Who pioneered modern skateboarding? The actual four-wheeled object was invented in the 1950s, but what’s even more fascinating is how skate culture blossomed and has endured to this day. A rag-tag band of misfits from the Venice neighbourhood of Los Angeles can legitimately claim to be the first skaters, coming together in the early ’70s. Named the Z-Boys, after the Zephyr surf and skate shop in Santa Monica, and comprised of 11 boys and one girl, most of them teenagers, they were the first to apply surf moves to skateboarding and create a whole new style. Stacy Peralta was one of the group’s most prominent members, along with Tony Alva and Jay Adams. After leaving the Z-Boys, Peralta became the world’s top-ranked professional skateboarder at the age of 19. He then launched the skateboard company Powell Peralta, which developed into one of the most popular skate brands of the ’80s. During that decade he assembled the Bones Brigade team with the best skaters of the era, including skate legend Tony Hawk. Driven by a desire to document the culture that had grown up around the sport, Peralta began to pitch skate-related projects to Hollywood studios, paving the way for the cult documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys, which won the Directing Award at the Sundance Film Festival. He also wrote the screenplay for the 2005 Hollywood adaptation Lords of Dogtown, and directed the 2012 documentary Bones Brigade: An Autobiography. Many of the original Z-Boys have sadly passed away, but Stacy Peralta agreed to talk to L’Uomo to explain the reasons behind the group’s lasting legacy.
You’re from Venice, LA, and you’re associated with this neighbourhood in the public imagination. How would you describe Venice, then and now, to someone who has never been there? It’s changed a lot since the Dogtown days.
It was an extremely cool place in the ’70s because there was very little money and interest in the place. It was fairly rundown, which allowed us a lot of freedom of movement, freedom of expression and freedom from people bothering us. Today it’s overpopulated with multimillion-dollar glass homes and is so overly hip that it’s unhip! [laughs]
It may be difficult for younger generations to imagine how skaters were considered as outsiders in the early ’70s. Was this feeling present in the early days?
We weren’t even worthy of being considered outsiders! We were all non-conformists trying to figure out a way to express ourselves and develop ourselves in the face of doing something like skateboarding that wasn’t even considered at all. We weren’t “outsiders” as skateboarding wasn’t considered anything but pure trouble, problematic and vandalistic.
Your film highlights the strong link between surfing and skating. From a cultural standpoint, what do you think are the similarities and differences between the two?
They’re both similar in their physical expression and how you move on the board, and both at that time were renegade sports – sports that precluded parental involvement. Both activities were done in locations where there were no adults: out in the breaking surf and in back alleys, empty playgrounds and dilapidated backyards.
You were a skateboard champion yourself and then diversified. Was it easy to transition from being a skater to being an entrepreneur with Powell Peralta?
It was easy for me only because I was so deeply interested in doing it. I was incredibly hungry to be a part of the founding of a progressive skateboard company, and I found it even more rewarding than my own professional skateboard career because there were so many things to do and the opportunity allowed me to develop so many talents within myself that I never knew were there. It was nothing short of a magic opportunity that had a tremendous impact on my life.
Skateboarding could have been just another sport, but it turned into a cultural phenomenon. How did that culture develop, and how important were people like writer-photographers Craig Stecyk and Glen Friedman in making it happen?
Right from the beginning it established itself as a culture with its own terms, with its own look, temperament and rules, if you will. Stecyk and Friedman were important in that they were both on the inside and both really skilled photographers documenting so much of what was happening in real time.
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Opening image: Stacy Peralta, photo by Tony Friedkin. “Dogtown and Z-Boys” (2001), photo Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock.