L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  “Every one of the boys would come over. I’d be in there banging chicks, and they’d be going, ‘Give me a couple of Thai sticks,’ and I’d say, ‘Go ahead, take a few,’ and they’d go in my laundry basket. I had a wicker laundry basket full of them,” Biniak says with a chuckle. “I was on my own from the age of fourteen. I had no parental guidance. I was running wild. We wanted to skate, party, and chase all the richest chicks up in the Palisades and see what we could catch.”

  Now the boys were running wild with money and license. Rich hangers-on appeared on the scene, wanting to be down with Dogtown. They gravitated to the Hollywood nights. Sponsors sometimes indulged their ever-increasing recreational drug use with freebies.

  By 1977, to the outside world, the Dogtown scene was exploding. Jim Muir and Wes Humpston, another local who used to embellish skateboards with his hand-drawn art, trademarked the Dogtown name and went into business with some guys from New York. Peralta left Gordon & Smith and hooked up with George Powell to form what would become Powell-Peralta. An investor backed Tony Alva to start up his own line of skates. Skateboarding was booming. Shot out of the double barrel of urethane wheels and an attitude adjustment courtesy of the Z-Boys’ punk-rock personas, it had turned into a $400 million business. For a while, Skateboarder was the hottest title on the newsstand.

  It was a dizzy, headfirst time, but the inevitable passing of the Zephyr team coincided with the inevitable passing of their youth. Most of the team had graduated or dropped out of high school by 1978, and it was clear that the big world outside Dogtown had different plans for each of them. Before that would happen, though, they had one last brief and brilliant moment together. It was at a place they called Dino’s Dogbowl.

  ◆◆◆

  Dino was a kid with terminal cancer who looked up to the Z-Boys. In the summer and fall of 1978, he fulfilled a personal “make a wish” and got his dad to drain their pool in wealthy north Santa Monica. It was open only to Z-Boys and their guests, and it became the place where they rekindled the old Dogtown spirit. “It was like back to the old times because it was just us,” remembers Peralta. “There weren’t any officials, and it wasn’t sanctioned. It was pure again for a while.”

  The Dogbowl sessions are still legendary. The friendly competitive fire was back, and the boys pushed each other further and further above the coping. Then, during one of the sessions, nobody’s too sure on which day, Tony Alva barreled up the wall to vert. He blasted past the coping and shot out into open air. He grabbed his board, turned his nose and reentered. Alva had landed the first aerial. The line in the sand had been crossed, and the Z-Boys had changed skateboarding forever, again.

  “It just felt like the ultimate adrenaline rush. We thought hitting the lip was the limit,” Alva says of that day. “I realized I had more control over gravity. There was a whole new level to get to now.”

  The Dogbowl sessions lasted until Marina del Rey built a skatepark that became the place to go. The Z-Boys dispersed, and though they would ride together from time to time, ruling wherever they went, it was never on again like it was at the Dogbowl.

  By the end of 1980, skateboarding had faded from view, too, going down in a sea of insurance issues, recession, and mothers who didn’t want their sons to grow up to be Z-Boys. Wentzle Ruml fled to the East Coast to escape the hard-partying lifestyle. Biniak went to college. Even Alva was out of circulation for a while as he tested the waters of higher education before deciding the mainstream world was not for him.

  Punk rock, since its West Coast inception, had been the sonic soul mate of the Dogtown scene. Jim Muir’s younger brother, Mike, was the lead singer for seminal hardcore band Suicidal Tendencies. In punk, Jay Adams discovered another outlet for the hundred watts of aggression he had brought to skating. Although the Z-Boys had the reputation of never taking any shit, they didn’t go looking for fights. With everyone gunning for them, they didn’t have to. In the punk-rock scene, however, Adams admits he found an arena for what appeared to be sanctioned violence.

  “During that time, I was into LA punk rock,” Adams writes from jail in Hawaii, where he’s serving time on a drug bust. “Life was filled with violence. In order for me to have a good night, somebody else had to have a very bad night. Now that I’m older, I know that shit ain’t right, but at the time, it was fun and games.”

  It stopped being fun and games after a typically chaotic Suicidal show in the Valley. On the way home a tequila-soaked Adams and his crew made their usual stop at Oki Dog in Hollywood. A gay couple, one guy white and the other black, strolled by and met with typical catcalls. Happens all the time, right? Only this time the couple decided to shout back—something along the lines of “Fuck you, punk-rock assholes.”

  To Adams, those were fighting words. He and a friend put the guys on the ground and bolted. Unfortunately, the rest of the crowd moved in with steel boots and didn’t stop until one of the guys was dead. Initially arrested for murder, Adams ended up serving a six-month sentence for felony assault.

  If you wanted to look for a sad epitaph for this story, that would be it. But the Z-Boys’ legacy endured. Stacy Peralta and Tony Alva, through their skate companies, introduced the world to the likes of Christian Hosoi, Tommy Guerrero, Mark Gonzales, Steve Alba, and, eventually, Tony Hawk. One of the most famous and recognizable athletes in the world, Hawk’s first years as a professional skateboarder were spent as an original member of Powell-Peralta’s famed Bones Brigade.

  With Powell-Peralta, Craig Stecyk and Stacy Peralta would also pioneer the use of video to document not just the most progressive skating, but the irreverent, self-aware, and barely legal exploits of the Bones Brigade in equal measure. Powell-Peralta’s postmodern marketing stunts, many of them imagined by Stecyk, would influence Spike Jonze, Shepard Fairey, and everything from Vice to Jackass. Wes Humpston and Jim Muir would formalize Stecyk’s initial artistic impulse and make production-level graphics on skateboards the industry standard.

  In effect, the Z-Boys remade skateboarding in their own image, an image that is still haunted by Pacific Ocean Park and the ghosts of Dogtown, and now skateboarding has remade youth culture in its image. It’s the three billion-dollar cornerstone of an extreme-sports franchise that rises from ESPN to Capital Cities/ABC up to Disney. Skateparks are again flourishing, this time in partnership with mega-mall developers. All of which helps explain why Stecyk and Peralta’s documentary is so aptly subtitled A Film About the Birth of the Now. It also helps explain why New Line has a feature film in the works, once again hoping to capitalize on the Z-Boys effect out there in the prized demographic of the teenage wasteland. One wonders if all the renewed interest in the Zephyr Competition Skate Team, once the fiery soul of skateboarding, can save it from this corporate takeover. At least Peralta won’t have to worry about how the story comes out. He’s been hired to write the script.

  Understanding Craig Stecyk

  Originally published as “Father of the Now”

  New Times Los Angeles, September 12, 2002

  Author’s note: This is sort of the second part of an accidental ontology I began when I was researching and reporting the Dogtown story for the LA Weekly. While putting that story together, the enigmatic C. R. Stecyk III made quite an impression on me. The more I learned about Stecyk, the more I wanted to know and the more I knew, the more I came to understand how much he had shaped the West Coast aesthetic while remaining an underground figure. Stecyk spoke in riddles, wrote under a pseudonym, and left his art unsigned by the roadside or tacked to trees. He had hard-earned trust issues and skirted along the edges of reclusion and asceticism, keeping company with a small inner circle. I thought he was a foundational figure, a confounding and unheralded genius, and I wanted to get his story out from the shadows.

  Decades ago, Craig R. Stecyk III tagged the walls near his seedy surf spot at Pacific Ocean Park, then a crumbling pier of abandoned rides and amusement parlors straddling the V
enice and Santa Monica border. Among the graffiti were the terms POP and DOGTOWN running horizontally and vertically in a cross, a rat’s head in the skull’s position over crossbones, with the warning, “death to invaders.” At first, these markings were little more than youthful insolence, meant to stake territorial claim for his band of surfers and skateboarders, many of whom were recently glorified in the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys. In the seventies and eighties, though, through enterprises like Jeff Ho’s Zephyr Surf Shop, Dogtown Skates, and Powell Peralta skateboarding company, these images would become among the first widely disseminated skateboarder graphic art: the first icons of a radical, street-savvy youth culture that reflected the attitudes of Stecyk and his Dogtown peers. Meanwhile, in magazines like Skateboarder and Thrasher, Stecyk’s photos and essays about the scofflaw Z-Boys skateboarding team created and spread the Dogtown myth to eager adolescents across the country.

  For this, many people credit Stecyk with all but inventing, and at the very least codifying, the modern skateboard ethos. For this, also, he has been called an outlaw and a reprobate. But to those in the surf and skate communities, he’s more often viewed as a groundbreaker, the original skateboard artist—even a god. Yet in person, Craig Stecyk doesn’t look any of those parts. In person, he looks like a walking joke about the contrast between the physical and the metaphysical.

  Metaphysically, it could be argued that he’s a big-bang theory incarnate, a major player in the decisive events of the past twenty-five years that have characterized the surf and skate cultures and, as a result, set the stage for how much of the world looks and feels to a large segment of the under-thirty crowd.

  Physically, Stecyk’s more demure. He’s rangy and bald, with a bearing that might be imposing if he didn’t droop like a shirt hung on a hook instead of a hanger. The droopiness may come from the time tumors were removed from his spine or from when his knee had to be rebuilt or his shoulder reconstructed. Then there’s that face, which suggests Clint Eastwood’s sidekick in those movies with the orangutan.

  Instead of god or outlaw artist, he looks more like your average Joe. Except, maybe, for the smile. It’s a Mona Lisa one, inscrutable, slightly bemused. There’s something in that smile that says he’s a step ahead of you. It’s the smile of a guy who can read the ocean. A guy who knows days in advance when a swell is going to break at the old Malibu Pit, where the spirit of Miklos Sandor “Da Cat” Dora III still hums in his ear like the sea breeze blowing across the Pacific Coast Highway. It’s the smile of a cat that didn’t get any milk, but instead drank your beer and smoked your cigarettes and left behind a quick sketch on a napkin for payment. The smile, like the man, confounds friends and strangers alike.

  Robert Williams, the famed “lowbrow” artist who’s known Stecyk through many of his embodiments, had a typical reaction when he first met him. “I didn’t like the guy,” recalls Williams. “It took me a long time to understand him because he talks in abstract parables. Then, once he’s in the background of your life for long enough, you begin to understand him, and even like him.”

  Understanding Stecyk is the difficult part, largely because he’s so elusive. He likes to stay in the background, a Wizard of Oz behind the curtain. He rarely comes forward to take credit or even cash the check for what he’s done. Some say he fears acclaim, and others say he’s scared of responsibility. Maybe he just likes it that way. Whatever it is, thanks to the popularity of the Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary, the mainstream is getting its first fleeting glimpses of Stecyk as the man who (under the alias John Smythe) first photographed and wrote about Dogtown and the Z-Boys in a hyper-intense style that is still being copied in skateboarding magazines today.

  Known as the “Dogtown Chronicles,” his photos, articles, and essays appeared in Skateboarder magazine from 1975 to 1980 and are often regarded as a print-journalism branch of the punk movement. Long a cult phenomenon and gospel within the skateboarding community, the series eventually caught the eye of Spin writer Greg Beato, who published a nostalgic article about the feats of Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, Jay Adams, and company—the Z-Boys—called “The Lords of Dogtown” in 1999. Always eager for fresh fodder to feed the kids, Hollywood got interested based on the article, which led to this spring’s well-regarded Dogtown and Z-Boys documentary (which Stecyk cowrote with director Stacy Peralta).

  The Dogtown phenomenon, billed in the doc as “the birth of the now,” has since become a cottage industry. Recently, Stecyk protégé and renowned punk and rap photographer Glen E. Friedman published Dogtown—The Legend of the Z-Boys, a photo history of the era that includes a compilation of Stecyk’s Dogtown-era articles. There is also a big Hollywood feature film in the works that will put Stecyk and the Dogtown myth on parade for an even larger commercial audience. Vans shoes, an original Z-Boys sponsor, has reintroduced an entire line of Dogtown shoes, shirts, and hats. Everyone from Peralta to Tony Alva to Glen Friedman will tell you none of this would have happened if Stecyk hadn’t been there at the beginning to portray the breakthrough energy and attitude of the Z-Boys in his own myth-making way.

  Beyond all that, skateboarding, and its spiritual forebear, surfing, has become the language of youth—shaping stylistic approaches to television, sports programming, movies, music and music video, fashion, marketing, and, most profoundly, the current art scene. In the art world, skate and surf artists fill hip galleries like Los Angeles’s New Image Art and have found their way into venerable institutions such as the Whitney, which recently featured surf and skate artists Margaret Kilgallen and Chris Johanson at its biennial.

  From the Dogtown hype, to the X-Games, to MTV’s Jackass (a direct descendant of Stecyk’s early skateboarding videos for Powell Peralta) to even the Red Hot Chili Peppers name-checking Dogtown in “By The Way,” the signs that we’ve been indelibly marked by the hand of Craig Stecyk are everywhere.

  “His interests became society’s interests,” says Skip Engblom, a partner in the Zephyr Surf Shop that spawned the Z-Boys in the mid-seventies and the skate team’s manager. “It’s just that he had the ability to articulate what he was feeling through his artwork, painting, photography, and words. He was able to articulate things and create an entire universe.”

  Some people would jump at the sort of recognition Stecyk seems primed for, but when the spotlight shines on his corner of the stage, he recedes into the shadows. He renounces his role in the making of the Z-Boys documentary and claims to want nothing to do with the Hollywood feature. He’s in no hurry to explain how this universe came to be, even though he’s the likely answer. In fact, he seems pained when asked to comment on his role in the current culture.

  “There’s nothing worse than someone talking about himself,” Stecyk bemoans. “It’s absolutely the most boring fucking bunch of shit. Just talk to someone else and whatever they say about me is fine.”

  OK. Here’s someone:

  “I was twenty-one, and it was like God walked in the door,” says Aaron Rose.

  Rose, an artist and curator, is referring to the time back in 1992 when he put together one of the first exhibits to focus on the skateboarder art explosion at his catalytic Alleged Gallery in New York. The show, a precocious demonstration of the talents of a whole generation of visual and conceptual artists, featured artists like Ed Templeton, Barry “Twist” McGee, Chris Johanson, and Mike Mills—who grew up in a street, surf, and skate culture shaped by Craig Stecyk.

  “I think that Craig and the movement he was a part of—the whole Dogtown phenomenon—had an incredible effect on this whole generation of artists that I’m a part of. I took art classes my whole life, but the first time a piece of art moved me was seeing the Dogtown cross painted on a wall in Venice,” says Rose, currently curating a three-year-long billboard display that will feature some of these same skate artists. “It was like, ‘Oh, art can be cool, it doesn’t have to be boring or unreachable.’”

  This sort of homage turns Stecyk’s
enigmatic smile into a grimace.

  “I mean, you know, uhhhhhh,” he groans, “let’s talk about the triangulation of the back of fucking coupes or something.”

  The what? Chicken coops?

  “No, power transfer and coupes versus, like, open vehicles where there’s no struts across the top. Trigonometry or something...three-dimensional models.”

  This is typical Stecyk. He twists talk about his past into debates about Fords versus Chevys. He turns retrospect questions about his life into historical lectures about his hometown and era. Even as the curtain slowly peels back to reveal the wizard as a man, Stecyk defies easy understanding or critical categorization. He’s as broke as ever, bearing a painful divorce, suffering the deaths of many who matter to him, has no permanent address, pays bills with certified checks, and stubbornly refuses to cash in on the current acclaim.

  The only explanation he offers: “I didn’t choose this life. It chose me.”

  Forget about the mainline and the fast lane; the edge of the glide is all that is of value. The true skater surveys all that is offered, takes all that is given, goes after the rest, and leaves nothing to chance. In a society on hold and a planet on self-destruct, the only safe recourse is an insane approach.

  We’re talking attitude: the ability to deal with a given set of predetermined circumstances and to extract what you want and discard the rest. Skaters by their very nature are urban guerillas: the future foragers of the present working out in a society dictated by principles of the past. The skater makes everyday use of the useless artifacts of the technological burden. The skating urban anarchist employs the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways the original architects never dreamed of; sidewalks for walking, curbs for parking, streets for driving, pipes for liquids, sewers for refuse, etcetera, have all been reworked into a new social order.