by Joe Donnelly
To get on the team, the kids had to prove their mettle in the water at the Cove—where guys like Engblom and Ho and Zephyr men’s team members Ronnie Jay and Wayne Saunders ruled the waves. Before you could even get in the water, though, you might be required to do time on rat patrol. Rat patrol involved bombing interlopers off the beach with stones, bottles, wet sand, or whatever else was at hand. This intense localism, which became a part of the Dogtown/Z-Boys ethos, was born in part from the need to keep kooks away from the dangerous breaks of the Cove, where local knowledge could mean the difference between catching a wave and becoming a casualty. But it wasn’t just a safety concern. As surf spots go, theirs was small, gritty, and barrio-like, and what little they had—a block of shoreline and one good wave—they had to protect fiercely.
“We were aware of it because we’d go surfing in Leucadia or Santa Barbara, where everything was beautiful and the trees went down to the beach and there was no smog on the horizon and you didn’t have to worry about getting your tires popped,” says Stacy Peralta. “We went to the beach here, and there were certain streets you just didn’t go down because of the gangs and stuff like that. It wasn’t like that in San Diego or in the South Bay.”
Most of the Z-Boys came from financially stressed, broken homes, but the team “gave us a sense of family and empowerment,” says Engblom. “We had an us-against-them mentality. It was so much more than just the business.” The team was like a secret society, whose headquarters was the Zephyr shop. It was the kind of clubhouse a teenager could only dream of, chaperoned as it was by three barely adults.
“Parents would just drop their kids off with lunches and tell them they’d pick them up at five. We’re trying to run a business, and I’ve got this group of kids who are just hanging out continuously,” says Engblom. “The thing is, with me being so young and Jeff being so young and Craig being so young, it’s hard to drop-kick somebody to the curb.”
Given their lifestyles at the time—workdays were no reason not to make a trip to Star Liquor for beer or to the backroom for a toke—the shop owners weren’t exactly in a position to preach about what not to do. Even so, they provided things that were hard to find at home or on the streets for the kids who were hanging around. Sometimes it was something as simple as shoes—Ho says he was in a constant losing battle to keep good shoes on their feet. Other times it was something more complex.
“All of us knew we weren’t going to get respect playing football. We weren’t good enough. Or academically,” says Peralta. But earning a Zephyr team shirt was a way they could make their mark. “So we all wanted to do that.”
As Alva puts it, “Skip gave me that kind of attitude where it was like, ‘Hey, you got the skills, you got the talent, you got the drive, get out there and kick ass.’”
That attitude would germinate among the kids as they pushed themselves in the surf and on the concrete, waiting for a chance to show the world what they had going on.
“I knew it was something, I just didn’t know what it was,” says Engblom. “I could feel it was something special. I mean, these guys used to go out and practice every day on Bicknell Hill, and these were guys that had no sense of discipline or sense of order. But they all showed up every day because they knew that we had to go do this to excel, because somehow, in the back of everybody’s mind, we knew this thing down there was going to be something.”
“Down there” was the 1975 Del Mar Ocean Festival, where Bahne and Cadillac wheels sponsored the Del Mar Nationals as a showcase for skateboarding’s resurgence. Del Mar, a well-behaved community just north of San Diego, appeared to be all that was right about the California Dream—sunshine, safe communities, and soft rock. It was a different world from Dogtown, and the Z-Boys were intent on going down there to let everybody know it.
“We had to work these people over,” says Engblom. “We had to validate our existence.”
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Skateboarding had gone back underground after its brief fling with mainstream popularity in the early sixties. It was perceived to be too dangerous, and the equipment—with slippery clay wheels—wasn’t really accommodating to the dilettantes. But it had never let up in Dogtown. Most of the surfers skated around town when the waves weren’t up. Particularly the ones who would make up the core of the Z-Boys. Skateboarding, however, started booming again in the early seventies, when Cadillac introduced the first urethane wheels. Technology was finally catching up to the imaginations of Tony Alva, Jay Adams, and the others who had long been outperforming their equipment.
Several other factors—a “disharmonic convergence,” in Stacy Peralta’s words—would come together to set the stage for the Z-Boys’ assault on the Del Mar Nationals.
One was geography. Los Angeles is full of slopes, canyons, drainage gullies, and all sorts of natural assets civic leaders have historically paved over. Santa Monica and vicinity was particularly rich in playgrounds with high banks. There was Mar Vista Middle School, Paul Revere Junior High in Pacific Palisades, Kenter Canyon, and Bellagio. At these spots the waves were always up, and the Z-Boys found them just right for fashioning a new style of skateboarding that emulated their favorite Hawaiian surfer, Larry Bertleman.
Los Angeles also has one of the greatest concentrations of backyard pools in the universe. In the mid-seventies, the worst drought in the city’s history drained them in unprecedented numbers. For Alva, Adams, Muir, Biniak, and the rest, the empty pools were the jewels of their delinquent empire. Steep and smooth, the bowls provided ample opportunities for aggressive skateboarding.
The Z-Boys would congregate at these playgrounds and pools and drive one another to new levels, refining a low-center-of-gravity, surf-influenced style that featured hard slash-backs at the tops of the concrete waves. They called these turns “Berts” in honor of Bertleman. In the pools, the coping on the lips was the line in the sand they were already starting to cross. Their pool prowess made an in-joke of the 1975 Skateboarder relaunch issue that featured a guy on the cover carving a turn barely four feet up a pool wall.
Jimi Hendrix, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, and Led Zeppelin provided the soundtrack to the boys’ pool parties and street sessions. The outings were charged with teenage aggression and the adrenaline of dodging the cops as they violated public ordinances or trespassed on private property and indulged in the occasional breaking and entering. They had a “fuck you” attitude, and if you messed with the Z-Boys you would likely get your head knocked.
The world outside Dogtown would have to wait until the Del Mar competition to get a taste of what the Z-Boys were cooking, but to get an understanding of how radical it was, you have to understand a bit about the accepted standards of skateboarding in the mid-seventies. By and large, it was done on flat surfaces in an upright position. Things like handstands and 360s, tick-tack turns and nose wheelies were de rigueur. It looked like synchronized swimming on wheels. It had far less drama than figure skating. It only seems so ridiculous now because of what the Z-Boys did to it.
Which was to take it from whitebread, well-to-do Del Mar and the beach strands and competition platforms where it had died numerous deaths before and bring it back to the streets. They shifted the paradigm. It went from kook to cool.
Peralta’s Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary is a barrage of indelible moments and images that communicate this energy. One of the raddest scenes is of Jay Adams debuting for the Zephyr team at Del Mar.
Entering the competition square, he gets lower and pumps harder than anyone outside of Dogtown had ever imagined. Just when it looks like he’s going off the end of the raised competition platform, he slashes a Bert at the square edge of the skateboarding world. Then, as if to emphasize the point, he bunny-hops back across the platform in front of the judges, in a gesture of contempt of their rules and limitations. Before his two minutes are up, he skates off the platform and carves a violent turn, proving again that the world isn’t flat. The other t
eams shake their heads and complain. The judges don’t know what to do. The crowd goes crazy.
“The Dogtown guys came down to that competition and just terrorized everybody,” remembers Warren Bolster, who would be the editor of Skateboarder when it relaunched a couple of months later. “These guys were so different and unique. They made quite an impression.”
Two years later the world would hear Johnny Rotten proclaim himself an anarchist, but that was arguably the birth of punk.
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As with skateboarding itself, interest in the Z-Boys and Dogtown never really went away. It just went underground or entered the mythology of the culture’s inner circle. The current Z-Boy fever, though, can be traced back most directly to a story by Greg Beato, in the March 1999 issue of Spin, titled “The Lords of Dogtown.” Beato, a freelance writer, had been given the assignment after an editor saw an advance of Michael Brooke’s The Concrete Wave: The History of Skateboarding. The Dogtown sections of the book jumped out at him. Following Spin, Hollywood came knocking. Rights to the life stories of various Z-Boys were purchased, and the machine started its slow, usually futile grind.
At the same time, Stacy Peralta’s life and career were at a crossroads. It had been years since he left Powell-Peralta, started in 1979 and at one time the most influential skateboarding company in the world. His own foray into television as a director and producer had not been terribly fulfilling. Then there was an emotionally draining divorce. At some point in the middle of all this, he happened upon some old photographs of the Z-Boys in action. The pictures had the same effect on him as they seem to have on everybody.
Peralta went for a hike, thought about the prospects of Hollywood deciding who would play Alva and Adams and the rest, and called Craig Stecyk when he came back down. Work on the documentary, funded by Vans (the same company Jeff Ho tried to coerce into giving the kids shoes thirty years ago), began in earnest.
The documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2001. In skateboarding parlance, it killed. Most of the gang assembled for the premiere. Skip Engblom says it was obvious from the moment he touched down that the Z-Boys, many of whom hadn’t seen each other in twenty-five years, were in full effect.
“I got off a plane. I got on this shuttle. I showed up at this house, and here are Wentzle [Ruml] and [Bob] Biniak sitting at a table. We looked at each other. Stacy walked in. We started laughing. We didn’t say anything for the first five minutes. We just cracked up laughing,” says Engblom. “We decided to walk into town to get some coffee and something to eat, right? We’re walking, and this is a huge event and people don’t know who we are or anything, but we’re walking down the street and people are responding to us, and what they’re responding to is that collectively we have this energy level that is so amazing. It’s so intense that people, for whatever reason, they don’t even understand it, but they get sucked into it. They get sucked into this black hole of Z-Boydom.”
It didn’t take long after Del Mar for Z-Boydom to suck the rest of the world in. Then, like a black hole does when the gravity becomes too much, it started collapsing in on itself.
It wasn’t just the skateboarding that created this pull, although looking at the overall cultural impact of the Dogtown movement, it’s sometimes easy to forget how good these guys were. Tony “Mad Dog” Alva was becoming the archetypal all-around skater in pools, on the banked playgrounds, or going for speed. He had a style and charisma that couldn’t be matched. “Bullet” Bob Biniak was considered the fastest skater in the world and the one many say had the biggest balls. He’d try anything and often be the first to do so. Shogo Kubo was known for strength and flair. Jim Muir was earning a reputation as one of the hottest pool riders around. Stacy Peralta was smooth and precise, able to beat the “down Southers” at their own game while subverting it with the Dogtown style. And then there was Jay Adams. Peralta likens Adams to Mozart on wheels.
“The movie Amadeus, when Amadeus comes to the court where Salieri is, and Salieri plays a piece and then Mozart sits down and says, ‘I think I can do this,’ and he plays the piece so much better than Salieri could have ever conceived—he starts playing it, and he adds all this stuff to it without really knowing what he’s doing, it just starts coming through him—that was Jay Adams,” says Peralta. “Most people have a twenty-amp plug in them. This guy had one hundred amps. All the time.”
Every time the boys skated together—especially in the pools they were so fond of crashing—it seemed like there was a new breakthrough. During these sessions, they started laying down the basic language of modern skateboarding. Pushed by Peralta, Biniak finally nailed a frontside kick turn at vert. Not long after, Peralta started stringing them together from tile to tile and a frontside forever was invented. Today, kids take this stuff for granted. It’s part of the lexicon. Back then, it was almost unimaginable.
Not everybody saw what the Z-Boys were doing as progress. In a now-celebrated remark, Skateboarding Association executive director Sally Anne Miller told People magazine that Tony Alva represented “everything that was vile in the sport.” This was after Alva had appeared as Leif Garrett’s thug rival, Tony Bluetile, in the 1977 movie Skateboard.
The assault on polite society didn’t stop with Del Mar. In a series of stories and images that appeared in Skateboarder and then other magazines like Thrasher, Craig Stecyk and his young protégé, photographer Glen E. Friedman, began building the legend of Dogtown and the Z-Boys. In stark black and white that fit the mood of their beachside dystopia, Friedman introduced teenagers to Tony Alva flipping them off as his kicktail perched impossibly on the lip of a pool. There were shots of bombed-out buildings and graffiti-splattered walls. Then there was Jay Adams grinding the coping of some fat cat’s pool with such disdain it looked like class warfare. Stecyk and Friedman created a raw, unapologetic style of documentation that put the boys’ skating in the context of their hardcore, uncompromising lifestyle. It became the aesthetic template for skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and everything cool.
The Z-Boys’ style and attitude resonated across the country. Kids in Michigan spray painted their own versions of Stecyk’s Dogtown graffiti on their homemade halfpipes. San Francisco artist Barry McGee, a.k.a. Twist, is said to have tagged his first wall with the Dogtown cross. In D.C., Ian MacKaye of Fugazi fame was dressing like he was from Venice. (MacKaye, Henry Rollins, Jeff Ament, and Sean Penn were eager contributors to Peralta’s documentary.)
Today, hip contemporary galleries like LA’s New Image and New York’s Alleged are dominated by skateboarder artists such as Ed Templeton, Mark Gonzales, and Thomas Campbell. Rich Jacobs, who curated a show of his peers’ work at New Image this summer, explains the impact the Dogtown aesthetic had on him and friends like MacKaye. “I remember going to the skateboard shop in Long Beach and getting Skateboarder and being amazed at what they were doing. Stecyk was really good at documenting what was going on with his friends,” he says. “In my personal opinion, it was the spirit and the energy as much as anything, going a little beyond being a rebellious teenager. They were attacking life with a vengeance that seems rawer than just the average teenager.”
“Everything else seemed so mellow and laid-back in the seventies. They weren’t that way. They seemed crazy to me.”
If Sally Anne Miller was trying to protect the sanctity of organized skateboarding, she was fighting a losing battle. Posters of Alva and Adams were being pinned up on teenagers’ walls almost as fast as those of Farrah Fawcett-Majors. To not understand why is to not understand the heart of male adolescence. As a young boy in 1976, you may have dreamed of being with Farrah Fawcett, but you dreamed of being Tony Alva or Jay Adams.
The business end of skateboarding wasn’t as slow on the uptake as was Ms. Miller.
“After we made the scene in Del Mar, there were skate companies coming after us and offering us things. People started turning them down at first, but then, after a w
hile, the team started to unravel,” recalls Bob Biniak over coffee at the type of shop that wouldn’t have been seen within miles of Main Street back in the day. Compact and still athletic-looking, Biniak is one of a handful of original Z-Boys who never left the area. “We all came from nothing. We wanted the BMWs, and we wanted the stuff, and that was partly how we got those things, and it was kind of a sad story.”
Jeff Ho did his best to keep things together, but the Zephyr shop just couldn’t compete with big companies like Gordon & Smith and Logan Earth Ski. Adding to the uncertainty, there were production problems with a signature line of fiberglass-deck skateboards the shop was trying to roll out with Jay Adams’s stepfather, Kent Sherwood. That partnership dissolved, and Sherwood started his own Z-Flex label. Adams and others went with him. The shop closed down soon after the team split up.
“The sponsorship money, all the corporate crap, guys wanting to make money and shit. Intellectually, I could understand it, because everybody had to move on and do their own thing, but it ripped everything up,” says Ho. “It was just over.”
Big sponsors picked the team members off one by one and started trotting out the Dogtown dog-and-pony show. For Biniak there would be a halftime demonstration in front of 85,000 people at a Rams-Raiders game at the Coliseum. For Nathan Pratt it would be a jump stunt in a movie for a fee negotiated by Engblom at $300 per foot (he’d warned that Pratt never jumped less than fifteen feet). Alva and Peralta would appear in movies and TV shows. Peralta even guested on Charlie’s Angels.
It was high times, and the Z-Boys were quick to embrace the fame, fortune, and party. Biniak’s apartment was the headquarters.