Archives: P-Rod's Balancing Act
a candid convo w/P-Rod 10 yrs ago for VICE
A few months from a decade — that’s how long it will have been since Paul Rodriguez and I had a genuinely fabulous conversation about skating.
At this point in my career, I was just established enough and VICE still had the juice so that people would periodically come to me, PR-types tossing interview proposals and pitches over the transom. Most of these are, as always, some degree of trash; an obvious snakeoil play, some goon who no one has ever heard of, that kind of shit. (Just imagine, imagine, what doesn’t make VICE, albeit dressed up, ‘DOs’ VICE, not quite Cat and Dash). But getting something from a rep of this magnitude — I think she was with Mountain Dew? — and being asked if I’d like to interview a skater in Pilsen the next day sparked a different level of interest.
I admit I assumed it was a youngster or lesser-known name, so when she said Paul Rodriguez to talk his then-approaching big budget skate vid-cum-blockbuster aspirant, We Are Blood, I was thrown. Regardless of how you feel about him, P-Rod is a capital-N Name, and for someone who grew up with Yeah Right! and CityStars, a dream ask — nvm living off of ~13k a year, you get to meet P-Rod on the rooftop of Hebru Brantley’s studio space, the Chicago skyline unfurling behind the both of you!
So obviously I said yes, smoked a celebratory bong, and the next day took my roommate/photographer to the Lacuna Lofts (years later, we’d reunite there for his brother’s beautiful wedding) and ended up having a truly open and honest conversation about something deeply polarizing — the place of corporate cash in skating. P-Rod talked candidly about a sensitive subject, and I will always remember that.
Paul Rodriguez’s Sense of Balance
Paul Rodriguez is set to headline what may be the most elaborate skate movie ever made.
Spanning continents and directed by skate auteur Ty Evans, fully crewed and accoutred with the latest state-of-the art cameras, a van with helicopter equipment, a fleet of drones—replete with specially trained pilots—and the royal largesse of a Middle Eastern prince, We Are Blood seems to hew closer to Hollywood-style motion picture than the collection of vignettes, album-like skate video which gets played for inspiration before a mission or to stave of winter, wind, and rain; its preview trailer looks something like Yeah Right! or Fully Flared or Pretty Sweet, films wherein the aesthetic vis-a-vis the presentation of the tricks was almost as important as the tricks themselves, but there is an obvious thematic thread, that of skateboarding as internationally recognized culture, demonstrating disproportionately shredded front toes of shoes as lingua franca for a cosmopolitan, honest-to-God culture.
And that vision will not be difficult to see; when We Are Blood is released in August, it will be all over everything, the usual streaming platforms—iTunes, Amazon—and in physical form in sundry brick and mortar locals, from core skate shops to big box leviathan Target. The film seems to walk the line between classic skate video and documentary, a highly stylized nod to the skate rats and elucidating entree for the curious/agnostic/antagonistic; We Are Blood is aiming to be a Thing for skate culture and popular culture both, hopefully with a minimum of alienation or acquiescence.
In short, it is the absolutely perfect vehicle for Paul Rodriguez, who is a few flights up in the devastatingly hip—neon signs! scattered remains of Hebru Brantley's! white walls and exposed supports, heavy doors, wooden floors, and a sense of creative and commercial energy—Lacuna Artist Loft Studios in Pilsen on Chicago's Lower West Side with a Mountain Dew logo affixed to his temple whilst discussing semi-esoteric French savant Bastien Salabanzi. Rodriguez is in the strange position of being a skater's skater—for what seems like most of his life, really, beginning with the bidding war he began while on City Stars—and The One You Mom Recognizes from Weekend Afternoon NBC Sports Coverage (the Dew Tour, in Grant Park, will be on NBC the next day, at 1:30 pm CT).
Whenever figures like Rodriguez comes along, i.e., skaters whose sponsors extend beyond the normal hard goods, soft goods, shoes and shops to corporate benefactors like Mountain Dew, Red Bull, and others seemingly better suited to race car liveries or stadia adverts, it raises—sometimes with mamba-like levels of venom—passions on the position corporate money (read: money coming from corporations which are not ostensibly skate corporations) has in skateboarding.
Too much influence, the core skaters figure, and everyone ends up with skate stoppers and excess heat, the skate culture they love—the very one captured in We Are Blood—co-opted and commodified, shilling Entenman's Donuts (Xtreme!) and turning every kid pushing down the block into Poochie. Of course, skateboarding without Mountain Dew and Red Bull, without the X Games and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Skate, threatens to atrophy, die that sad, exsanguinated death that can befall passions without pockets.
A film like We Are Blood would not be possible without a level of financial support most core skate companies would be hard-pressed to provide.
“I personally have no problem coming together, getting with bigger sponsors. Of course I have my core sponsors, but I have no problem venturing outside that world,” Rodriguez says. “I have no problem trying to make a film like this and expose our culture on a bigger scale, because it's progression, man.
“It's just like, for me … to be honest, I'm tired of doing video parts. I could do another video part, I could film another video part and out it out there to the same audience I've already put video parts out to for 15 years now, and do that again. But like, that's boring. I don't feel driven to do that again, because it's like repeating myself.”
Rodriguez sees in We Are Blood a different challenge.
“This was what was exciting,” he says. “To do something on a bigger scale, tell a better story, do something more progressive. And yeah … it takes those bigger sponsors to come in and help make that happen.”
While an obvious beneficiary of outside money in skating, Rodriguez does not belittle the core's complaints. In their attempts to keep skateboarding for skateboarders, Rodriguez sees a steering mechanism helping to keep skateboarding, in its purest forms, from dissolving in lucre.
“I think it's like checks and balances,” Rodriguez says. “If you don't have that group of guys constantly nagging people about being too mainstream, than it might go too far, skateboarding might go too, too far. And vice-versa. If you don't have dudes over here”--Rodriguez holds his arms out in spread evocative of a spectrum—“pushing shit mainstream, then the core guys, if they had it their way, there ultimately wouldn't be a viable industry. It couldn't sustain itself. That's how skateboarding will die. Core is cool, but core won't sustain and industry. People can't build brands and companies off of that.
“I know most people out there, when they hear that, they think, 'well, it's not about the money.' Of course it's not about money, but you can't factor out that money is necessary in the sense of like, if there's no money out there, then the person who owns the wood shop, the manufacturing shop, can't make boards to get it to you. He has employees, he has machinery. That costs money to run that.”
The balance can be a difficult one, and the reception of We Are Blood may be the best chance since polygonal pros collected the letters to the word “Skate” and Erik Koston was on ESPN for skateboarding to re-assess its tense relationship with corporate America. After all, the non-skater who plucks a copy from a Target shelf and falls in love with the imagery of a fully armed Ty Evans, or the Prince-aided session on the helicopter pad of the Burj Khalifa, may also be inspired by an appearance from Dustin Dollin to grab a Thrasher and visit their local shop.
“This is skateboarding, man,” Rodriguez says (perhaps with a nod to the Emerica classic). “Whatever it's going to be to you is whatever it should be to you. If that's how you feel, there's nothing wrong with that.”
