Thrill Of It All.

The other side of mid to late 1990s skateboarding: Zero.

Three things that weren't happening back then were heavy metal, skulls and big drops. Jamie Thomas saw an opportunity and ran with it. The result was money in the bank because the kids ate it up. As long as there are teenage boys, you are always going to have a market for something like this. It's hard to believe that in 1997 there weren't many companies with skull and sword images that were taken seriously, if any. Scarecrow? * I don't think so.

I'm not much of a Jamie Thomas or Chad Muska fan, beyond wishing I could do frontside kickflips on transitions like Chad does/did. I was fascinated by how much people got into them. At the time there weren't really any pros that were worshipped the way these two were. Skateboarding was a little plain, in a good way, without any singular defining trends happening in the mid 1990s. Most of the tricks were tech and lines were important in videos, as they should be. The jeans had slimmed down and plain logo shirts were popular. The fashion meter was definitely tipped toward the fresh side instead of the hesh side until Jamie's group of Zeros came along. They skated big rails. They jumped off dumpsters. They put the slams in their video parts. They were dirty. They had long hair. They wore tighter jeans. Their shoes weren't fresh. And if they were, they got spray painted gold or something.

Two things about the Muska:

JT Alutz gave him some props on noseslides in a Thrasher interview within the last couple years. His advice was to check out the technique on nosesliders because he did them the right way. I don't know why this stuck with me. It's kind of funny.

The reason I went with Chad is because of Marc Johnson's quote from the Direction ad about always carrying a ghetto blaster. It all started when I was looking for Sheep ads and the week filled in from there. Who else do you think of in skateboarding when you hear the words "ghetto" and "blaster" together?

* I did have a Dorian Tucker from them that was awesome, but that was more because it was the only board I could find that was 8" wide.

Note: Some of this was going to go in the comments for the Muska, but I'm brain dead today and felt it deserved to become proper content.

Big Brother - June 1997 Issue Number 26