When I was asked to write an introduction for my Thrasher interview,
I just wrote what came out at that moment, right from the skateboard-
ing. Instantaneous thoughts on paper I guess.
Skateboarding is not for sissies. With a new era of skateboarding
interest, and a new wave of cash flow starting to enter the scene again,
it makes me think back. Having had a vast amount of experience from
an inside and outside point of view, I know certain pros and cons can
be foreseen as an inevitable future for skating.
The skaters, I feel, are truly behind skating, regardless of the fact
that there isn't much booty to be made in competition. Product en-
dorsement does not grant much more $$$$. So, you have to manufac-
ture your own shit! I believe in skating! I'm going to be pushing it till
the very end. A lot of "fastbuck" philanthropists will be out there this
time, just like the last. I guess in a way it's like a good game of chicken
against an unavoidable foe. I know I'm not going to pull out
though, it's too much fun, and I'm too god-damned stubborn.
THERE'S ALWAYS A BEGINNING
Started skating when he was ten years old. At fourteen he reached a new
stage. The full surfer stage. His dad bought him a surf board when he was
10 years old. This interview asks no questions.
"We were walking in front of this place, which now is a full-on real es-
tate broking agency, but back then it was a big Wilken Meth production
shop, and the board I got was a six eight,22ft.wide Wilken Meth, Martin
Sugarman model. Glen Henning and Jay Riddle were hot kids surfing for
Natural Progression back then, and they knew I was a good skater because
I competed in all the little contests around town just for the hell of it. Four
years later, by the time I was fourteen I had created my own style of skat-
ing as well as surfing. Mostly skating because I knew I could just do any-
thing that I wanted in skating. Surfing was still a learning process. But the
main thing was, I copied Natt Young and Wayne Lynch, who were a
couple of really radical Australian surfers that I saw in magazines. They
possessed the real explosive style. Then I saw Dave Hilton and those guys,
skating at Revere. So I started skating the banks. This was about 1968."
"By the early 70's I was on all these different surf teams. Back then,
skating was just as big as the surfing was, because everybody related their
skating to surfing back then. That's how all the older guys got started, the
Hiltons, Torger Johnson, John Fries and Danny Bearer. All those guys
were the full-on surf/skaters, but they were all real good surfers and they
just skated the banks at Revere, Bellagio or anywhere. That was the bank
era."
"We kinda took over after a while with our different style of skating.
"Progressively," like really super low speed pivotal moves and slides. The
old guys were more into their own trip, like surfing or working. We were
still young kids. We had all the skate energy, all this free time. This was
the early seventies, 72-73, when Led Zeppelin was the big thing. I re-
member that because in Jr. high school it would be the favorite album
every year. One year it was Led Zeppelin I, the next year was Led Zeppe-
lin II, the third year it's Led Zeppelin III. Everybody surfed and the guys
had longer hair than the girls."
"We used to ride square skate boards. That's where I got the square nose
idea, way back then. We rode square boards that were dished out. We took
chisels and we'd chip the wood and make rockers in our noses and in the
tail. They were black and looked like the custom surf designs in either col-
ored marker or airbrush, and we'd lacquer them on. We'd put wax on
them, and ride them with the surf wax on them and a shoe on the back foot
so we could drag our foot. These were still with claywheels. Break a wheel
everyday, chip the cones out, lose some bearings, knock the screws out of
your wood. I'd make a board everyday."
ON THE Z-TEAM
"There was a contest in Del Mar. The Z-Boys were a big team of just sur-
fers really. We all used to just skate banks alot and Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom
and those guys said that there was a big contest down there, and that we
should go down and just enter. We didn't know what was going to happen.
We didn't know whether it was freestyle or whatever. We just kinda knew
that there was to be a slalom race and we're supposed to do a freestyle
routine. So we went down there with a team of about eight guys who were
all pretty much on the surf team but skated good. There was Jay, Wentzl,
Bob Biniak, Jim Muir, Chris Cahill, Nathan Pratt, Alan Sarlo, Paul Con-
stantineau, myself, Stacy Peralta and I'm not sure if Shogo Kubo was on
that first team, but he came pretty soon afterwards. We had one guy on our
team from San Diego too, Dennis Harvey. He was the only guy who
wasn't from Santa Monica, Venice or L.A. area who was on the Zephyr
team. We used to call him Spiderman. He had this really nasty girlfriend
who was always trying to do it with all the other guys on the team. She was
pretty cool."
ALVA
by Mo.
"As far as the team deal was, we worked for our surfboards by just fix-
ing things or just sanding or whatever. That's how Nathan and those guys
got into working with surfboards. They were learning how to airbrush and
shape. Jay's dad, Kent, was making our skates and so, pretty much, we
got the skates for free. The more we rode, the kids started to buy them.
"The Pacific Ocean Park days were really cool, in Santa Monica. The
rowdy days when there was just full homosexual haven under the pier, de-
relicts everywhere. Just street kids hangin, police, narcs, drug deals,
whatever. Everything was going down right there with the riff-raff. That's
why they tore down the place. But the waves used to break unreal in there.
When they took the pier away the waves just got all bad too, it just got
funky. All the locals were pretty bummed, but that's an example of the sur-
roundings."
"We (the Z-Boys) started getting recognized through contests in our
area. Skateboarder Magazine started printing Dogtown stories, but it was
pretty much hype. The guys were being recognized by other manufactur-
ers because we were selling skates for Z-Flex and Zephyr. I pushed Logan
Earth Skis for a really long time. Then Logan Earth Skis began selling lots
of boards and everyone started gettin' really excited because there was
some money to be made. Then they (manufacturers) started trying to buy
out Dogtown Skaters. Like, Paul Constantineau headed for G & S, so did
Stacy, there were people riding for all kinds of people. But I think Jay and
I pretty much did our own thing. We just stuck to our roots kinda. But we
had people we knew that made skates, and skate equipment. We kept
going. All the other guys sold out for a little while, till the money ran out,
then they quit skating. Some of the hottest guys were Biniak, he was really
hot, I just saw him the other day. Arthur Lake was good too. There was a
guy named Ross Powell. When I was a little kid, he was my main compet-
ition in skateboarding. But he like, just disappeared. He would have been
"World Class,' whatever that is."
'I went all the way through high school, and I graduated in "75. Around
that same time Jim Muir, Bob Biniak, Chris Cahill and all the guys I grew
up with were graduating too. So all the age groups were all pretty close to-
gether. Like Jay was one of the younger kids, as were Paul Cullen and
Wentzl Ruml. We were all around sixteen or seventeen years old. Right
around there, we were all youngsters. The youngest kids were like ten,
twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old."
"I was the captain of the Zephyr team when it first started off. It was a
pretty heavy scene. When we're riding somewhere and someone put our
area down, we stood up for it. Whether it meant fighting, talkin' or ska-
tin', all the guys were pretty loyal to their home turf and to the influences.
It was a heavy influence, it was all surf/skate related. We all partied with
a certain group of chicks, cruised around certain areas of town, surfed cer-
tain spots."
"Stacy was always a good skater, he had a real smooth style. He wasn't
always the real aggressive type, but he had a lot of control. He had like a
style that was recognizable."
"When we went to San Diego, everybody thought that we were a gang.
We wrecked our motel room, got kicked out of our hotel, just did tricks in
freestyle demos that nobody's ever seen before. Just all these weird slides,
low pivotal moves."
"I guess we were always looking for trouble, because we used to find it
a lot. The way the Zephyr team was back then is kinda like the way Jak's
team is now, in a way. The thing that we were into was to find as many
skate spots as possible, and making the most of them. We were into find-
ing as many pools as we could and just skating the hell out of them. Find-
ing and skating the best banks. Just being the influence. We didn't try to be
skate stars. But through the magazine, it just turned out that way. There
was no attempt for anybody in the Dogtown, Santa Monica area to be a
star, we just wanted to be known as real hardcore aggressive skaters."
"After riding for Logan, I decided to branch out on my own and just
make my own boards. I was tired of making money for everybody else,
and not myself. That's when Pete Zehnder and I got together, and I was
doing that movie for Universal ("Skateboard") at the time. He was making
me custom boards six to eight months prior to us signing any contractual
agreements. We started pumping our boards and got a place in Irvine. This
was also around the same time as the interview in People magazine."
"When I was doing that movie, I guess I was at Zuma Beach, and some
guys said they saw the producer and his wife, and that I was supposed to
do an interview. So I left my surfboard with my friends, grabbed my skate,
and hitchhiked home. I got as far as Santa Monica and skated the rest of
the way. I got there just as they were walking out on the boardwalk look-
ing for me. So this lady who did the interview was like a small, short, little
older than middle age, Jewish reporter chick, and she was more interested
in other things. She was fully asking me questions about Leif Garrett. I
answered them honestly and she got pretty bummed out. I said that I
thought he needed a daddy and he was a full mama's boy, that he was a fag
or whatever. She bummed out on that because I guess she was a movie
publicity lady. The good thing about the whole People thing was, I went
out in the desert with this older, action-sports photographer. I forgot his
name. Zehnder said that he was a heavy-duty sports photographer, but to
me he was just some old guy that had a camera. We went out to the desert
and he drives up to the main office of Ameron. This place, you have to
sneak in, but he goes, 'So and so from Time magazine.' He gave them a
business card and said, 'I'd like to take some pictures here at your pipes,
I've got this skateboarder here with me...' So I went out there and started
shredding this big pipe. There were rows of them. He got the killer pic-
tures, they used one of me coming down off the ceiling, full thruster."
"The reporter lady wrote all this shit about me, so my mom wrote
People magazine a letter. She told them."
"In that movie 'Skateboard,' with Leif Garrett, they at least gave me a
halfway realistic portrayal of a skateboarder. Everybody else had to be all
candy-ass. I got to fart, drink beer, read Playboy, and wear headphones.
That's probably why People magazine didn't like me. I guess they (Uni-
versal) didn't think they could change me, so they put me in the movie as
I was.
"It was cool though, because guys from Santa Monica, I could refer
them for jobs and they could come down and be an extra in a movie and
make money.
"I filmed the sequence of the race in the end on the camera board. The
winning shot. Like one time they said, 'Just cruise behind the pack, we
want a shot of the pack.' That camera board was pretty heavy, you know.
We started jamming down the hill. I got right behind them and found a
hole, shot through the hole and won the race. Eventually, that was the shot
for the winning part in the movie. They used that and it was an accident.