STACY PERALTA

Bones Brigade ringleader, original Z-Boy, probably the most significant filmmaker in skateboarding, and alongside George Powell co-founder of one of the sport’s defining companies, Stacy Peralta is the man. We dropped in on a call with him to talk skate, film music, art – and cosmic connection.

Who pioneered modern skateboarding? The actual four-wheeled object was invented in the 1950s, but what’s even more fascinating is how skate culture blossomed and has endured to this day. A rag-tag band of misfits from the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles can legitimately claim to be the first skaters, coming together in the early ’70s. Named the Z-Boys, after the Zephyr surf and skate shop in Santa Monica, and comprised of 11 boys and one girl, most of them teenagers, they were the first to apply surf moves to skateboarding and create a whole new style. Stacy Peralta was one of the group’s most prominent members, along with Tony Alva and Jay Adams. After leaving the Z-Boys, Peralta became the world’s top-ranked professional skateboarder at the age of 19. He then launched the skateboard company Powell Peralta, which developed into one of the most popular skate brands of the ’80s. During that decade he assembled the Bones Brigade team with the best skaters of the era, including skate legend Tony Hawk. Driven by a desire to document the culture that had grown up around the sport, Peralta began to pitch skate-related projects to Hollywood studios, paving the way for the cult documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Hollywood adaptation Lords of Dogtown, and directed the 2012 documentary Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Many of the original Z-Boys have sadly passed away, but Stacy Peralta agreed to talk to L’Uomo to explain the reasons behind the group’s lasting legacy.

You’re from Venice, LA, and you’re associated with this neighbourhood in the public imagination. How would you describe Venice, then and now, to someone who has never been there? It’s changed a lot since the Dogtown days.

It was an extremely cool place in the ’70s because there was very little money and interest in the place. It was fairly rundown, which allowed us a lot of freedom of movement, freedom of expression and freedom from people bothering us. Today it’s overpopulated with multimillion-dollar glass homes and is so overly hip that it’s unhip! [laughs]

It may be difficult for younger generations to imagine how skaters were considered as outsiders in the early ’70s. Was this feeling present in the early days?

We weren’t even worthy of being considered outsiders! We were all non-conformists trying to figure out a way to express ourselves and develop ourselves in the face of doing something like skateboarding that wasn’t even considered at all. We weren’t “outsiders” as skateboarding wasn’t considered anything but pure trouble, problematic and vandalistic.

Your film highlights the strong link between surfing and skating. From a cultural standpoint, what do you think are the similarities and differences between the two?

They’re both similar in their physical expression and how you move on the board, and both at that time were renegade sports – sports that precluded parental involvement. Both activities were done in locations where there were no adults: out in the breaking surf and in back alleys, empty playgrounds and dilapidated backyards.

You were a skateboard champion yourself and then diversified. Was it easy to transition from being a skater to being an entrepreneur with Powell Peralta?

It was easy for me only because I was so deeply interested in doing it. I was incredibly hungry to be a part of the founding of a progressive skateboard company, and I found it even more rewarding than my own professional skateboard career because there were so many things to do and the opportunity allowed me to develop so many talents within myself that I never knew were there. It was nothing short of a magic opportunity that had a tremendous impact on my life.

Skateboarding could have been just another sport, but it turned into a cultural phenomenon. How did that culture develop, and how important were people like writer-photographers Craig Stecyk and Glen Friedman in making it happen?

Right from the beginning it established itself as a culture with its own terms, with its own look, temperament and rules, if you will. Stecyk and Friedman were important in that they were both on the inside and both really skilled photographers documenting so much of what was happening in real time.

I’ve heard people describe certain skateboarders as “stylists”. Some even say that “style was everything”. That’s interesting because you wouldn’t describe a baseball player as a stylist. Who springs to mind when you think about “stylist” skateboarders? Do you think it can be considered an art form?

Any sport can be an art form because physical expression can be beautiful, and usually is beautiful. Some athletes accentuate the technical side of their sport, some the aggressive side and some the beautiful side, and some athletes express all aspects. When we began skating, we were riding equipment that was extremely limiting, so the manoeuvres we could perform on the boards were simple. Since they were so simple, we had to perform them beautifully and flawlessly, because we couldn’t hide imperfections skating in such a simple manner, so style became more important than any other aspect.

You experienced the skate world in both the ’70s and ’80s, first with the Z-Boys and then with the Bones Brigade. How did skateboarding culture evolve over those two decades?

Skateboarding in the ’70s was in a sense a “free-forall” in that it was all so new. It was the initial explosion. Equipment and terrain at that time was developing incredibly fast, and since it was developing so fast, a million mistakes happened. It was a time of furious trial and error with endless errors. In the ’80s, boards, wheels and trucks standardised somewhat and vertical ramps standardised to a degree which then allowed the prominent skaters at that time to really begin excelling and developing modern skateboarding, which is why so many of today’s modern manoeuvres were developed between the years 1982 and 1988.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of your documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. How do you look back on the experience of making this film?

It was fun and we were fortunate to get a company like Vans to finance it for us.

The skateboarding scene you were part of had a huge influence on music, even spawning genres like skate punk, from Suicidal Tendencies to NOFX and Blink-182.

Modern music has underscored every generation of skateboarding; it went from rock and roll to punk to new wave to rap and continues on.

Skate culture has also inspired the visual arts. I’m thinking artists like Gabriel Orozco, Shepard Fairey, Jim Houser and Mark Flood. How would you describe that influence?

There seems to be a legitimate cosmic connection between being a skateboarder and being an artist. Perhaps it’s because to be a good skateboarder, you have to be flexible, liberal and you have to have an open mind. You have to be adaptable and you have to be able to overcome continuous disappointment, which are all qualities that make for a good artist.