Tracing Skate Punk: From JFA To The Man Who Brought Punk To Skateboarding

Skate punk started in the ashes, where skate parks were closing and the art was dying. Those who did did it for themselves as no one else cared to invest anything in it — the pioneer bands of skate punk consisted of skateboarders, who just wanted to do whatever they wanted and listen to whatever felt right.

Jodie’s Foster Army is probably one of the first skate punk bands, if not the first, and their reason for getting into music couldn’t be more simple.

“When we started the band, there wasn’t enough music to skateboard to,” frontman Brian Brannon told Wasted Attitude. “In the early ‘80s, it was still arena rock, like Journey or Fleetwood Mac. You’d hear that kind of music at the skate park, and you can’t really skate to that stuff. It’s not inspirational.”

The type of music that would fulfill the skateboarders’ needs hadn’t been invented yet, which was why the pioneers of the skate punk took things into their own hands. “We played fast and hard music, to get in the mood and go hard out there, skate pools and stuff, but after the session, you mellow out, so you need some surf music,” Brannon said.

They crafted the original aesthetics of skate punk — D.I.Y. and has no rules.

“You don’t have to sound a certain way,” he said. “If somebody’s telling us we have to sound or look a certain way, that’s when we’re gonna break out the weird songs, just to mess with them, you know?”

Being all over the place is what they were there for, and they couldn’t think less about creating a new genre. The fact that they were skaters who were making punk music made them well-qualified to be called skate punk. “We’ve always been big skateboards, so there’s a bunch of songs about skateboarding.”

And surfing — skateboarding on the West Coast had a very intricate connection to surfing.

“It’s always the same bullshit answer, but it was the bastard stepchild of surfing,” Steve Olson, the man who was credited for introducing punk rock to skateboarding explained in an interview with HypeBeast. Many who grew up on the West Coast had a lifelong passion for surfing, and skate punk, a music that originated in Southern California, shared that connection.

Before JFA, there was a Texas band called The Big Boys, who were already starting to create music for the skaters, and their story is eerily similar.

Tim Kerr was a surfer before getting into skateboarding. “That’s why I started skating when I got to Austin,” the California native told Juice Magazine. “We were three hours away from a beach. I couldn’t go and surf every day so I started skateboarding.”

“We surf too,” Brannon said. “There are a couple of references to that. And then just the everyday punk rock existence.”

The early skate punk didn’t get more complicated than that.

The early ‘80s skateboard scene had a natural overlap with punk. As Brannon recalled, skateboarding was on the downslope. Skate parks had been closed down. Skateboarding wasn’t considered a cool thing, and those who got into it were in it for passion. Naturally, they had to have the gut to say, “Fuck off.” “Just like punk rock — you could get your ass kicked just for being a skateboarder.”

This is also to say that sometimes, it’s necessary to break rules or think outside the box just to pursue something that no one else wants you to do, like “climbing over somebody’s fence to skate their pool” or “going under a fence to skate a ditch” or “going into some mammoth pipe project.”

They were completely on their own. “You just had to make something up, and we were doing all of that stuff.” 

As Kerr put it, being a skateboarder in the early ‘80s called for “DIY.” Rather than tuning into the punk culture, they were more into paving their own path. “You got to do whatever you wanted to do, your way. It’s your self-expression. There was no set rule or uniform until they started labeling it.”

In 1978, Oslon won Skateboarder Magazine’s Skateboarder of the Year. He was told to give a speech, which he refused. And as he happened to be into punk rock, the historic moment somehow triggered a cultural movement.

“I was a punk rock kid back then,” Olson said. “I think I had leather pants on, some black shirt and a polka dot tie, and a white dinner jacket and these fucking pointed shoes that had white tips. They were way too small for my feet. Then they were like, ‘Speech!’ and I was like, ‘Fuck you!’ and didn’t give a speech and spit at the cameras. I’m like rebelling against the whole thing.”

It made no sense for his attitude to resonate with skaters on a larger scale, except that it did.

He recalled a lot of ups and downs in those days, with skateboards having started as toys in the 60s and peaked around the mid-70s.

“In the mid-’70s street skating was freestyle — like gymnastic handstands, spinning and tricks — pre-ollie. It was just all over the place and it was wicked. In the very late ‘70s and early ‘80s skate parks were just flying everywhere and money was being made with pros and this and that. But then it died.”

In his opinion, skateboarding died at the peak of its time because it was ahead of its time. Lawsuits and insurance problems piled up and put an end to it, forcefully. “Skateboarding just died with everything else that happened.”

It was bound to cause some rage, and it was also bound to come back, stirring a much bigger wave — this, of course, included the rise of skate punk. By the time The Offspring brought Guns N Roses’ level of exposure to the genre, things were very different, with skate punk already becoming a subculture with its own dedicated fanbase. Everyone can be a punker. It’s no longer to be frowned upon or discriminated against, and the music reflects the reach and volume.

The Offspring are largely considered a skate punk band, but they are not necessarily die-hard skaters. Their music is elected by the subculture more than anything else.

“It’s just really cool how this stuff kind of works together,” frontman Dexter Holland explained in an interview with The Music. “Before the video games, it was snowboard videos and skate videos and stuff like that, and there just kind of seems to be this marriage of this kind of music and other kinds of entertainment, and somehow what we do complements some of those things, which is cool.”

Their most successful album, Smash, seemed to alienate many punk rock fans by simply being melodic and successful. With success came the loss of purity. All the bands are still making music, but one thing everyone missed the most was the sense of community that got lost in time.

“The thing that really stuck with me wasn’t so much the music,” Kerr said. “It was the community of it. There wasn’t any barrier between the stage and the audience. Everyone was pretty much the same.”

“The audience was on stage as much as the bands were back then,” Noodles, The Offpring’s guitarist recalled. “You can't do that anymore. There are too many lawsuits. But it was really, everyone... we're all in this together. There was that kind of spirit in punk rock, and I love that we're still trying to figure out ways, now that we're doing it on a bigger scale, how can we keep the audience incorporated.”