Reason

Dill

Salman

Thanks for putting a link to this site on your blog!

Tim Upson

One of those dudes you never got to see enough of.

Puleo

Ray Barbee

Strictly for Money

A poor scan of this ATM ad. Full Gonz saturation on here lately, but that's okay.

And a colorful Real ad from 1996. Crazy trick.

Steven Cales

Mark Gonzales

My magazine collection is a direct result of long bus and subway rides to school as a kid, as well as a general hatred for classes. To alleviate the boredom of public transportation and math class I would buy and read skate magazines whenever I could. I never had a subscription, yet in this way I managed to accumulate nearly every issue of Thrasher, Transworld, SLAP and Big Brother from about 1994 until 2002, when I pretty much stopped buying magazines. Usually the first three I would purchase were Thrasher, Transworld, and SLAP. Big Brother was insanely hard to find in my neighborhood and I don't have all that many of the early issues; although some of the older guys who skated had notorious collections of that glorious mag. If I managed to buy and read all of those magazines and still found myself emptyhanded at the bus stop I would turn to the "lesser" publications, namely Warp, Strength, and Heckler. These magazines were for the most part pretty terrible(one could argue that Strength was decent) mostly due to the fact that a good portion of their content wasn't related to skateboarding at all, but once in a while these magazines had great features, such as this Mark Gonzales interview from the August 1997 issue of Warp. Enjoy.

Sixty-Forty

60/40 was the shit. I think that the original team was Mark Gonzales, Ron Chatman, Fabian Alomar, Lee Smith, Joey Suriel and Steven Cales. I personally was drawn to 60/40 via excessive readings of Thrasher magazine in 1994 through 1996; Gonz was writing short stories in the mag pretty much every month and I was definitely stoked on him. I even got a Mark Gonzales 60/40 deck for my birthday in '94, complete with Gullwings(hah) and 43mm A1 Meats. The footage of Gonz during this era in random 411's and Thrasher videos is my favorite besides Video Days; while it was amazing that he later had full parts in Non-Fiction and Kicked Out of Everywhere, I feel that Real presented him in some overly dramatic way which didn't really get me too stoked to go skate. The earlier glimpses of Gonz skating in Simples and f/s bluntsliding brick ledges down stairs in 411 were far more inspiring as far as I'm concerned, not to mention his appearances in those 60/40 commercials; the most vivid in my memory being a perfect f/s flip over a bump to can wearing cuffed Levi's. By the time Glasses For Your Feet came out, Gonz had already left 60/40, although his 43 seconds of footage in Gino Perez's part is some of his best stuff ever.

The bulk of the original team left to make up most of the Menace roster, but 60/40 added a bunch of new dudes, most notably SAD and Gino Perez.

Gino Perez had the best part in the 60/40 video for sure, check his tricks at Union Square and I believe you can spot a Menace shirt at 1:29.

Two comically similar ads which ran in different issues of Thrasher. Listing off tricks "Performed Daily" seems like a harsh beam, but Sixty-Forty was getting pretty rotten at this post-gonz stage so whatever.

SAD is criminally underrated. Judging by his multi-colored Fu Manchu and penchant for skating with a towel in hand he was definitely eccentric, but that only adds to his unique illness. "No time for slippin!"

60/40 had a bunch of other dudes as well, ranging from sick skaters like Ron Chatman, Rodney Torres(edit: not sure about this, but the part is good so I'll keep it up) and George Morales, to kind of boring dudes like James Qua, to straight-up crazy Larry Moore. And no one will forget Bobcat.

That's all I got to say for now about one of my favorite companies. Expect more Gonz related stuff soon.

No Stranger