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Rating: "The world wasn't ready for the Z-Boys"
Skateboard Magazine - 1975
There are moments that remain etched forever in the flow of time and the history of humanity. These are brief but intense periods where all the pieces perfectly fit into the final composition of the puzzle, so that when one has the complete view, they are left in awe... mouth agape. The pieces in this case correspond to an extraordinary group of young Californians, led by a trio of enlightened visionaries just a bit "older" than them, who more or less unwittingly rewrite the rules of professional skateboarding.
Anyone who knows the meaning of words like grind, slide, curve, mc-twist... "landing" a 900, or has already heard of Stacy Peralta, Tony Alva, Jay Adams, the Ho boards, or the Zephyr Skateboard Team, knows exactly what I'm talking about; as for the rest of the world, I'm deeply sorry. The record in question is the soundtrack of the film/documentary directed by Peralta himself (in the meantime becoming the best skate video director... The Bones Brigade rings a bell? and he launched a certain Tony Hawk into the limelight... the Michael Jordan or Maradona of skateboarding, just to clarify), which retraces the feats of a group of modern heroes, maladjusted children of the defeat of the American way of life.
In the early seventies, Venice Beach (Los Angeles - California) was no man's land, abandoned by the commercial splendor of the sixties; and in that portion of beach known as the Cove, surfing was lived in a total, extreme manner, without compromises, as a challenge for survival itself. A group of young surfers brought all this to the streets, transforming skateboarding from simple entertainment into extreme art. Skateboarding as horizontal entertainment becomes vertical, coinciding with the great drought that afflicted California in '75, when these young urban warriors invaded private properties, searching for empty pools, thus spending entire days there, interrupted only by homeowners, their fierce guard dogs, or the police. The Zephyr Team was composed of young devotees to style and extremism, and the soundtrack chosen perfectly exalts their exploits. We are still in the pre-punk period (music that became the soundtrack of this sport), and our protagonists traveled at the infernal rhythm of hard rock like Ted Nugent's "Motor City Madhouse" or Thin Lizzy's "Bad Reputation", to the dirty rhythm of southern rock like ZZ Top's "La Grange" or Joe Walsh's "Rocky Mountain Way"; they "surf" the pools (bowl) like the sect's followers in Marc Bolan's "Children Of The Revolution" with T. Rex, constantly seeking danger like Iggy And The Stooges in "Gimme Danger". Their impact on the stagnant skate scene was fierce at the Del Mar contest in California in 1975, when they officially presented for the first (and only time together) and marked the point of no return... the first to perform was the most talented and gifted, the fifteen-year-old Jay Adams, who left even his companions stunned by executing tricks never done before (as evidenced by the cover photo taken during that session), and the notes of Jimi Hendrix's "Ezy Ryder" were sublime and perfect for him, who is still remembered today as "The Original". Pure emotion, footage after footage, song after song, interview after interview... I really don't know how much the soundtrack can tell you, but if you have even the slightest curiosity about the skateboard, get "Dogtown And Z-Boys" and let yourself be carried into the "dogbowl"...
"Skaters are by their very nature urban guerrillas: every day they make use of disused structures, products of technological evolution, using the artifacts of governments and corporations in a thousand ways that even the architects who designed them can't even dream of."
Craig Stecyk 1976
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