Bones Brigade: An Autobiography, the epic 2012 documentary by skate legend and original Zephyr Team skateboarder, Stacy Peralta. I finally found it free on YouTube, and watched it. It got to me. These guys were big influences on me, like all skater/punk/action sports kids in the 1980's.
The Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade team was legendary in the skateboard, punk rock, and action sports subcultures in the 1980's. This is the guys behind that crew, telling the parts they didn't tell along the way.
While mostly known as a Has Been BMX industry guy, I actually started skateboarding in 1976, three or four years before I even knew BMX bikes existed. I lived in the small, rural town of Willard, Ohio. My friend showed me a pressed aluminum skateboard his dad made at the shop at work, with steel roller skate wheels and no grip tape. I thought he was lying when he said his dad made it, it looked factory made, like a lawnmower. But I've never seen another board like it.
His name was Jeff. Jeff put it down on the flat rocks of the walkway, in front of his house. We didn't walk out to the actual sidewalk, for some reason. We were on the walkway through their front yard, made of big flat stones, most were a foot and a half, or two feet across, and there was grass growing between the rocks. Jeff put the skateboard down, put one foot on it, and pushed off with the other. He rolled across one stone, then onto the next stone, rolling about three feet. I said, "Whoa." So he let me try. I put my left foot on top, pushed off with my right foot, pulled my right foot up on the deck. I rolled about a foot, and the front wheel hit a crack in the stone. The board stopped, I got thrown forward, and fell to the ground, slamming a knee and scraping it. I was a complete wuss as a kid, I hated pain. I stood up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb." That was my introduction to skateboarding, the first time I ever saw a skateboard. I walked away with a scraped knee and turned off on skateboards. It was the corner of Laurel and Clark streets, I just looked it up on Google Maps, bottom right corner there, It looks like those big flat rocks are still in front of that house.
That was during fourth grade for me, I lived a block and a half away, down Laurel Street, from Jeff. A couple months later, another friend got a plastic skateboard, with urethane wheels. I tried that board, on a smooth piece of sidewalk, and found that riding skateboards was actually fun. Another friend got a skateboard, it was the mid 1970's, when the skateboarding fad swept across the United States. That was the second big wave of skateboards, after the 1965-66 rise, a decade earlier. Skateboarding turned into one of those things we did as 9-year-old kids. We played backyard baseball, football, swam in the city pool a couple blocks away, and we rode skateboards.
We didn't have magazines to look at then. There was one book, a hardcover book, about skateboarding, in the Willard Library. We took turns checking that book out, which had a bunch of the late 60's and early 70's skaters. We looked over each other's shoulders as one kid flipped through the pages. Those were the only tricks we knew existed. 360's. Wheelies. Daffys. The Coffin. Sitting on our board sideways, with our feet on our friend's board, and his feet on our board, going down a big hill.
I decided I needed a skateboard. I got 50 cents a week allowance from my parents... sometimes. After buying some penny candy downtown, that cost 2 cents each, I saved up my extra change. For nine fucking months, I saved quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. I saved up to buy a green plastic Scamp skateboard, at the Western Auto store on Myrtle Street, the main street in "downtown" Willard. That was the first thing I ever saved up money for in my life.
Finally I had a board, and my friend Steve and I wound up at the parking lot of my Lutheran church, which had a decent sized hill, by 10-year-old standards. Steve's board was blue plastic, and had a double kicktail. We figured out that we could put my board backwards, on top of Steve's board, and then took turns trying to make it all the way down the hill, riding the stacked boards. We both made it to the bottom of the hill within an hour. That was skateboarding for us, then 10 year olds, in Willard, Ohio, in 1977. Like old guys always say, skateboarding if it was ever mentioned on TV, it was nearly always compared to hula hoops, and called a "fad," like the hula hoops our sisters had.
There were no skateboard videos, we only had three main channels of TV then. Us kids only got to see skateboard magazines twice, I think. One of Jeff's older brothers skated, and had a few skateboard magazines. But us"little kids" never got to look at them. A couple of times, that brother gave us little kids five or ten minutes to look through his skateboard magazines. There were four or five of us, we each grabbed a magazine, and flipped through them like maniacs, as fast as possible, so we could find the coolest photos during those few minutes. That was the first time any of us saw photos of kids in California riding skateboards in pools. But it was just this quick glimpse of some kids, way out west in California, skateboarding in pools. We didn't know that there were skateparks. We weren't sure where those pools were, or why there was no water in them. But those were those far away kids... way out in California. We didn't know any of their names. They might as well have been on the moon.
The next year, in 1978, my family went to a flea market, in a parking garage, in Mansfield, the city my mom was from. We had a booth, selling random stuff, like a garage sale. I had a lot of time to wander around and check out the other booths. I found some high school kid in his parents' booth who was selling a skateboard he made, for $2.00. It was made out of a 3/4" thick oak board, about 5 1/2" wide. No kicktail, it was flat. It had a pointed nose, curved sides, and a narrow tail. It had GT trucks which were really narrow, but, the maroon wheels were each 2 1/2" wide. The wheels stuck out over the edges of the board. That became my skateboard, and I skated that thing for a decade. I took it down to the Huntington Beach Pier, in 1987 or early 1988, when I was a BMX freestyler, hanging out with Pierre Andre, Don Brown, Hans Lingren, and the HB local skaters. We all took turns trying to ollie my old $2 board, and finally broke the trucks.
As my family moved form town to town, I would go out on the street, and do rock walks, toe drag 360's, and backside G-turns, which I didn't realize were called G-turns. Every new house we lived in, I met the kids in the new neighborhood on that $2 skateboard. I would go skate in the driveway, and down the street, and that's how I started meeting the neighbor kids.
When we first moved to Boise in 1981, I would put Joan Jett's "I Love Rock n' Roll" cassette on my cheesy ghetto blaster in our garage, and do rockwalks and G-turns for hours. I'd still never bought a skateboard magazine. Our house was a incredibly psychologically tense place, and miserable, by and large. Skateboarding wasn't a sport to me, because I sucked at sports. It wasn't anything that I ever imagined to do after high school. It wasn't a thing that anyone made money at, as far as I knew. For me, skateboarding was another escape, a physical way to cope with my constant depression and the drama of everyday life. As a screwed up teenager, in a family that was more fucked up than most, I would read, run off and wander the woods (later he desert), ride my bike around, or skateboard. Those were my escapes.
Skateboarding had died, it wasn't cool anymore. I didn't care. Skateboarding was a way to cope. That's who rode skateboards in those days, fucked up kids from families that were more dysfunctional that most. It was never something that was going to lead to anything else. Skateboarding was a way to cope with daily life. That's it.
This video took me back to those early days. As my life wandered in weird directions, I wound up working in the BMX and skateboard industries, and the Bones Brigade riders were a huge influence on me in my 20's, and since. I was in that world, met a couple of them, and this story they tell touches my story, like tens of thousands of other kids and young people in the 1980's, and millions of kids in the 1990's.
None of this was supposed to happen. We weren't supposed to follow that weird intuition that drew us to bikes and skateboards, and the other action sports. We rebelled, we bucked the system. We just needed to follow this other, weird thing, and see where it led. It led us to places that none of us could have imagined back then.
But then that's the thing about creativity, it leads to brand new places, brand new things, and new "sports," new businesses, and new industries. Those weird little things have now spread to so many people around the world, that the fucking Olympics has added, is adding more BMX and skateboarding. None of this was supposed to happen. But, then again, it was supposed to happen. The Universe likes to fuck with the status quo every now and then, using weird, fucked up, driven, creative goofballs like the Bones Brigade, and all of us who followed.
More to come...
My online store is opening soon, check it out
No comments:
Post a Comment