While digging around on Julien’s auction site after the insane $115K Tony Hawk auction found a separate collection of listings titled Vintage Grails of the 70’s and 80’s and decided to see if there was anything interesting. It was quite a chore to sift through the 332 lots, and just as the tedium was about to win I spotted the thumbnail of what looked like a pretty cool old G&S team shirt from the 70’s and a Nash… hold on, that’s a Skate and Annoy shirt! The auction lisitng only says Nash because the topless lady had Nash logo pasties covering her nipples. At the time that illustration was used as the intro to a Nude Bowl trip I made in the late 80’s. The Nash logos worked great in this context because at the time we felt like Nash boards were cheap and exploitive, so it made sense with the graphic. Was there more than meets the eye on this graphic? Sure. Were we also essentially adolescent, immature young males at the time? Definitely. What cracks me up is someone at the auction house had to place this shirt on a mannequin and professionally photograph it. WHOSE COLLECTION DID THIS COME FROM????!!!!!
This was the first “official” Skate and Annoy shirt. I had made a Skate and Annoy graphic with a dog and a fire hydrant with a “learn to screenprint” kit I had gotten at the art supply store I worked at. The image was only about 4″x5″ and didn’t really work as a single print on a shirt. I printed that thing on everything though, even the window of my bedroom in the house we were renting. You can see the dog made it to this version too, on the bottom right. The photo below is one of our roommates, Doug Didjit (R.I.P.), from the legendary band The Didjits. The photo is a little blurry but you can see the ink is fresh and solid.
Meanwhile, this one auctioned off more than 35 years later is bit faded. The film positive for this was made at Kinkos on transparency film, and the border was laid out with artist tape, again from the art supply store. They used to sell it in black and transparent red Rubylith that would photograph as black with a stat camera. The tape was sold in various widths. This was before computers and you had to lay out everything mechanically. The screen came from the art supply store too. I’m surprised I was able to pull this off so well in the living room of our old house.
At about the same time we ended up making T-shirts for the Didjits first west coast tour as well. We even made a huge screen to print their backdrop. In retrospect that was kind of dumb when we could have just painted it directly instead of painting the block-out on to the screen. We never made more than one, and I don’t know what ever happened to that screen.
Below: Left- Drummer Brad Sims and bassist Doug “Joe” Evans heat setting the shirts with an iron in our kitchen. Middle – a stack of freshly printed shirts.. Right – Doug and the banner.
Below: Left – The obnoxiously large screen drying before the first use. Right – full size banner complete with printing error. On the top right is Brand Lump, the sound man for the Didjits. Top Right – Brad Sims. Bottom Left – Rick Sims (vocals and guitar) Bottom Right – Doug.
Getting back to the Skate and Annoy shirt… Another part pf the reason I found this so hilarious is the sweat stain on the cheap-ass Fruit of the Loom shirts we printed on that we probably bought at this place called Huey’s that was like a cross between a really low rent Walmart and a Farm & Fleet.
All things considered, the shirt is in pretty good condition for being about 38 years old, and probably the thickness of tissue paper these days. Neil says we did some in red ink as well but I do’t have any pictures of those. I was able to parlay my screen printing “experience” into a honest to Glob job shortly thereafter. We eventually made some two color versions of this shirt printed in plastisol on legitimate garments.
I am dying to know who sold this though. It was amazing to see it so many years later online, and it’s pure luck that I happened to spot it. I feel bad for the guy selling it. I don’ know if it hurt or helped the value of that G&S polo shirt. Oh yeah, that’s a pair of pink Madrid sweat pants in there too. The lot sold for $265.
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