Rodney Mullen meets Andy Anderson- The last Hawk vs. Wolf podcast of 2024

Rodney Mullen meets Andy Anderson.  Hawk vs. Wolf podcast.  I need to watch this whole thing Thursday.  I don't have a laptop right now, so I have to wait to use the library Thursday to watch it.  

Tony Hawk and Jason Ellis interview Rodney Mullen for their podcast

Rodney Mullen is probably an alien.  He's too weird and cool and innovative to be from this planet.  Skaters used to say he was a mutt of a human, and that's the title of his book.*  He's one of the coolest, most genuine people I've ever met, an amazing skateboarder, an original member of the Bones Brigade, and a guy who has gone on stage to explain creativity and innovation to some of the smartest people in the world, at TED Talks.  Here's a look at Rodney Mullen.  Above is a brand new interview of Tony Hawk and Jason Ellis interviewing Rodney for their podcast Wolf vs. Hawk.  I got about 50 minutes into this last night, it's a great podcast.  I need to listen to the rest tonight. 

"Just try to be an individual when you skate.  Don't look at others, don't think about others, it just brings you down... It comes out of you, that's how it gets good."  

-Rodney Mullen, in the mini interview I did with him when he was 19, at The Spot in Redondo Beach, in late 1986 for FREESTYLIN' magazine.  Follow this link, and go to the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN', page 56, to check out that interview. 

On my second night in Redondo Beach in 1986, my new co-worker and roommate, Mark "Lew" Lewman, led me down to the place where he and a few locals practiced flatland BMX freestyle every night.  The large brick paved area, on the north end of the Redondo Beach Pier, had been dubbed The Spot by the freestylers.  "There's a skater down there you have to meet," Lew yelled back, as I followed him on my Skway.  "He's amazing."  

On that night, I think it was just Lew and I practicing our flatland freestyle tricks.  After an hour or so, a sandy haired guy on an old beach cruiser road up.  Lew said "Hi," as the guy rode past and set up on the smooth concrete area, next to The Spot.  In between trying my tricks, I watched this skater pull his socks up to his knees, and put on knee pads.  Then he checked out his skateboard, meticulously put white tape on his finger tips, and then went through some stretching exercises.  Only then, 15 minutes or so after arriving, did he step onto his small, flat freestyle board.  He went into this sort of stationary wheelie thing, swinging the front of the board about 270 degrees, while keeping balanced on the back wheels.  It was a warm-up of his.  Then he started doing his tricks.  I watched from a distance.  It was like watching an Olympic athlete or something begin to train.  

Lew and I and the other BMX freestylers just rode down to The Spot, in jeans or shorts and a T-shirt, and just started trying tricks.  Rodney trained.  He went on for 2 1/2 hours or so.  He never fell.  He stepped off his board two or three times.  But the tricks he was doing were insane.  

By that point, I had been goofing around on skateboards for 9-10 years, and could do rock walks and back wheel spins.  I'd never bought a skate magazine, I knew almost nothing about the world of pro skating.  I was a kid from Ohio and Idaho that just pulled out my board to goof around now and then. Lew told me that Rodney was the 8 or 9 time world champion freestyle skater at that point.   Rodney just kept skating by himself.  Lew and I finished up riding, and I think we rode down to the pier to get a Coke, maybe a slice of pizza as well, then rode back.  Rodney was still just skating away, alone.  

Finally Rodney took a break, and took a swig of water.  Lew headed over towards him, and I followed, on our bikes.  Lew introduced me to Rodney, and we talked for a few minutes.  That's how I met 19-year-old Rodney Mullen.  He was one of the original members of Powell-Peralta's Bones Brigade at the time.  Rodney was going to college in Florida, in his first year, and debating between going into engineering or medicine.  He ended up taking a much different path in life, when his friend Steve Rocco started a little skateboard company a few months later... called World Industries.  

I wound up talking to Rodney quite a bit after our sessions, for the two or three weeks he was in California.  Sometimes it was Lew, Rodney and I talking for a while, and sometimes jut me nd Rodney.  We did the FREESTYLIN' interview one afternoon, with Windy Osborn shooting photos, there at The Spot.  Rodney taught me how to do pressure flip style kickflips on his board, on my second or third night there.  Night after night he blew my mind with all the tricks he could do on a skateboard.  Non of it was death defying, but they just looked so freaking hard.  He came back in October or November for another three weeks.  Again, Rodney, Lew and I wound up talking a lot after our sessions.  I remember him showing me half flip underflips then... in 1986.  That trick blew the minds of street skaters about 8 years later in a Plan B video. 

Rodney not only invented many of the core freestyle skating tricks, like the flat ground ollie, kickflips, double kickflips, the ollie impossible, and 360 flips, but he invented the tricks that the emerging street skaters took to bigger, gnarlier terrain, as street skating took over, and went worldwide.  I watched Rodney trying to teach Mark Gonzales impossibles on his street board there, at The Spot, one night.  

Rodney Mullen made a huge impression on me, like he has on thousands of other people.  One big idea was that I could take freestyle seriously.  It wasn't just goofing around, like most people thought then, it was a legit sport, and form of athletic creativity.  Years later, Rodney re-invented street skating, and in more recent years, has given TED Talks, and done many interviews, about the nature of creativity to some of the most intelligent people on the planet.  

None of us at The Spot back in 1986 expected any of that to happen.  It's weird and amazing how life unfolds at times.  I saw Rodney once more, when I took my bike up to the Hermosa Pier, in late 1987, I think.  Rodney and Steve Rocco were skating for a crowd there, and I did some BMX freestyle, and we talked a bit.  I remember Rodney saying, "You've got a lot of new stuff."  I thought he was talking about my bike.  But he said, "No you've learned a lot of new tricks."  I had improved a ton in that first yea rin Southern California.  But I didn't think Rodney ever really watched us ride.  Obviously he had.  I haven't seen him since then.  I've been following him through videos for the 34 years since, like everyone else.

The podcast interview above is great, and here are several other videos of Rodney Mullen to check out, if you're interested.  Take your cap off, our mind is about to be blown. 

One of the better compilations of Rodney's skating online.  

Rodney Mullen TEDx Talk- "Pop an Ollie and innovate"

Rodney Pop Tech Talk - "Getting Back Up" 

411 Video Mags "A day in the life of Rodney Mullen" (late 90's?) 

Lemelson Center interview with Rodney   The Lemelson Center is part of the Smithsonian's National museum of American History, and focuses on invention and innovation.

Rodney as stunt double for Ben Stiller in The Secret Life of Walter Middy  They talk about this in the podcast above.

Physics Girl on why Rodney's tricks should be impossible Yeah... no kidding.

Wired Magazine: Rodney Mullen- The intangibles that distinguish us

Impact Theory: Rodney Mullen- How to use pain to become the best in the world 

From the Ground Up: Rodney Mullen (documentary) 

Vogue: Rodney Mullen in 360 degrees  (and SUPER slo mo) 

Bones Brigade- An Autobiography  Stacy Peralta's look back at the legendary Bones Brigade

The Man Who Souled the World  Steve Rocco/World Industries documentary 

Rodney Mullen's run- NSA Oceanside 1986 contest-  Gork and Lew took me to this contest when I flew down for the weekend, for my interview with Wizard Publications.  That was about a month before I actually got the job, moved there, and met Rodney.  Don Hoffman, the guy interviewing Rodney at the end of his run, became my boss at Unreel Productions a year and a half later.

* Not a paid link.

The Bones Brigade: fucked up kids that changed the world- Part 1

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

WPOS Kreative.com

Rodney Mullen on getting up again

"What we do is fall."
- Skateboarding pioneer and legend Rodney Mullen

The first time I ever rode a skateboard was at my new neighbors' house shortly after my family moved to Laurel Street in Willard, Ohio in 1976.  I was nine.  This kid Jeff pulled out a thing called a skateboard he said his dad made for him.  It was flat, the shape of a small ironing board, and made from pressed aluminum.  There was no grip tape.  The edges were bent over with some nice craftsmanship.  It had steel roller skate wheels mounted on the bottom.  Jeff set it on these flat rocks that formed a broken walkway to their front door.  He skated across the bumpy rocks easily.  He asked it I wanted to try.  I pushed off, went about a foot, the front wheels crabbed in a crack, and I fell hard on my knee.  It hurt like hell.  I got up and said, "Skateboarding is dumb."  I never intended to do it again.

A year later, after saving my measly allowance (after candy purchases) for nine months, I bought my first skateboard, a green, plastic Scamp board.  I've been skating on and off ever since 1977.  In 1986, a decade later Rodney Mullen taught me how to do pressure flip style kickflips, the non-ollie original version.  I landed the first few on his board on night at The Spot at the Redondo Beach Pier.

But I wound up being a much more serious BMX guy.  I got into it in 1982, raced a while, and then freestyle became my thing for the next 20+ years.  The only reason I don't ride every day now is my weight gained while taxi driving and my lack of a bike at the moment.  I'm working on both of those, and I'll session again in a few months or so.

In 1984, I was out in the street in front of my best friend Darrin's house one night.  I was trying to learn can-can brake endos.  It's a simple trick.  I had been doing curb endos and brake endos for a few weeks at that point.  But taking my left foot off and stretching it over the top tube to the opposite direction just didn't work.  I just couldn't get the coordination down.  At one point, I pushed my leg over while balancing on the front wheel. somehow the bike slipped out form under me, and my feet kicked sideways up in the air.  I was only a couple of feet off the ground, but I landed with my right hip bone hitting the end of the pedal with all my weight behind it.  It was not a bad bail, it just hurt like hell.  I rolled off the bike cussing.  "That's it," I said, "Fuck this freestyle crap.  I QUIT!"

I slowly stood up and hobbled around, whining about the pain in my hip.  For about fifteen minutes, I gave up BMX freestyle forever.  After sitting down for a while, though, I decided to give it another try.  I got back on my bike, and finally pulled off a few decent can-can brake endos.  That's the last time I can remember actually "quitting" riding. Right now I don't ride for the reasons a mentioned, but I haven't quit.  I'm on a hiatus.  I'll ride again.  Giving up riding for good is incomprehensible at this point.
In the years after that night I "quit" because of hip pain, I went on to ride with most of the best riders of the 80's and early 90's at some point.  I wrote or had photos published in 7 BMX magazines.  I've published 40+ zines.  I produced and/or edited 15 bike, skate, and snowboard videos.  I've worked on the crew of over 300 episodes of a dozen different TV shows.  All of those things happened because I first got into BMX freestyle.  None of those things would have ever happened if I had actually given up riding that night in 1984 when I landed on my hip trying a pretty easy trick. One of the many things I've learned from bike riding and skating is that when you fall, you get back up.  Simple to say.  Hard to do on many occasions.  But after a while, it becomes a habit.  After a much longer while, it simply becomes a part of who you are.

I've had a lot of really crazy stuff happen in my life.  You know, little things like getting hit by a Jeep while riding my mountain bike, having a top MMA fighter try to throw me out of my taxi because I wouldn't run over the guy who he just had a bar fight with, or the time I was homeless and a young mountain lion crashed into my campsite.  You know, those weird little things we all deal with from time to time.  By the time those things happened, getting back up and trying again was just my nature.  It wasn't easy, especially through some of the homeless days in Cali and 18 hour long days driving drunk idiots in my taxi.  But I kept going.  Rodney Mullen kept going when his hip locked up.  I watched Tony Hawk try that 900 11 times in 1999 at the X-Games.  He got back up an landed it.  Danny Way at the beginning of the video above.  Mat Hoffman for the last 25 or 30 years.  Some, like me, dealt with weird situations.  Guys like Danny, and Mat, and Tony and many many others dealt with debilitating injuries and unfathomable physical pain.

Why do so many people from the action sports world go on to be talented and successful in so many other ways after the actual sports?  Because, like Rodney says above, "Falling is what we do."  So is getting back up. 

At 14:22 in the clip below, Mat Hoffman tries a trick and bails.  Then he gets up and tries again...

Mind baffling TED Talk by Skateboarder Rodney Mullen

It just occurred to me that I might be the only homeless person who's had a published interview with a person who's done a TED Talk years later.  My life is filled with obscure things like that.  Actually, Rodney has done several TED Talks.  Groups of super intelligent, high achieving techies, scientists, business people and others show up in rooms like this and willingly spend 18 minutes of their precious time to listen to a skateboarder.  Why?  Because Rodney is well known as one of the most innovative people in action sports, not to mention the whole world.

Yes, I know Rodney kind of jumps around in this talk, and comes across like a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  That's because he is a somewhat scatter-brained genius.  It's a little hard to follow.  But he brakes down skateboard tricks into little groups of movements.  Once you learn a basic group of movements, a trick, then you can either add variations to that trick, or take that trick to an entirely new type of terrain.  In doing this, skaters (and other action sports people) continually innovate, and add to the collective base of tricks.  The community respects these contributions (mostly), and those contributions then live on long past the time you came up with them, and continue to evolve.

I first met Rodney in August of 1986, at a place we called The Spot, just north of the Redondo Beach Pier in California.  I had just started a new job at Wizard Publications, a BMX magazine publisher, and my new co-worker and roommate Lew said, "You gotta meet this skateboarder Rodney, he's amazing."  Lew and I went to The Spot to practice our flatland BMX freestyle tricks on a good sized brick area.  After we'd been there for a couple hours, Rodney rode up on this rickety, old, black beach cruiser bike he called Agnes.  Where we would just start practicing our tricks, Rodney prepared to skate.  He taped his fingers, checked over his board, and stretched.  It was the first time I met a skateboarder who actually trained.  Then he did some basic, but still hard, tricks to warm up.  Then he skated, alone, for two or three hours.

At one point, he stopped to take a break, and Lew and I rode over to say "hi."  Rodney was staying with then washed up skater Steve Rocco for a few weeks.  Lew introduced me, and we talked for a few minutes.  Rodney was kind of quiet, really down to Earth, and obviously really smart.  After meeting him that first night, I started hanging out after I was done sessioning, and watch Rodney skate.  We started talking, and hit it off.  So I got to know him over those three weeks or so, and then later that fall when stayed at Rocco's for another month.

FREESTYLIN' magazine, where Lew and I worked, was covering skateboarding at the time, as well as BMX freestyle.  So I got the chance to do a short interview with Rodney, and he even got a photo on the cover of that issue (below).  BMX freestyle and skateboarding drew a weird crowd of people who generally felt like outsiders to "normal" life.  Some of those guys were the total crazy daredevil types.  But hanging out with Rodney, I found it was possible to read big books, be smart, and still be part of the BMX/skate world.  The more introverted, intellectual skaters and bikes often invented technically hard tricks.  Those tricks were often taken to bigger and crazier version by other riders and skaters.  That's where the community aspect of action sports, which Rodney speaks of at the end of this talk, comes into play.  No one person in these "sports" is "The Best," and everyone can contribute to the scene.  You can read my 1986 interview with Rodney Mullen.  I couldn't get that to load today.  If you can, it's in the skate section of the magazine near the middle.