John Lucero.

Are you the Godfather of street skating?

I started skating street long before the inception of street skating. In the '70s, when all the skateparks were in, I would get to skate there once a week if I was lucky. The rest of the week I just skated around the streets and hit up whatever was around. I've been doing boardslides on curbs and benches since like '78. We eventually got booted from the local park entirely, for doing dumb shit like peeing on people, and ended up skating the parking lot of the skatepark everyday. Stacey Peralta showed up one day to skate the park and we were skating the curbs out front. He told us we were going to be part of the new wave of skateboarding and that he was starting this new company called the Street Brigade. Honestly, we were just trying to make people laugh at us. Street skating was very accessible and when the skateparks started closing, the industry turned to it as the answer. To us it was just a joke.

The man behind the Black Label.

Thrasher - November 1990 Volume 9 Number 11

For the quote: Skateboarder - March 2002 Volume 11 Number 5