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Intro

Put a skateboard video from the 1980s on and you will almost certainly hear punk. That link was not invented by a marketing department. It grew out of the same few square miles of Southern California coastline, in the same years, often among the same teenagers. Skaters went to the shows, punk bands came from skate towns, and the do-it-yourself spirit of one fed straight into the other.

This article follows that story from the drained backyard pools of the mid-1970s to the skate-rock tapes of the late 1980s. Every date and claim is checked against the sources listed at the bottom.

Before the music: Dogtown and the drained pools

The skateboarding side of the story starts in Santa Monica and Venice, an area locals called Dogtown. In 1973 Jeff Ho, Skip Engblom and Craig Stecyk opened the Zephyr surf shop there. The shop's skate team, the Z-Boys, included Tony Alva, Jay Adams and Stacy Peralta, and they skated the way they surfed: low, fast and aggressive, dragging their hands on the ground as if it were a wave face.

Their breakout moment came at the 1975 Del Mar Nationals, a contest still dominated by upright freestyle routines. The Zephyr team's surf-style riding looked like a different sport, and the skate world noticed.

The second ingredient was a drought. California's dry years of 1976–77 left backyard swimming pools empty across Los Angeles. The Z-Boys and others started sneaking into them and riding the curved walls. Pool skating led to vertical skating, and vertical skating led to aerials, with riders leaving the lip of the pool and coming back in. Stecyk documented the scene in a series of magazine pieces, the "Dogtown articles", that turned the crew into legends far beyond Venice.

That attitude of trespassing into empty pools, ignoring the rules of established contests and doing it for yourself, was exactly the attitude punk would bring a few years later.

Hermosa Beach: Black Flag and SST

A few miles down the coast, in Hermosa Beach, guitarist Greg Ginn and singer Keith Morris formed a band called Panic in 1976. In late 1978 they renamed it Black Flag. Ginn had already been running a small electronics business, SST, and around 1979 it became a record label so the band could put out its own music. The first release was the Nervous Breakdown EP.

Two things about Black Flag shaped everything that came after:

• The look. Ginn's brother, the artist Raymond Pettibon, drew the band's four-bar logo and most of its flyers and covers. The four black bars became one of the most copied images in skate culture, sprayed on ramps and drawn on grip tape.
• The method. Black Flag had no major label and no booking agency, so they built their own. They toured relentlessly in a van, played anywhere that would have them, and helped create a network of small venues, fanzines and promoters across North America. That do-it-yourself network is the model every independent skate brand and skate video later followed.

Henry Rollins joined as singer in 1981, and that year the band released its first full album, Damaged, on SST. SST went on to release records by many other bands, and its catalogue became part of the soundtrack of 1980s skating.

The film that put the scene on screen

The Decline of Western Civilization, directed by Penelope Spheeris, was filmed in 1979–80 and released on 1 July 1981. It documented the Los Angeles punk scene through interviews and live performances by Black Flag, the Germs, X, the Alice Bag Band, the Circle Jerks, Catholic Discipline and Fear.

The film showed the scene as it was: small clubs, violent pits, broke kids and fierce music. It was controversial enough that LAPD Chief Daryl Gates demanded it not be shown in Los Angeles. Today it is regarded as a key historical document, and in 2016 it was selected for the US National Film Registry.

Venice hardcore: Suicidal Tendencies

If Black Flag supplied the method, Suicidal Tendencies supplied the identity. The band formed in Venice in 1980, led by singer Mike Muir, in the same neighbourhood where the Z-Boys had skated a few years earlier. The band's members and fans were deeply tied to local skate culture.

Their self-titled debut album came out in 1983 on Frontier Records. The video for "Institutionalized" became one of the first hardcore punk videos to get substantial play on MTV, carrying Venice skate-and-punk style into living rooms across the United States.

The scene around the band also had a darker side. According to Louder (Metal Hammer), by 1983 the band had become too violent to book in Los Angeles, as fights at its shows made venues refuse it.

Musically, Suicidal Tendencies became pioneers of crossover thrash, blending hardcore punk with heavy metal. In 2016 the band was inducted into the Skateboarding Hall of Fame, a recognition of how closely its history is bound up with skating.

Surf guitar meets punk: Agent Orange

From Fullerton in Orange County, Agent Orange made the link to surf culture explicit. The band recorded "Bloodstains" in 1979, and in November 1981 released the album Living in Darkness on Posh Boy Records. Alongside originals, the band played fast punk versions of surf instrumentals such as "Miserlou" and "Mr. Moto".

That mix of reverb-soaked surf guitar and punk speed became a template for what people later called skate punk. It also shows how short the distance was between surf, skate and punk in Southern California in those years.

Oxnard, Nardcore and Mystic Records

North of Los Angeles, the city of Oxnard developed its own scene, nicknamed Nardcore. Bands such as Dr. Know came out of a community where skating came first. Singer Brandon Cruz put it simply in an interview with Louder: "We were all skaters before we were punkers."

Many of these bands released records on Mystic Records, run by Doug Moody, a small Los Angeles label that put out a huge number of hardcore compilations and singles in the early 1980s.

Thrasher, Skate Rock and the national network

The scene went national through a magazine. Thrasher was founded in January 1981 in San Francisco by Fausto Vitello and Eric Swenson, partly as a way to promote their company, Independent Trucks. Its first editor was Kevin Thatcher. From the start, Thrasher treated punk as part of skateboarding, covering bands next to skaters and using the slogan "Skate and Destroy".

In 1983 Thrasher started a cassette series called Skate Rock, sold by mail order. The first volume featured bands with direct skate connections, including:

• Big Boys from Austin, Texas
• The Faction, whose guitarist was pro skater Steve Caballero
• Skoundrelz, featuring Tony Alva of the Z-Boys
• JFA (Jodie Foster's Army) from Arizona
• Drunk Injuns and Los Olvidados

The Skate Rock series ran until 1990. For skaters who lived far from California, these tapes, along with Thrasher's pages, were how they discovered the music. JFA, formed in Arizona in 1981, is a good example of the loop: the band's singer Brian Brannon has credited Thrasher with spreading their music to skaters around the country.

Why the two cultures fit so well

Looking back, the match seems almost obvious. Several overlapping reasons stand out:

• Same places, same people. Venice, Hermosa Beach, Fullerton and Oxnard were both skate towns and punk towns. Many musicians skated and many skaters went to shows.
• Outsider status. In the early 1980s skateboarding's first commercial boom had collapsed, and skaters were often treated as a nuisance. Punk was also unwelcome in most venues and on the radio. Both cultures built their own spaces.
• Do it yourself. Black Flag's van tours and SST's self-released records mirrored skaters building backyard ramps and photocopying their own zines.
• Speed and aggression. Fast, loud, short songs matched the energy of vert and street skating far better than the mainstream rock of the time.

The legacy

By the end of the 1980s, the combination of skateboarding and punk was established as a global culture. Skate videos, brand graphics and the bands themselves carried it worldwide, and later generations of skate punk bands grew directly out of it.

The story has also been retold on screen. Stacy Peralta's documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) and the feature film Lords of Dogtown (2005) brought the Zephyr story to a new audience. In Lords of Dogtown, the band Rise Against appears playing Black Flag in a party scene, a small nod to how impossible it is to tell this story without the music.

Timeline

Sources

• Wikipedia: Z-Boys
• Surfer Today: Z-Boys, the story of the legendary Zephyr skateboarding team
• The American Prospect: Dogtown Chronicles
• Wikipedia: Black Flag (band)
• Wikipedia: The Decline of Western Civilization
• Wikipedia: Suicidal Tendencies
• Louder: How Suicidal Tendencies changed hardcore forever
• Louder: Skate or die! How skate-punk took over the world
• Wikipedia: Living in Darkness (Agent Orange)
• Wikipedia: Dr. Know (band)
• Wikipedia: Thrasher (magazine)
• Surfer Today: Thrasher, the story of the ultimate skateboard magazine