My name is Josh Friedberg, as of today I’m taking over the word spewing duties on In the Gnar. I’d like to wish Nick good luck with Holeshot, I hope to build upon the good work he has done here.
I founded 411VM in 1992 and worked on it every day until 2005. Since then I’ve been doing some independent production work and focusing on becoming a better photographer. Skateboarding took over my life when I was 13, in the summer of 1985, but it could have been a very different story.
I had been riding bikes for a while, bunny hopping crap, riding off sketchy jumps in the park and just having fun cruising around with my friends in the neighborhood. After saving all my lawn mowing money for a couple of years, I decided the best use of it was to purchase a brand spanking new Redline RL-20 BMX bike.
I grew up in Topeka, Kansas and there wasn’t a good BMX shop so I had to mail order it. It was going to be a 4 week wait, but i was headed to Staten Island, New York for a month to visit my dad. I figured I could order it and by the time I got home my new bike would be there and i would be in possession of the hot shit.
A couple things happened that pushed me in a different direction. A few days before I left New York, I called to check the status of my bike and they told me it would be another 4 to 6 weeks. Imagine waiting 10 weeks for anything when you were 13, I cancelled the order on the spot. Back in Topeka, my friend Mitch Germann returned from a family vacation to Florida with an original Vision Mark Gonzales board and a skateboard video.
Before that, I had one of those yellow Free Former boards, i think Mitch had a blue doublekick one and my other friend Jason Rooney had a dope fiberglass Surfer board with some orange OJ’s. We used to ride on our butts and race from Mitch’s driveway to Jason’s house a couple blocks away. It was a fun downhill ride but that was about the extent of our skateboarding. Now that Mitch had the Gonz, and Stacy Peralta provided us with Future Primitive, it was a whole different world. Skateboarding was officially all that mattered.
I convinced my parents to take me to Topeka’s version of the standard bike shop that sold skateboards. I picked out a blue Sims Flagship with Gullwings and Sims Street wheels. Got the noseguard, tailskid, rails, copers and it was on. That board had to weigh like 20 pounds, but it was awesome.
Nothing defined skateboarding for us more than Future Primitive. We watched that tape hundreds of times, memorizing every word and trying every trick we saw, it became our first guide into the world of skateboarding. I want to give a big thanks to Stacy and the Bones Brigade for putting my life on the right path.
What video did it for you?
