Interview With Mike Vallely Continued from Sick Drummer Magazine Issue 8
By: Craig Sternberg
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SDM: You’ve been involved in skateboarding for a long time, including involvement in the first X Games. How much has extreme sports grown over the past fifteen years?
Mike: I turned pro in 1987, and I thought skating had boomed at that point. It was still underground, though, at that point, very much like punk rock. We were influencing a culture, we were on the forefront, but it was in a very quiet way. The influences we had back then, you couldn’t quite put your finger on it, but it was happening. The skate scene was influencing the music scene, it was influencing the fashion scene, it was huge in the ’80s boom. I was there for it, got to participate in it, and got to participate in the birth of street skating, which never happened before. It was an amazing time. Then in the early ’90s, skating kinda died, just disappeared. The only people that were doing it were skaters, there was no audience for it, no one spectated skating at that point. Skaters skated, and it was a very underground subculture. Then around 1995, ESPN started the X Games; that kind of changed the course. I always look at it as — Tony Hawk came out of retirement to skate in the first X Games, and it was a good thing he did. If he didn’t, I don’t know who would have been Tony Hawk if it wasn’t Tony Hawk! It wasn’t just a given that skateboarding was even going to be at the X Games or Tony Hawk was going to perform the way he did and change the course of things. Skateboarding was very conflicted at that time, the industry was trying to control it, they didn’t want it to grow. They wanted to control its growth. Just like punk rock music, skateboarding was going to grow no matter what, because it’s fucking cool. It had an audience out there and needed to get to that audience. So I decided in the mid-’90s to be one of the people that was on the frontlines and be a promoter and an ambassador for it. I knew it was going to happen anyways, I knew it was going to go into the mainstream, the underground was going to become the mainstream. All I decided to do was participate at a level so that it wasn’t just going to be competition that you saw, it wasn’t just going to be vertical skating or guys spinning in the air, I wanted to inject some soul into the mainstream. I wanted to be another voice out there that said, “Well, that contest was cool but that isn’t really what it’s about!”. I felt like that was my calling throughout the ’90s and the early 2000s. It has grown incredibly, it’s a whole different beast now. At this point, I don’t really follow the culture, I just skate. It is what it is at this point.
SDM: Do you see any young skaters coming up today who you think are going to be the next big thing? Or any skaters that you know for a fact are influenced by you?
Mike: It comes around every five or so years where I really see my influence on the scene. I go in and out of favor with the scene itself. I don’t really care about it, I’m not trying to impress anybody else, I skate for myself. I’ve stuck to my guns. I still do the tricks I love to do since the ’80s, I don’t think they are outdated or old, I think they are relevant today. I never followed fads or the trends. So when you follow that approach, you fall in and out of favor, sometimes people are like, “This guy just has got to disappear!”, then other times it’s like, “Oh man, this guy, the influence he’s had…”, so I don’t put too much stock in either. But I do see every several years some influence in there, but as far as the new skaters coming up, I just feel they’re so talented. They’ve truly become athletes. I don’t really see anything new happening, there’s no one that’s really blowing my mind, they are just going higher, further, and longer. They are not creatively adding to the story. The generation I was lucky enough to grow up with, they created it. That was something to see. That was the heavy duty stuff.
SDM: Let’s talk about the DRIVE documentary, and if you are ever going to do something similar again.
Mike: Well, we did an original documentary film called DRIVE, I think in 2002. Then we did a DRIVE television program, and we’ve done three seasons of that. We are looking to do a fourth season, changing the program a little bit, shaking things up. We exhausted the current format, I think. DRIVE is something I really care about, and something I’ll continue to do through the years in some capacity. I think we’ll be able to do something with Fuel, have a fourth season, and take it from there.
SDM: I’ve seen you pop up in movies a lot lately, and I’m wondering if we’ll see you in any movies again anytime soon?
Mike: I guess I’ve got good friends! I haven’t actively pursued anything in movies, I just get phone calls from people. When I did Mall Cop, it was just a matter of them having written skateboarding into the movie, and they were looking for a skateboarder who was a bad-ass dude, so I was at the top of the list. That one kind of landed in my lap. The Hangover recently, Todd Phillips, the director, is a fan of mine, and has been a fan of the band for a long time. He hit me up for doing music for the movie a long time ago, so we had a song in the movie. Then the opportunity popped up for a small cameo part. I’m not really pursuing any of this, it’s fun and it’s cool. It’s an easy paycheck, I can tell you that much! Much easier than hitting the stage and baring your soul or getting on a skateboard and throwing your body onto the ground. Not to discredit actors or acting, I don’t consider myself one. It’s definitely easier for me.
SDM: I wanted to talk about your obsession with the Anaheim Ducks, and your involvement with that team. Are there any other sports you are into besides hockey?
Mike: I don’t really follow sports besides hockey. Hockey has been a sport I followed since I was a kid, and it’s a sport I love. I’ve worked with the NHL through the years, and it just kinda evolved with me having an opportunity to work with the Anaheim Ducks in a marketing and promotional kind of capacity. The idea is that I just love hockey, I think it’s such a great sport, I always believed all it takes to get into hockey is to just go see a game. So my whole thing is just trying to get the skate, surf, action sports community if you will, to let them know hockey is out there and get them out to some games. I think the action sports world that would really appreciate the game of ice hockey if they took an opportunity to check it out. It’s a marketing and promotional kind of thing, I get to hang out and skate with the guys. It’s kind of a dream job.
SDM: Jess Margera is going to be in this magazine as well, so I wanted to talk about your relationship with that family in general. Were you close to Jess at all?
Mike: Yeah, we’ve known Jess for a long time. I’ve known Bam for what seems like forever, he seemed like a little kid when I first met him. When Bam first popped up on the skateboard scene, he really made an impression on me as a skater. Then I could always tell, just see something in Bam, he was a different type of kid, he had dreams, stuff he wanted to do that was bigger than just riding a skateboard. I always liked that about him. He had this kind of energy that made you want to be around him, he made me laugh. So Bam and I just through the years hooked up and did things here and there, I was never a staple of his crew or anything, I just floated in and out. When I met his family, they were so sweet and so nice, fed me well, took care of me. I loved going to West Chester and hanging with the Margeras. The first time I met Jess, actually, was right after we formed Mike V and the Rats. He just stopped in, home from tour, he was complaining about one of the opening bands they were touring with, and I said, “Well fucking kick them off. Mike V and the Rats will join the tour.”, and that’s what happened. So Jess played a role in the Rats getting out on the road for the first time for real. That was huge for us. Mike V and the Rats gigged with CKY more than any other band. They really took us in and got us out there, it really helped us cut our teeth as a touring band.
SDM: What’s the worst situation you’ve gotten yourself in with skating? You ever have to run away from cops or anything like that?
Mike: I refuse to run away from cops. I won’t because I don’t feel like I’m doing anything so wrong I feel like I need to run. That’s how I was when I was fourteen. My first interaction with a police officer ever was with him punching my face in. I didn’t run and there was a part of me that didn’t even respect that he was yelling at me. He didn’t like that and he kicked my ass. When I was fifteen, I was skating in New York City, cop came around the corner, and I just stood there and I ended up in jail. There’s been a history of that throughout. Most of it is overblown or over-hyped. Most of my run in with cops or security guards are at actual skateboarding events, competitions. We are performing and yet these guys still feel like they can muscle us. Skaters and authorities don’t mix. Most of the situations have been me coming to the aid of another skater, like the Muska incident. Someone lays their hands on a skater, I go, “well, that’s interesting, what if I lay my hands on them?”. I don’t see security guards and start shaking in my shoes, I see those guys and I say, “Fuck those guys!”. It can lead to some problems. I don’t even skate in competitions or skate at big events, so I haven’t had any kind of incident like that in a long time. It’s just like I go looking for it. Most of the skaters nowadays I don’t even know them well enough to know if I should come to their defense or not. Part of me thinks they have it coming anyways!
Click here to read the Interview With Brendan Murphy of Revolution Mother
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