#and we are one could be a scene with lance and a young frankie

[montygatorguy]

we are one is a song. i love we are one

[purefunskatezine]

BANNED IN ST. LOUIS

Friend and Pure Fun contributor, Matt Picker, originally wrote this article for our 13th issue but seeing as Ban This just turned 30 years old, I figured it would be fun to publish it online for everyone to enjoy. - Larry

Summer ‘89: I was living in Chesterfield, Missouri, a western suburb of St. Louis, about to start my first year of junior high. My younger brother and I were certifiable skate rats and card-carrying members of the Bones Brigade- not the actual Bones Brigade, of course, but the mail-in fan club version created by Powell Peralta to keep skateboarders immersed in news, tour dates, and product offering in the days before the internet. It was always a great joy to come home and see that large white envelope sitting on the kitchen counter, adorned with the familiar red Rat Bones stamp and Santa Barbara, CA return address.

Powell Peralta was my favorite skateboard company, and I spent many hours foregoing schoolwork to meticulously doodle their various logos and pro model graphics in the margins of notebooks and test papers. At the time, Powell videos like The Search For Animal Chin and Public Domain were the undisputed holy bibles of skateboarding: the standard to which all others aspired, the videos you watched before embarking on daylong skate adventures or all-nighter parking lot sessions.

One afternoon late in the summer, an envelope from Powell arrived in the mail. Usually these would carry Intelligence Reports (the Bones Brigade ‘zine) and a few stickers, along with the occasional patch, folded poster, or postcard autographed by a team rider like Tommy Guerrero or Kevin Harris. However, this one was different. Instead of the normal assemblage of Bones-branded swag, this one contained a folded paper invitation, which read:

Imagine yourself sitting with Tony Hawk, Ray Barbee, Lance Mountain, Stacy Peralta, and George Powell, watching the World Premier of “Ban This”, our newest video production. Got that? You’re there with your popcorn and your drink and there’s McGill sitting next to you and it’s showtime! Too good to be true? Well, it’s all possible because Powell Peralta is bringing the World Premiere of “Ban This” to St. Louis and, because you’re a Bones Brigade member, you’re invited to the very showing ever on Sat. Nov. 18at the Sheldon Concert Hall. Just follow these simple instructions to obtain your 2 free tickets…

Was someone messing with me? Surely this couldn’t be real. Head spinning, I called up my friend Dave, who lived on the next street over. A fellow Brigadier, he had just received it too. Minutes later, he was at my house, invitation in hand. We could barely comprehend what we were looking at: things like this just simply didn’t happen in St. Louis. Sure, we had some demos here and there, but a Powell Peralta video premiere? An event of this magnitude may go down in California, but not here in the middle of the rust belt. None of it made any sense, but we weren’t going to question it.

I immediately grabbed the phone and dialed up Powell HQ, reserving our tickets for the debut screening of Ban This on Saturday, November 18, 1989. A few weeks later, they finally showed up in the mail. This was really happening. To say that the level of excitement was high amongst my group of friends would be a massive understatement- we talked about it almost nonstop. Speculation ran wild: how could Public Domain be topped? What new tricks would be debuted? Who would have the opening segment? Which members of the (actual) Bones Brigade would be in attendance? Was Johnny Rad going to play? It was almost too much for our juvenile, skate-addled brains to process.

After an excruciating few months, the long anticipated day finally rolled around. More correspondence had trickled in from Powell in the interim- there would be an autograph signing beforehand at Splash, our local skate shop, featuring Tony Hawk, Ray Barbee, Steve Saiz, and Ray Underhill (along with Stacy Peralta himself). Luckily it was an unseasonably balmy afternoon, because the line snaking into Splash spilled out the front door and creeped down past several storefronts, hundreds of kids long. Despite being perched awkwardly behind a glass display counter on barstools for the better part of two hours dealing with an endless line of skateboard-wielding kids, the Brigade was all smiles, doling out innumerable autographs, shaking hands and posing for pictures with any kid who wanted one.

That evening a group of us piled into someone’s mom’s car and took off, getting to the Sheldon early to take it all in. The buzz was off the charts as we finally took our seats and the room went dim. I will never forget the deafening roar of the packed theater as the screen turned blue and a gigantic Ripper the size of a two-story house poked his bony fingers through the screen and tore out, laughing maniacally. You’ve obviously seen Ban This so I won’t go into too many details on the video itself, but suffice to say that starting with Frankie Hill’s monstrous opening segment and lasting straight through to Tony Hawk’s jaw-dropping 540 ollie ender, it was a scene of sheer, barely-containable pandemonium. You could have powered a small city with the energy in that hall.

After the video ended, everyone filed upstairs to a ballroom for an extended meet & greet/hangout with the Powell pros. The huge room was decorated with cardboard stand-ups of the lab professor who narrated the video, and numerous red winged ripper banners peppered the walls. There was even a little bulldog running around that everyone joked was the very dog that stole Lance Mountain’s board in Public Domain, flown in for the occasion. The scene was overall very chill, at least compared to the near-riot that had ensued in the theater, and to just be there in a room casually mingling with people like Tony Hawk and Ray Barbee, chatting about skateboarding, ramp building and whatever else was nothing short of surreal.

Splash Skate Shop, we later discovered, was an instrumental component in the St. Louis world premiere coming to fruition; yet despite extensive prodding from myself and my friends in the months following Ban This, the owner was always very vague on the details, usually smiling and saying something to the effect of “I just worked it out with Stacy”. My brother recounts, “I have a very hazy recollection that he just asked and they said OK, if he arranged everything”. Could it really have been that simple?

Whatever the circumstances, to this day, I consider that event to be a real milestone in my life. What an unbelievable privilege it was to be one of the first 150 people in the world to see a brand new Powell Peralta video- at the height of their dominance- was not lost on me then or now. Luckily, I kept everything I ever received associated with that night- very likely some of the only remaining copies in existence- and I’m happy to get to share them with everyone reading this issue of Pure Fun. Even today, watching Ban This (and all the old Powell classics) continues to provide maximum stoke, fueling my quest to cheat adulthood and stay young forever, which I’m happy to say is still going strong at 37.