The following interview ran over a wide gamut of topics including the Dogtown and Z-Boys * movie, pool skating, the influence of surfing on skateboarding, rock'n'roll, Tony Hawk *, Tommy Guerrero *, Sean Penn *, Mark "Gator *: Rogowski, staying pure, Mark Gonzales *, Christian Hosoi *, and Sean Penn.

Here we present to you the (nearly) complete transcript of the 24-minute interview. We hope you enjoy.

Stacy Peralta: So fire away, you guys.

?: Where have you guys been on this tour?

Tony Alva: San Diego *, LA, Seattle *, San Francisco *, Phoenix, we didn’t do Chicago * because we had a film festival that covered that.

S: Same with Denver.

T: Dallas, Texas *, Boston *, New York *, and then we till are going to do Washington * DC and Philadelphia *. Then back to LA of course.

S: Yeah we’ve got to go back to San Francisco, we’ve got to come back to here to New York as well, and we have other gigs that haven’t been booked yet.

T: We’re heavily targeting Phoenix, like doing the whole city, just hitting it big time, so I’m going to be going back to Phoenix also, some skating as well as, you know, some PR (public relations) stuff.

?1: Are you guys skating at every spot?

T: I’ve skated every other spot. They've had me skating at seven in the morning, believe it or not. For television. From parking lots to skateparks * to whatever, you know. To campuses that are strictly forbidden, with big cracks. You know, whatever it takes.

S: It's like old times. It's actually like old times. It's really weird, where they just said "Here, we got a camera, start the demo"

T: So we’re doing freestyle * in the parking lots and stuff.

S: It’s pretty goofy.

T: It’s fun though.

?1: Do you still skate a lot?

S: I have an 11 year old boy, we have a ramp at the house, we snowboard, skate, and surf together. Never stopped.

T: I brought him a board.

S: Yeah. I actually carved a pool for the first time in a long, long time in San Diego that Tony took me to (at) this park. And I've got tell you, I can’t stop thinking about it.

T: Well, he told me "I’m not going to bring a board cause it’s too much to carry" or whatever. I’m like got a board (laughing).

S: Well I don’t have board anyway.

I got a board bag for you, I brought the pieces as a matter of fact, and the first place we came to where we were going to have some skating, I was like dude, we’re going straight to the shop. We went to the shop, walked into the shop in Ocean Beach, this is a relevant story, I’m not getting too far off track. We go in there, because we’re supposed to do this shoot for this skatepark, for the newspaper. Anyways, first thing I do is I walk in and I go "I need some riser pads," cause I gave him (Stacy) some big wheels *, I wasn’t gonna give him some little chintzy little wheels, I want him to go fast. So I’m putting this board together, and this guy, he gives me the little Indy riser pads, which is my sponsor so I’m like "perfect, this is going to work" and we’re putting it all together and the guys starts talking and he’s going, "aren’t you guys, you know, like..." and I go "Yeah, yeah, I’m Tony Alva, this is Stacy Peralta. and the guy was like all "WHOA, dude." You know, it’s like eight in the morning, we’re in this shop putting our board together. So it was really cool. He ended up... he had us sign something?

S: Yeah, he comped us.

T: Yeah he comped us the riser pads, and said "All I ask is that you guys sign this thing for me." And that was it. We were in and out. And he (Stacy) had a brand new board, ready to rock.

S: Plus he’s paying me if I get photos in the magazine. He’ll pay me a hundred bucks a shot.

T: I’m trying to get him on the cover of rolling stone, or vanity fair or something like that, but we’ll see what happens.

S: We've had fun though. It’s been a really good buzz, a good time.

T: But we get recognized quite a bit nowadays, you know, and a lot of people just pay us major compliments by just going "Thank you, thanks for just putting the fuel on the fire" so it’s been really nice, it’s been a good ride for us.

?1: Without the X-Games *, and all the publicity around skateboarding in the last five to seven years, what would the film be like that without that?

S: I think the fact that there is the X-Games, it has brought the awareness of skateboarding to, you know, the general, mass audience. Also you see a lot of television commercials now with skateboarding incorporated, so it’s becoming as accepted as, you know, almost like baseball was forty, fifty years ago. People just go "that’s part of the rites of passage as being kid". So because of all that awareness, one the reasons it seems to me that people are accepting the film, is because they’re going "We knew there was this sport, we knew there was Tony Hawk, but we didn’t know where it came from, or why it came from. We didn’t know it was truly American, we didn’t know it came from surfing." And it seems like everyone’s going "Wow, this is a viable piece of culture". That’s at least the word we’re getting. And it started at Sundance * (film festival 2001 *), with all these non-skateboarding people saying "God, you know we didn’t know what to expect, and we look at your film, and we just loved it. What a rich culture it is. And why these kids do what they do, we can understand it." We met a journalist in San Francisco, a fifty year old man, and he writes for the cultural column in the San Jose Mercury, and he was saying "Look, I’m on the board of my neighborhood, and for the past 10 years all I’ve been doing is kicking skateboarders out of my neighborhood because they scratch up the place". And he goes, "I can’t do that anymore. Now I realize. They woke me up, yet again, Saturday morning with their loud wheels, and my wife started flipping out and I go, no, we can’t kick them out. There’s a reason these kids are doing this. And he said it changed his whole idea--

T: So basically I think he lectured his wife on like "Dear, this is how it is." And his wife’s probably looking at him like "are you fucking out of your mind? You’ve been chasing these guys around for years and now you love them?"

S: So Tony gave the guy some Dogtown stickers and said "give these to them" (the skaters). They’re little mini-posters, you know of the movie poster, and they’re stickers, and was going "Give these to them, see what happens". It’s gonna be funny man. Cause they’re probably just gonna like... they’re gonna run from him in the beginning, and he’ll be like "no, no, no, no, no, no", and they’re gonna give them the stickers, and they’re just gonna look at him like "whoa".

S: That’s kind of a microcosm of what’s been happening with the film.

?: Do you guys miss the exclusiveness of skateboarding? I’ve been skateboarding for 13 years, and what I used to like, is the fact that (if) you saw a kid walking down the road, with a skateboard, I knew that I was pretty much like this person. I knew that there was a better chance of me getting laid with a chessboard in my hand, going to high school, than with a skateboard. Where I grew up it was so unpopular. You could not have done something more unpopular than that. There were like three of us in the school.

T: Well it’s like being a punk rocker.

? Exactly. There were certain political aspects. You knew the person was... You knew they didn’t go to church every Sunday. You just knew certain things. And now, it’s so changed where you’ve got soccer dads out on ramps saying "I’m not gonna have a kid not drop into a ramp, blah blah blah, you’re a wimp." That to me just seemed like a sort of death of half of what I did skateboarding for. Do you guys feel that at all, are you just happy that it came up?

T: There’s a fine line between--

S: There’s two things going on.

T: You know what? There’s a fine line between, even being a professional skateboarder like myself, between being totally corporate, and being totally gangster. Hard core. And what you do is, especially when you’re a professional skateboarder, you walk on the edge of that razor. And you learn to just not to lean to one side too much. At this point. But as far as the media exposure and everything, I think it’s good. Because the kids, you know, at least they have this Michael Jordan now, like Tony Hawk, and a lot of the kids that Stacy and I have sponsored have gone on to own their own companies, and they make a decent living off of it, so that’s the good thing. But then the other side, you got these kids like Chad Muska *, Tony Trujillo *, the hard core kids who are making bucks, but at the same time, they’re doing it on their own terms. And they still got that really gnarly kind of image, as well as that attitude, you know? So, there’s always going to be--

S: There’s room for both.

T: Yeah, there’s always going to be the pros and the cons.

S: But also, another thing too, there’s something that’s so true about this sport: it attracts disenfranchised kids and it gives them an identity.

T: And ethnic minorities as well.

S: It really gives them an identity.

?: I think it used to. I work in the skateshop, right now, and I see that the little league has fallen to skateboarding.

S: Let me throw something else at you. You do have the little league approach right now, you do have skateboard parks, and you do have what seems to be counter-culture to skateboarding, like enclosed areas to skate, but you gotta, and you’ll know this is true: if you’re at a skateboard park, and there’s Dads there screaming at kids, if a backyard pool opens up a mile away, half the kids are going to drain out of that park and go sneak into that pool. Because of the adventure. Like in Los Angeles *, in all the inner cities in California *, the kids are sneaking into to ride the railings and the whole thing like that. They’re never going to stop doing this stuff. So you’re going to have the skateboard parks, but there’s always going to be the kids sneaking into the places that they’re not supposed to be. So it’s really a bit of both. And we’ve seen this all over. We’ve been involved in this sport for so damn long, we’ve seen this coming.

S: When we were growing up skateboarding, aside from the little diversity we had in our team, which was quite diverse for the time, when you went outside the Dogtown area, the only people you saw skating were white kids, white surfers. You go into the inner cities now, you see black kids, Mexican kids, Salvadorian, Vietnamese... skateboarding. You go into some of the areas, and these were the kids... the kids that are skateboarding in some of these areas would have been the kids that were kicking our asses twenty years ago, in gangs. But, you know, it’s changed. It really is an urban sport.

T: And the Zephyr team, the team that we were on, was one of the first multi-diverse teams as far as ethnicity. We got Asian, Mexican-American, we got black kids, Polish, whatever, you know, every walk of life. So our team was pretty far ahead of the whole deal, not only just as getting along, the brotherhood that we shared, and the style, and the aggression and everything... cause we were Rock n’ Roll all the way, that’s what fueled our fire was like Led Zeppelin * and Black Sabbath * and Iggy Pop, and Ted Nugent and Alice Cooper. That was like our theme. It was like Yeah!, we’re rock n’ roll, and this is how we express ourselves, instead of playing guitars we play skateboards.

S: But it’s so weird to think that there are Dads that are behind kids skateboarding now, man. That’s not what we had.

T: Tony Hawk’s dad was behind him 100% the whole time. When he passed away, that was a major deal for Tony to have to deal, to keep on going, and still be focused on something that was so dear to not only him but his father, and to keep going and stuff. I’ve never read his book but I know Tony personally, and Stacy was the one that channeled him into his competitive career, and helped him become what he is today. And I’ve done the same thing for Christian Hosoi, for Mark Gonzales, for kids like this, and for Tommy Guerrero, for all these different talents. Stacy and I, after we decided to kick back and be more a part of the entrepreneurial part of the thing, and just skate for our own enjoyment, we had other guys to back up and promote our products and our images, through competition, and we just shared our experience and our wisdom with these kids.

S: So you guys are doing a company, is that correct?

?: Yeah. He's actually the company end of it. I was running a store that sold boards.

T: That's rad, where's your retail outlet?

?: Glassenberg, Central Connecticut *. I work in Avon now. We've got Satori Sisters stores in the state. (Ed note: we have no idea what they're talking about here).

S: See what happens is, if you get really successful, and then the cycle starts to go down, it becomes a challenge when you have to make payroll, and that’s when you start going, "How pure am I?" And you have got to really watch--

T: Here's my card guys, Eastern Skate Supply covers my stuff, but it you ever need any information or anything. All the Van's skateparks carry my stuff too now. There's that corporate side I was telling you guys about!

?: Yeah, because I didn't see your guys boards, for like, I'd say like seven years.

T: Yeah, we've always manufactured them, but what I do is, I’m really selective about who I go to, dealer direct. I have a few different distributors. Like Reggie Barnes, who’s a real good friend of mine. And I don’t sell to every other distributor and every dealer. I’m pretty selective about who I sell to. I don’t want my stuff to end up in discount dumps or sporting good shops. I want them to be in the specialty shop, and especially the ones who have been around for 10 or 20 years.

?: Skate shops.

T: Not the fly-by-night ones. There’s a lot of them. I’ve had bad checks written from every channel you could even ever think of. So now a lot of my distribution now does go through guys like Reggie Barnes at Eastern, and different distributors in all the different countries. I’ve always tried to keep my company kind of grassroots. I don’t want them to be in six different shops in one area. I’ll pick the two, the ones that have been around the longest. Like Rip City, like Sidewalk Surfer *, the old school shops that kind of cater to the hard core element * of skateboarding, and that’s where I try to get my product into.

?: You’re not the only brand that came out of this doing a lot better. Like, SMA wasn't around five years ago, either, was it?

T: No.

S: SMA?

T: That's Skip's thing.

S: Oh. No, Skip had that in the eighties.

?: Yeah, but didn't it fall out?

S: Yeah, he doesn't have it any more. What happened is skateboarding cycled down in the early nineties, it has an ebb and flow. The strong companies made it, and the weak companies didn’t. And that was one of the weaker companies. So he kind of put it away, and he might bring it back again.

?: Oh it's not… Because I saw him wearing an SMA shirt.

S: Well he still wears the shirt.

T: He'll always design and make like custom boards and stuff. Skip's like that, he's a craftsman. And the same thing with Alva. It's like, I’ve never stopped since the inception of my company, making boards, but sometimes we just take it a little farther underground. Just to keep things real, you know.

? How about Dogtown itself?
S: That’s Jim Muir *’s company.

T: He owns registration of the Dogtown logo. So anything that comes out, hard goods especially, from Dogtown that’s his project.

S: He runs that out of his house, small business.

T: Him and Wes Humpton started the company together. Wes was like one of the original graphic artists for actually putting graphics on skateboards.

S: Elaborate graphics, like multi-colored graphics.

?: These old Dogtown boards, like, I mean…

S: They’re worth a lot of money. They sell for a lot of money now.

T: They’re like old cars, like old ‘57 Chevy’s and stuff if you can find one in good shape. Some of my old Alva boards like the leopard skin and the paint splatter, like a lot of the old school, ten-inch wide... those are worth thousands of dollars now. Hold on to them if you have any old ones.

? On the skateboarding documentary or film front, there’s obviously your film, and then I guess you guys probably know about the Gator documentary that’s coming out.

T: Yeah, the girl (Helen Stickler) tried to contact me, I heard something about it.

S: I did an interview for that.

?: I was just curious what you guys think of that, and if there were any other skateboarding documentaries coming down the line. Cause it seems like there’s a huge hunger for history for skateboarding history now, all of a sudden, and you guys are fueling it, but...

S: You mean, do we know of any other projects?
?: I’m just curious what you think of the Gator documentary.

S: I haven’t seen that Gator documentary. I know Helen, but I haven’t seen it, and I’m not aware of any other projects. But I’m assuming this will probably open the door. If the film succeeds, it’s probably going to open the door for a multitude of surf, motocross, surfboard documentaries.

T: And some of those stories really need to be told. I’m sure Gator’s does, I’m sure there’s some angles, some intricacies that haven’t been exposed before. And maybe it could help his case, I don’t know.

S: Have you seen it?

?: Yeah, I've seen it.

S: Is it good?
?: I think it’s amazing. It’s really good. It’s sort of like the hangover after your film. Yours leaves you kind of amped on the beginning of skating and that kind of stuff, and that one is just, like, the polar opposite, of how wrong it can possibly go.

S: So is it about a person? Is it about skateboarding, or...?

?: It’s just about Gator. That’s it. It just shows his rise to fame in the eighties and then his downfall after the murder.

...

T: Gator was a good guy. He was a great skater, just amazing, and I think just something went awry with him. It could have been a chemical imbalance, who knows. Or just getting involved with drugs and alcohol, maybe just pornographic weird shit that went on inside of his head, you know, when it came to the way that he dealt with women. There’s a lot of different factors. I didn’t do an interview for her, only because we were doing so many things with the Dogtown thing that I wasn’t available. Other than that, there’s another documentary that’s coming out, that's just on pool skating that’s coming out just on pool skating that’s pretty cool called "Chlorine," that some people are doing, an English * gal and some people that are stationed out in California in the Palm Springs area. I did some footage with them, and they’ve done a bunch of stuff with Salba, a bunch of other really hard core pool skaters. I heard that’s going to be pretty neat. And there was one that came out, a video, in between Dogtown thing and these other projects called "Fruit of the Vine",

?3: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that as well.

T: That’s a really cool tape. I have a really quick part in there, too, but it’s not just about my deal, it’s more about the undercurrent of pool skating, and how it even kind of relates now, too... In the end it gets kind of slow because it gets into how these pool skaters now are just (using) wheelbarrow, shovel, whatever it takes, building skateboard parks, especially all over Oregon *. So it all relates. Like I said, the thing with pool skating is, there wouldn’t be any half-pipes, there wouldn’t be any skateparks, there wouldn’t be any of that shit if it wasn’t for the Dogtown boys and other guys in their little different sects going in and skating pools. Because that was where actually riding transitions *, and riding these concrete waves, took it to different a level. It basically took it to a level. It basically took it to a level where, "hey, we can control gravity, man". And not only that we can smack the lip and do floaters and then change the way trucks * and wheels and boards and everything were designed. And so it was the beginning of the revolution that became an evolution. It’s just a really cool thing to look back at, man. And now you see look where pool skating’s at, you see where vert skating’s at. You see these beautiful skateparks being built, you see kids doing these crazy stunts on the streets and stuff. So, you know, it’s kind of where they started. Somebody had to lay down a foundation. And where it was going with sixties style skateboarding, it wasn’t going anywhere, man. It was going to figure skating, it was compulsory moves that were completely boring. One of my favorite parts of our film is where they show Russ Howell do his little fairy-ass moves and he jumps off and does these little handsprings and comes up and goes like "yup, yup." I’m just like, everybody in the theatre just went "oh my god", you know. Just laughing, and just gassing on this guy. If you want to know the truth, Russ is a really nice guy too, he was cool, when we competed against those guys, our job was to just smash all the guidelines, and all the rules, and all the regulations that went along with their approach to the whole deal. Like Ty Page, and Bruce Logan. Even though I respected Bruce Logan big time, because he was a world champion. Torger Johnson was one of the guys who rode for his team, was one of the best over-all skaters in the history of skateboarding *. Loved that guy.

S: We respected all these guys. They were all great skaters.

T: We had more respect, if you want to know the truth, for the guys before us, though we thought their style kind of sucked, than skaters have for us, if you want to know the truth. Because kids nowadays, they have that attitude like, "fuck that, that guy can’t even do a kickflip" or whatever, you know. But the bottom line is, man, when we grew up as kids, we had a lot of respect for not only these old surfers like Mickey Dora and stuff, and Torger Johnson. That’s got to come back to skateboarding.

MC: The question I have, having watched the movie, is are (the boards you were riding then) much more difficult than the boards they ride with these days?

S: The kids today could never ride a pool with those boards. Barney Rubble was on our team.

?: Can I ask you guys a surf question? What was the influence of the formation of (surfing's) Tri-fin and thruster... did that have any affect on what you guys were doing on the street?

T: Of course it did. We were living in Hawaii *, or I was-- Jay and I were after graduating high school. And we were right in the middle of that evolution as far as surfing goes. Simon Anderson came over with thrusters and stuff, and Mark Richards was riding a twin fin, Larry Bertlemann was riding a stinger single-fin with a long, raked fin... I used to live with a guy named Bumper Spreckels, who was like light years ahead too. He rode all these weird experimental vehicles, where he would start out, like, on his knees, do a bottom turn, come into the tube you know like standing up, then come out of the wave at the end like lying down. He would do like a knee-board, body-board, and stand-up surf on one wave, he would do it all on one wave, on some crazy, strange vehicle and stuff. Anything that kind of went with surfing correlated to skateboarding, not only because of the design, and the influence and from all the weed and the LSD, and all that stuff kind of turned into an experimental, like the fantastic plastic, you know, all of that stuff. It all had an influence because as young kids, we looked at Surfer Magazine * and all this stuff, and saw Terry Fitzgerald, Nat Young, Midget Farley, then Gerry Lopez, Barry Kanaiaupuni, Pooney Reno Abalera (SP?), all these guys were influencing us in a subtle way. But then, boom, here comes Larry Bertlemann. And then we were like, "That’s our boy."

?: Suddenly he was hitting the lip.

T: Well, then we realized that what we really wanted to do was to emulate what Larry Bertlemann was doing on waves on our concrete waves. And in the water, we tried in the water, but we weren’t good enough, we weren’t as good as Larry Bertlemann. I mean, Jay is a very adept surfer to this day, probably the closest thing to Larry Bertlemann that was on our team, but still, Larry Bertlemann was Larry Bertlemann, and Jay Adams * is Jay Adams, and Jay Adams is truly, even though he was born and bred on surfing and skateboarding, he was a natural when it came to skateboarding. Total natural. See, Jay’s going to get mad at me now, too ‘cause he’s going to say, "Man, I’m a surfer, dude". Even when I was talking to him on the phone today, he was all "I just want to surf". He goes "skating, it’s all good, but I need to just get back to my roots, and just surf." And I was like, "More power to you, man". But I think he’s going to, he’ll get back to the swing of things with skating, he just needs to establish himself on a new program, he needs to live a sober life, and then eventually he’ll regain his freedom, and with that I think skateboarding will step back into his life.

MC: Josh wanted to know if you were going to do another project, if you had another project lined up.

S: Another skateboarding project?

MC: Well, he just said, if you were going to have a follow-up movie or project planned.

S: There’s a couple of things right now. We’re talking about doing a documentary on the enigmatic surfer from the sixties, Mickey Dora, but we also, Agi Orsi, who produced Dogtown, optioned the rights to a book that involves surfing called "In Search of Captain Zero *." She and Sean Penn are producing it, I’m set to direct it, the three of us have a deal at Radar Pictures. So if we can get the book turned into a terrific screenplay, they’ll back it, and (we'll) go into production. So that’s what’s happening right now. Just gelling. Thanks you guys.

T: Tell Josh I said hello.

MC: OK, I will.

* If we made any spelling, grammatical or factual errors, then feel free to email us! Peace.

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