If you don't know these names, then you do not own a skateboard--probably never have, never will. You do not subscribe to Thrasher or Skateboard or Slap or Juice. You do not have a poster of Tony Hawk tacked to your bedroom wall. You've never surreptitiously drained a swimming pool at midnight to skate it at sunrise. You've never rolled an ankle or ridden the rail or gone vert, and you sure as hell have no idea how to perform a Blunt Fakie or a Backside Shove-It Frontside Nosegrind, much less even know what they are. You aren't Generation X-Games.
So, take it on faith if you must: Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva are pioneers, legends, golden gods on wooden decks who rode their way into fame and, for a while, fortune via the skateboard mags in the 1970s. As Tony Hawk wrote in his 2000 autobiography Occupation: Skateboarder, Peralta is "the Arnold Palmer of skateboarding," which would have made Alva the sport's Nicklaus, Hogan and Crenshaw rolled into one. Don't believe me, just ask them. Or watch Peralta's Dogtown and Z-Boys, unspooling at a theater near you courtesy of Sony Classics, which has been schlepping the two boys cross-country to tout the film that took top-doc honors at the Sundance Film Fest last year and the Independent Spirit Awards a few weeks ago. It's a love letter masquerading as a backward-glancing tell-all, an infomercial (partially paid for by the Vans shoe company) offered as art--in other words, a film by Peralta about Peralta and how he and the so-called Z-Boys, surfers-turned-skaters from the wrong side of the Santa Monica pier, shredded their way into the history books, or at least its footnotes.
"When we grew up in California, we were constantly kind of shit on by the New York establishment, and the reason we were shit on was because it was like, 'Hey, there's no culture out here. This is a complete cultural wasteland,'" Peralta says. "In front of you is the ocean--there's nothing. And behind you is the desert--there's nothing. You have no historical architecture, you have no art out here, and we constantly get that beat into us. This gave us the chance to go, 'You know what, there is culture out here. And, in fact, not only is there a rich culture out here, but now, this day and age, it's shipped all over the world.' The Japanese kids want it, the European kids want it, so it is a chance for us to...a chance to..." He pauses. "It's that 'v' word."
"Validity?" Alva offers.
"Not validity, not vindictive," Peralta says. "It's when you get something back--vindication! It's like a vindication. And it's a terrific feeling...With Tony Alva and Tony Hawk, these guys [had] the same effect on the culture they affected that Joe DiMaggio had 60 years ago. People don't know this, and I think it's important for them to know this: Skateboarding is a serious activity to be taken seriously. It's not a yo-yo, like they thought when we were doing it."
In the 1970s, they were just nowhere kids killing time in the beachfront wastelands, surfing concrete waves when the ocean was playing dead. Peralta, Alva and guys with names like Jay Adams, Chris Cahill, Shogu Kubo, Wentzle Ruml and Bob Biniak staked out their territory: a stretch of beach that spread from Santa Monica south to Venice and just beyond--Dogtown, it would come to be known, a refuge for artists, junkies, dropout teens, suburban wanderers and other comers with boards and balls. They surfed deadly waves, dodging the remnants of amusement parks that once attracted tourists decades earlier; they zigged and zagged between jagged wooden stumps and shards of metal that once beckoned the day-trippers. And they marked their territory by dropping bricks and carburetors on trespassers from the piers.
It was in Dogtown that Skip Engblom and Jeff Ho, visionaries and dopers and baby sitters, went into business, starting the Jeff Ho & Zephyr Productions Surf Shop. Their partner was Craig Stecyk, who took the native markings--the graffiti that seemingly covered every surface of Dogtown--and transferred them to the boards Ho was designing. The trio gave surfing, and skating, its look, its aesthetic, its vibe. They made their young stable of skaters--the Zephyr Team, the Z-Boys--and photographer Glen E. Friedman made them famous, snapping still pics of kids moving at the speed of sound (hard rock, till it gave way to hardcore punk).