Hella Nation - Evan Wright [22]
Phoenix was beyond his wildest dreams. “Phoenix wasn’t nothing but skating, getting fucked up and fucking broads,” he says. Among the original Piss Drunx was his childhood idol, Randy Colvin. “He was chopping meat in a butcher shop,” says Greco. “He didn’t give a fuck. He could still skate.” Colvin had turned his back on the world of pro skating and was hanging out with two Phoenix characters, Punker Matt and Jimmy “Moron” Moore, both in their mid-twenties. Punker Matt, a dedicated anarchist who has since moved to Oregon, and Jimmy Moron, a sometime water-quality analyst for the city, were both pool skaters.
Pool skating had fallen out of favor more than a decade earlier, condemning its practitioners to obscurity. “Jimmy Moron is one of the best skateboarders in the world,” says Reynolds. “But no one will ever know about it.”
To Greco, the Piss Drunx were “O.G., Original Gangsta, no-rules skaters.” He came back to Huntington Beach with a PD tattoo and began listening to the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols. He traded in baggy skate fashions for a lean punk style. He hung a life-size Sid Vicious poster on his wall. Later, when he posed in a skate magazine photo layout, he imitated that poster right down to the crooked snarl.
Soon, just about everyone in the Warner Avenue Mob had Piss Drunx tattoos. But no one else took their unspoken credo of being a “no-rules skater” to heart as Greco did. His behavior while touring with the Birdhouse team became increasingly outrageous. “He was a pile, drunk all the time, fighting,” says Strickland. But Reynolds marveled at Greco’s ability to draw crowds. “You’d go to a demo with the best skaters in the world, but Jim would get the biggest crowds. He’d be off at the edge of the parking lot, and he’d be drunk off of his ass doing ollies over a beer bottle.”
Greco’s attitude degenerated to the point that Tony Hawk finally fired him from the team. “He was the cause of so much tension,” says Hawk. “Jim is chaos.” Kicked out of the Birdhouse apartment, Greco couch-surfed Huntington Beach before being picked up by Jamie Thomas’s Zero team. It was not the best match. Thomas, a born-again Christian with a “Jesus Saves” tattoo on his chest, tried to help Greco get sober, but Greco was having none of it. “Jamie means well,” says Greco, “but that Jesus shit gets old fast.”
Reynolds sneaked Greco back into the Birdhouse apartment, and Strickland began filming Greco, Reynolds and their Piss Drunx friends doing tricks. “It was just high jinks,” says Greco. “We kept adding to it, and people would come over and be like, ‘Put in that sick video.’”
In early 1999, Jay Strickland and Andrew Reynolds decided to quit Birdhouse and form their own company. They would have their own team, and design and sell their own boards, shirts, jeans and accessories like school book bags. Initially, they thought about calling the company Piss Drunx Skateboards, but, says Reynolds, “the Piss Drunx isn’t something anybody can own.” Besides, says Strickland, “parents probably wouldn’t want their kids wearing Piss Drunx clothes to school. We ended up naming the company Baker Skateboards, after our friend Ali Boulala, who used to sit around all day getting baked.”
Reynolds put up half the money and became majority owner. Hawk backed it with a distribution deal, and Strickland became the creative director. One of the first things he did was edit the Piss Drunx high-jinks tape into a raw but commercial product. Called Baker Bootleg, it was offered over the Internet. While the skating was unremarkable—Greco’s portion consisted mostly of crude tapes made during his teenage years in Connecticut—the unapologetic scenes of Piss Drunx’s cockeyed revelry caused a buzz, and the tape sold well.
Strickland took control of the day-to-day operations. Among the Piss Drunx, he was known as Suge because of his vision of turning Baker into the Death Row Records of the skateboard industry. He supervised the business strategy—what Greco calls the “dark stuff.”