Yugo Mail

It may actually take decades to respond to reader mail, a Jim Gray can attest. I recently found an envelope from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, mailed to Skate and Annoy sometime in 1988, only to be fully examined in an entirely different millennium. Do I regret not reading this letter from Darko Kolesar, AKA “Gricko” from Zehun, Yogoslavia? Do I lament the lost opportunity to create a cross-cultured, transcontinental friendship, let alone the chance to establish an outpost behind the Iron Curtain? Would I have loved to have a copy of the Yugoslavian skate zine Body & Soul in my collection? Do I wonder what Yugoslavian skate rock sounded like in the 80’s? Do fell like a dick? Yes.

UPDATE: A response from Gricko! Thanks to everyone who helped track him down. Read the Darko chronicle appended to the post!

Honestly, it was buried in a box of zines. It must have gotten lost in the move that happened shortly after we… moved and got a P.O. box for the zine. What a waste. I’m sorry Darko! I love the drawing of the skatespot.

This is the punk band Orthodox or possibly Orthodox Christians that Darko mentions in the letter. Apparently they had one song about skateboarding. I hesitate to dwell on how much money that poor kid had to pay to get a Thrasher sweatshirt in Yugoslavia.

More historical artifacts.

A response from Gricko!

Turns out it wasn’t hard to track him down after all these years, and unbelievably, he heard about the post second hand. Darko responds:

Ok. this might be the long one, so brace yourself.
first – much respect to everybody tracking me down and to kilwag for the post.

do not know where to start…

like…. iron curtain…. i guess there was a ‘curtain’ but it was not iron in any sense. very light and very porous. we had a red passport [very dark red, almost brown] but were free to travel around the world. did not need visa for the states, western europe. and we did travel. the thrasher hoodie was bought in london, rough trade shop. we did live quite an easy living.

’90s were the bitch, but you all know it, i guess.
we did not get to be drafted, go to war or had somebody shoot bullets at us, but economics changed quite a bit. immense pressure and depression all around.

so – bass player vanja and drummer andra put out the first issue of the body&soul zine. i helped a bit towards the end. the that was in spring of ’87. vanja and me did the next one in the spring of ’88. we called it 1 1/2. kind of ‘special edition’. it was in english, just about YU scene/bands and meant for abroad distribution. then i did my year of mandatory army service. the second one was [i think] in the summer of 1990. and that was about it. in ’91 shit hit the fan we we got to be the world news for the decade and there was no room for zine making.

#1 and #1 1/2 i do not have. neither original plates nor copy. have #2 plates for sure, maybe even some unsold copies. i know i saw them in the closet some years ago, but i’m not sure if i threw them or moved them to deep archive. anyway – if anyone is interested i could scan #2 plates and post them somewhere. i might ask around for other two issues if somebody still have them and is willing to let me borrow and scan. but that might take months.

the band you can find on you tube. very hard search, words are very common but i did manage to find two that are representative of what we did. This one is a demo we did in ’87

this one is a live recording

the band did not continue after i got back from the army. vanja and could not play together that was it. wolfie did not get to make any music that matters and vanja went on to sing for ‘overdose’

skateboarding? all four of us did it for a certain period of time but only vanja was really, really good and passionate about it. before that london trip where vanja and myself got that thrasher hoodies and ‘real’ boards the only skates you could see were those small ones that looked like this.

My sk8boarding career ended in late ’90 or early ’91 when a bus run over it. i’ve managed to save myself by grabbing a street light pole. board and one truck died and i just did not get replacements. my son got to use my bullets with his first deck. wheels the deck came with were…. generic. from time to time he’s asking if he could get some new, smaller wheels. he’s the only one w/ ‘weird’ wheels. and i’m telling him to be proud of his wheels.

that’s about it. feel free to ask if i missed something.