An absolutely sick new part from Stereo’s Yoshi Tanenbaum has hit the web today announcing his AM status. Wait until you see the laser ender, it’s ridiculous.
Author: Zac
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All hail John Lennon
It’s incredible to think that it would have been John Lennon‘s 73rd birthday today. A man whose musical talent is undeniably one of the greatest of all time, whose ear for a song and fast moving production values changed music forever worldwide. He even managed to get a shred on back in 1965. Take in this photo shot by Henry Grossman in 1965 and all hail Lennon.
The best Beatle/Lennon related skate quotes win bragging rights.
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Exposed: Chris ‘Rhino’ Rooney
We first met Rhino in Marseille at the Prado Bowl a few years back. We sank some beers, skated, laughed a lot, shot the shit, sank some more beers and got on like a house on fire – the rest is history. Fact is, Rhino here is one of the best in the business. He has time for people and with that, he also takes a pretty fucking good set of skate snaps because he is trusted. It was only natural that he shared some of his tales and pics from over the years on here so sit back and take it in from this month’s Exposed feature.
You‘ve been on the road for Thrasher now for what seems like a lifetime, how do you juggle snapping pics and life outside of skating?
Shooting photos pretty much takes up most of my time, usually shooting around San Diego, driving up to LA and also traveling. Basically just have to try and make some time for my personal life or else skateboarding just takes over.
Where’s was your latest trip?
King Of The Road 2013 just ended, I was with the Real Team and we got 2nd place. It was a fun trip, and it never matters what place you get, it’s always rad to be involved with it. The web videos should be out soon on Thrasher as well as the magazine articles.
What jams go down on your road trips these days?
A bit of Slayer, some High On Fire, Devo, Motorhead and Classic Rock stations on the radio.
What are your preferred rigs to shoot on at the moment?
A Nikon D3 camera, a Nikon D7000 for video and still back up and a Leica digital point and shoot for candid party and blog shots.
Do you shoot any film anymore?
No, I shot film for a while and it was rad but digital just took over. I sold my Hasselblad about 4 years ago and that was the last of my film cameras. Kind of wish I still had it but didn’t want it to sit around and get fucked up. I do miss shooting film but the convenience of shooting digital is really nice. No more anxiety going to pick up film and hoping you got the trick.
If there was a story to pull from the archives on the road what would it be?
King of the Road 2010 with Nike. 3 days left our van got stolen at the hotel in Arizona with just about everything in it. The book, lights, generator, skateboards, everything except camera gear and some backpacks that were in the hotel. Thought we were done, last place, humiliation, not even the KOTR book with all out tricks marked off. Then 2 hours later, the police found the van about ½ mile away. They stole a lot of stuff that was in the van, but not the book. We were back up and running and ended up winning that year.
What was the toughest photo you shot over the years?
Believe it or not it was a photo of Chet Childress slash grinding a concrete not made to skate transition. (above) It had about 3 feet transition and 3 feet of vert. Really steep, downhill run up, large crack at the bottom, he had to swerve in to hit it. The hardest part was the timing on a slash grind. You never really shoot slash grinds and he was only on there for a split second and it was at night. We had to keep looking at the video camera to see where the flash was because we were shooting film. So he ended up having to try it over and over again.
What was the toughest injury from a photo-shoot over the years?
A texas pipe trip with Chet Childress, Adam Alfaro and a few others when he got on Nike. Grant Shubert was the filmer with us. We drove 4 hours from Austin to skate a full pipe that we have been wanting to hit for a few years. Trespassing on Federal property, we had to raft in with all our equipment, concrete, beers, water, everything. Long story short, after shooting one photo of Adam Alfaro, Grant (filmer) wanted to get a few runs in. I went down to the edge to grab a beer and just heard a loud scream. Walked back up into the pipe and he broke his kneecap in 4 places. We had to pack up and start rafting everything back across, then manage to get him in the raft while he was in some serious pain. Four hour drive back to Austin and to the hospital, then Grant had to fly back to Los Angeles a few days later for surgery.
Come on then, Expose your ten…
1. Duane Peters, Chickens Pool.
Duane showed up for a Z-Flex reunion interview session at the Chickens house. Sounded like he hasn’t skated in a few weeks because of injuries. He was the first to pad up and go to the pool. Eyeing up an acid drop off the hip for sure.
2. Aaron Homoki, kickflip melon.
Jaws skated 2 other big things that day for a few hours, then all of a sudden he says he wanted to go to this gap. After about 6 attempts he landed this kickflip melon. His legs are built differently than most humans.
3. Al Partanen, front feeble.
The chick who lives at this pool sucks. She found out that she can get money off skaters to skate the pool, which is fine, but it supports her drug habit and she always comes up with stories about getting robbed, beaten, raped, etc… to try and get more money. Anyways, sometimes you got to pay to play.
4. Div Adam, alley oop backside air, Washington St Park.
Div is a maniac and killed this park all the time. This day he smashed his nose with his board frustrated skating a ditch. Then took it out on Washington St. Blasting big alley oop airs on the big wall. He is back in Scotland for a while and the sessions just aren’t the same under the bridge without him.
5. Peter Hewitt – Boneless.
This pool is about 2 hours outside of San Diego on the way to Arizona. The house is abandoned and it used to be used for smuggling drugs using airplanes across the border of Mexico in the 70’s. The pool is huge and a lot of the walls are different and transitions are steep. This one pocket is really mellow with a love seat. I bet the parties that went down here back in the day were off the charts!
6. Ben Raybourn, boardlside.
We found this rail while driving through Poland on a Bones trip. Ben jumped on it right away and got a board slide on it within 10 tries. The filmer didn’t have his camera set up and asked him to do another. Somehow he couldn’t make it again, then it started raining out. Photo no footage, that’s how it goes sometimes.
7. Pedro Barros, stale fish in Portugal.
This park is at the Quiksilver shop on the coast outside of Lisbon. Just got Pedro hyped up and watch him fly. He did a handful of tricks this high around the corner.
8. Willy Akers, Pivot fakie.
This weird drainage wash is not easy to skate. Really rough run up, ollie up and then a really elliptical transition where your nose scrapes on the way up and tail on the way down. Willy said he just learned pivot fakie’s recently and wanted to do one there.
9. Nyjah Huston, switch lipslide.
Nyjah’s first time to this rail and he did about 15 tricks just warming up. He is on a different level. Then he started hitting this switch and knocked out about 5 tricks. Spot killer for sure.
10. Omar Hassan, judo air.
This pool was really good. This dude Mike rented it out and decided to drain the pool to skate it. He pissed the owners off by doing so and got an eviction notice. So in the meantime sessions were on. Always a cooler full of Tecate’s, Slayer and lights if sessions were going into the nighttime. It had a good run, lasted about 2 months and it was over.
If you want more from Rhino read this article from back in 2006. Yep, it’s been a while. Look out for him out there on your travels and if you see him, buy him a cold beer.
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Diamond Days #70
Rob Harris’ latest Diamond Days video blog from the East Coast is live today. Press play for #70.
New York filmer Steve Marino has dropped a minutes worth of raw footage online overnight of Gino Iannucci, Kenny Anderson, Stefan Janoski, Eric Koston and Jered Bassett. The footage was filmed in the summer of 2012 and at a guest I would imagine that some of this was destined for Pretty Sweet but never made the cut.
Alec Majerus’ – Backside Flip – Arto Photo
More Flip Eurodyssey tour edits are live following the first installment. Watch the team skate Jena and Berlin in Germany in these new edits.
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Lakai Innit
Remember Go Skateboarding Day this year in London with Lakai and Parlour? Sirus F Gahan had Sebo Walker, Danny Brady, Nick Jensen, Jesus Fernandez, Enrique Lorenzo Alex Barton, Mikey Patrick and Jason Cloete in tow for some street missions and has finally dropped this edit aptly titled Lakai Innit.
Press play for London treats that takes Skate Edit of the Week.
Like our FB page for more of these interviews coming soon.
Photo: Taken on the rooftop of the Metal Hammer offices 1990 by Hannah Jordan.
Words by James Sherry.
It’s hard to express quite how important Nirvana were to my life and the direction it took. In the late eighties I started my first job as office junior at Metal Hammer magazine. I had my own fanzine ‘Phobia’ and I was over-flowing with enthusiasm and eager for every bit of nasty noise that came my way; “you used to like everything….everything’s great,” an old work college reminded me recently. And he’s right, I loved it all.
In one of my first weeks in the office I happened upon a package of records that had been sent to the then reviews editor John Duke. He had recently left the magazine and I was charged with the job of sorting through the pile of records for review. One of the packages really caught my eye. It was from Anton at Bad Moon Publicity and had three records inside; ‘Superfuzz Bigmuff’ by Mudhoney, ‘Bleach’ by Nirvana and a Tad record which I now forget. I snuck the records home and suffice to say, they tore my little teenage mind apart. My record collection at this stage was crammed full of a motley collection of punk, hardcore, metal and classic sixties and seventies rock thieved from my father’s collection. These Sub Pop releases seemed to contain elements of all the music I liked. They were heavy, punk, melodic and so fresh and exciting. Nirvana and Mudhoney soon became my favourite bands.
Metal Hammer at the time was still very much in the big hair metal phase. Thanks to the lovely and hugely encouraging editor at the time, music journalist legend Chris Welch, I was allowed to write small articles and reviews on various underground bands, hidden amongst the Yngwie Malmsteen, Lisa Dominique and Skid Row posters and features. I soon built up a friendship with the aforementioned Anton and he secured me an interview with Nirvana on one of their early trips to the UK in November of 1990, here to promote their ‘Sliver’ single and to play at headline show at The Astoria, with L7 and Godflesh as support. I recall the band calling reception from the top of King Street in Hammersmith saying they were having problems finding the office. I walked up the road to meet them and vividly remember Krist Novoselic’s lanky frame lumbering down the road towards me with Kurt and Dave shuffling behind him. Once we got back to the office and I had made the band a round of tea, we settled down to talk – well at least Krist and Dave did. Kurt, however, sat on the end of the sofa rolling an un-lit cigarette I had given him between his fingers as he stared straight ahead. He had heavy eye-liner caked around his eyes and hunched himself on the end of the sofa, mumbling occasionally. Thankfully Krist and Dave proved to be easy guys to get along with and after the interview they hi-jacked my tape recorder and ran around the office interviewing various members of the staff. “So what do you do here?” questioned Dave, thrusting the Dictaphone into the surprised receptionists face.
Better still, I had tried to get the folks at Metal Hammer to book a photographer to shoot the band so I didn’t have to use a promo picture with the piece but none were available. The office H.R. woman at this point was an abrasive German woman called Hannah Jordan who was in her late fifties and had previously worked as a photographer for a European pop magazine in the seventies. She hadn’t shot a band for years but I asked her to bring her camera in and she kindly agreed and did a shoot with the band on the roof of our offices as I stood and watched. The band really came alive and goofed around for Hannah, amused by her quirky nature. She later sold the pics to an agency and made a bloody fortune. I constantly see them on unlicensed Nirvana merchandise. If I’d known how big the band were going to get I would have taken the bloody pictures myself!
Photo: Nirvana by Anton Corbijn
The second time our paths crossed was sometime in the summer of 1991 in the sunny back garden of our local pub boozer The Salutation in Hammersmith. The band had ‘Nevermind’ finished and were happy and excited about the future – a stark contrast to the paranoid confusion that engulfed the band after their success. At the time they knew they had an amazing record under wraps and couldn’t wait for people to hear it. Kurt was a different person to the one I first met in our previous interview. He was chatty, enthusiastic and excited to ‘maybe sell as many records as Sonic Youth’ with no clue as to the success that was about to engulf them on the records release. On the way back to the office I remember chatting to Kurt about music as we strolled along in the sun. He had a garish psychedelic Butthole Surfers shirt on and we talk about Gibby’s musical lunacy. (Gibby Haynes interview discussing Kurt in rehab here). I was wearing a Poison Idea shirt and we laughed about their thirst for excess on every scale and their punk-as-fuck attitude.
Once Nirvana exploded around the world, I didn’t get to interview them again, apart from a brief phone interview with Novoselic after they had won Metal Hammer’s ‘Best New Band’ award (he was a little bemused by this!) but the fact that the band had broken through to the traditional rock/metal crowd showed how things were changing. It was incredible to watch as ‘Nevermind’ took over the world and how it changed music and affected the band. The build up towards the release of ‘In Utero’ was equally exciting. The press was full of statements from Kurt about how they were going to make an album of total noise to commit commercial suicide and shake off the mainstream success and fans that they never wanted in the first place. When it was announced that Steve Albini was going to record it, the suits gulped. His reputation for being a punk-as-fuck difficult fucker was legendary and it really did seem likely that Nirvana were going to smash their success to bits with a wall of total noise.
As it turned out, that isn’t quite what happened. I can clearly remember hearing ‘In Utero’ for the first time. By this point the Metal Hammer office had moved to Putney and a good friend of mine, who was also a huge fan of the band, lived down the road from the office. The tape arrived in the morning and I held off playing it in the office and took it over to my friend’s house at lunchtime. We cranked it up on his stereo and were instantly floored by the production and how insanely heavy Grohl’s drumming sounded – it totally blew us away, so excited by it as we leap around his front room in a frenzy of air guitar and drums. And as we got our heads into the record it just got better and better. The sheer honesty of the lyrics, that opening line. Even now when I hear opening song ‘Serve The Servants’ and the verse about Kurt’s dad “I just want you to know that I don’t hate you anymore,” still sends shivers down my spine.
Photo: Nirvana by Anton Corbijn
In Utero is an incredible album and it fully deserves the recognition and reissue treatment it is getting now. At the time, as Kurt’s depression and drug dependency became more apparent it was becoming clear the journey might not last long but nothing could have prepared us for how it was going to end. When the news came through of Kurt’s death I was in a studio with a band I was playing drums in and we were obviously stunned. We spent the afternoon jamming Nirvana songs. We were all so shocked. Empty. It was such a violent, brutal end to an incredibly exciting journey and they will always be the most important band of my youth. Once you peel away the bullshit, the drugs, the media attention and the eventual tragic suicide, all you’re left with is the music and 20 years later, it still resonates as powerfully and dramatically as it did big then. God bless Nirvana.
James Sherry
Enjoy these original interview dictaphone recordings (cleaned up by Jody Sherry) that were released on CD back in 2004. Today, these have been officially released to the internet by James Sherry for the first time and the first in a series of original interviews from the 90s that we will unleash this winter.
In Utero has been re-issued this month in a dope new boxset. Find it, treasure it and reminisce one of the greatest bands to ever entertain us.
Interview 1:
British journalist James Sherry (then 21 years of age) interviews Nirvana the summer before Nevermind was released. This discussion took place to in a pub called the Salutation on King Street in Hammersmith, London in 1991.
Interview 2:
Krist Novoselic is interviewed on the phone in James Sherry’s suburban family home in Surrey, England to discuss the mammoth success of Nevermind and the new found fame that came with a platinum selling record.
Interview 3:
This interview recorded at the Metal Hammer offices may be the hardest to hear audio wise but was recorded post Bleach era (November 1990) after Dave Grohl had joined the band. Nirvana are in top form and steal James’s dictaphone at the end to interview people in the office.
Like our FB page for our Courtney Love interview coming soon.
If you have not heard of Westboro Baptist Church they have a reputation for calling out everyone to get attention for themselves, but this time round US punk band Get Shot hit back at their xenophobic attacks by filming a sex scene on the lawn of their HQ in Kansas.
The video features bass player Laura Lush masturbating on the church lawn who says in a press release today that “The Phelps family and Westboro Baptist Church are ridiculous and do nothing except spread hate and cause controversy. As a bisexual woman and the bass player of a ridiculous punk band, I wanted to spread my legs and cause controversy.”
“There was a lot of traffic and we saw a few cops at a coffee shop a few blocks away. We barely had enough gas money and cocaine to make it to Denver for our next concert,” says band member JP Hunter. “Since we can’t afford bail, we had to cut it a little short before the cops got called. If someone will bail us out, we will bring a group of girls and a whole camera crew when we come back in a few months.”
Note that the video is obviously NSFW.
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Ben Fisher Small Wheels part
If you remember Ben Fisher’s intro to Stereo back in April then you will probably get more hyped on this new footage announcing his new wheel on Small Wheels. One to watch for 2014 for sure.