Brian Lotti Interview

'Sussex Wheats' by Brian Lotti

Brian Lotti remains one of skateboarding’s great enigmas.

One of street skating’s golden generation alongside Matt Hensley and Jason Lee, his era saw street skating metamorphosise- as every culture of movement can only once- from an activity into a nascent art form.

  In other words, they made it look not just good, but intentionally so- like something being said.

 His seminal segment in Planet Earth’s classic 1991 video release Now ‘n Later is still cited twenty full summers on as a defining point in the genesis of skateboarding, not least by modern inheritor of his legacy Marc Johnson who said of Lotti in ON Video’s ‘Why Style Matters’:  “Not only did he (Lotti) innovate, but he made it look amazing.”

 Perhaps more so than even his peers Hensley and Lee, Brian Lotti is synonymous with style.

 Now ‘n Later spread his lore around the world. He moved to Blind skateboards where the young talents created a hothouse atmosphere of technical progression that would surely produce Lotti’s greatest opus.

And then suddenly, at the peak of his powers, he vanished without trace.

Eventually surfacing in a Buddhist retreat in Hawaii, he would dabble with painting and seek a different perspective on existence than the relative bubble he had become cocooned in as a professional counter- cultural icon.

Fifteen years later, at a bar in downtown Madrid, I await a ride across Spain with a team of skateboarders. Someone phones ahead to say Brian Lotti is part of the group, as he is scouting locations for a skateboard film.  Yes, he is skating again and yes, he is feeling it again.

 We meet at a plaza off the historic Gran Via where the professionals among the group are warming up before filming begins.  Lotti starts skating around the periphery and within minutes the entire tableau are transfixed. Everyone sits down. French pro Thibaud Fradin leaned over and said “It’s not every day you get a masterclass”.

It was to be the start of a remarkable renaissance for Lotti within skateboard culture. Today from his garage studio in Los Angeles, Lotti runs a creative hub which spans graphic design, film,  easel painting, and animation.

 Erstwhile studio- mate of Shephard Fairey, collaborator with Beck,  the prodigiously productive watercolourist  has rekindled his love of skateboarding and is representing its highest expressions in spheres and in mediums no- one else  ever thought to.

  Having already made one film with Universal Music Group, he has an ambitious new film in pre-production and plans to come to Europe this year to shoot, paint and exhibit.

F Scott Fitzgerald once wrote “There are no second acts in American lives”.

 But then, he never knew Brian Lotti.

If I can go back beyond what any interview given in your heyday may have asked, what were your formative years in which you became Brian Lotti- where did you become interested in skateboarding and art, and who were you then?

You asked a lot of things right there; some start before others...

 (a pause) I mean, my Dad was in the US military. He was an Air Force pilot, and we moved around a lot...and I remember we were living Salt Lake City, Utah. I didn’t have a lot of friends there, but I got really into riding BMX bikes, and then racing BMX bikes, but that wasn’t that much fun. When BMX freestyle came around I was drawn to it because you could do it anywhere, by your own rules and standards and what have you. Then somehow I saw one of the first Powell Peralta videos...The Bones Brigade Video Show...and I just thought “Fuuuck Man. This is fucking in-credible”. I remember thinking  ‘I think I can do this, I can’t make it on a BMX but I think I can do it on a skateboard.’

Did street skating allow you to look at Salt Lake City in terms of its possibilities and not limitations?

Absolutely. I remember reading a Transworld called ‘The Street Skating Issue’ and that’s when I realised that this is what I could do. As I say, I was just this little kid in Iove with skateboarding and not too many friends so I would go down to the loading dock at Albertson’s near my house by myself.  I threw a little street contest in the parking lot of Mc Donalds there, made some friends that way.

How do you feel about the ‘golden generation’ mantle of the first pure street skating pro’s? Is that overstating the era?

Well... maybe we really embraced it (street skating) and made it our thing. I mean, at the end of the day the Bones Brigade guys all went back to the ramp and would do their handplants and airs; we never had ramps. All I had was fucking... parking lots and shit. We were looking at people like Chris Miller doing backside lipslides on a vert ramp and thinking “How could I do that on a bench?.”

 That was what was really important to us, to take what those guys were doing but be able to do it...in a schoolyard.

If we can fast forward to the peak of your skateboarding career;  I remember us being in the Basque country when you had a déjà vu that you had been there before and Alain Goikoetxea* had to fill you in on the details. What was the timescale from Salt Lake City to filming your famous Now ‘n Later part, and how quickly did your life begin to move ?

Probably... four or five years.  It was a lot different then to what it is now, what with the travelling and what- have- you. I was still at college when I was filming for Now ’n Later; like a total skate rat I would go to college and as soon as class got out I would just go skate as much as I could, go back home and do my homework. No- one knew you could skate for ten or fifteen years as a pro back then so maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough and it did begin to move fast. I wasn’t overly busy though, maybe I could have been busier.

I know you try not to be drawn on what precipitated your decision to walk away at the peak of your fame but I want to ask what happened on the day you decided to get off the hamster wheel of pro skating. What happened on that day? Was it a single event or a series of small things?

It was a series of small things... (hesitates)- it was a series of injuries, first of all: broke my foot, broke my thumb, broke my shoulder...and I had really wanted to film something comparable (to Now ‘n  Later), you know, but with the Blind guys. So I kept getting held back from filming and at the same time I as I was getting hurt, I was still going to college, getting into photography and art, and so I think my interest was changing. There was a certain frustration building as well until I got to a point where I just thought ‘Fuck, it would be kinda rad to just make a clean break.’

 There really wasn’t that much pressure from the outside, I just wanted to make a change and move ahead in my life, and I didn’t feel like I could do it by keeping skateboarding. So one day I went to (Blind HQ) World Industries and talked to Rocco** and  Mike Ternasky*** and told them ‘Look, I’m quitting to go back to school and study art.’  They were like ‘WHAT??’- it didn’t make sense to them.

Did you feel unburdened?

(Rolls the idea around) Yeah...yeah. I did. (Pauses) I did.

..and so to Hawaii.

Yeah...SO (exhales)- so I quit pro skating, got into painting and art, and I had this kind of...existential quandary.  I was reading all these philosophy books, trying to go back to school and to get something going and... maybe what happened was I just waking up to how much suffering there was in the world now that I was outside of this nice comfortable bubble of being a professional skateboarder. Anyways, I discovered Zen Buddhism and meditation, met some different people and ended up going to Hawaii to study at a Zen centre there.

Did you continue to paint there?

(Conspiratorially) I did, I even skated too. I kept those things at arm’s length a little bit while I was there but it was still in the background.

Did you surf?

Tried it a little bit, yeah.

Is there a big surf machismo culture on the North Shore?

There is, that IS the North Shore... but on the whole people there are really friendly, there is a bigger sense of surf machismo here in Southern California than in Hawaii, for sure.

And so from a watcher’s point of view there was nothing heard from you until 1^st and Hope*** came out as a very ambitious declaration of intent. Here it divided opinion as to whether it was heralding a new aesthetic or too dreamy and not intense enough...

You always look back and want to change things sometimes. If I went back to it now I would structure it differently with some more intense passages. The new project will have more peaks and valleys and be a more rounded production. I certainly hope we can get some freaky projects going this coming year... I think there is a lot of potential for pushing the boundaries of how skating is represented. You know, music, film- making, art, they all have so much in common; there’s a ton of opportunities to make fresh presentations that approach skateboard films as entertainment, and not just brand promotions.

Your enthusiasm seems undiluted now...

Absolutely; I am a total fan of skateboarding. I’m a total fan of skateboarding (laughs). I guess that’s it.

And now to today: you paid the price for having a late summer in skateboarding by having a horrendous wrist break in the last year. Did you have to have the Big Talk with yourself as to whether you can afford to keep getting hurt late in life as a painter?
Right. Yeah... I still have that conversation with myself.  I broke my wrist really badly- like really badly.

How?

I was trying an air on a ramp, and I shot my board away from me and it literally landed right underneath my foot again****, and I fell back into the ramp, cracked my wrist right back, got sick to my stomach, rushed to hospital. Then right after that I broke my finger on my painting hand...skateboarding is hazardous .

Can we alight on your place in the LA art scene at the moment: whereas you have peers like Dave Kinsey and Shephard Fairey who have enjoyed great success within the world of street art there, you’re more of a...I hesitate to use the term ‘fine artist’, but maybe more of a purist?

Yeah- for sure. It’s funny because with the stuff I do, it’s kind of like I’m one of the outsiders here now. Street art now is like the main entree in the art world now so easel painting, landscape painting on an easel, people are like ‘Whoa dude’.

I think of it as a kind of contemporary impressionism-

Yeah (squirms a bit), I think that’s my natural response to a lot of situations is to paint impressionistically, immediately. Whether from a photo or just being there, I try to get it down all at once.

You produced a lot of watercolours from Spain during the making of your second film Free Pegasus, and you have referred to the ‘romance’ of the land in the past. Is Barcelona romantic, or is it a dangerous Mediterranean port city?

That’s a good question- it’s both. It’s absolutely both. From an aesthetic standpoint it’s an incredible city what with the old world architecture and this new kind of modern design vibe, the lore there, Gaudi was popping mushrooms and building these archways to the heavens. AND there’s a lot of hot chicks and people from all over Europe so it’s a good place to get it on. I had so many positive experience painting in the streets there; it’s not like downtown LA, I’ve been kicked out of so many places here...

For painting?

For easel painting. It's just like skateboarding here. Literally being asked to leave by the security guards. At the Grove, and a couple of metro stations.

So to bring skateboarding and painting together, I’d like to ask you about skateboard graphic design. Sean Cliver once said that because the way a skateboard deck frames the image it is almost totemic and so deserves to be looked on as a sub- genre in and of itself. Is he right, and who are the best in that field?

I feel like skateboard graphics are really getting good these days. All the companies are really turning it on. And it is a sub- genre, it is a very specific thing to make a skateboard graphic, you can’t just slap any old thing on there and expect it to have impact. The shape of the deck certainly frames images differently; the things you want to preserve you position where the wheel wells fall and so on. I love Pontus Alv's new works and approach for Polar. Really exciting...I dig all of Todd Bratrud's work and I'm a big fan of Michael Leon's board graphics, too. And Don Pendleton, love his stuff.

Given that skateboarding is now moving away solely from the shock of the new to celebrate it’s history in things like Grosso’s Loveletters, Epicly Later’d, Chromeball Incident and so on, who do you see as the contemporary keepers of the flame?

Oh man... (to himself) who is ripping right now? Mark Suciu is really fun to watch. Guys like Chima Ferguson and Dennis Busenitz... Dennis Busenitz is always spontaneous. He is a real treat. Lucas Puig, Silas Baxter- Neal, Dylan Rieder.

You could drop any of them in at any point in skateboarding’s history and they would still be standouts.

Well imagine this: it’s the NSA street contest in Phoenix, Arizona in 1987, and Neil Blender is drawing on the sides of quarterpipes, Lance is doing long boardslides and Eric Dressen is tearing around the course. Imagine Dennis Busenitz just appeared in there, what people would have seen. 25 foot long backside tailslides; imagine that.

During your hiatus I wrote an article for SLAP in 2001 about the possibility of a return to the fold for you and Jason Lee*****; here we are almost 12 years later, Jason has re- started Stereo, and you have a board out on Stacks. Is it nice to have your contribution acknowledged?

It is nice, and it’s still fun to skate. At the end of the day it is still fun. Broadcast wheels have been doing some cool stuff lately; nice to work with them, too.

Is it too soon to talk about your next film, in terms of who may be involved in it?

(Being circumspect) Errrm- let’s say it’s at developmental level right now. It’s in the works- I’m pushing to start shooting it in January. It’s likely to be a Six Stair****** production, working with Rick Charnoski and Buddy Nicholls...and we’re roping Mike Manzoori******* in, and hopefully some other skateboard film-makers. It’s a session- based film; we’re trying to present a slice of skateboarding now, a real raw, sick picture of skateboarding as we know it today- so it will have banks and pools and halfpipes as well as street and ditches and so on. For those of us living here in California there is so much good skateboarding going on, but most of the output is brand videos and so the kind of skating people see comes through these narrow pigeon holes and we want to make a film which is more ...sort of...everything. It’s very ambitious.

And if this is already crystallising in your mind’s eye, then can we speculate on what- in an ideal world- the project over Brian Lotti’s horizon might be?

Hypothetically(laughs) it might be a film shot in a lesser- known German city with a bunch of really great European skaters...get some Japanese skaters over and maybe some American skaters too. An eclectic group of skaters in a smooth city in Germany, but shoot it with some life slices, you know? Shoot from inside buildings, that kind of idea.

Are we likely to see any exhibitions of your work here in Europe any time soon?

I’m collecting together a motley body of work which I would like to exhibit here and maybe a show or shows in Europe too, I think that’d be a blast.  I’d love to get back to paint more too.

Are you where you want to be in life now, Brian? Are you contented? You seem excited by the prospect of tomorrow.

I am excited, but I’m not contented. I feel like I would like to weave all the predilections and interests I’ve had and stitch them together more tightly. I feel like I’ve been on my own for a little bit, doing my thing but now I want to get my work out there and I’d like to engage the outside world a little bit more. A lot more, actually.

www.brianlotti.com

* Basque skating legend.

** infamous Machiavellian multi- millionaire svengali Steve Rocco

***  visionary flmer and team manager who later died in a car accident

*** dreamlike directorial debut

**** every skater’s worst nightmare

***** Lee became a successful actor during this time.

****** prolific and terrific skateboard film production house

******* British skateboarding  icon and acclaimed videographer.

-this interview originally ran in HUCK magazine.