Grip Tape Scars

ELEPHANT interview!

2009-01-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

Have you heard Elephant yet? If not, your lame, and probably do not do enough digging for new music. Suffice it to say the group rocks, and sounds a lot like...well, like Elephant. Also, the band was nice enough to answer a few questions...

What got "Elephant" going in the first place?

It's been a long time coming for both of us...we've been involved in other projects/bands seperately in the past, but I think we always knew that in the end it would come down to the music we wrote together that stuck around. We both have the same message in mind, the same musical taste for the most part, and our writing process has always been similar.

Is there an album or any other realeases coming soon?

Our self-titled EP will be available in all iTunes stores worldwide, Amazon, Rhapsody, and Napster on February 3rd, 2009.

Whats up with shows in the future?

We just recently booked a gig with a large, elaborate monthly party called Society in downtown Los Angeles for February 28th, 2009. Other than that, we'll have several more shows announced within the next few coming months.

Influences?

They vary wildly...anyone from Placebo to Joan Jett to Jeff Buckley to The Cliks...lots of electronic stuff, too, obviously.

Are there other projects the band is involved with?

At the moment, not really...we're still writing a bunch of new material like hell and are really focused on that right now.

Words of wisdom from Elephant?

If you believe in what you're saying, let it be heard, regardless of how the world will see you.

For more check out: http://www.myspace.com/elephantwave

31G Records Interview!

2008-12-31T17:18:00.001-08:00

I am psyched to be able to present a short interview I was granted with 31G Records. I apologize for the questions, however, I am not the most experienced interviewer, but I am trying. I hope everyone enjoys the insight offered into (in my opinion) one of the greatest rock labels currently operating. Read on!

Why did you start 31G and how did it come about? Influences in starting a label?

i started three one g because i realized that i didnt have to deal with smaller labels that did sketchy stuff, like alter art, make merch that was not authorized, and not get paid royalties when money was being made.
as far as influences, i suppose its anything from dischord to the economy to class struggle to art in general.

Who were some of your first artists?

unbroken, swing kids, and jenny piccolo were the first bands we dealt with.

What are your hopes in running a music label?

keeping it real. but i dont have to hope for that.

As a primarily rock label have you ever considered signing any musicians in a different genre?

we dont "sign" bands per say. but if you take a look at our roster, we cross many genres in my opinion. anything from orthrelm to quintron to cattle decapitation, to chinese stars.

How did the name "31G" come about?

joy divisions "warsaw"

Thanks for answering my oh-so professional sounding interview questions.

Check out: http://www.threeoneg.com

ILLADEL INK! The ink that bleeds through like new jeans on white-on-white's!

2008-12-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

I was recently fortunate enough to get to chat with the founder/ proprietor and all around "If I do not do it, it wont be done!" guy for ILLADEL ink "JASKE"! Here is the information I was blessed with, which reminds me, any of you who happen to be reading this, do SOMETHING as a matter of fact ANYTHING for yourselves! Make a zine! A sticker! A mop! Shit, just make ANY kind of creative effort! I know that a Wii makes you move slightly to and fro but let's be real and get out and be a creative force again! Thats my piece, on to JASKE!

HOW I GOT INTO WRITING- I always was drawing and stuff like that as far back as I can remember, but one day, I think it was 5th or 6th grade, some kid in my class pulls out the Subway Art book and I seen them SEEN & DONDI whole cars and that was it....I been drawing/sketching/painting ever since.
WHAT DREW ME TO MAKE MY OWN INK- basically lack of quality,affordable materials. I just started ILLADEL~STYLEZ back in '07. before that I was buying maybe 2 or 3 different kinds of ink or dye or whatever and mixing those together to try and get something that covered all the bases (fadeproof,bleed thru,hard to buff) because there really wasn't anything that I would call a "complete package" if ya know what I'm sayin...and that's not a diss to anyone either. There's still a few brands of ink that I cop on the regular for myself. I was just tired of spending money only to be disappointed on alot of products.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE TRYING TO GET MY STUFF IN SHOPS- actually,that was the easy part. At first I had a partner who was lazy as hell and just wanted to smoke all day and handle everything else afterwards. That's all good & everything,but when your trying to get into a business that's already cut-throat you need to be on point,not all retarted and slow,ya know...he sent out half-assed samples to a few major shops and that made them pass us over. Now it's just me though,solo. I handle everything from the damn stickers & labels to the mixing the ink to the promotional shit...this way I know what's going on and if anything fails I know exactly why and how. But back to getting the mops and ink into the shops, I sent out samples to all the shops I can find online and waited for them to holla back. That was pretty much it. Now I got my site ( www. illadelstylez. com) and I'm constantly putting out new shit...new ink (Black Label & Illadel Colorz) and I'm just trying to give my fellow vandals,writers & artists what they want without raping their wallets. I just got picked up by my European distributor (www. graff-city. com) and at the same time my Australian distributor ( Victor Lopez Records) so shit is going pretty smooth right now. The Black Label ink is killin it and all is well....that's about it I guess....hope it helps!! Oh yeah-for all the people that are into the stickers/slaps thing, I just put up a website for trading stickers with other writers & artists. There's a photo gallery and forum on there too and we're gonna be archiving all the stickers we recieve. Y'all can check that out at www. stickerfiendz. com . We just got that up so we still need people to send some slaps in!!

Sho from MUte erA

2008-09-27T13:57:00.000-07:00

I used to skateboard in japan in the mid to late 80's after I was astonished by the movie back to the future. Nobody in japan was skateboarding (as far as my small friends circle). and i always thought i was the coolest kid on the block because of that.

Patrick Melcher and finding the heart of the beast

2008-09-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

around four years ago, i found myself on a European trip with the team black label. we were all scarred and bruised having done demos and photo shoots all across the surface of the moon and the rebuilt facade of war torn central Europe. these went on for several weeks and a much needed break from the constant slamming of one's body down on the pavement was needed. our team had gone from seven healthy , ambitious athletes, to three tired, sore, and angry young men. I'd seen the remaining four get sent home due to one broken wrist, one separated shoulder, a near death case of pneumonia, and a concussion resulting in seizure. i was pretty over the idea of being in Europe , stuck in a foreign landscape and never hearing English. i wouldn't call it homesick,(since i could care less about getting back to LA) just sick of the present state of things. it seemed everywhere we'd go, there wasn't time enough for personal excursions or even half a day to go check out the city. just people expecting you to shred their set-up, or wanting some type of mini interview from you, or rushing you off to a skate-shop autograph session. you really start to feel like a whore after a while and begin to see why dudes like Matt Hensley decided to hang it up and forgo the pro skateboarder life. this isn't why i started skating and ain't what i expected when i decided that being a sponsored skateboarder was about the coolest thing in the world (which it is). i don't know why, but after this tour i decided to accept an invitation to Ireland and do an interview for the European magazine 'kingpin'. although the idea of spending more time in a strange land with different customs and odd accents made me want to vomit, i thought (as i always do) this all could be over tomorrow and you'd better take every opportunity that skateboarding wants to give you. i was totally beat and boarded the plane to Dublin not knowing whom i was to meet up with, I'd never met an Irish skater before, let alone an Irish skate magazine editor. fuck it, live this life to the fullest. i prepared myself for more skating and my sore body was hating me, i was about to try and pull off shooting an interview in the span of a week in a country severely lacking in skate-spots with a history of an eleven month rainy season. upon arrival, i saw , thank god, a couple of dudes who looked like they might have skated. this was to be the editor and photographer. they instantly, and without provocation, insisted to me that "this is Ireland, and we take a back seat approach to skating here". i was told that, not only was there nothing at all expected of me, but it was all my show. where, when and whatever i wanted. aaaaaahhhh, i sighed. things are looking up. that evening i was to be introduced to Bruce 'the OX'. the rawest skateboarder I've ever met. Bruce 'the OX' and i hit it off instantly. he regaled me of tales of his trips to America in search of full-pipes, i was told of many Bruce 'the OX' missions that would involve hours upon hours of digging and shoveling sweeping and pick-axing his way to some simple type of a bank to ledge or a 200 year old fountain that he just knew was skatable if he only could dig it out. i saw photos and footage of he and his mates trekking across grasslands and taking blow-up rafts out to remote areas just to get to a cement quarter pipe that was full of mud. there were missions of repelling, no joke, down into the earth into pitch black tunnels with coal-miner lights on their heads, trying to skate some abandoned tunnels. the one that really sticks with me was the footage of them crawling into the sewer systems with gas masks on and skating the sewage pipes and literally falling in shit. no magazine, no 411vm Filmer following them around. all in the name of skateboarding. this is living? i thought. what this dude had gone through, his drive to seek out the unskated, the uncharted spots, made my last three weeks look like a cakewalk. right then and there i was born again. never again would i bitch about the life of a sponsored skateboarder being a bummer. this, right here in front of me , was real skateboarding, for the love of it. if skateboarding is our religion, then Bruce 'the OX' is our messiah. you'll never see this dude in a magazine, and probably never hear of him after this , but that is the heart of the whole thing. whenever i feel like focusing my board, or hate on this life due to getting kicked out of spots all day or whatever, i think of The OX. and i smile. and i skate. -melch

Dylan being introspective also skateboarding

2008-09-22T07:46:00.000-07:00

My name is Dylan, I am nineteen years old, and I live in the very small town of Manistee Michigan. I love hip-hop, graffiti, and of course skateboarding. I have been skateboarding for 10 years now, which is more than half of my life. Skateboarding is freedom of expression, skateboarding is an art form, skateboarding is passion, skateboarding is the shit. I have always just been so stoked on it, and I think it will always be like that. I remember when I first started skateboarding, just trying to learn how to ollie and stuff; just watching people and wishing I could obtain the skills they owned. Now I see kids at the level I used to be, and I'll try to give them some pointers at what they're doing wrong. It feels good to know how much I have progressed, however, It also makes me aware of how much better I could be if I hadn't got distracted from my dreams throughout my high school career. Drugs are what mostly put my skateboarding on the back burner for awhile, and that is totally not what I want to do anymore. Now I am more concerned with my skateboarding rather than how many bags I have sold or who has the best hook-up. Sometimes it takes drastic measures to make us realize what is important to us in life. I guess jail was what I needed because the feeling of getting back on the board after jail was so rejuvenating. I fell in love with it all over again, it felt like I was 12 years old just learning kick flips, skating my old mini pipe in my backyard. I guess through my dedication and love for the board, I am a pretty well respected skater in my hometown. It makes me feel good to know that people like my skating. I am just going to keep at it the same way I always have (hopefully minus the distractions though...) and maybe one day I can land myself a spot in the skateboarding industry/culture somewhere. I would like that...

*Dylan*

John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats and why Skating can be a fun challenge NO MATTER WHAT! Kids, please remember that shit. It is for fun, not work!

2008-09-09T12:45:00.000-07:00

Patrick you're never going to believe this but my one goal in life, for real, is to learn to ollie. I was around in Southern California during the big initial skating boom of the mid-seventies (I was a kid) but I never had a decent board so I never got into it. (My board was a hard-plastic nightmare with red polyurethane wheels that pretty much got toasted after two or three rides on gravelly pavement, which was the trend back then.) I have had people explain ollieing to me, and watched a Chad Muska "how to ollie" video a dozen times, but no go. I practice on grass. The amount of air I get is truly pathetic, but hope springs eternal.

If I ever do manage to master the humble ollie my goal after that is to acid drop off the roof of my house onto our Rav4 and grind down the kayak rack on top of it out to the street, possibly landing in a nose manual, but I think both you and I know that's never going to happen

still, they can't take my dreams

love

John

The Jerk! COPYWRITE! Yeah, that Copywrite, dick's!

2008-09-09T06:55:00.000-07:00

Vision street wear was the shit. This was like '86.I had the Mark
Gonzales.the one with the comic book print and the red,blue and yellow.
This was in Florida so you can imagine how many kids where skating. Tony
Hawk was popular then. I remember him in Police Academy:Citizens on
Patrol skating to the mall.I still want to find some Vintage Vision
street wear.I stopped skating long before I started rapping,but I always
saw a connection between hiphop and skating. Both were (at one point),
underappreciated. Both were "underground" for a while before they
finally surfaced. Both have the same attitude. I'm not surprised skating
has become so super mainstream in the past few years.nikes on the dick
now. I still do sb's, but I know what it is.anyways, no broken bones are
boken in vein.stay grinding.peace   www.myspace.com/odotrecords
--copywrite

Chuck Treece of McRad is an inspiration. Believe it!

2008-09-05T13:12:00.000-07:00

TREECE SK8’N

AGE 11 I TRY SKATEBOARDING

AGE 13 I GET ON SKATEBOARD AND NEVER EVER COME OFF.

AGE 44 STILL LOVING MY SKATEBOARD AND FACT THAT COMPLETELY TRAVLED THE WORLD THRU SKATING AND MUSIC..

EVERY TOUR I HAD MY BOARD OR BORROWED A DECK WHEN I HAD A SHORT RUN OF DATES.. I NEVER LEAVE HOME WITOUT MY DECK IN MY CAR. I’M A LOCAL AT FDR SK8,ALTER ST BOWL,BAM’S SK8 PARADISE AND MAPLESHAED SK8 P PARK AND MY HOMES BEFORE THAT WERE CHERRY HILL SK8 PARK,TOM GROHOLSKI’S BLUE RAMP AND PLEXI RAMP,EASY RIDER SK8 PARK.. SKATING IS THE BEST FORM OF KEEP’N YERSLEF CONNECTED WITH DREAMS AND OVERALL LIFE. YOU HAVE TO PUSH YERSELF CONSTANTLY EVEN IF YER CRUIS’N.. YOU HAVE TO PUSH YER SELF EVEN IF YER TAKING SLOW ON A SKATEBOARD.. I HOPE THAT ALL UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF SKATING BECAUSE IT’S ABOUT CHANGE AND ABOUT LEADING A LIFE THROUGH A LIFESTYLE THAT KEEPS ON GIVING. THERE’S TONS OF PUBLIC PARKS FOR KIDS AND ALL TYPES OF PEOPLE TO SESSION.. INDOOR BOWLS,PRIVATE SK8 LOCATIONS AND OVERALL PARKS.. I’M AMAZED AT SKATING AS MUCH AS I AMAZED AT MUSIC.. THEY GO TOGETHER AND THEY RELATE TOGETHER… I WENT TO CHECK OUT A PLAY AT FDR SK8 PARK LAST NITE WERE THE AUDIENCE SAT IN THE BUNKER WALL TRANNY AS THE PLAY WAS THRU THE ENTIRE SPACE OF THE PARK..THEY HAD SOUND AND THE PEOPLE WATCHING HAD EAR PHONES OR COULD TUNE IN ON A RADIO STATION TO HEAR THE THE AUDIO.. NEEDLEES TO SAY TO HAVE ART AND SKATING COME TOGETHER AGAIN WITHOUT IT BEING ON CANVAS,DECK,TSHIRT OR SNAEKER MAKES ME FEEL THAT SKATING APPLIES ITSELF TO ALL FORMS OF EXPRESSION.. REGARDLESS OF HOW YOU FEEL ABOUT SKATING IT FEELS THE SAME ABOUT YOU. WHAT YOU PUT YOU GET OUT.. TREECE/MCRAD

Travis, my man, my boy, my best friend forever

2008-09-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

I know I was alright at sk8boarding, but it kicks ass that you'd consider me in your feature.... no problem!

I remember it all like I just woke from a dream... i was 14.
My mom was a drunk and former heroin addict, so i gave up on any kind of expectations long before then, and it showed.

The school i went to wasn't any different than anywhere else, you had all the proper social classes in their proprietary working order.

The jocks were following in their father's footsteps as captains of all the school sports, well on their way to their future employment as gas-station attendants, pedophiles, rapists, and police officers..

The cheerleaders were also doing very well for themselves. Their boyfriends (the gas station attendants as previously mentioned) were given the "gift" of pregnancy, and a false promise of marriage just as soon as they graduate..

The nerds were always flocking to the cafeteria, the library, or to the halls, seeking sanctuary, playing cards, and practicing their black-belts that they earned from all the jackie chan movies they watched.

Then you had me.

I had every right not to want to go to school including
the fact that everyone there knew how bad my situation at home was, so I didnt really get along with anyone at all. I had a job, I remember i was working 10 hours a week, at 4.15 an hour. in 1996, being 14, that was decent money.
my parents worked their asses off just to afford this piece of shit house that was worth roughly a third of what we were actually paying for it. It was a GOODWILL christmas that year. I actually got a home stereo system. a full sise stereo system. I had to share it with my brother. god, what a bitch....

I was in a local meijer, (Michigan's equivalent to wal-mart) when I seen a copy of transworld. I only had 4 bucks on me, so I snatched it up.

About a week later, I was staying the weekend at my grandparents house. I had just got a paycheck that friday, so I had $45. We went to a local target, and I bought my first double-tail board. I remember everything about that day. the price was $31.72, it was a variflex with a red, white, and black abstract art design that covered the entire bottom.

The next day, I was out learning how to skate more, and I only went about 1/2 a mile down the street until I met up with my first skating crew...

It was that weekend that taught me that no matter what people said about my mom being a jailbird, or missing so much school, being so broke, my choice of friends, or lack thereof, I was validated. for once. for all.

Mr. Dibbs and his success as a DJ, and his demise at skating

2008-09-03T18:19:00.000-07:00

I can right you a story about how shitty I was at it. It would be funny.
Let me know...

Dibbs

Jamie and the painful end

2008-09-03T18:13:00.001-07:00

do u remember skateing behind aeroquipe? that abandon factory down the street from my house in leslie? i never did get the hang of skateboarding. i dont really have any stories, i did go down a really steep hill on my grams street once. got going so fast that i bailed and landed behind a parked car while my board went like a quarter mile down the street. i quit trying soon after. thinkin about picking it up again for transportation reasons......

A bit of BMX with Cage

2008-09-03T17:51:00.000-07:00

BMX kid here all day and still in fact i am nursing bruised ribs.i was hopping the lip of a 2 ft curb with a 4 ft drop on the other side. i went over the handlebars haha good luck.