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...

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Chris Moeller in "Leg Muscles": The Chain Wallet

The S&M Bikes 30 year book, Behind the Shield, is coming out soon.  So I figured it's a good time to tell a few of my stories from the days of being part of the S&M posses and longtime roommate to Chris Moeller.

In 1990, as Vision Skateboards was collapsing, and Unreel Productions, their video company, where I worked, was shut down.  Since I was the cheapest guy on staff and knew how to work most of the equipment, they kept me around and moved me to the Vision main headquarters building in Santa Ana, California.  Oddly, that's a block from where the S&M (and Fit) Bikes headquarters is now.

Anyhow, tired of being a peon on all the kinda goofy Vision videos, with no say in how they were made, I decided to self-produce my own BMX freestyle video.  I wanted to show the actual riding we did day after day, no uniforms, lots of street, and no riding on minature golf courses.  I shot footage all year long, put all my money into it, borrowed a grand late from Mike Sarrail to finish it (which I did pay back, just for the record), and The Ultimate Weekend came out in October of 1987.  As one of the first rider made videos, it was good for its day.  I spent $5,000 making it, of my own money, and made maybe $2,500 back over the next six or eight months.  I went into the project thinking I'd make like $20,000 or more back.  Yeah...sure...  I was still super shy, and a horrible salesman, and I let a surf video distributor do most of the selling.

I didn't pay off all my credit cards, and soon was working at a video duplicator in North Hollywood for $8 an hour and had $7,000 in or so in debt.  In the days before crippling student debt was a normal thing for people, that seemed like a lot to me.  I worked all the time, rode solo in the San Fenrnado Valley, and was depressed by the "insurmountable" amount of debt I had.

In 1991, while working that duplicating job, Chris Moeller found me somehow, and called up saying he wanted to make a video for S&M Bikes.  The entire company then was housed in the single car garage, of a one bedroom apartment, on Alabama street in Huntington Beach, California.  The BMX industry had "died" a year and a half earlier, and times were tight in the 20 inch world.  I was initially hoping Chris wanted to spend $2,000 or so to make the video.  I could have some fun, and pocket a good check.  When I asked him what budget he had in mind, he said, "like maybe $200."  After working at Unreel, where the budget wasn't ever a factor, $200 seemed like nothing.  But it sounded like fun, and I started going down on the weekends to H.B., and shooting video of Chris and the crew.

It's hard to imagine now, but dirt jumping wasn't even a sport then, it was something we all did to some extent, and Chris and a handful of lunatics, did to an insane level for the time period.  They'd have a jump contest at BMX nationals every once in a while, with one, single double jump, and that was it.  But Chris, Dave Clymer, John Paul Rogers, the P.O.W. House guys, and a few others were pro racers who spent a ton of time jumping for fun, and were pushing the progression at the time.  Most of the top jumpers were then S&M riders.  Chris couldn't pay them, but the bikes were stronger, and no other companies had a budget, or even the idea, to steal riders from S&M then.  Basically, S&M Bikes WAS dirt jumping in the minds of most BMX racers and freestylers in 1991.

Chris Moeller, being the guy he was, wanted to fuck with everyone when we made the video.  First was the whole thing of using the bad acting from porn videos in it.  Then, he started the video with flatlander Perry Mervar's section.  He wanted hardcore jumpers everywhere to get the video, pop it into the VCR all excited, and go, "Flatland?  What the fuck is this shit?"  In addition, dorking around and practical jokes have always been a part of BMX, and the whole hardcore punk mentality we had back then.  Basically, we we being jackasses a few years before the Big Brother videos came out, which turned into the Jackass TV show, and ultimately, the Jackass movies.  That first S&M Bikes video, Feel My Leg Muscles, I'm a Racer,  is basically a prequel to the Jackass stuff years later.

I crashed out on the floor of Moeller's apartment one weekend night, and the next morning he said, that to start his section, he wanted to start with skating.  Again, he wanted to do that just to fuck with people.  He said he had this funny idea to make fun of old school skaters, who'd taken to wearing biker-type chain wallets then.

So he grabbed his board, I grabbed the camera, and we rode our bikes down to a little park, Manning Park, on the corner of Delaware and Detroit.  There Chris got the big car tow chain he came up with somewhere, stuffed one end into his front pocket, and the other end into his back pocket, and started skating round the basketball court with it dragging behind.  At first, I thought it was just dumb.  We did the little intro part, where he talks about wearing the beanie ("stocking cap" in my world), another skater trend then, and the old car thing, then leads into the chain wallet.  I didn't even know Chris could skate at all then.  I knew him from a few years back, and had seen him around from time to time, but didn't really know much about him, other than he was a pro racer, about the craziest jumper of the day, and had somehow started a bike company at 16-years-old.

This was one of the first video pieces we shot for the video.  I had my big, full size, S-VHS camera, and shot footage as Chris started skating around, doing little tricks, with the massive chain dragging behind.  The longer it went on, the funnier I thought it was.  That, goofy, dorkin' around, sarcastic sense of humor that morning set the tone for all the video shoots we did for Leg Muscles.  Things got weirder and crazier from there, the opposite of my video a year earlier, where I was trying to be professional.  Even more funny, the kid playing basketball just kept playing, pretty much ignoring us, which made the final video look funnier.  And that's why Chris Moeller started his first real video segment skateboarding.

More weird tales from the S&M Bikes world of the early 1990's coming soon...

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My Sharpie Scribble Style Art 2005-2019 - #7

 Let's skate.  I started my drive to turn my Sharpie art into a business in late November 2015.  Here's what I started with.  I had a free place to live, though it was a toxic environment, and I sort of earned my keep by doing the "guy things" around the apartment, like fixing what broke, and driving my mom around to shop, lots of appointments, and all that.  I LITERALLY did not have a dime to my name when I started this whole thing.  That's how tight money was.  I had a refurbished, old, HP laptop, which was still running Windows XP in 2015.  I had a bunch of Sharpies and a few other supplies.  I had a cheap, 12" X 18" sketch pad.  That was it. 

After the previous BMX and other drawings to begin to find my new style of drawing with my scribble style, I did the Chris Miller drawing above.  In the days long before GoPro cameras, a jerry-rigged system took this amazing photo from above, of an epic, Chris Miller nosebone at Pipeline Skatepark's Combi Pool.  That was one of my favorite skate photos of all time.  The drawing came out pretty good. 

 Months later, with a bunch more drawings done, I saw this photo of skater Diego Najera doing a one-footed nollie.  This had great, high contrast lighting, which worked well for me.  I was really stoked on this one.  I sent it to Huntington Beach Pier friend and old skate buddy, Don Brown.  Don's also the vice president of marketing for Sole Technologies (aka Etnies, E's shoes, etc.)  This is a big, 18" X 24" drawing, and is now floating around California somewhere, as far as I know.

 When I started getting orders to do drawings in 2016, a friend from my BMX days, Paula, asked me to do a birthday drawing for her friend.  That friend happened to be legendary skateboarding pioneer, Robin Logan, from the family behind Logan Earth Skis skateboards.  Robin was known in the 1970's for doing toe flips, a pre-curser form of a kickflip.  The owl represented Robin's mom, who loved owls, and looked over the Logan kids in those pioneering days of skateboarding.  With this drawing, I became Facebook friends with Robin Logan, a woman who I saw photos of when I first started skateboarding in about 1976.  That's cool.

 As time passed, Robin Logan asked me to do some drawings for her of other skaters from her era.  Here we have Skateboard Hall of Fame women Vicki Vickers, Deanna Calkins, and Robin on the right.  Vicki and Deanna got my drawings of themselves for Mother's Day last year.

 Another early skateboard drawing I did was this one above.  It's based on a classic old photo of Rodney Mullen doing an Ollie Melancholy, which is the most tweaked a skater can get without a ramp involved.  I met Rodney when I first moved to Southern California in 1986, he practiced the same place we rode every night, The Spot, in Redondo Beach.  I also got to do a mini-interview with Rodney, which was in the December 1986 issue of FREESTYLIN' magazine. 

This one is Armando Chulo, a couple years ago, learning to do kickflips as a teen in Austin.  His mom, Athene, asked me to do this one.  He's older, much taller, and in college now, I believe. 

Welcome to Level 50 Tony Hawk

Skateboarding legend Tony Hawk decided to land 50 of his original tricks in celebrating of his 50th birthday.  You know what that means.  Yeah, he has really good health insurance.  Freakin' amazing stuff.  Go back and watch the 720 again. Watch the ending.

My 50th birthday was not this cool.  Yet, oddly, I was really stoked to hit 50 for some reason.  That was almost two years ago, I'm creeping up on 52 right now.  I've never met Tony Hawk.  But in the action sports world, "meet" means actually having him knowing who I am at some point, that's what I've never done.  But I was in the same realm as him over the years.  Here's a few of my stories about Tony Hawk.

I first heard of Tony Hawk in a BMX Plus article about a BMX skatepark contest at the Del Mar skatepark keyhole bowl.  They added a sequence of some local skater kid doing a 540 in the bowl.  That kid was Tony Hawk, and that was probably in 1984.

When I moved to Southern California in 1986 for the job at Wizard Publications, my new roommates/workmates, Gork and Lew, had a VHS copy of the second Powell-Peralta Bones Brigade video, Future Primitive.  I used to watch that video every Saturday morning and every Sunday morning and then go on solo street riding sessions all day.  That's where I first saw a bunch of Tony Hawk footage.   Tony does a 720 in the intro of the video. That was 1985.

When I worked at Unreel Productions, Vision sponsored the NSA contests, and I was the guy who made VHS dubs of all the raw footage that came in.  At that point, as a BMX guy who hung out mostly with skaters, we were still mostly focused on getting ready and skating /riding in contests.  But deep down, it was just fun, we new there was another reason we kept doing it, but I never heard anybody put a name on that reason.  In a quick interview by our cameraman at some contest, Tony was asked what skateboarding was all about.  "Progression, it's all about progression," was his answer.  It suddenly clicked to me.  Yes, we practice for contests because that's how you play the sponsorship game and that means something to family and outsiders.  But the continual progression was why we really did it.  I never forgot that.

Getting ready for the huge (at the time) NSA finals in 1989, aka Skate Escape, Tony Hawk came by Unreel to share ideas on what would make the contest better.  I came back from lunch one day, saw his blue car in the parking lot, and got all stoked, "I'm gonna get to meet Tony Hawk, finally."  I saw him walk by with Don Hoffman and the other guys, but I was the lowly "Dub Guy" at Unreel, so I wasn't cool enough to be in the meeting, and definitely not cool enough to get introduced to him.

Another time that year, I got to go with Don Hoffman to Tony's Fallbrook house to shoot video  of both Ken Park and Tony's roommate at the time Joe Johnson (the skater, not the BMXer).  Both times, Tony was off doing demos somewhere.  You can see me in the back ground of the Ken Park's section (in all white at :17, :26, :42, 1:34, 1;41) of Barge at Will, a few times.  If that music in the second half of Ken's section sounds familiar to you BMXers, it's because that's "No More Cheap Talk" by The Stain, which I used as intro music in The Ultimate Weekend.

That was a really cool day, because Frank, Tony's dad was there, and he had me run to buy us all sandwiches and drinks at some little liquor store nearby.  Then I sat in the bed of his pick-up as he and Don Hoffman sat on the tailgate talking about "the old days," of skateboarding.  That was one of those epic moments to just shut my mouth and listen to these two guys who'd seen it all before.

Sometime in the early 1990's, H.B. local Brian Jordan of J'Lofty hired me to make a video promo for the Action Sports Retailer trade show.  I managed to get to the deck of the demo vert ramp to shoot some photos.  It was mostly skaters on it at that point.  Just a big ol' jam session.  As luck would have it, Tony Hawk popped out right next to me at one point.  In the bike skate world, formal introductions are all that important, so I wasn't going to just act like a fan and introduce myself in the middle of a session.  So I stood there next to Tony watching guys skate.  Some newcomer to the scene, a kid named Bucky Lasek, dropped in and started to skate.  I'd never heard of the kid before.  That kid was Bucky Lasek, and on one run he did a backside 360 ollie right in front of Tony and me.  I thought that was amazing, I'd never seen anyone do that before.  It turned out to be far more amazing than I thought, because Tony Hawk started freaked when Bucky did it, and started slamming his trucks on the coping in appreciation.  Bucky does a backside 360 ollie in this video at :25. 

Oh, and then there was the time I nabbed a press pass to the 1999 X-Games.  I ran into Maurice Meyer, who I hadn't seen for years, as BMX vert practice was ending.  We started talking, and the skate best trick contest started at the skate ramp 100 feet away.  So we walked over there and kept talking.  By some weird bit of luck,  we saw this happen.  We were standing right behind the rows of chairs 20 feet from the side of the ramp.  We could see the look in Tony's eyes after the 3rd or 4th try as he walked off the ramp.  We realized he was either going to land it, or go to the hospital from trying.  As luck would have it, I had my Sony Digital 8 camera in my hand... with a dead battery.  I'm kind of glad, though.  Because I just stood there and watched history take place, soaking it in.  That's pretty cool.

Maurice ran out with the guys to congratulate Tony on the ramp.  At 6:04, you can see him in a white hoodie with sunglasses, right behind Tony.  I stayed where I was and just watched.  That was a moment to always remember.