RIP Jake Phelps of Thrasher / Old Skateboards
Jake Phelps was the face of Thrasher skateboard magazine. He passed on March 14, 2019.
Jake Phelps was hugely influential to me. I wasn't a big skater or anything, but Jake Phelps went beyond just skateboarding. His vision and ability to always stay ahead of trends (in a way that was anti-trendy) was always inspiring. His attitude was so authentic and hardcore, both in ethics sense and his general approach to life. He had an understanding for the direction of the magazine and how to maintain that. He coulda sold it out for mainstream popularity at many points. I remember recently when there was a photo of Justin Beiber and they knocked the shit out of him for wearing their shirt. Most places would try to capitalize on it in this day and age.
Jake seemed to intrinsically get how image played into everything. Thrasher didn't just print photos of guys doing tricks. It was about guys doing ILL shit, while looking ILL, and pulling it off smoothly. The mag promoted rougher and harder skaters than their shitty competitors who sanitized their pages. Thrasher was all about guys like Corey Duffel, Greco, Tony Trujillo, Geoff Rowley and their own King of the Road, while other places fawned over the X-Games and skaters like Ryan Sheckler.
I remember when I was like 20 and put together that the editor of Thrasher was a part of the SS Decontrol and Boston Crew, and it just cemented how I felt about him even more. Learning that two of my favorite things had this singular thread that tied them together blew my mind. He was asked in an interview what his favorite bands were a couple years ago and one that he listed was Void. I felt 16 again being pumped by someone else's answers.
I've had a Thrasher sub since January 1998. I let it lapse a couple times, but for the most part I've got 20 years of that magazine sitting upstairs. When user name Aaron and I started our own magazine and discussed what it should look like, "'80s Thrasher!" was the only logical answer. And so we modeled an entire contemporary magazine around trying to make it look like "old Thrasher meets old British hardcore records." We spent hours and hours (and hours) going through every issue from 1981-1989 on their online archive, writing notes on the style, aesthetic, trying to figure out what methods they used to create it, and more. But sometimes you'd come to a feature or a Puszone or a Lipcream interview and you'd just stop and get sucked in to reading it all. It had that level of pull. And, even though Jake wasn't the editor back then, he did a great job of continuing that tradition of including great underground music with each issue when he took over.
Jake Phelps was a legend. RIP.
Phelps in the SS Decontrol tour van circa ‘82 (photo from the SSD site).
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Along with the above post, I recently sold some old completes on eBay. Like old records, there’s a huge collectors market for old skateboards and plenty of sites dedicated to cataloging them and people showing off their collections.
The first is a Santa Cruz (SC) Pro Series model for Mitsugu Toyoda released in 1988 with art by the master Jim Phillips. I believe this was Mitsugu’s one and only pro model. This is the black deck version, although red, white, purple were also produced.
As seen in the photos, the top of the deck has a Steve Caballero sticker and Santa Cruz Rip Grip sticker on the underside of the tail. The grip tape is pink with that ILL cut up design.
The wheels are Santa Cruz Speedwheels (95 mm) and trucks are by Active with riser pads and truck guard. Deck comes with unknown brand hot pink deck rails and tail guard as seen in photos. All in all this complete is in good shape.
This is a rarer board that doesn’t come up for sale all that often. You can see Mitsugu’s Instagram account here with some great vintage pics.
https://www.instagram.com/mitsugutoyoda/
Santa Cruz had some great skaters in the 1980s with Christian Hosoi, Rob Roskopp, Jeff Grosso, and Claus Grabke among others. I remember getting their Strange Notes catalog in the mail as a teenager and it was half zine, half catalog. It was a great idea.
The second board is a Freddie Smith Punk Size board also released in 1988 by Alva Skates. Alva Skate was of course the company owned by Tony Alva after he’d broken away from the Dogtown team. The Alva team were known for being more aggressive, raw, and well, punk, than other pro teams. Alva also had some of the best style and vibe in the ‘80s. Their ads always looked ILL.
Here's a team photo from 1988 taken from the Vert Is Dead blog as well as a photo of Freddie Smith himself taken from the November 1985 issue of Thrasher.
Anyway, this board also comes with Santa Cruz Speedwheels (95 mm) and trucks from Active with riser pads. The deck comes with G&S brand yellow deck rails.
Finally, the third board is an H-Street Skateboards Colby Carter Cactus skateboard. This was my buddy’s board. We both got skateboards for Christmas in 1990 when we were in the third grade. His got left outside for a few years and is in rough shape, but I got it in high school off him so that it didn’t get pitched out. This version is the red deck, which seems to be less common than the white deck version.
The deck itself is not in great shape. The board plies have started to separate, one of the bottom plies has partially split off (see photos), and the graphic has worn off largely. The deck rails help keep the board together at this point. This deck is for collection purposes only and would probably not be suitable for riding. I wrote H100s and other bands on it that I was listening to in 1999 when I got it.
The trucks are Gullwing Street Shadow and the wheels are Spitfire 58 mm. Both the trucks and wheels are in good shape despite the weather exposure.
H-Street is probably best remembered for their videos (especially their first two, Shackle Me Not and Hokus Pokus) as well as introducing Danny Way, Eric Koston, Matt Hensley and others to the world.
