I dunno where I first heard it, but skaters like Hosoi, Hawk , Cab, Jessee, Mariano, Koston etc etc... you can tell it's them just by the way they skate! I can't do that with many of the youngbloods. I believe this is a product of jumping straight into tricks before just cruising around on the board like the old days! Raybourn is a slayer that's for sure!
Off the top of my head, bands we had locally were like Laffinstock, Big Fucking Deal, Whoppers Taste Good (<-- late 80s etc), then Dogfight (the original version rocked!), Round 2, Shortcut, Discourse, New Iron Column, and of course Judge Nothing etc etc. Fragile Porcelain Mice were pretty big around here. I saw them at Bastille's a few times I believe! Back in those days I didn't venture to Farmington much, as we felt we had to "rep" our local spots sooooo hard, ha. That Gino's place sounds awesome though, I always wanted to skate one of those roller rink floors!
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Dogfight were awesome! Holy shit forgot all about them. A band I was in back then got to open for Judge Nothing at Bernard's Pub at the time I thought that was the greatest thing ever! I always liked Bent then as well and got to catch Uncle Tupelo a few times.
I understand not traveling to skate when you had the city available, just had quite a few guys come down from the city to skate the ramps. We had a 2 foot, 4 foot and 6 foot at Gino's all indoors. Of course as soon as one of the crew got a license we started hitting the city regularly. I miss skating downtown back then, especially late nights. You had all of downtown to yourself then (91-94). Just us and the bums after 9pm. Unless there was a game there really wasn't anything else going on downtown. Kiener Plaza, all the marble, underground parking lots. Skated lots at some banks over in south city too, don't remember what everyone called the place, it was off Lemp and Potomac I think? Near Cherokee street.
I agree about kids these days just jumping on their boards and trying tricks immediately. It took me a whole damn summer to learn how to ollie! But besides a one or two older guys around that skated you had no way to learn stuff then and now the internet makes everything immediately available with the click of a button. Shit how many times would you rewind a damn vhs tape to try and learn a trick? I remember watching rubbish heap 8 million times trying to learn certain things, late shuv-its come to mind. Now you can just look that shit up on youtube. The learning curve is certainly different now days.
I wonder if kids now still have people giving them shit for skating like we did? Back when I started as all you other guys are well aware, skating was NOT COOL. Running from rednecks who wanted to beat your ass for just being a skate rat was a pretty normal occurrence for me growing up. Normally some big truck would roll by, some hillbilly would yell "skate fags"or "skate rat", we'd flip them off, then run for our lives. That's some character building stuff! Seriously though, it's got to be a way different experience to be in highschool now and be a skater then it was when I was coming up. Maybe it was different in bigger cities or on the coasts, but here it could be pretty rough. That's my OLD MAN rant, those little fuckers just don't know how good they have it these days!