From the book The Good The Rad and The Gnarly by Ben Marcus, Photos by Lucia Griggi. Tony Hawk’s first skateboard was a blue Bahne, a gift from his brother Steve: “It’s true that Tony’s first board was a blue Bahne,” big brother Steve said in an email. “It was a hand-me-down. I gave it […]
From The Good, The Rad, and the Gnarly by Ben Marcus. Of all the skateboard truck companies that bubbled up in the 1970s, the three that are still going are Tracker, Independent and Gull Wing. Those companies, their founders and the products get their own sections of this book. Below is an alphabetical list of […]
ALL THE YOUNG DUDES, ANNOYING ON PURPOSE, THE WILD ONES Steve Alba and Lance Mountain On the Origins of Inland Skate Heroes, and SkatePunk. In the parking lot at Malibu during a south swell in August of 2010, Steve Olson said he wasn’t the Missing Link. I had told him I wanted to interview him […]
Jeff Ho was the first person I interviewed and Lucia Griggi photographed for this book. This was way back in the spring of 2009, when I was working on a couple of other books and was too frazzled to be doing anything right. Okay we got ahead of ourselves. Let me go back and ask some […]
The many faces of Steve Caballero and friends. Cab is a classic case of a skate park kid made good. Born in 1964 – the Year of the Dragon – Caballero utilized the dragon theme in his graphics, as he became one of the leading skateboard stars out of the 1970s and into the 1980s. […]
The answer is: We may never know. Many inventors and corporations are quick to stake a claim, but finding that first commercially produced skateboard may be a futile search. In the first edition of the Quarterly Skateboarder, a full-page ad by Skee Skate of California makes a heavy claim: “This is it!!!! The skateboard that […]
Cred is important in skateboarding, so let me establish mine. I began skating when I was ten in sunny California around 1970, in the bad old days of clay wheels. I also started surfing about then, walking with my purple Haut longboard every day from Santa Cruz’ Seventh Avenue to Cowells, and putting in the […]