Some Classic Skateboarding Videos

Don’t know why I’d think my status in blogdom would make anybody remotely interested in me personally.  Nevertheless, here it is, the obligatory blogger reminisce-fest.  I'll keep it short.

I’m always much more sane when I’ve got a hobby to dig my teeth into.  Today I guess I’m sorta interested in music.  But for years skateboarding was my life.  I’m pretty sure that’s a big part of how I got interested in music – between blasting Minor Threat and Misfits out of a boom box on the corner and the watching skate videos religiously, I got a pretty good education.  Also, skateboarding made me independent, which easily leads to antisocial tendencies, a pretty necessary characteristic for any music nerd.

After nailing a huge 360 off a quarterpipe, Gonz falls boardsliding a little curb.  He skates past the camera, saying, “That’s all a rider can expect”.  “OK” responds the cameraman uncomprehendingly.  Then Gonz ollies onto a car hood.  Unreal.  Mark Gonzales is definitely the greatest artistic mind skateboarding’s ever seen.  His video parts always had tons of strange, unique tricks and his illustrated short stories in Thrasher were the only literature I ever used to read (here’s a decent one from ’95, I’ll have to post the weirder ones when I get to my stash in NJ.  1, 2).  The other two skateboarders in this ’86 competition, Natas and Tommy Guerero, were equally great at the time but didn’t have Gonz’s longevity.

I’m kinda surprised I didn’t break more bones given how little I must’ve cared for my physical well being.  I wasn’t as crazy as some of my friends were though, I was more into technical tricks.  Rodney Mullen is the king of that stuff.  When people were still treating skateboards like surfboards, Rodney Mullen was doing flip tricks that nobody else can do to this day.  In this video from ‘84, he consecutively lands like 100 really hard tricks in a row, even though those socks must be cutting off the blood flow to his feet.

Jamie Thomas, on the other hand, is known for pulling huge tricks.  I used to watch his parts in Toy Machine’s Welcome To Hell video and Zero’s Misled Youth video and pause at each trick to count how many stairs he had just annihilated.  This clip is from his part in Welcome To Hell, probably the video I watched the most growing up.

Comments

Gonz rules

[Robin]

I think this Sacto thing is also featured in the Powell video 'Future Primitive'... But maybe that's earlier than '86 (?) Anyone?

And, yes, Gonz rules.

[scott in tokyo]

All these guys were revolutionary. I remember seeing Gonzo do an ollie in Future Primitive, thinking that everything was going to change with that trick. Then along comes Natas who takes the ollie to a new level. Guerrero was awesome as well, especially with those huge jump ramp tricks- 360 judo etc...
Thanks for the post, that stuff still gives me the shivers.

[Rick Ele]

I was a BMXer myself, but I do seem to remember 1986 being a watershed year for the ollie just as much as it was for hip hop MC's putting the nursery-rhyme-flow to bed in favor of the permutatable offbeat rhyme-flow. It was like reading about the history of recordbreaking mile times in the sport of competitive running. After one dude did 4:00, dozens of others reached the feat within a year. I was just watching "Thrashin'" on my Comcast onDemand and surprised that no one could ollie more than about three or four inches of the ground. Anyone who wanted to get real air had pick up his board and put his foot down all in the same move, and then jump off the down foot. Does anyone even remember what that move is called? That's how buried it is, I guess...

[christopher o.]

Boneless.

[natasha]

"That's all part of my trick"