L.A. Man

by Joe Donnelly

  —John Smythe, a.k.a. Craig Stecyk, from the “Dogtown Chronicles,” Skateboarder magazine, 1980.

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  The words are now accepted as fact, but when Stecyk wrote the “Dogtown Chronicles” and manifestos like “Skate and Destroy” for Thrasher magazine in 1980, they offered put-upon kids the oldest new way of looking at things in the book, which was basically, “Fuck you! You suck! We’re going do things our way!”

  In the hands of the Z-Boys and the next-generation skaters like Mark Gonzales and Christian Hosoi whom they inspired, that attitude rapidly morphed skateboarding from a tame distraction for surfers caught on a day without waves into a subversive and rebellious lifestyle for kids everywhere. It was the official sport of punks. In retrospect, it’s not surprising that Craig Stecyk would be the one to sound the rebel yell. He was in the right place at the right time and had the right tools. If he will admit to anything, it’s that he’s a product of his environment, having come of age in a place and time when the extraordinary was everyday. Consider that he grew up next to a bust of Will Rogers and an attendant plaque that read: “The Main Street of America ends here.”

  “Just another victim of Manifest Destiny” is how he puts it.

  He’s not kidding about that. Both sides of his family have colorful histories that Stecyk doles out in small, cryptic parcels. Grandparents with whispered IRA links, frontier homesteading, scandalous interracial miscegenation with Native Americans on the western plains, a grandmother who went to the grave thinking the government would eventually give back the land she lent to Teddy Roosevelt for Yellowstone Park—these oral histories spun his own family’s mythology. It’s no wonder Stecyk would eventually turn his ear and narrative sense to the landscape of surfer heroes, skateboarding rebels, and outlaw artists outside his door.

  The Ocean Park neighborhood in south Santa Monica was a lucky place to be born, and 1950 was a good year to be born there. While the East Coast was retiring into a post WWII stratification, a good 300 years of practice under its belt, Southern California was still an unruly adolescent. There was money to be made in defense, aerospace, Hollywood, and a thousand offshoots of those industries. On the Santa Monica/Venice border, life was boho and beat in the purest sense: you didn’t have to sweat the rent, and cops and city ordinances were few and far between.

  Stecyk didn’t have to look far to find transgressive lifestyles. His father was a photo documentarian in the Army Signal Corps during the war. “He was one of the first guys to photograph Hiroshima; the ground was still warm,” says Stecyk. Both his parents were artists, too, setting up a ceramic shop in their courtyard. They encouraged young Craig to experiment with the materials at hand, be they cameras or clay.

  For work, his father painted cars at an auto assembly plant and became both a friend and business associate of legendary car chopper George Barris. Stecyk talks about when his dad drove one of the very first 1955 Thunderbirds from the assembly line.

  “His first impulse was to drive the thing over to George’s, which was a couple blocks [from the plant] in Lynwood, and they customized it before day one,” says Stecyk. “The attitude was, ‘You can’t drive this stock thing.’ It had a continental kit, different trim, fender extensions.”

  Before long, Craig was a regular in Barris’s shop, apprenticing under the likes of Kenny “Von Dutch” Howard and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, both of whom fathered the custom car culture craze in the fifties and sixties by reviving the pin-striping tradition long after manufacturers had ceased putting such fanciful touches on stock cars. The work of Von Dutch and Big Daddy in turn bled into the lowbrow art phenomenon of R. Crumb, Robert Williams, and Zap Comix, a style of art that has recently been brought back to prominence in part by Juxtapoz magazine.

  “I had access to all of them. I remember the paint, the technique, the materials. I had all that stuff around me. I was aware of it all. I mean later, obviously, I used a lot of it,” says Stecyk, who still spends much of his time prowling the desert junkyards of Riverside and San Bernardino counties for parts to use in art projects. “Somewhere in there, there might be the whole idea of maybe deconstruction, or assemblage or something. The whole concept that you could take different elements and put them however you wanted to do and then change it around any time you wanted to. That was just how the people I knew did things.”

  Stecyk is quick to point out that this accumulation of influences wasn’t in the least bit self-conscious. Given his environment, it was merely inevitable.

  “It was what you thought America was supposed to be,” he says. “Isadora Duncan danced nude down the streets of Santa Monica. C’mon, there was a lot of stuff going on. Robert Benchley [the humorist and one of Dorothy Parker’s circle; the guy who, most importantly, said, ‘There are two kinds of people in the world, those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who don’t’] was drinking at the pier with Stan Laurel. Mae West was down the street. There were honky-tonks, full-on carnival red light districts. It was a fun neighborhood. Then you’d have these women in bat costumes.”

  The women in bat costumes were the nuns who taught him at grade school. They were suspicious of Craig from the start because he came from a mixed Catholic/ Protestant household. Their fears were confirmed when, in art class, the young boy painted a purple barn with a black sky. “All the bells went off. It was a Catholic school,” says Stecyk. “There were tests and stuff.”

  Before long, he was sent for a series of psychiatric evaluations. Fortunately, the psychiatrist was a progressive thinker and thought it was fine that Craig’s favorite color was black. He was recommended to a high school program for kindred eccentrics.

  “At that point, I think Craig understood art had implications,” says Skip Engblom, Stecyk’s accomplice in more than a few guerilla art stunts, such as planting a fake bomb on Santa Monica Beach on Independence Day to protest patriotic celebrations at the height of the Vietnam War. “I think he saw that, through art, you could create impact. I think that might be one of the things that sent him on the path.”

  His environment also determined the type of artist he would become. It was not to be an effete, establishment sort, molded by painting fruit bowls in a Swiss finishing school, even though Stecyk did take a side trip into the formal art world, earning a master’s degree in fine arts from Cal State Northridge by 1974.

  Although his stint in Vietnam is clouded in mystery because of his refusal to discuss it, Walter Gabrielson, Stecyk’s professor at Northridge, believes Craig was trying to find “some truth” in formal art after his disillusioning experience in Vietnam—a war that his father’s decorated service in WWII may have compelled the young Stecyk to sign up for. Gabrielson, who counts Stecyk as among the handful of “original” students he met during more than two decades of teaching art, says the academic bureaucracy “failed” Stecyk. The budding artist quickly returned to the streets where he had grown up sidestepping clashes between two rival Latino gangs vying for turf in a ghetto section of beach between the jurisdictions of the Santa Monica and LA police departments.

  Meanwhile, Pacific Ocean Park developer Abbot Kinney’s unlucky dream of a Mediterranean-style resort at the Venice and Santa Monica border, sat crumbling into the sea. North of there, the 10 Freeway was under construction, cutting a swath between north and south, leaving a wake of abandoned buildings and juvenile mischief. The local boys called this area of benign neglect Dogtown.

  “For me, it was an endless source of material. You’d go in and rearrange furniture [in abandoned houses] so it looked better. Take out the windows so the air moved better, cut holes in the roofs to change the light. Paint up the walls. There were clubhouses, wardrobes. Pictures were still on the wall,” recalls Stecyk. “I would venture about gathering up detritus from block after empty block and add it together, making these walk-in assemblages. I suppose, in that sense, it was empowerment.”

  It also off
ered a lesson about progress and its little-publicized side effect. “When they were building the freeway, it went through the heart of the neighborhood and created a barrier, and people who lived together went to different schools. [We witnessed] the continuity and the social structure torn apart, people moving, houses vacated. What emerged was a DMZ.”

  The theme of progress and dislocation would stick with Stecyk and pop up frequently in his more personal artwork. But, meanwhile, he and his friends threw block parties, because the cops rarely ventured into this area. The construction zone offered other possibilities, too. “I started riding skateboards on it,” Stecyk recalls. “We’d ride down the off-ramps into the traffic on the 405. The first time, it was accidental. After that you’d do it on purpose. All the interesting girls would hang out there because all the interesting guys were there.”

  In the water around the rubble of Pacific Ocean Park, the scene was equally amplified. A testament to both inspiration and indifference, the pier, jutting as it did for hundreds of yards into the ocean, formed a dangerous but enticing surf break where the local surfers went through their rites of passage. The break became the proving ground for the Zephyr Shop surf team and famous skaters like Peralta, Alva, and Adams who became the Z-Boys. They’ll tell you being a Z-Boy was great, but you had to cut it at POP first.

  Taking cues from the local gangs, Stecyk began tagging his own tribe’s turf with graffiti, creating icons and images that would find their way onto the Zephyr Shop surfboards and skateboards and later across the country and eventually into skate culture’s lore. The Dogtown cross, the “vato” rat-bones icon, the ominous warning of death to invaders sprayed in a familiar hand on the concrete walls of their local break—all became marks of a movement that would wait years to be given its name.

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  Craig Stecyk was profoundly influenced by his friend and mentor Mickey Dora. This could account for some of his idiosyncrasies, or what friends might call his “obstinacy.” Those who know Stecyk have said you have to understand Miklos Sandor Dora III to understand Craig. As a person and as a persona, Dora loomed large along the waterfront and in Stecyk’s life. Though fifteen years his junior, Stecyk had an almost spiritual connection to Dora, right down to the III at the end of their names. Dora, along with Johnny Fain and Lance Carlson, ruled Malibu Point and were known as the three kings. Dora may or may not have been the best surfer, but he was the most charismatic character. Whether he was mooning judges at the peak moment in a contest (he disdained the idea that surfing grace could be quantified with points) or whether he was hanging out with Hollywood celebrities, dark, mysterious Dora defied the conventional Beach Boys stereotype of the blond surfing bimbo. Frequently called the surfer of the century, Dora was the James Dean antihero of surfing, the type of guy whose magic everyone wanted to rub up against.

  Together, Stecyk and Dora set about shooting holes in the Gidget-glossed surfing image of the early sixties that drove kids in Ohio to cruise around with surfboards strapped to their cars and that also unleashed a flood of kooks on Dora’s hallowed Malibu surf breaks. By the late sixties, the friendly surfing fad all but forced Dora from the scene at the height of his powers—only to see him resurface in stunts and hoaxes put on with Stecyk. For example, after long absences from the public eye, Dora would show up in photo shoots for Surfer magazine that set him against a desert background in a wig and fur coat, flashing diamonds or standing in front of Camarillo mental hospital holding a surfboard adorned with swastikas. Dora’s refusal to take part in the commercial surfing craze prompted graffiti and bumper stickers around Malibu that said, “Where’s Mickey?” or “Free Mickey Dora.”

  The point is, Dora did his best to perpetuate the image of the surfer as a rebel living outside convention. Stecyk pitched in with a series of articles for Surfer magazine in the late sixties that resharpened the radical edge of “the sport of kings” and separated the poseurs from the real deals. The works are now viewed in the surfing culture as important exercises in contrariness and iconoclasm. They drew lines that needed to be drawn: there were kooks, and there were surfers who understood the culture of surfing and the antiestablishment statement it made. The difference had always been known at the Malibu Pit. Articles like Stecyk’s satirical “The Cracker Jack Conspiracy” in 1968 would tell the rest of the world.

  Perhaps Stecyk’s most formidable dissent from the newly scrubbed-clean surfing image was “Malibu: Curse of the Chumash,” which appeared in Surfer in 1976 under the nom de guerre Carlos Izan.

  Done in vignettes, “Chumash” is a dense 450-year history of the development of Malibu and its surf scene using the area’s long-gone original inhabitants as a metaphor. It became an instant classic and inspired many surfer artists, Chris Wilder among them, to reflect their surfing subculture back to the world in a less-sanitized manner than Gidget or Beach Blanket Bingo. Most notable of these artists, perhaps, was legendary psychedelic-era poster artist Rick Griffin, best known for his work with the Grateful Dead and Jimi Hendrix. Griffin based a painting on “Chumash” that has become a staple of surf-culture exhibits.

  “By the mid-seventies, surfing had gotten kind of groovy, and there was much less subversive stuff. That’s what made ‘Curse of the Chumash’ so significant...because in that Jackson Browne world, we got a dose of Lou Reed. It was a really self-critical, subversive look at what had become, at least to the world, a cliché—and that is Malibu,” says Sam George, editor in chief of Surfer. “[Craig’s] point of view didn’t jibe with the direction of ‘surfer as product spokesperson’ that the sport was going.”

  Though Stecyk continues to write for Surfer’s Journal, these early contributions helped establish much of the cultural history with which today’s surfers paddle out into the water, just as his “Dogtown Chronicles” and his later contributions to Thrasher were among the earliest articulations of a new, aggressive lifestyle oriented around skateboarding. It was all uniquely Los Angeles.

  “He helped define the way people here lived and our identity. How [people saw] themselves regardless of whether they skateboarded or not,” Aaron Rose says. “Stecyk helped shape a modern understanding of the California dream. It’s grittier than the Beach Boys, but it still has that idea of self-determination and freedom and all the things we Americans believe in.”

  Influential as these early writings were, it was Stecyk’s work with the Powell Peralta skateboarding company that truly turned skateboarding into a populist counterculture movement. If the Z-Boys heralded a radical change in skateboarding’s action and attitude, Powell Peralta ensured that the change would become a popular phenomenon. For better or for worse, it was during the Bones Brigade era at Powell Peralta that the revolution was sold. Photographer Glen E. Friedman, whose Fuck You Heroes tomes are the textbooks of this movement’s genesis, calls the Powell Peralta era “Stecyk’s great rock ’n’ roll swindle.”

  By 1980, original Z-Boy and world-champion skater Stacy Peralta had teamed with enigmatic Santa Barbara businessman George Powell to create what became the biggest commercial skateboarding company in history. Peralta wisely brought Stecyk onboard as the creative director. Together, Peralta and Stecyk drew a blueprint for reaching the prized demographic that is still being imitated today. The trick, they realized, was that you didn’t try to sell a line of bullshit that young people were far too cynical to buy. In fact, you made fun of the traditional marketing approaches that did just that.

  Many firsts stemmed from the philosophy. For instance, when Powell Peralta assembled its skate team in 1981, standard procedure had been to print a T-shirt with the team’s name on it—like Zephyr Skateboarding Team—and then send the boys off to competition. Hopefully, they’d win and attract allegiance. To that end, Powell Peralta corralled a veritable hall of fame of skaters: Tommy Guerrero, Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, and a gangly kid named Tony Hawk, among others. From the outset, however, Peralta and Stecyk were determined to be as innovat
ive at presenting the team as its skaters were on their boards. It began with the name.

  “I wanted to call it a different thing,” recalls Peralta over breakfast on Main Street in Santa Monica, today a tidy and safe version of their old stamping grounds. “Stecyk said, ‘Bones Brigade,’ and I said, that’s perfect.” Peralta explains that the idea was to storm contests and the world without calling their team a team because it was more than that.

  “It was a lifestyle, that’s what it was all about,” says Peralta.

  Some of the industry standards Powell Peralta established seem obvious only in hindsight. One was adorning the full skateboard deck with edgy graphics, many of which were evolutions of Stecyk’s early street art, such as the signature Rat Bones icon.

  “Everyone said you couldn’t do that because there’s a kicktail and you can’t bend the silkscreen. We said, ‘We think you can,’” Peralta says. “It completely started that graphic trend. Now, [full-length graphics are] standard issue.”

  Then, there were the T-shirts, adorned with B-17 bombers with “Bones Brigade” printed in military lettering, bombs lining the sleeve. “That shirt was such a hit and so disturbing to so many people,” recalls Peralta. “Right now it sounds tame. But back then, whenever you put something on a shirt, it was a ‘literal read.’ [Our imagery] had no reference to skateboarding whatsoever.”

  At action-sports trade shows, the Powell Peralta booth was a mini-forerunner of Lollapalooza (an event at which Stecyk would later be a guest artist). One year Powell Peralta’s booth was a detailed reproduction of a 1950s gas station. The next year it had a full bar with operational slot machines, later it was a vintage pinball arcade, later a tattoo parlor.

  Greg Escalante is a partner in Juxtapoz, Culver City’s Copro/Nason Gallery, and a sometimes consultant to Laguna Arts Gallery, venues that are striving to put grassroots subcultures like skating and surfing into a larger cultural context. Over time, he has befriended Stecyk. First, though, as an art major at Cal State Long Beach, he studied him.