The vicious drought that struck California in the mid-1970s killed lawns, turned golf courses to dust, and created the modern skateboarder. A team of street riders from "Dogtown" -- south Santa Monica -- began hitting Los Angeles's dried-out swimming pools in search of new curves and walls. And these desecrated bowls, filled suddenly with the combustive roar of urethane-coated wheels, became crucibles of transformation. Water gave way to fire, to a new hardness and dryness, a scorching fluency. Limits were abolished daily, unguessed-at achievements became routine. For skating -- and for America's youth -- the future had arrived.
Dogtown and Z-Boys is a documentary by director and former skateboarding champion Stacy Peralta. It is, not to put too fine a point on it, superb. Half of it whips by in a near-ecstasy of classic rock and jaw-dropping skate antics; the other half (narrated by Sean Penn) carefully researches the birth of a phenomenon -- skateboarding's roots in outlaw surfing and a gang of beach kids pulled together by a couple of surf Fagins (Jeff Ho and Skip Engblom) to make the Zephyr team (the Z-Boys) and then the dominantly successful Dogtown one. The movie lingers lovingly over footage of the 1975 Del Mar Nationals Bahne-Cadillac Skateboard Championship, at which the Zephyr team made its debut. It's one of those unrepeatable occasions, an evolutionary lightning strike, when the doziness of the old order is ambushed by the ferocity and innocence of the new. Before the Z-Boys came along, the reigning kings of skateboarding wore taut singlets and brief shorts and hopped to their tricks like trained seals. The standard repertoire -- nose wheelies, kick-flips, handstands, squeaking around in fussy little circles -- expressed nothing more than the simple vanity of Homo erectus, his pride at staying upright. The Z-Boys were anything but upright. Long-haired urchins in T-shirts and torn jeans, they were the heralds of a new style -- low riders, cement lovers, knock-kneed texture freaks, one hand stretched out to touch the concrete as they pivoted like their surf idol Larry Bertleman. For almost a minute we watch little Jay Adams on his board, 13 years old, a blond moppet putting himself through a sort of controlled seizure six inches above the ground. His bleached hair flies and his brown limbs flash, all grace and spasticity, and the soundtrack salutes the glancing eroticism of the moment with Jimi Hendrix's "Foxey Lady." The older skaters, the smug bipeds with their stunts, shake their heads, outmoded at a stroke.
The Dogtown crew came complete with its own folklorists and carnival barkers,men like photographer Glen E. Friedman and writer-cum-photographer Craig StecykIII who, under the nom de plume John Smythe, kept the readers of SkateBoarderenthralled with his "Dogtown Chronicles," canny self-promotional blurbs that fused straight reportage with bombast, street sloganeering and skate catalog tech-talk: "While the cops and government are busy closing down spots, the street skaters find new places to ride or new ways to ride the old places, working the Amerikan concrete technology for all it's worth. ... It's going to go as far as you are willing to take it and the only way to know how far you can push it is to lose it."
This was business -- big business: SkateBoarder in the mid-1970s had more than a million readers -- but it was also the truth: All the evidence was in the photographs, the iconic, agonistic images of skaterly excellence. The passage into legend was slick and immediate; poolside guests for the skating sessions sometimes included Marvel Comics artist Doug Moench, who was making action drawings for a planned superhero called the Concrete Crusader. And the attitude couldn't be faked: The fathers of "vert'"(vertical) skating were not nice young men; it wasn't niceness at all that drove them against that ever-receding frontier of possibility. Tony "Mad Dog" Alva in particular seems to have been flung skyward on an arc of pure ego, a vast and militant snobbery that sponsored feat after feat of self-projection until his board at last lifted inches clear of the pool rim and presented its underside to space (the legendary "frontside air"). He literally took off: The vertex was conquered, the shock of which would rattle through one of America's subcultures for years.
Did skateboarding invent punk rock, the fuck you-ness andphysicality of it? Peralta's film -- probably wisely -- doesn't go there, contentingitself with brief encomiums from two punk sages: Henry Rollins, ranting amiablyin broad daylight, and Fugazi's Ian MacKaye, whose monkish head bulbs solemnlyout of a reverently darkened background. The limping, surging gait of the modernskater, rushing at obstacles with an appetite as comprehensive as gravity, isjust one of the legacies of Dogtown. In its wake, skaters and musicians alikewould try to get "in the pocket," to be effortlessly intense, fully present,letting each moment exact its price.
And there was a price. For a while the Dogtowners, still in theirteens, were making rock-star money and -- more to the point -- leading rock-starlives. Some of them barely survived. Chris Cahill is MIA, last seen in Mexico, nocurrent photograph. Of the available Z-Boys, Adams looks the most brutallyused, facing down Peralta's camera with sozzled defiance, answering warily, a longscab or scar twisting around one eyebrow like a piece of bad wiring. You can hearthe low buzz of drug damage even before Neil Young starts up on the soundtrack:"I've been first and last / Look at how the time goes past." "He was the best ofall of us," says Peralta of Adams, and hangs his head. The elegiac quality ofDogtown is unforced and deep running: Super-8 footage always comes dosed with nostalgia, the images smeared and glowing as if seen through remembering tears, and the reels of these young gods at play in their parks and pools catch the heart. Sunlight from 1970s California surrounds them, chiming like a psychedelic hangover, and we sense strongly that nothing will be this good again. Beyond this is a backward look at a time when words like "attitude" and "extreme" were still fresh, when the idea of "pushing it" meant something more than a new pair of sneakers. Watching the Dogtowners in their heyday, we feel that something awful might have since occurred -- a steady debasement in the concept of individuality, of growth, a commodification of our fiercest drives. At the same time we are shivered in our boots by their vitality. Not just history, then: living myth.
