American Fun (49 page)

Of course it was the old
Gilded Age scam that pure fun can be simulated, packaged, and sold back to the people as mass amusement. DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and the newest innovator,
Grandmaster Flash, had come to accept that their dance-party subculture could never get bigger than block parties and discos. It was a rolling, organic urban experience that required hip-hop’s “
four elements”: DJing, MCing, breaking, and tagging. Like Zulu Nation, it was all about
unity
. Rapper Chuck D, who was a teenager at the time, remembers thinking hip-hop could never be recorded. “
’Cause it was a whole gig, y’know? How you gon’ put
three hours
on a record?” But then in December 1979, just as hip-hop was dying of old age in the Bronx, a studio found three unknown rappers, called them the
Sugar Hill Gang, pressed a fifteen-minute
track called
“Rapper’s Delight,” and captivated the world with a bright and tinny echo of hip-hop’s original street-level bomb.

IN THE
1970s and early 1980s, young Americans, in cliques and crews, fixed their own society by urging each other to scary new heights—of personal style, of cool expression, of musical power, of physical
daring. Discontent with the rebellious styles in stores, kids aggressively reconstructed fashion with scissors, markers, paint, and rejects. Unwilling to trust TVs, magazines, and
newspapers to report the news that really mattered, they commandeered photocopiers,
Diggers-style, and connected their subcultures through posters and zines. Unamused by the machinery, toys, and playgrounds that were sold to them by the older generations, they went where they wanted and
crafted new tools. And unsatisfied with the entertainment
industry—with the overproduced hits of hard rock and disco, with the deeply entrenched trends in both movies and sports—they made their own music, invented their own dances, shot films in Super 8, and, inspired by their era’s athletic mavericks, pushed sports into unimaginable new territory.

Doing it yourself (or DIY, as it came to be known) was nothing new for Americans. Plymouth and Merry Mount were DIY colonies, though with contrary ideas of what “it” was. The Sons of Liberty were DIY revolutionaries, determined to build government from the streets. Antebellum African Americans, deprived of society’s most basic freedoms, designed and sustained DIY liberties as durable as the
U.S. Constitution—which, for that matter, was another big DIY project. And the pioneers in covered wagons, the Mormons pulling handcarts, the
forty-niners over land and sea, and the millions upon millions of intrepid immigrants were all of them DIY adventurers, leaving behind what was safe and familiar to break something new from the frightening unknown.
Historically, DIY is the American way. But its new rising spirit among 1970s youth, who picked up when the sixties counterculture tuned out and made use of what was already at hand, grew in large part from American failure: the inner-city devastation of “urban renewal” projects, the energy crisis, soaring unemployment, runaway crime rates and drug addiction, the
moral collapses of Vietnam and
Watergate. Many kids whom the system neither helped nor gave hope to made their lives meaningful all on their own. They built their civil society from the urban rubble and, as kids do, made it wild fun.

In the early 1970s, while Clive and
Cindy Campbell were jacking into streetlamps and hosting their game-changing
block parties, teenagers were risking their lives for fun along the embattled Los Angeles shoreline, where crews and gangs carved up turf south of Wilshire Boulevard—from the mean streets to the breaking waves. At the turn of the century, the tobacco millionaire and real estate developer Abbot Kinney had turned the marshland south of Santa Monica into a
Coney Island–style seaside resort. Coursing with Old World canals and gondolas, it earned its name, Venice of America. After 1967, when its last theme park shut down, the derelict pier and its surrounding streets gave way to typical early-seventies decay: gang wars, arson, drug dealing, vandalism. But churning in the center of its waterfront ruins was a
natural
source of thrilling amusement: the wildest break in Los Angeles, growling through the broken rib cage of the Pacific Ocean Park pier. Among the radical surfers who braved
Hell’s Angels and deadly chunks of urban detritus to surf underneath the P.O.P. was a band of fearless, long-haired teens sponsored by the
Zephyr Surf Shop—the legendary
Z-Boys. Home movies of the era show several kids at once fighting to own a curling wave, swerving and clashing between dock pilings and rebar and executing life-saving cutbacks. Locals chucked bottles and dropped concrete blocks onto outsiders who tried to crash their waves: “
Death to Invaders” and “Invaders must die” read the in-dead-earnest spray-painted warnings. But the greatest hazards lurked underwater. “You could get impaled on a fallen roller coaster track or, like, a piling,” Z-Boy
Tony Alva recalled. Under the jagged P.O.P., these most radical Californians fairly butchered the Beach Boys’ chipper “Fun, Fun, Fun.” In the same breath they openly mocked the wreckage of
George C. Tilyou’s crumbling amusement-park legacy.

The Z-Boys were twelve Asian-American, white, and mixed-race youths, many of them “discarded kids” from low-income, single-parent households. One of their most talented members,
Peggy Oki, was a
girl. The Zephyr shop was their “
clubhouse,” and their den-mothers-of-iniquity were the owners,
Skip Engblom, who organized their time and pushed them, in his words, to act like “pirates”;
Jeff Ho, a professional surfer who shaped and painted surfboards to mimic
graffiti and low-rider street styles; and
Craig Stecyk, also a surfboard shaper, as well as a budding journalist and sports photographer whose articles in the mid-seventies for
Skateboarder
magazine made the Z-Boys national celebrities.

For the Z-Boys didn’t earn their fame on the waves—they earned it on the pavement. In the afternoons, when the surf at P.O.P. was flat, they imported their hell-for-leather style to the wavy asphalt basins of local elementary schools. With the recent invention of polyurethane wheels,
skateboarding, a trend that had vanished in the early sixties, was enjoying a rebirth with American kids. The Z-Boys took cues from Ho and Stecyk and crafted performance skateboards of their own from chunks of lumber and old furniture. Like B-boys and B-girls mimicking
Bruce Lee, the Z-Boys aped their surfing idol, the shortboarder
Larry Bertlemann. Riding low to the ground, fluid, and
fast;
dragging and planting their hands for leverage (like Bertlemann did on the waves), the Z-Boys reinvented skateboarding for extreme velocity, danger, and style.

The Z-Boys were children of a DIY culture; their mentors, and the rogue sport of surfing in general, demanded quick-thinking ingenuity. Their own guerrilla moment came in 1976, when California suffered from an historic drought and L.A.’s ubiquitous swimming pools were drained. The Z-Boys combed streets and surveyed canyons with binoculars, searching for empty pools to ride. When they found one, they would unload pool-draining equipment from their trunks and post high lookouts for cops—who often came and ran them out. “
Part of the thrill was knowing the police could come at any time.” The rest of the thrill, of course, was skating—carving high-speed, surflike turns in the cavernous deep ends of forbidden pools. Under these intense new conditions, each skater ground out an inimitable style (risk and style being the highest achievements), but the Z-Boys’ searing competition, combined with their ganglike group cohesion, kept them raising their collective standards—for individual performance, for rebel pride. Their practice
had the conviction of politics. “
Skaters,” Stecyk wrote that year, “are by their very nature urban guerrillas: they … employ the handiwork of the government/corporate structure in a thousand ways the original architects could never have dreamed of.” The Z-Boys’ example of the guerrilla skater enthralled the nation’s kids, who followed their story, who imitated their Vans and skater hairstyles, and who scoped their hometowns for auspicious pavement. Skateboarding, like break dancing, inspired America’s youth to flaunt their skills in full public view. It showed them reinhabiting the failing public sphere in creative, daring, and exciting style. “Skateboarding is not a crime” became a common tagline, a postmodern echo of the
Declaration of Independence, which dared to declare a higher law. But in 1977,
Skateboarder
reported a weird new twist on the timeless feud between cops and punks: in response to a mouthy young skater’s taunt (“
Bet you can’t ride it, pig!”), an L.A. cop shed his sidearm, took the punk’s deck, borrowed Adidas from one of the “rowdies,” and turned out some “highly technical freestyle routing,” topping it off “with a stylish crossover dismount.” He told the kid “to tighten his mounts as well as his act.”

Some of the Z-Boys achieved international fame. Tony Alva bucked corporate sponsorship and, at age nineteen, started his own popular line of skateboards.
Stacy Peralta used the proceeds from his co-owned skate-equipment company to found the
Bones Brigade, a Zephyr-style team for the next generation of radical skaters. The Z-Boys’ personal achievements aside, their greatest contributions were to the future of sports.
In the fall of 1977, when Tony Alva shot up over the lip of a swimming pool and magically sculpted a turn in the air, he broke into an aerial frontier from which the sport has never returned. With the advent of makeshift half-pipes—and then with publicly sponsored skateparks—the guerrilla efforts of these L.A. daredevils blazed trails for an awe-inspiring realm of sports. From the Z-Boys’ innovations came the aerial-based
X Games in which skaters, snowboarders, BMXers, skysurfers, and others still push the limits of soaring midair.

Of course, with the professionalization of such sports, as was the common complaint in the 1880s, a good part of their original fun drops out. Like professional football, baseball, and basketball, the X Games
are now big business, subject to the limits of corporate sponsorship and intense regulation. It is fitting, then, that
Jay Adams, the wildest
Z-Boy with the most original style, the group’s surefire
punk, should have lost interest when the others went pro—when, in his words, “
guys didn’t seem like they were having as much fun” and skating became “more of a job.” At the same time, however, the urban-guerrilla side of skating—and of BMXing and break dancing and newer activities like European
parkour (PK), which turns urban landscapes into aerobatic playgrounds—has inspired kids ever since with its fun of exploration and rebellion. For all the skate parks cropping up across America, the nation’s parking ramps, sidewalks, and staircases still smack and growl under polyurethane wheels.

Z-Boy
Shogo Kubo goes vertical in the Dogbowl, Santa Monica, 1977. (Photograph © Glen E. Friedman.)

DIY WAS A PUNK TERM
. DIY was a punk
ethic.
DIY was the punk rocker’s exuberant raspberry at a corrupt, bankrupt, and fucked-up
system—a wholesale rejection of the commercial dream. Punks, in the tradition of American pragmatism, shitcanned ideals; they scuffed the cleats of their steel-toed Doc Martens on hippie-dippie idealism. To punks,
real
punks, even the authorities (cops, presidents, whatever) weren’t considered a worthwhile menace—they were just a lurid joke. And if you didn’t get the joke, you weren’t punk. You were just a poser, a weekend warrior in safety-pinned jeans. And the only thing worse than a poser (who was never punk to begin with) was the sell-out, the punk who
becomes
a joke.

In December 1970, writing for
Creem,
the rock critic
Lester Bangs bemoaned the decadence of rock in his article “Of Pop and Pies and Fun.” Designing “A Program for Mass Liberation,” he scorned the new wave of self-important commercial rock in favor of the half-naked, howling
Iggy Pop and his loud, simple, ridiculous, and generally offensive band, the
Stooges. Bangs praises the Stooges for their “
crazed quaking uncertainty” and “an errant foolishness that effectively mirrors the absurdity and desperation of the times.” A grim message? Certainly. A warning? Not really. In 1970 Americans were tired of warnings. Instead, in the Stooges, America’s third proto-punk band (alongside the
Velvet Underground and MC5), Bangs also observed “a strong element of cure, a post-derangement sanity.” Bangs’s prospective “Program” involves audiences throwing pies “
in the faces of performers who they thought were coming on with a load of bullshit.” It also praises the Stooges for their self-mocking “courage” to admit to fans that their show was a “sham” and “the fact that you are out there and I am up here means not the slightest thing.” Obliteration of the sacred stage had a long American history: in the
Jackson Age,
b’hoys and g’hals behaved as if they owned their
celebrities; in
Buddy Bolden’s
Jazz Age, musicians and dancers kept a hot rapport; and for a few minutes in the West, in the early sixties, the Mime Troupe and the
Charlatans rose to meet their crowds in edgy showdowns of shared satire. The “
rock revolution” reclaimed the stage, but Bangs wanted both sides to crush it, both the prankster crowd and the puckish rockers. All he requested was a shared sense of “fun”—the joy of smashing the
Gilded Age myth of celebrity-centered enjoyment. His “Program,” in a word, was punk.