Checkout-ake Vogel
Age-17 Home-SFcal-Emb
Sponsors-Real-Thunder
Here is the Itroduction for the weasle
When I first met him he was a little ass.
kid who could barely even ollie, and I
Scandle him for his milk shake. Any ways
through the years I have watched him grow
up and turn into, abuttin hice little trashmah
He's mostly at Emb, other skating or hangin
outheckling with the Pellas like, Scotty Jd,
Henry, Dinger, Chico Reb, Mayork the whole
chev, mayorn the
Hechly listens to HipHop, his buddy Hold Blue
Meand him made up the word?
you
heard it first you heard it at Emb.
He loves skating more than anything else
maybe except for he also needs to
get his extra tooth pulled cuz its
getin potten. So if you see the weaste
licking his lips leave cuz he's got somethin
up his sleave.
James Kelch
SW: It stands for 'tard. Retard. "Tard dog.
GC: Tore down, tore back. What are some of the
funniest and most original nicknames that came
about, besides your own?
SW: I had a crazy one. Nick Tershay's is pret-
ty fucked up. Big Reeg. If you were little, you
got stuck with Little. If you were fat, you got
stuck with Fat.
NT: Mike Carroll was Nerd. What was Henry?
SW: Young Punt.
NT: Chico used to be Mental Mexican and
Jake Vogel was Weez.
GC: And Little Dirt. Kelch was Big Dirt. Jack-off
Dennis. JD. Skid.
SW: We used to call Bobcat "Woodchuck" before
we called him Bobcat. Stinky Boy. Flannel Man.
GC: Little Nick, Little John.
LS: I don't think Marcus had a Little. He was
just Marcus.
STAT
SW: Marcus McBlunted.
LS: Lavar had a new name every week.
SW: All kinds of fashion statements came from
Embarcadero, too. We didn't try to dress like
skaters. We lived in the city, so we couldn't look all
crazy and slashed out, you know.
NT: You'd see pictures of people at Embarcadero
and people would go down there and think it was
bunch of gangsters and shit. Everyone in Giants
jackets, and skaters didn't usually look like that.
SW: We'd be skating and we'd see girls on the
sidelines, and Kelch and I would just go up and
start eating their food. They'd be like Hurricane
Helens and runaways, doing little strip shows in
the fountain. Take 'em up to Hubba Hideout and
do crazy tricks.
GC: You mentioned Hubba Hideout. A lot of peo-
ple don't know what Hubba Hideout means. That's
where everybody used to go up-not the
Embarcadero crew-but all the vagrants and busi-
ness people used to go up there and smoke their
rocks. That's where Hubba Hideout came from.
James might have set that one off. Embarcadero
definitely was some comedy. Tourists would come
through and get heckled like fuck. Namblas getting
beat down, tough guys... I remember one time
some
Navy
dude
walked
through and
"Well, she shouldn't have been sitting there." Next
thing you know, the demo turned into a riot.
NT: Josh Swindell got beat down for killing
a pigeon too.
GC: Who were some of the first pros to come out
of the Embarcadero generation?
SW: The EMB click, it was like Kelch, Henry,
Dinger, then after that Chico. Wait, Chico was
the first kid.
GC: No, it was Mike. Mike was the first to get a
model out of anybody.
SW: Carroll, then Henry, Kelch, Dinger, Chico,
then fuckin'... Rick Ibaseta, Jovontae. Who the
"Kelch started stabbing
the dude in the head
with a wrench"
he bumped into
somebody, and next
thing you know me,
Thoren, Kelch, and some-
body else just mopped this
dude up from the stage all the way around the cor-
ner into the street.
NT: That was nasty. Kelch started stabbing the
dude in the head with a wrench. A lot of pros got
beat t too. Alphonzo Rawls, to Ricky Oyola.
GC: Yeah, Ricky Oyola got kicked by
Jovontae's boy.
LS: He was skating the Gonz and he screamed out,
"Nigger!" for no reason at all. We're like, "What?"
GC: Who hit Alphonzo? Oh yeah, THK Ryan
hit him.
SW: It was an H-Street demo, and Alf was skating
the seven, and all of a sudden his board hits Ryan's
girl in the shin, and Ryan goes, "Hey, can you
watch it, man? Your board hit my girl." So Alf says,
fuck was I asking for boards every day?
Everybody was sponsored.
GC: I remember the first time Mark Gonzales
came down there and ollied the Gonz channel.
That was amazing to me. He had some little 55mm
wheels and this crazy style. The whole place
stopped skating to watch him do it. It was amazing.
Bobcat: I saw Gonz and Natas sessioning that shit
a long time ago. I just happened to be there, and I
hadn't been skating very long, but I'd kind of heard
about it. It was before I moved to Vallejo. I was
amazed too. I couldn't even believe someone
could ollie that far.
GC: And I remember those guys ollieing off the
top of the pyramid too; I was just like, "Oh my
God." So crazy. What the hell were they thinking?
SW: Back in the day, just to ollie the seven was some
crazy shit.
BC: Years later I found out who they were, and I was like,
"Whoa, I was there." I couldn't believe it.
GC: I remember the first people to ollie the Gonz channel
after the Gonz were all those Marin boys, like Ray Simmons,
Joel Wrona, Jeff Pettit, came down there and ollied it, and I
was like, "These dudes are psycho."
SW: I saw Frankie Hill ollie it once. Kelch said he
ollied that shit.
BC: I seen Kelch ollie up the stage on everybody's board who
was at Embarcadero. There were about eight or ten people
there, and he just took everybody's board one at a time and
ollied up the stage.
NT: Kelch used to cut the tail off the Mark Gonzales kinda
short so he could ollie higher.
BC: He ollied up the stage on a Ninja with a skidplate, and a
kid's
freestyle board.
GC: What about some of the craziest parties we had
going on?
SW: Every night was a party. We'd skate every night till about
eight o'c
o'clock. We'd hit the stores up. Sometimes fools would
bring kegs down. THK motherfuckers, they were down there
bring Kegs
every day partying.
GC: We'd have parties that would start there and next
thing you know
know we're on a bus going out to some other
part of the city.
part
LS: I can't believe the place nowadays seems.so snotty. I
can't believe the shit we used to get away with. Walking
around with no shirts on, forties open, fuckin' hundreds of
people skating. Blasting radios, yelling, smoking weed. Seeing
how it is, all snotty and stuck up, the fuckin' yuppies, it sucks.
I don't think we could ever get away with that now.
GC: We can't. One thing I thought was rad about
Embarcadero is that we all had a dream, and we all just
wanted to go skateboarding every day and to someday
be sponsored or pro, whatever, and next thing you
M
know 80% of us lived out our dreams. Some
people just fell off, but a good percentage of us
did it, and we still live it. Other people moved
on' and they're doing their own thing. It's all
worked out for the best.
SW: Embarcadero was like a school or something.
GC: Totally like a school. Learning about life in the
streets. Survival of the fittest.
NT: The other day when I went down to that new
spot, I was trippin'. I was like, damn, this could be
like a new Embarcadero, but it'll never be.
GC: There could never be another Embarcadero.
80 THRASHER
Clockwise from far left:
Jake Vogel's checkout and
a switch noseslide. The
Gonz gets drilled for the
last time. Wing-Ding does
the ledge dance. Backside
lipslide 5-0 shove-it.