…great for collectors, or sports bars don’t miss this one

NOS or not, $75 (shipping included) is too much for a plastic skateboard. Especially if you are just going to bolt to the wall of the local TGI Fridays knockoff. Still, it looks an awful lot like the first skateboard I ever set foot on. The listing says it’s a Marco Polo brand. That’s a new (old) one to me. I swear there must have been one mold for these yellow boards that a hundred different companies copied outright and made a slight modification for a different brand name.

OK, top picture first. Garage Manufacturing, the makers of Soft Trucks, also makes a wire rack that hangs over a door and holds several boards horizontally, plus one “go-to” board vertically. Not noteworthy except I liked the picture they used in the “natural environment” setting. With those Kiss and Farrah Fawcett posters there ought to be fiberglass GT boards in that quiver intead of modern popsicles. Look closely and you can see Farrah on a skateboard.

Lastly, aside from serving as a location to shoot Bratz commercials, Skatepark franchise Skatelab has teamed up with an artist called ZAZ (never heard of him/her/it) to sell skateboard bookshelves, pictureframes and the like at Target. under the name Skatelab Furniture. I’m not sure how they talked Target into it, considering they used to sell unbranded skateboard curios. Even Pottery Barn Kids used to do it. It’s not like Skatelab has huge brand recognition outside of their two locations and Concrete Disciples. There was a “news item” about it on Kids Today, turns out Skatelab has a few other licensing deals too.

Psst! Hey kid. Wanna see a titillating picture of Farrah Fawcett?

I didn’t have an appropriate cultural time machine sound bite reference for these boards like I did for the Max Headroom deck. I dunno, maybe I should have used “You can touch this.” A lot of 80’s and and even 70’s era boards have been reissued, but you don’t see too many from the dark ages. Or maybe you do, but I don’t. Here’s two circa 1991 from Foundation with the skinny from Swank himself:

Not a huge deal. Just some fun stuff. Eighteen years in business. That in itself is crazy. I like the mid modern shape to ride. It has a nose and tail and a melow concave. The OG seem to be popular to people from that era just to have one. I have been signing a handful. Very close to OG mold. The OG mold was a Prime wood and had a bump on the top for the arch of the foot. Brainchild of Rocco. Watson still has mold from back in the day. That place is a fricking museum. These are made here at WL in San Diego, USA. We have made some wide decks over the years but they mostly sat and my sales staff would not be siked on trying to sell. Whatever. We just keep them around for those few that wanted them.

I miss wheel wells sometimes. If you get yours, Tod can go back to concentrating on more important things like trying to top this.

It’s that time of the week again, making up for lost time and pushing the envelope of freshness dating. The Los Angeles Times has a nice historical piece on the Signal Hill Speed Run that has a lot of interesting tidbits of information. For instance, I had read that one year a previously non-skating longshoreman showed up to enter, but I wasn’t aware that he blew off his daughter’s baptism to compete. This article also goes into more detail on some of the hair raising crashes that took place. The amount of mayhem that took place is pretty amazing. In today’s litigation heavy insurance risk climate, that race wouldn’t have made it past the second run of the first year. Yes, this is skateboarding. The picture on the left is John Hutson from Thrasher Magazine of January 1981. The shot of Hutson was actually taken at a different race on the Laguna Seca road racing course in 1980, (Signal Hill officially ended in ’79) Hutson was a first place finisher at both. The shot on the right was poached from Vetter design. Check out the L.A. Times article Board out of their minds. Free registration may be required.

[Source: SkateDaily]

Last Friday Evel Knievel passed away at the age of 69. He had been battling lung disease for the last three years. Any skateboarder that can remember the first time they got on a board as a child or even teenager should be able to relive to the thrill that you felt the first time you felt that glide over the concrete or asphalt. Many of us were called “daredevils” by our chuckling neighbors, parents or relatives. Many of us felt like outlaws skating in times when it was unpopular. All of us should be able to relate to Evel a little. Nowadays there are about hundred Extreme Motocross riders (who probably have a different name for their discipline) who perform technical jumps of higher magnitudes of difficulty on a regular basis in arenas everywhere, but Evel was the first of his kind, and he was a real showman as well. As I kid I sat glued to the TV when he jumped double decker busses in a stadium. Of course he ate it pretty bad. I also watched the less than spectacular Snake River canyon jump too. Even though it seemed like he was always eating it, you had to love the guy. The Photos above are all from the official Evel Knievel web site. On the bottom right that’s Tony Hawk with Evel as part of a Vanity Fair photos shoot featuring sports icons and their hereos. Tony chose Evel Kneivel for his session.

In a moment of weakness I must have blacked out and sleep walked over to a computer where I bought this 1965 magazine advertisement for Mademoiselle Shoes. I don’t know what magazine it came from because the jackals that dissect these old magazines and sell individual pages online don’t bother to catalog this information. In fact, I think the page size may have been trimmed at the very edges to remove any identifying marks. After all, there are no staple marks visible, although it could have been perfect bound. I can’t tell for certain because the purveyor is curiously absent minded to any of my questions that aren’t “What else do you have for sale?” I paid $13 plus shipping. My wife is annoyed and insists I’d better frame it or else it will be a waste of money. Of course framing it will cost more than the advert. Click to enlarge. Bonus points if you can reference the title of this post in it’s original context and the song it was sampled in. No cheating.

Jason Corley sent in a couple shots of Santa Ana California spots circa 1984:

I was just cruising around the site and thought you might appreciate a photo of what was probably the best natural ditch in Orange County back in the day. This is/was Flower Street. Located at the end of Flower Street in Santa Ana, CA. I took this one morning back in 1985. This is what the main section of this amazing ditch looked like. Thing was that it split into a “Y” at one end and further down the ditch maybe 60 yards was a smaller height transition with a long roll in, about 8 feet of flat ground that when coming down the roll in you could carve the smaller bank and then have access to a natural extension that just reached vert. I feel so lucky to have been able to slate this gem from 1983 to around 1987. Santa Ana also was home to the killer Lloyd’s Bank about 1/2 mile away. I also attached a shot of Lloyd’s Bank, the front portion. Not my best trick but I was 13 years old…

I was reading a story in the San Jose Mercury News about a girl who died after falling off the tenth floor of a parking garage that said her crew skated. She wasn’t skating at the time. Anyway, on the side of the page there was an advert for an email marketing company called Constant Contact that caught my eye because there was a skateboard flipping around in the box. It ended up with a still of the new millennium Business Skater Dude. Somewhere, if he was dead, Judge Reinhold would be spinning in his grave, seeing as how he was the 80’s archetype in the movie poster for Vice Versa. Vice Versa is one of those body exchanging movies like Freaky Friday. And while we are on the subject, it wasn’t the only body switching movie to come out 1988. 18 Again! came out the same year but is more notable (for us at least) for having a simulated live performance and soundtrack appearance by legendary funny punks The Dickies, who also have a skateboard model out now, albeit about 20 years too late to do them any good. George Burns was in that movie. I think he may even appear on screen with the Dickies.

I can’t believe how remiss I’ve been in posting the news that aside from reuniting to play Riot Fest last year, Naked Raygun has continued to perform in Chicago as well as embarking on a West Coast tour, something they rarely did in their heyday! They’re in Portland Oregon on December 1st at the rather smallish Dantes. Tour dates are up on the Naked Raygun site. If you want to get a video fix, check out EPM‘s post. Raygun is arguably the definitive punk band to come from Chicago, although the Effigies, Articles of Faith, and Big Black also come to mind. The concert images above are from a not-so-secret secret performance by the band under the name Holyy Lazarski Nahane back in November of 2006. And now on to schilling product: Naked Raygun skateboards available.

This weeks SOFTW is Steve Schneer at the Heineken pool taken by Jim Goodrich in March of 1979. Check it out.