West Coast Love Letters. We're figuring it out right now.
Where's Ramps? I thought you were talking about Ramps.
We are.
I thought you were just talking about West Coast or Ramps.
I don't know. I'm supposed to say Love Letters.
Love Letters. West Coast Ramps.
West Coast.
Ramps.
You're talking about Ramps.
Yes.
Ramps.
The birth of the Ramp was evil conneval.
Before we get back to racing, I'd like to introduce to you the most unusual young man.
This is evil conneval and his specialty in sports is to take a motorcycle up over a ramp
and leap through the air some 90 feet.
Every kid liked evil conneval in the 70s and he launched off of things over things
and so kids went out and got a brick and laid a piece of wood up and went off it.
That's the birth of the Ramp.
Yes.
Then they stuck it up against a wall and then they stuck another board
and it started making tranny tink, tink, tink.
Then they put another piece of wood over it and it made it smoother.
Kids made things to skate on to find vertical.
That's what Ramps are.
The first time I went over to his house to like hang out or whatever
and then get a ride down to the skate park
and I remember looking down at the ramp going, it was thrash.
And then Skate City closed down. That was when he kind of started to fix his ramp up
and then we kind of all shipped it over there out of necessity.
It was just like, oh well we're not going to quit.
It wasn't do it yourself because the stuff that exists isn't what you're into.
It was do it yourself because nothing else existed.
There was a scene, there was money, there was skate parks, it collapsed.
The backyard scene was a conscious decision to try to create a pro scene.
So we built ramps or had ramps or found a ramp,
went there with all 12 pros in the world,
made an article pretending it's something to get other people to do it.
I mean that's the whole point of doing these articles or doing these contests
is to get other kids to do it.
This is probably the best ramp I've ever seen.
And I'm sure with exposure that a lot of kids will get in their backyards
and create even better ramps.
They had to build their own industry.
So they promoted it and did these things to get other people to do these things.
Hey, what do you say we all go skate our ramp?
Alright, let's go!
Once you saw this, and your fucking swing set,
really? Oh my god. That was locked in after that.
It was like snake charming.
Neil Blender called me up one day, said he'd get a camera.
You're working for TransWolf.
I was like, what's TransWolf? It's a new magazine.
Are you going to do an article? Get to lay it out yourself.
That's how ramp books came out.
Yeah, let's just go around and shoot photos of kids that have their ramps.
And that was our best excuse of trying to make an article saying,
hey, just make it yourself.
So it wouldn't die.
People started building ramps in their backyards,
and pros started building them in their yards,
and the contests and events started being in the backyards because they had to be.
Cap built his 12-foot wide vert ramp in his backyard out of necessity.
Lopes.
Lopes built his ramp.
He only had the Premier ramp up in the Bay Area for that period of time.
So they held Joe's Ramp Jam.
And you had all the Texas boys building, you know,
P-Ramp, Blue Ramp, Blue Ramp, Clown Ramp.
You know, like what comes first.
My brother would take all the instructions from Thrasher,
and so we'd sneak across the canyon into the construction sites
and steal as much wood as we could, you know.
We'd drag this plywood and 2x4s into the canyon,
and sometimes, you know, we just wouldn't make it all the way home.
We'd just get the wood to a certain spot in the canyon,
and that's where the ramp would end up.
Here it is. I can't drag this shit anymore.
Like, let's put it here.
Just being in someone's backyard and not at a skate park
and not, like, being supervised, you know,
and not having random people watch you.
You know, you're not putting on a show for anyone.
It's just backyard ramp style.
It was a really, really magical, small moment in time for skateboarding,
and we used to laugh about it, make fun of it,
and it's discounted nowadays that this even fucking happened,
but it was a magical, neat moment
where it was a bunch of kids making shit happen for themselves.
Period.
The heyday of backyard hotness is late 83
till they went into the arena around 86.
I don't know if it's going to win, but I know I'm going to have so much money.
Tony!
And then it turned into, oh, this is what skateboarding is.
Let's build these and put them in arenas and skate the same thing
and do the same thing until street skaters make it interesting
for someone else because what we're doing is terrible.
That's what happened, I think.
Pretty much.
So that's it. West Coast Ramps.
Tune in next time, and we're headed east,
unleashed in the east, because I want to show you photos of Blaze
and Cedar Crest Red, and that's about it.
Thanks for watching.
