Oh yeah, welcome back to the letters, we're here with Alan Losey, the one and the only
Alan Losey, and this is his love letter, so enjoy.
I turned pro 1981, I believe, at the Oasis Gold Cup. Got a big old photo during the
backside of Oli. Best photo ever. I've changed my life.
When it came time for him to basically turn pro, skateboarding was gone.
I thought skateboarding was going to blow up at that time, and it fell flat on his butt.
Instead of getting money and flying around the world, I was stuck without a car and
before. It's great to be a pro skater at that time, let's tell you.
He was so kind of unrecognized and ahead of his time, because it was such a dead time,
but he was inventing a lot of tricks and doing things a lot different than the pros at that
time. Oli fakeys off his back wheels, fakey Oli foot plant. He's the one that figured out
the lock, what's now known as the Smith Drive. It was a long time that nobody did that, and then
all of a sudden Losey was going up, pushing on his toes, locking into his rail and grinding six,
seven blocks, and then everybody learned it. Did Variflex and all this already exist?
Was it already going? No. About a couple of years into me riding, my uncle and my cousin
and my dad and my brother decided to start a skateboard company. So they get Variflex
off the ground and go, and they start. Well, what really happened with Variflex is you had
my uncle who wanted to go straight to the mass market. You remember Uncle Ray? Yeah. He didn't
care about skateboarding. He just wanted to make his money. And my father wanted to make good
skateboards and travel and kick country with us in a van and go all these cool spots. Well,
they had some conflict and whatever, whatever in the end. By 1982 or 83, my dad was out of Variflex.
And me and Jeff and John Lucero, Lance Mountain, Bill Beauregard, we had a kick-ass skateboard
team on Variflex even after the heyday was over. Unfortunately, I wasn't allowed to leave like you
guys. Yeah. Something for myself. So I had to stay there and ride it out. We kind of picked it
back up again Del Mar days and had a whole nother spurred. Al for the 80s. That was Lucero's joke.
Like, you know, Al for the 80s, Al's big comeback. Nothing you hadn't gone anywhere, but it was just
like, yeah, Losie's coming up, man. Losie's our guy, you know, and we were standing behind you.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about who actually invented the wing to tail. Oh, yeah,
me and Losie have something to, so I want to get to the bottom of that. Yeah. I think it was Alan
Losie that did it first. Totally Alan Losie. He was pro before me. I was amateur and I was skating
Lakewood at the time. I did it in the halfpipe and it was like real big and real loud. You know,
I didn't think anything of it like I invented the maneuver, but in the magazine, it was like
lean to tail. Christian Soy invents new trick, you know, and I just remember hearing the flak like,
just know you didn't. Must have been these guys, you know what I mean? No, no, no, no, no. So you
did it first, Losie. There it is there, on camera. Losie did the lean to tail first. Was that how
Team Losie comes about? Was the original Team Losie's crew veriflex? Actually, Team Losie is
supposed to be Santa Cruz Bullet. And my family told me if I did that, I was going to get disowned
and blah blah. So I got very afraid to do it, didn't sign it. And they put Team Losie out there to
keep me from leaving and doing something for myself. And that's like the broken heart and all
that? Who knows where they got the boards made. Yeah, I remember. And they were the worst skate
boards I've ever seen. And as I would fight and argue with them, my family wasn't even there,
then it was some guy they hired to run it. And that was just the end. And I broke my leg and
they were done with me and they just fired me. And that was the end of me and veriflex.
Coming out on the other end of that for like the next boom, the 86 to 90 boom,
like you fucking told it when most people would have written you off, Alan, you rose up hard.
Well, I did get written off. And that's, you know, when I did get thrown out of the family thing.
And, you know, I kind of gave my life to it. And now I'm fired and I'm unemployed and I have
nothing. Next thing I know, we drew on my board of the marker and bought me a plane ticket to Ohio.
I got fourth and LSD started. Breakdown LSD for us. In my mind, it was about trying to make
what I thought a skateboard company should be. I thought, I'm just going to throw myself with
people that I think I want to live with and build something that's cool to travel with as a unit.
And I think that the LSD team really was that.
You know, like a spinal tap, a bib savage keyboard player. The only line in the whole
movies have a good time all the time. And that like totally embodied what it was like to hang
out with York, like the crew you put together. It was just about like, we're here to skate our
balls off, party our balls off, get the girls. We're just here to eat life, basically.
Everywhere we went, it became about making enough money out the contest to keep going to the next
contest. So we always had to do good at every contest or we were stuck wherever we were.
Just trying to say earlier, like, whatever, we learned a lot from you, Alan. So thank you,
you know, because we were, I was a clueless little kid, you know, and it was really neat to be taken
under your wing and like, even though I tanked the whole thing. I actually think you did it right.
Yeah, thanks for watching. This is Alan Loslie Love Letter. I hope you enjoyed it.
I don't know what the next one is. Tune in and find out, please. What are you doing now, Alan?
Getting into music, playing guitar and drums, actually. Kind of stoast on it. I'm in a couple
bands. One less zero is the band that's been doing the most. Got another band going called
The Nightmares, which is a full cover crazy party band. And now it's all about this neat.
Getting healthy and getting skateboarding. Mostly, yeah.
It gets so fucking deep so quick. And, uh, yeah, fuck yeah. You got it in the heart, man. Yeah.
I don't talk to too many people.
