Revenge against boredom - punk rock and skateboarding; excerpt from Jocko Weyland's The Answer is Never—A Skateboarder's History of the World

Thrasher Magazine, Oct, 2002 by Jocko Weyland

IN 1981 RONALD REAGAN WAS IN OFFICE, there was a recession, unemployment was high and the cold war was at its height, filling my adolescent mind with hyper-realistic nightmares of nuclear annihilation. The popular culture of the time was overwhelmingly boring, conservative, and unwilling to address the ugly realities of life. Music was the domain of over-bloated rock bands whose time of innovation was 20-years past. It was grim. Skating was an outcast activity and it was becoming increasingly connected to the even more subversive and iconoclastic punk rock movement, particularly the brutally fast American offshoot of punk called hardcore. It has to be vociferously stated that punk rock was actually a movement of substance and importance and not the watered-down, artistically bankrupt style that it is today. It was new and scary and against everything that was the establishment. The music was alien--speeded up, aggressive, and genuinely strange. What the bands were saying was edifying and I took them very seri ously, imagining real changes and revolution. A whole world of radical politics and intellectual questioning that was completely absent in the discourse of the day was revealed to me. SKATEBOARDING AND PUNK ROCK CHANGED MY LIFE.

THE NEW MUSIC was dynamic and against everything sacred, its ideas forged my rebellion against society at large. I didn't know about punk's debt to Dada and the Situationist International and other precursors, all I knew was that it was new and really, really different. From the B-52s and David Bowie I branched out into increasingly inflammatory material. The record store in Boulder had a tiny new wave section and I found myself smelling the vinyl and the cardboard and examining the records like they were exotic archeological finds. My first real punk rock purchase was the 10-inch EP Black Market Clash by The Clash. Right after I got the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and the Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables with the cover photo of police cars on fire. I listened to these LPs incessantly and was profoundly affected by their engagement with and denunciation of many of the world's ugly truths. It was as if a curtain had been ripped away to reveal the grotesque machinations of a perverted adult world. Then there was Let Them Eat Jellybeans, a compilation with DOA, Flipper, The Feederz and the Bad Brains and other bands from the extreme margins who illuminated and reveled in the dark side of America. Flipper had a Vietnam veteran guitarist and played tragically funny dirge music, hardcore punk on Quaaludes. The Bad Brains were rastas from DC who played faster than anybody else, and The Feederz had a song about being sodomized by Jesus Christ.

These and the other bands I discovered offered a dizzying variety of opinions, stories, declamations, rants, and manifestoes, from the existential surf music of Agent Orange and the suburban despair of the Adolescents and Black Flag's rawness in California to the eclectic hardcore bands featured on the Flex Your Head compilation from DC and the Boston scene's Unsafe At Any Speed. Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Antisect and Amebix were English squatter bands that were extremely political and exuded end of the world bleakness in their heavy, dark music. The spectrum of subjects covered by the bands under the general umbrella of punk and hardcore included but was not in the least restricted to anti-vivisectionism, the joys of cunnilingus, child abuse, the Boer rebellion, the corporate takeover of the world and many, many fiery indictments of organized religion. It was thrilling to hear these things even mentioned, let alone set to sounds that touched a deep chord.

Along with the change in my musical tastes and nascent political consciousness, my wardrobe went from surf-skate style Town & Country shorts and Ocean Pacific shirts to my uncle's hand me down army pants and combat boots and striped work shirts requisitioned from my father that I painted band names and logos on with house paint. I was really into Argyle socks because they were about as uncool as you could get. I cut the sleeves off of a T-shirt and spray painted the anarchy A symbol on it, tied bandannas around my wrist and sometimes around my ankles. The real break came the last day of eighth grade when I took a copy of Action Now magazine to the barber and showed him a picture of Steve Olson staring into the camera with a grown-out crewcut. It took some cajoling to get him to do it; he kept repeating "Are you sure you want this? I haven't given one of these in 20 years." It was truly unprecedented in our small town of Estes Park, Colorado. My new clothes and hair were a direct provocation and they really wo rked, I was looked at as weird at best and seriously demented and somebody to be shunned at worst.

I skated alone on my ramp every day the weather permitted and started to really learn tricks. First rock to fakies, putting the front trucks over the coping and rocking the board before coming in backwards. Learning regular rock and rolls was harder, the 180 degree turn after rocking the board led to a lot of sketchy slides down the wall on just my back wheels. I learned fakie ollies below coping, popping the tail off the wall and floating without hands. I did handplants half-way up, airs to fakie and tried Miller flips. I would skate for hours with just the sound of nature and the rhythm of the wheels on the ramp. Often when I fell I would yell curse words at the great outdoors in frustration, later I suspected that my mother could hear my rantings at the house. Other times I would lie there for a long time pondering the sky and the trees. Then I would look over to the meadow and see a bull Elk with his harem of cows calmly eating grass and contemplating my folly. I only had pictures and my own visual record of seeing people doing tricks to go on. I might have been doing things all wrong but there was no way of knowing, there were no skate videos to study.