Dogtown and Z-Boys

Hear me out with my question first. Okay.

That question sucked. Yeah, man!

I'm trying to explain this to you, but you're not getting what I'm telling you.

I don't like that question.

That was good.

We weren't looking at this as some kind of future.

There was no promise in it. There was no nothing in it.

People were really living in the moment.

There were no goals. There were no aspirations.

It started here, in this area.

That's where it all started.

You know? That was the beginning of the revolution.

We were all punk kids, man. We were tough kids.

And we wanted to be something.

It turned into, like, a rock star thing, you know?

We were treated like kings at places that we went to.

I was on summer vacation for about 20 years.

It was cool to be in the magazines and stuff, but, you know,

the bottom line was all we wanted to do was skate.

Craig understood that, like,

children took the ruins of the 20th century and made art out of it.

I was, like, 12 years old and I'm reading these articles,

and you don't know where your place is in the world yet.

And you read these words and the things that he had to say

and the way he said them

and the photographs that accompanied them and it was like,

"Wow, I'm really a part of something incredible, something important."

In 1975, the second issue of the recently reincarnated

SkateBoarder magazine would feature "Aspects of the Downhill Slide,"

the first of what would become known throughout the skateboarding world

as the "Dogtown" articles.

These feature articles chronicled the adventures and exploits

of Dogtown's Z-Boys.

They were the badasses. I mean, they were the freaks of the sport.

There was a scary thing about it, like, "Whoa! These guys will kick your ass."

They didn't seem like they were a part of the rest of skateboarding.

It seemed like they had their own thing going on.

The Dogtown articles were the brainchild of 26-year-old artist

and photojournalist Craig Stecyk.

Using a handful of pseudonyms, Stecyk would conceive, write,

photograph and design the aesthetic

that would come to define the Dogtown movement.

When we saw you guys in the magazines, it was, like,

"This is full-on. They're living this."

No one skateboarded, no one rode a board,

no one was as aggressive or as radical as they ever were.

The Zephyr team had guys with all different styles,

and,really, it sparked a revolution.

I think the Zephyr team was straight-out

the most influential skateboard team ever, ever to be assembled.

The Zephyr Skateboard Team was comprised of 12 individuals

from an area in West Los Angeles known as Dogtown.

They were Shogo Kubo, Bob Biniak,

Nathan Pratt, Stacy Peralta,

Jim Muir, Allen Sarlo,

Chris Cahill, Tony Alva,

Paul Constantineau, Jay Adams,

Peggy Oki and Wentzle Rum].

There is a place where America's manifest destiny

collides into the Pacific Ocean.

A place where the fabled Route 66,

the roadway of American dreams, terminates.

This is Dogtown.

There's an invisible line of demarcation

from the north side of Santa Monica

to the south side of Santa Monica.

You're looking at one side of town that had trophy houses and lots of money.

And you're looking at the south side that wasn't like that geographically.

It was actually a visible financial line,

where, if you lived above Wilshire, you had money,

and, if you lived below Wilshire, you wanted their money.

Dogtown was a territory encompassing the three beach communities

of South Santa Monica, Venice and Ocean Park.

This was the last great seaside slum.

This was not the beach that people came to vacation at.

It was Dogtown, and Dogtown was

a place where you had to have eyes in the back of your head.

It was dirty. It was filthy. It was paradise.

Dogtown was a faded blip on the radar screen of popular surfing,

a rundown coastal resort inhabited by surfers

infamous for their aggressive localism and outcast behaviour.

Surfing in 1972 or 1971 was outcast, period.

Surfing was antisocial, generally-speaking, in the world of things.

It wasn't the thing you did to build your self-esteem in society.

It was like... if you were a surfer, it was like saying you were a dropout.

It was not necessarily like it is today,

where you've got Kelly Slater making millions of dollars.

In 1972, 23-year-old surfboard shaper Jeff Ho,

24-year-old surfboard builder Skip Engblom

and 21-year-old artist Craig Stecyk joined together to form

Jeff Ho and Zephyr Surfboard Productions.

In reaction to what they felt to be the mundane world of commercial surfing,

the three scraped together what little cash they had and set up shop

on the corner of Bay and Main Streets in the heart of Dogtown.

They were dedicated to being anti-mainstream,

and they were proud to be anti-mainstream.

I think that we probably started it

because there was nobody else building surfboards

of a certain type that we kind of envisioned could be built.

They were a specialist surf shop.

If you wanted the most high-performance surfboard, this was the shop to come to.

It wasn't like you were going into a standard surf shop

by any stretch of the imagination.

There was other surf shops, but they didn't have

the "bad boy" image as it came out of the whole P.O.P. culture.

They created a whole new identity, a totally separate, unique identity

in terms of the kind of surfboards that they made,

the colour of the boards, the way they were shaped,

what Jeff Ho was doing was kind of revolutionary at the time.

He was exploring all kinds of design concepts.

Jeff Ho was the most intense person I've ever worked for

in any business environment my whole life.

Jeff was a madman. I mean, Jeff would lose it.

He'd lose his temper.

He could just erupt on a moment's notice

and put you through just the ultimate Chinese water torture

on any little thing.

Jeff Ho was recognised throughout the coastal region

as an eccentric surfboard shaper

who pushed the boundaries of conventional surfboard design.

The boards that were coming out of the Jeff Ho Shop were a different design.

Constantly, Jeff would shape something, develop it,

try it, and then go on to the next level.

I mean, he was, like, a guy that was like Howard Hughes.

I mean, he'd make something and actually fly it.

He was making it, and he was surfing it.

So, he was exploring it as an engineer and a designer,

and also actually riding it.

We just wanted to create something

that was different than the other boards.

I was trying to develop something that was new, unique and different.

Inspired by the wall art tradition of local gangs

and the vivid colours of the area's vibrant car culture,

Craig Stecyk airbrushed the Zephyr surfboards

with a look reminiscent of Dogtown's culturally mixed neighbourhoods.

It was to personalise stuff for the user,

to make something that wasn't a mass-media,

garbagey piece of junk

that had been designed in some factory for everybody else.

Because we came from a little bit different environment.

It was graffiti art. It was full-blown, you know, urban graffiti art on surfboards.

FRIEDKIN.' It was very much an identification of an environment,

like where we live. "This is who we are."

Our history is based on lowriders and hot rods and Latinas.

Like, I'd fantasize about chicks with huge hair and lowriders.

You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, little blond girls

named Buffy just weren't my scene.

So, therefore, that wasn't what we were at.

The average surf look at the time, the aesthetic of surfing,

was very clean, very powder blue, very beige,

you know, rainbows and sunsets and sandy beaches kind of a look.

What we were doing was "the debris meets the sea."

Using the shop as their front, Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom

formed the Zephyr surf team,

a group made up of the best surfers in the Dogtown area.

We were in the midst of rebar and concrete, airbrush saying, "Go home."

It was a statement saying, "Nothing's gonna stop us,

"and we're gonna do whatever the heck we want.

"And screw you if you don't like it. We don't care."

And that was the attitude, and that was the attitude in the water,

"We're here and look at us. If you don't like it, split."

We weren't really surfers in a traditional sense.

You know, we're from Venice.

Freedom fighters sent out to the sun

Escape from brainwashed minds and pollution

Leave the earth to all its sin and hate

Find another world where freedom waits, yeah

One mile south of the Zephyr shop,

lying directly on the border of Venice and Santa Monica,

was Dogtown's epicentre, the Pacific Ocean Park pier.

Around the turn of the century, visionary land developer Abbot Kinney

set out to create a European-like community,

geared towards art, culture and amusement.

Kinney's dream would become Venice, California, replete with canals, gondolas,

and a full-scale replica of the colonnaded square of its Italian inspiration.

The coastal zone that ran from Venice through Ocean Park and Santa Monica

became the home to so many amusement park piers

that it earned the reputation as the Coney Island of the West.

Eventually, only Pacific Ocean Park, known to the locals as P.O.P.,

an amusement park atop the old Lick Pier, remained.

They had this park with all this celebration of humanity

and people having a good time, and they're free,

and they're out in the ocean and, you know, the ocean breeze.

We can sing in the glow of a star that I know of

Where lovers enjoy peace of mind...

And then, all of a sudden,

it turns into the worst nightmare you've ever imagined.

The party ended in the mid-'603.

The beachfront expanse running from Venice through Santa Monica

had become run-down and seedy.

Attendance at the once-magnificent Pacific Ocean Park plummeted,

and in 1967 it closed,

and soon thereafter became a no-man's-land.

A place where pyromaniacs, junkies, artists and surfers

could excel in symbiotic disharmony.

It was kind of like the circus had left town.

It was a little scary for some people.

It was like this dead Wonderland.

I mean, you know, you've got this carcass of all these rides

that are rusted and falling apart.