tech events, along with talks that essentially explore this and proximal questions.

As to the specific lineage of this music through Bill Monroe -=> Jerry Garcia -=> John Perry Barlow -=> EFF/archive.org/etc, I had a sit-down with my producer where we recorded a sort of video-open-letter to a few friends on this topic:

https://youtu.be/bYLrIGOEVPU?t=193

Oh man, loving it, I just subscribed, so you better put some Dead covers on YT for me!

Thanks for providing images of the suit, quite strange the article never shows a single image of the iconic suit he created.

Mike Mills (of R.E.M.):

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/b67/a2e/a00e6ba7b7a66520191b...

Yes… Mike Mills was a legit rockstar in this era.

https://m1.paperblog.com/i/73/734550/mike-mills-L-82LOCy.jpe...

https://youtu.be/jWkMhCLkVOg

Just in case any other Deadheads were curious about that guitar, it's a walnut stratocaster built by Dan Erlewine, who also built "Lucy", Albert King's flying V guitar. It's likely they were built from the same batch of wood. Known to be played on 11/18/72, 11/19/72, 11/22/72, 11/23/72, 12/10-12/72 (only on two of the nights, but Alligator was also played), and 5/13/73.

https://www.rukind.com/viewtopic.php?t=14697 https://deadessays.blogspot.com/2019/08/jerry-garcia-instrum... https://danerlewine.com/jerry-garcia-stratishcaster

Very cool!

I was thinking "Hmm, never seen that one before!" I dig the numeral fret inlays.

Seems like the article should have been about his mentor, creator of the Nudie Suit, Kyiv born Nuta Kotlyarenko - Nudie Cohn. https://carriagemuseum.org/history-of-nudie-cohn-and-his-nud...

To be fair, the article mentions him - and the lede here is that someone is still alive making them who has been doing it since the way back.

Crossing the border with $40k cash in the 1950s would be the equivalent to $450k cash in 2023 dollars. Sounds like they got that bit wrong or there’s more to the story.

Maybe it was in pesos?

The 6 million peso man!

We ran out of funding after the right leg, so while he can run at 60mph, he can only do it in circles.

Would watch the first 5mins of this netflix series before I got distracted and ordered a pizza and...wait what was I doing?

Its a very, very old joke. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was the movie, I think?

> Gram Parsons, a longtime client of Nudie’s Rodeo Tailors and Manuel Couture, poses in his iconic marijuana-encrusted Nudie Suit.

Parsons was once in a band called the Flying Burrito Brothers, and each member had their own Nudie suit. Rolling Stone ran a story not too long ago about one of them that had been lost [0]. Though it is somewhat odd to imagine the short number of years Parsons might have been a client given he died at 26.

0: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/elton-john...

That photo of Parsons in the original article almost looks like it could be contemporary, fashion going in circles as it does

The title gave me the impression that a man started a western wear Empire at the age of 90.

Don’t call him the Rhinestone Rembrandt, but do call him the Beyonce of western wear.

> By 13, he was sewing prom dresses for the girls in his town.

Those have to be quinceanera dresses, right?

What a way to put someone into a box

Edit: maybe they were but they don't "have" to be

A village in Mexico in 1946 seems a lot more likely to have a market for quinceanera dresses than prom dresses.

"Have to" is a figure of speech in conversational English.

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