Nick doesn't like my taste in music. I know this because he flat out told me so while sitting (and mostly sleeping in) shotgun as I drove us back down to Southern California from Santa Cruz following the 50th anniversary extravaganza hosted by NHS, circa 2023. Granted, it was a super long ass drive. He was also dealing with the mental and physical repercussions of a bizarre if not ridiculous shower mishap, and I'm sure I had on some random Spotify playlist that was algorithmically grabbing anything and everything that may have vaguely applied to the UK sounds of the Courteeners and the Vaccines. So, at some point, Nick grumpily told me he was over it and hijacked the bluetooth connection to play music he liked.
Even though I'd long tuned out to what had actually been playing—for me, listening to music while long-hauling is more of a static zen thing where I just succumb to the rhythm and the ripple of the road and let my mind wander where it will [1]—this irked me to no prickly end because I'm a lifetime subscriber to the Big Brother road trip rule that whoever's at the wheel gets to be the DJ (for better or worse) and everyone else can suck it. Not only that, but Nick's one of those quirky dudes who is constantly fiddling with the "tuner"—for lack of a more modern word that correlates to streaming technology—bouncing from genre to genre, sometimes only listening to half a song before ADHDing on to some other random track of whimsy. Whereas me, myself, I once listened to a single track on repeat for over a week straight while reading Jubilee Hitchhiker: The Life and Times of Richard Brautigan, so you know I'm nestled somewhere on the spectrum with an extreme sensitivity to staccato disruptions in my aural environment.
Where exactly is this going? Good question. Not sure myself. I've spent a lot of time inside my head lately… a solitary state of mind which has both upsides and downsides, but also makes for a perfect time to drop a StrangeLove State of the Union Address. Especially since there's a whole lot of goofy shit going on in the world right now and if I don't ponder something so inconsequential as the fate of skateboarding then I'll likely spin out into the void, burning hot rubber curlicues in a desolate mental parking lot.
Photos left to right: MCA and Ad-Rock exit stage left after the performance at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, on December 31, 1995; Mike D in the VIP tent with (I think?) Steve "Pav" Pavlovic, the Summersault ringmaster.
But first, if you're curious, why yes! That was indeed a photo of Lou Barlow that first lured you into this particular dump of synaptic effluvia. I popped it off at a Sebadoh show at the El Rey Theater in Los Angeles, circa 1997, and they're actually a perfect example of some of the music I mostly listen to: Lo-fi power pop for the sensitive sad bastard [2]. Neat, right? Anyway, one of the perks of working on Big Brother magazine back in the rip-roaring '90s was abusing press credentials to interview bands we liked [3], score free tickets and CDs, and every so often land premium spectating placement under the guise of being a professional photojournalist. Like, for me, the charade of a lifetime came on the New Year's cusp of 1995–'96 during the Summersault music festival in Australia, where I coasted along on the VIP coattails of sideshow pro skaters Ed Templeton, Max Schaaf, and Ethan Fowler to gain both front and backstage access to a lineup of performances that included the Beastie Boys, Sonic Youth, The Foo Fighters, Pavement, Beck, The Amps, Bikini Kill, Rancid, Jawbreaker, and even that little Aussie wunderkind pipsqueak of the indie time, Ben Lee.
Photos left to right: Lars Frederickson of Rancid; Stephen Malkmus of Pavement; and Kim Deal of The Amps. Wondering why I left all the sprockets on these photos? Mainly because A) That's how I shot them on my light table to turn them into digital smart putty; B) nothing in the design world screams The '90s! like film sprockets do (well, I guess a lot of awful, ravey, Ray Gun fonts do, too); and C) Dave Carnie absolutely hates them.
Needless to say, there's definitely something to be said for comfortably standing in the gutter between the band onstage with thousands of people barricaded behind you who are all pressed together in a massively sweaty Vegemite sandwich. Yeah, I kind of felt like a big time phony (Holden Caulfield would've singled me out for sure), but who cares. Whatever shred of shame I may have had fucked right off, because I had the best seat in a sprawling open house to some of the top alternative acts in their prime.
Photos left to right: Thurston Moore in blue + Kim Gordon in red = the primary colors of Sonic Youth.
But let's get back to StrangeLove, where we've apparently gone off on a counteroccultural lark. Am I the first person to ever coin that word? Could "counteroccultural" possibly be my very own big "bromance" moment a la Dave Carnie? I know, I could google it to find out for sure, but fuck those bootlicking shitheels for embracing that "Gulf of America" claptrap. Plus, I really don't want to know if anyone else has ever used the word before. I'd much rather hang out in my own blissful bubble of ignorance like everyone else does these days. Man, I'm a bit of a pill at the moment, aren't I? Next thing you know I'll be going off like an angry old man about the insatiable ouroboros of nostalgia that skateboarding has become and how it seems hell bent on consuming itself at the cost of fuck all else. Bah! Humbug! But, mind you, I'm also painfully self-aware that I may well be the only person who feels this way and my grousings amount to doodly-squat in the grand irrelevant scheme of things.
Photos left to right: One of the downsides to shooting film—or at least for my amateur ass—is that the images my mind processed through the lens weren't always what came back from the chemical bath. To my discredit, though, I was often just clicking, wishing, and hoping for the best possible outcome. So, if I managed to get a couple decent photos out of a 36 shot rolI, I was feeling pretty damn good about myself. Unfortunately this crummy live photo of Bikini Kill and ghostly, blown out interaction between Kathleen Hanna and Ed Templeton land squarely in the vast, crap majority of my wasted celluloid graveyard.
Okay, okay, to backtrack once again: How did we find ourselves in this mystical vein of a creative direction? Well, I can assure you it wasn't that Agatha something something show on Disney+, where I was only slightly mortified to see one episode's plot revolve around the tarot arcana precisely as I was working on the series of graphics. But, in a way, the origin still involves witchy girls, if only because that's the place sensitive, shoe-gazing guys like us first encounter such things. I've spoken about these temptresses before—or written, whatever—a few years back when we had Aaron Rose contribute a few graphics. Perhaps you remember? Here, see if Jonathan Richman jogs your memory:
That was great, wasn't it? Spike Jonze turned me onto him back when I started working at World Industries in 1992. Made me a better human for it—or at least sanded away one abrasive edge of my personality. Not that there weren't many other barbs and spurs to work on over the next three decades, but I know I was an exceptionally cynical and snide shit back then and distinctly remember feeling like a different person after seeing Jonathan play live at a small Long Beach cafe.
Not exactly staying on the rails, am I? So yeah, tarot decks and vampire girls. That is, after all, how I first encountered the classic Rider-Waite tarot cards back in 1991. One bewitching female of interest later and I was suddenly vibing off the imagery to create Ray Barbee's third and easily least popular graphic for Powell Peralta [4]. Normally I'll come right out and call a spade a spade—there have been god knows how many flops throughout the course of my career—but I still feel that's one of my more underrated graphics. Perhaps it suffered due to the lack of a strong, central image? I don't know. Hell, H-Street was slapping their graphics under the trucks or on the upturned tip of the nose, so, if anything, I think it had more to do with that being the pivotal point in skateboarding time when Powell had already taken it on the chin one too many times from Rocco and there was just no coming back… especially not then.
Then and now. Days of future past. Time is a flat circle. Rock over London. Rock on Chicago. Coca-Cola: It's the real thing.
So, when Nick proposed the idea of a team rider series springboarding off the old tarot imagery, I initially balked… a knee-jerk reaction to the ho-hum reception of the aforementioned Barbee graphic back then. But once I started looking at the old Rider-Waite illustrations again, I came across "The Fool" and instantly envisioned Abbie Hoffman prancing off a San Francisco cliffside—you know, the Sacha Baron Cohen character from Netflix's The Trial of the Chicago 7. And from there, with my brain stuck in a counterculture rut, it was only logical to envision Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski as "The Hermit," Malcolm X for "Strength," and a revisitation of Patty Hearst, aka Citizen Tania, as "The Empress" for Monica's model, what with the bonus reptilian iconography of the seven-headed snake. "The Magician" came last, binding all four tarot suits together with a nod to Moloch, the Bohemian Grove, and the"Cremation of Care," mostly just to fan the flames of any conspiracy nutter's case. To be fair, I hadn't intended to subvert Nick's idea in this overall subversive manner, but such was the path in my cards. No sense fighting the preordained future.
Obscure subject matter though it may be—perhaps even more so for skateboarding—in the end they're all just silly little pictures. The fact there are intriguing stories behind them all is an added attraction, I would think, but many, it would appear, much prefer blundering through this apparent Golden Age of Ignorance like blissful bull elephants in a china shop. However, in the event you're not one such wrecking ball of history and culture, A) that's awesome; and B) precisely why I've included zip-lines into the Great Beyond for further illumination in a CliffsNotes fashion. The boards, by the by, are now available exclusively in shops with bonus 8 x 13 prints of each arcana to boot. —Sean Cliver
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1. Not to get all Kerouac, but being on the road is my brain's preferred time for creative thought processing. Like this one time, circa 1996, I ran away from home, so to speak, after a very regrettable life mistake blew up in my face in an embarrassingly public, workplace manner, and while hightailing it north on the 5 freeway I rewrote the entire history of Mormonism without even knowing any of the history to begin with. While this did not end up on Broadway as a smash hit play, it did become a series of wine-fueled, late night photo captions in a later issue of Blunt snowboard magazine.
2. I was once driving in the car with my son (who was 11 at the time), when he finally turned to me in frustration and said, "Dad. All your music is sad—SAD, SAD, SAD." What could I do but laugh? He called a spade a spade.
3. This was really just an excuse to post my photo of Robert Pollard being interviewed by Tracy Vanderlinden when Guided by Voices played The Troubadour, circa 1995, on the Alien Lanes tour. We had such a great time hanging out with the band (and Kim Deal!) that it was assumed we were now all best buds—or maybe that was just Jeff Tremaine's assumption, seeing as he hopped up onstage not once but twice during their performance that night to get a beer out of the band's cooler. He didn't make a clean getaway on the second bottle, though, and was subsequently bumrushed out of the show, whereupon he kicked over a Harley-Davidson and was eventually detained by the West Hollywood police for a night in the drunk tank, making for quite the quintessential Guided by Voices experience.
4. At the time, I wasn't aware of Ray's religious beliefs, and the fact that tarot cards are generally deemed to be The Devil's playthings (because supernatural) this probably wasn't a direction much suited to his liking. I did have fun animating the Rag Doll into different scenarios, though, as it appealed to my earlier comic book aspirations.