Issue 10
Bones Brigade
By Caleb NeelonIllustration By Jason Filipow
What cheesy lines are you talking about? We were serious about our acting roles!” barks Bones Brigade skateboarder Steve Caballero. “I never thought that anyone saw it as anything short of fantastic acting,” muses former teammate Lance Mountain. Neither is serious. The Search for Animal Chin. The name itself sounds like a porno. The fact that it starred a group called the Bones Brigade didn’t help. Its director, Stacy Peralta, readily admits, “The filmmaking is lower than a B-Movie.”
Twenty-one years ago in 1986, Animal Chin was released, and it instantly became one of the most well received videos in skateboarding. Fourth and fifth generation VHS copies passed from skater to skater around the world. Directed by then legendary skater Stacy Peralta and produced by his preeminent skateboard company Powell-Peralta, it featured the Bones Brigade corps of young pro skaters: Steve Caballero, Lance Mountain, Mike McGill, Tommy Guerrero and skinny little Tony Hawk. The acting quality and background music were not far off from porn—but this was skateboarding.
There is a plot, sort of. The five skaters are on a quest to find a missing skate master, Won Ton “Animal” Chin. Along the way, they skate the Wallos ditch in Hawaii (and eat poi and fruit), the streets of San Francisco, a halfpipe in Bakersfield and the Pink Motel’s pool in Vegas. They skate at a garage nightspot with a lounge MC named Johnny Rad who scats skateboarder gobbledygook, then sends them to skate a still-legendary dream ramp built in an Oceanside, California, pasture. They don’t find Animal Chin, but they have fun skating.
Animal Chin was by far the biggest-budget skateboarding movie up to that point. It was the first to feature a plot and some scripted lines, which plumbed the depths of 1980s cheese. “Everybody agrees that whatever writing there was, I did it,” says skating’s poet and artistic laureate Craig Stecyk. In the 1970s, Stecyk painted surfboards and designed logos for the Santa Monica Dogtown neighborhood’s Zephyr skateboarding and surfing team, of which Peralta was a prominent member. Of Animal Chin, Stecyk qualifies, “I doubt I ever saw it, but I’m sure I sat through an edit of it.”
Many of the lines in the film were straight from the skaters’ mouths. “I don’t consider too many lines cheesy,” says Tony Hawk. “We got to say them in our own words as long as they fueled the story. For instance, I used to say, ‘You are gelling!’ whenever someone was lagging. ‘Yapple-dapple,’ ‘rager,’ ‘homeslice,’ and all that stuff were in our vernacular back then. The one line that I repeat to this day is ‘Japan Air? On it!’”
Tommy Guerrero feels differently. Lines like “Ripping style, holmes!” naturally poured from his mouth in those days, but he winces when he hears them now: “I can’t stand to watch or hear my voice. It makes me want to punch myself in the balls. I thought we’d be ridiculed for eternity, which we kind of are but in a loving way.”
George Powell was an aerospace engineer who skated for fun in the 1950s and 1960s. When he had a son, he decided to make him a better skateboard than what was available at the time and realized that skateboarding was an industry that could use some engineering talent.
He started Powell Corporation in 1976 and two years later brought on Stacy Peralta, who had just made history as a core member of the Zephyr Z-Boys skateboard team. Peralta brought Craig Stecyk into the fold. Between the three of them, they set into motion their remarkable talent for finding the best skaters around and mythologizing them—and themselves. In 1979, they established the Bones Brigade skating team.
Some of the best skaters of the 1980s rode for Powell-Peralta, including Rodney Mullen, Alan “Ollie” Gelfand and Per Weilander. And the core Bones Brigade team was made up of five of the best skateboarders in the world. With his keen eye for talent, Peralta picked out the members, some of whom were barely in their teens. “I wanted up-and-coming skaters only,” says Stacy Peralta. “Skaters taken from the amateur ranks, not skaters who’d been around the block who were looking for the next free ride. I wanted skaters who were going to take the skate scene over in the years to come.” This approach was unusual, since many skate companies were happy to poach off of other teams. Peralta adds, “From 1977 until I left the sport in 1990, I was usually the only manufacturer that would show up at amateur events aside from Fausto [Vitello] of Indy [Independent Truck Company].”
In 1979, Stacy Peralta discovered Steve Caballero, who began riding for Powell at age 15. Caballero’s career epitomized skateboarding’s omnivorous combination of creativity and athleticism. In 1981, he invented the “Caballerial,” a 360-degree ollie.
The same year Peralta discovered Caballero, Powell picked up Floridian Mike McGill. McGill developed a 540 flip on a halfpipe in Sweden in the summer of 1984. The newly named “McTwist” became the killer trick of the year—and maybe the decade.
Lance Mountain was there in Sweden the day McGill invented the McTwist, and he was quick to master the move himself. Mountain was a congenital goofball whose first board was a clay-wheeled castoff. His friend had given it to him after buying a new board with urethane wheels—the 1972 invention that suddenly made modern skateboarding possible.
One of the first skateboarders, other than McGill, to stick a McTwist was a skinny blond kid from Carlsbad, California. If you only know one skateboarder, you know this one: Tony Hawk. Hawk was a skating prodigy who turned pro with Powell-Peralta at the age of 14 in 1981. He wore his blond hair in the skater flop-hawk and had a body so skinny that even his custom-made pads stuck out.
Tommy Guerrero was a late addition to the Brigade. A San Francisco native, Guerrero specialized in skating street terrain rather than the halfpipe and pool vert surfaces preferred by his teammates. In 1984, at the age of 18, Guerrero won the first street skating contest held in Golden Gate Park. The next year, he was recruited to Powell-Peralta.
George Powell says, “When we first arranged to sponsor young skaters in the 1970s, there were no rules, no norms and no good examples to follow. So we made up our own policies. Stacy and I viewed our team members as young prodigies and tried to treat them like family members. Each one was totally different and unique and so required a different type of mentoring and assistance. We grew together as a skating family with Stacy as their ‘big brother’ and me as a fatherly authority figure. I think this evolved because of each of our ages. I was a father and in my 30s, Stacy was unmarried and in his 20s and the Brigade members were in their teens.” Of Peralta’s dealings with his young charges, Bones skater Mike McGill is to the point: “Boy, did he have the patience of a saint.”
Also in the scene was Miki Vuckovich, a teenage skateboarder and photographer who was a friend of Tony Hawk. Today, Vuckovich heads the Tony Hawk Foundation, which helps build public skateboard parks in communities across the United States. As Vuckovich remembers, “The Bones Brigade was the ultimate team. In skateboarding, the word ‘team’ is a sort of oxymoron. But the Bones Brigade came across as a tight-knit group of individuals, unlike any other skate team at the time. They were so different in their personalities and styles of skating, but they seemed to get along so well. And their personalities fit together somehow.”
Skateboard promotion includes tours where pros make appearances at skate parks and ramps around the world. “If a demo came to town, it was your one chance all year to actually see the guys you emulated and maybe even skate with them,” Vuckovich says. “Skate demos completely broke down the barrier between your average skater and skateboarding’s elite. It was part performance and part meetand- greet.”
These meet-and-greets, which were populated by overwhelmingly young, male fans, could be a trying experience for the pro skateboarders. “I tried to take it all in stride,” Tommy Guerrero remembers. “But even the Fonz blew a fuse every now and then. By the 2,362nd kid who wants your scribble—which he’s gonna lose before he gets home—you get a bit sick of it all. But you always need to check yourself, ‘cause you could be flipping burgers.” Steve Caballero was annoyed with fans constantly asking him for free boards. But, he says, “I didn’t really get frustrated being in the limelight. It was awesome getting so much attention.
Isn’t that what kids want these days—attention?”
“In the 1980s, skate videos were rare,” Vuckovich recalls. “So the magazines were all you really had to keep in touch with the vanguard of the culture if you didn’t live in Southern California. You memorized the names, the photos, the styles, the tricks—everything. Just like today, kids who were into skateboarding were really into it.”
Grant Brittain, who was the photo editor of Transworld Skateboarding, taught Vuckovich how to shoot and worked as a still photographer for Powell-Peralta. He took the shots of the Bones Brigade on the Animal Chin ramp. “I knew I was witnessing history,” he says. “The ramp, and the skaters acting—or trying to act. Nobody had put that much cash into a video before. It seemed very extravagant at the time. Nobody had done double, triple and quadruple runs to this extent, either. That ramp was the grandpa of every ramp that has existed since. I feel so lucky to have been there. It was pretty much closed to spectators, and I realize I was one of the lucky few to have witnessed it. I get emotional when I watch the behind the scenes [footage].”
The skaters feel just as grateful. As Tommy Guerrero relates: “I knew that getting paid, traveling the world and doing what you loved was a complete anomaly. We are, and were, the fortunate ones.” Very fortunate one Tony Hawk reminds that, “Skateboarding wasn’t considered ‘cool’ to the general public back then. I was still an outcast in high school, even after winning a major competition and signing autographs across the country the weekend before.” He continues, “The happiest part of my later high school years was realizing that I may already have a career doing what I love when everyone else was applying to colleges.”
In the mid 1980s, Tommy Guerrero—with his mastery of ollies, wall rides and grinds— was as good a street skater as they came. In Animal Chin, he ollies into his jumps on a ramp set up at San Francisco’s Palace of Fine Arts—innovative and daring stuff at the time. Street skating was in its infancy, and its most basic elements, like the ollie, were still cutting-edge. Alan Gelfand invented the move in a pool in 1978, but it wasn’t until 1981 that Rodney Mullen took it to flat ground. Tony Hawk says he found the Animal Chin street skating scenes—in which he ollies over small hedges—very difficult to do, and Lance Mountain laughs because his tail never hit the ground when he tried to ollie.
Laugh even harder at the clothes, of course. To watch Animal Chin today, it is hard to believe that these guys ever made a dollar selling clothes. Even so, the colored Nikes the team wore probably fetch top Ebay dollar today—to say nothing of the boards they rode. With so many young skaters watching the Brigade’s every move, it did mean that they became, in a way, fashion icons.
“Fashion icorns,” corrects Tommy Guerrero. “I apologize to all who followed our or my style. I think it came from boredom. Sitting in the van or train or plane for hours on end, you end up doing some goofy shit. A dose of sunstroke will also make you rip up your t-shirts and put the sleeves on your head and tassels on the bottom and vents on the side. Or maybe it was Christian Hosoi.” Lance Mountain laughs it off as a part of the job: “Late-1980s fashion was horrible, just because money finally came into it. I wore a kilt in the video at one point. I don’t think that had the same influence as the pink shorts that we got paid to wear.”
Skateboarding on the whole was a more concentrated phenomenon in the 1980s. There were not as many companies making equipment, and there were not as many pro skaters to promote the gear. Today, with so many pro model boards for sale, the market has been diluted. But back then a top company—like Powell-Peralta—could sell tens of thousands of their pro boards in a month. This was a big deal to the skaters because it meant royalties.
Fortunately for the Bones Brigade, says Tony Hawk, “We did a good job of keeping things in perspective. Nobody was out spending all of their money or getting wasted every night.” Lance Mountain had a devout Christian background and never drank or did drugs. “I was 23 and already had a family, so I was definitely not in my carefree childhood,” he says. “When you’re young and doing what you want, and everything is thrown at you, you don’t reflect on things as much—you’re just doing it. Acting crazy or getting into things that destroy you can seem fun at the time for some [people].”
Other big-name skaters like Christian Hosoi and Mark ‘Gator’ Rogowski were partying like rock stars. When their careers waned in the ‘90s, both these pros disintegrated into crime and drug addiction. In 2000, Hosoi was sent to jail for transporting crystal meth; in 1991, Rogowski was sentenced to life in prison for the rape and murder of his exgirlfriend’s friend. As time went on, the pro-skateboarding community—and the Bones Brigade—matured. “By the mid ‘80s, Stacy wanted to grow up and be the dad,” Powell says. “And the Brigade wanted to grow up and be the big brothers to our younger amateurs, and that’s pretty much what happened. We tried to evolve our relationships with each other as we all grew and matured. Like in any family, this caused frequent stresses and temporary schisms, but we always patched things up if it was possible. A few of our skaters went off the deep end and did things we could not condone or accept, and they left the company. But I think we were very successful in supporting our team’s needs in general.”
The late ‘80s saw a new wave of skater-led companies—the nimble, irreverent youths who used their videos and lowbrow board graphics to mock industry giants like Vision, Sims and, of course, Powell-Peralta. It all started in 1987 when Steve Rocco, who had skated for Sims, found himself without a main sponsor. He started his own company, which by 1988 was called World Industries. Eventually, Rodney Mullen and Mike Vallely both left Powell-Peralta to become investors and riders for World. Jason Lee and Mark Gonzales joined the World spin-off company named Blind, whose name was a snipe at industry heavyweight Vision, Gonzales’ former sponsor. By the early 1990s, the Bones Brigade was depleted of most of its major stars. Stacy Peralta himself left the company in 1992, though he would return in 2005.
McGill says, “After our reign came to a screeching halt in 1991, the original Bones Brigade went their separate ways, and the era of money hungry Steve Roccos set in for a while.” Powell adds, “By the end of the ‘80s, ‘Rocco’s revolution’ had affected our senior team members too, and they all wanted to be Stacy and me and start their own companies. This kind of felt like having your kids kick you out of the family business you built together and tell you it was only successful because of them anyway. It was hard to deal with emotionally, but I tried to rise above it as best I could and just go forward. I am on speaking terms with most of the Brigade now, but in the wake of this experience, I have learned to be more professional with my team. I do not invest so much of myself personally anymore. I have learned that most skaters have come to see us in business terms, not family terms. So I expect less on a personal level and more on a professional level. I am still very proud of our team, and I like each member very much. So I figure that’s probably as good as it gets.”
Tommy Guerrero went his own way in 1990, returning to his hometown of San Francisco to work with intertwined companies Deluxe, Real and Krooked. “I don’t run anything,” he says. “Me and [fellow San Franciscan skater and Animal Chin cameo] Jim Thiebaud were brought in as figureheads who had the status to give credibility or validity to Real and the rest of Deluxe. I’m the art (re)director for Krooked.
A computer monkey basically. The only thing I’ve learned is that I don’t want to be a businessman. In all seriousness, I just want to skate and create. I’m like the kid who wants his cake and to eat it while riding on Dumbo on a rampage through Disney, crushing Mickey and Minnie and chuckin’ poison apples at the tourists. I just don’t have the killer instinct it takes to run a large operation. I am and was never concerned with what people wanted. Coming from Powell and having very little to no say about design or product development nurtured the D.I.Y. Ethic for me at Real. A Xerox machine, a pair of scissors and some glue sticks. Next thing you know you got your graphic, good or bad.”
Lance Mountain left Powell-Peralta and started his own skateboard company, The Firm in 1991. Brazilian vert wizard Bob Burnquist and San Jose street skating pioneer Ray Barbee were among the riders on the team. Mountain closed the company in 2006. He explains, “Working really takes away from doing what [I] love to do, which is skate. Business was something I was not good at and was not natural for me. So, to be thrown into that and do it for 15 years made me feel like I could do anything I wanted.”
Mike McGill started the short-lived Chapter 7 skateboards and opened his own store and park in Encinitas, California. He recently launched a new line of inexpensive skate shoes available exclusively at Wal-Mart.
Steve Caballero didn’t budge. He stayed with Powell and branched out into motocross and hot rods. Just when everyone had written his skateboarding career off as a relic, Caballero transformed himself into a street skater in the 1990s, coming out with ridiculous footage in which he slides down 40-stair handrails. “I’ve always been happy working for someone else,” he says. “But God also blessed me with opportunities when times were slowing down. The Vans contract I got in 1988 and my first signature shoe opportunity helped me keep doing what I do best, and that’s ride a skateboard.”
Then, there was Tony Hawk, the consummate vert skater. He spent a few lean years in the 1990s but exploded back onto the scene with a litany of products, tours and endorsements to rival top athletes in any other sport. He and fellow ex-Bones Brigade skater Per Weilander formed Birdhouse Skateboards in 1992. Soon, vert went from completely out of fashion to the biggest commercial aspect of skateboarding. With his clean-cut appeal and record-breaking video game sales, Hawk is the most commercially successful skateboarder in the world. Vuckovich explains: “The general public hadn’t really seen skateboarding in a few years, so it was completely re-invented by the time they began to pay attention again. TV became the conduit. Producers quickly realized that vert skating was confined—the maneuvers more clearly defined than street skating. And vert skating happened to have a handful of marketable personalities, so TV went with vert.” Hawk went on to develop some truly remarkable tricks. He was one of the first skaters to complete a loop-the-loop, and in 1999, he broke records when he added a full rotation to the McTwist, making it a 900-degree spin.
Long before the skateboarding industry included video games, autobiographies and TV contracts, the Bones Brigades’ Caballero, Mountain and Hawk had made headway into creative careers—work that had a wide influence on the core culture of skateboarding.
At the height of his fame, Lance Mountain used to draw small, silly pictures on his grip tape with paint markers. With his young son, he even drew graphics for some of his Powell-Peralta skateboards. Mountain was the only member of the team to exert any influence on his deck graphics. Eventually, he had exhibitions of his work. The appeal of art was “the same as skating,” he says. “You think up something, and you want to see if you can do it—or see how it looks when you’re done. Sometimes it comes out totally different than you thought, and it’s bad, or it looks good to you. If others like it, it is even better.”
Mountain and his wife are now empty nesters. He says he is more relaxed these days, and even though his skateboarding has slowed down with age, he has a renewed appreciation for the sport. “I would say it’s had up and down points,” he says. “But I might be enjoying it more now. It’s just for fun, like it was when I was 10. Nothing attached to it. I’ve been pretty mellow lately and have been able to slow down. I’ve been spending lots of time with my wife now. Just being thankful for all the Lord has given me and learning to appreciate it all. I was so busy trying to make everything work. I had no time to really believe it was all a gift. Seeing what Jesus Christ has been doing in my life, my friend’s lives and in skateboarding has blown me away.”
Caballero’s MySpace blog is dedicated exclusively to messages about his recent conversions to Pentecostal Christianity. He has written lengthy posts on sex, sin and the scientific basis of Creationism. “I’m not religious,” he says. “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, who I have faith in and believe that he is the son of God. I have never been so fulfilled until I surrendered my life, put up the white flag and asked Jesus to save me. I’ll never go back to an empty life again.” Caballero recently celebrated 25 years with Powell, but skating remains just one of his interests. Like it did for Mountain, art came naturally to him. Over the years, he did design work to accompany many of the skating products he endorsed. Today, he paints brightly colored portraits of hot rod cars. Starting in the 1980s, Caballero embarked on a music career, playing guitar and bass in punk bands the Faction, Odd Man Out, Shovelhead and Soda.
Tommy Guerrero still skates, but the sport has taken a back seat to his music and family. “I can do all the shit I used to do—in my head,” he muses. “But the failing flesh ‘n’ bones have another idea about that. Skating kept me sane and still does when I get a chance to shred.
I mean fall.”
Like Caballero, Guerrero has played music for as long as he has skated. Well before he signed with Powell-Peralta, he played guitar in the punk band Free Beer. His band was on bills with DOA, Black Flag, Bad Religion and the Dead Kennedys. Guerrero’s music today is more cinematic and ethereal. It is not the kind of music one could skate to. (Guerrero himself says there is “no fuckin’ way” he’d skate to it—although it might work for pushing back up the hill you just bombed down.) Street artists like Steve Powers (ESPO), Barry McGee (TWIST) and the late Margaret Kilgallen have made cover art for Guerrero’s records. “I think [these artists] all have a natural style and approach: unforced. I hope my music comes off the same way,” he says.
While not an artistic person per se, Tony Hawk learned how to use computer editing software in 1993, which, he says, lends itself to infinite creativity:“Everything else I am involved in requires a huge creative element: tours, video games, apparel, etc.” With his enormous commercial success, Hawk bears the brunt of skateboarding’s core crowd cries of “sellout.” But, it is worth recognizing how carefully he has crafted his long career, establishing his charity foundation and picking and choosing his endorsements.
Stacy Peralta went on to develop a highly successful film career. His documentaries Dogtown and Z-Boys and Riding Giants were cinematic achievements miles beyond his early work with the Bones Brigade. “Getting the financing is always a challenge,” he says. “But so far I’ve been able to do it.” As for the skate video genre he helped to create, Peralta says, “I find most skate videos today dreadful and unimaginative. The idea of having to shoot a skater 40 to 100 times to make one trick seems downright absurd.”