JIM MUIR: Skip was standing there out in front of the shop
talking, and they were going, yeah, these are really the dog
days of summer.
And this is just a dog town.
And the name stuck.
There's another version that I remember.
Basically our area here was, we were east a Smogtown, which
is LA, we were south of Hogtown, which is Pacific
Palisades, so there was like the rich cats living up on the
hill looking down on us.
And we were north of Marina Del Rey which before--
now Marina Del Rey is kind of a spiffy area, but back then
it was basically a marsh.
Everyone would come out on the weekends in the summer and
bring their kids and their dogs and their picnic basket.
And they would just leave all their trash on the beach, and
destroy the place, and leave their dog shit.
This is Dogtown, because everyone comes here and shits
on it and leaves.
I had already come up through the Zephyr Team and the early
Dogtown era.
So I was taking that energy and trying to direct these
guys that had the same energy.
So I was picking up the local riders.
And we put together this ragtag team of guys from the
neighborhood.
SCOTT OSTER: A lot of teams were just like dudes put
together, where Dogtown was like we were all friends.
We all hung out every day together.
It seems like how the guys do now.
But back then it didn't seem like it was like that, as much
camaraderie between your team of guys that you were with.
We were all just boys hanging out in Venice, just like every
day, just skating together.
So when it came to the contest it wasn't--
I guess it was kind of competitive.
We'd just all climb in Jim Muir's old Falcon.
It was kind of like being on the Bad News Bears back then.
Our goal was to beat the Powell guys.
Definitely.
They were the shit, yeah.
Even though we liked them and everything,
they were great guys.
We wanted to beat them, just to show them what was up.
That was the old Dogtown attitude.
ERIC DRESSEN: In Los Angeles, there's not very many ramps,
so we just street skate every day.
Try to go fast, stay low, and stay on.
LANCE MOUNTAIN: They were trying to
create street skating.
It was just skateboarding, and they didn't
really have street pros.
Because there's no pay for it, so there's no
one fully doing it.
When that came out Eric, Tommy, Notis, Mark, they were
kind of the dominating guys.
Eric was the only one that knew how to skate contests out
of those guys.
JEFF GROSSO: And those courses that they built were just
hybrid, vert, crap.
Fly over the fucking pond.
And Eric would make it work.
Coming from a more advanced place, Eric pieced it all
together and floated, and went fast.
CHRISTIAN HOSOI: Eric Dressen was like a force to be
reckoned with.
I remember him just being the guy to beat in these street
style contests now.
And I'm like, dude, this guy has been skating a long time.
You could see his face turn red, and you just knew he was
like going to go 110 miles an hour.
And you knew he was going to stay on, you know what I mean?
-First place, $2,500, Eric Dressen
JESSE MARTINEZ: At one point Eric couldn't beat me at all.
Then all of a sudden, he just turned into this
skateboarding monster.
And just a machine.
I mean the end of the day would come after two days of
competing in the finals.
I'd always be glad to be there, and I would always go,
oh fuck, there's Eric.
It'd be the last runs, and you'd be gasping for air.
I'm tired and, oh, fuck, I hope I did good.
Then Eric Dressen would come up and just
fucking hammer his run.
And you'd be like, fuck man, this guy's still not tired.
CESARIO MONTANO: And we called him Pony Boy because of his
fucking calves.
He was like a little horse.
And he was fucking everywhere.
Whenever he skated the course, the street course, he skated
everything and didn't stop.
Dressen never slowed down.
He's pumped full [EXPLODING NOISES]
down the stairs.
SCOTT OSTER: The street league of our time, Eric was winning
every year.
He was like number one every year.
So like you had Notis.
You had Gonz.
You had all these people that were like getting a lot of
notoriety, and then you had Dressen
winning all the contests.
JIM MUIR: For two or three, four-year period there, he
probably was one of the most successful competition skaters
there ever was in skateboarding.
So we don't really have that good of record keeping in
skateboarding either.
So--
[LAUGHS]
ERIC DRESSEN: For me I really wanted to do good, because I
thought if I did good it'd help my career.
And I just wanted to be a pro skateboarder.
And I didn't want to work in a deli anymore.
And I was doing good in contests, and I got offered to
stunt double on Gleaming the Cube for Max Perlich.
Stacy guaranteed me eight months of solid work.
I ended up working one day, and they didn't
need me after that.
And I was like, well, what am I going to do now?
And then a few days later somebody was like we're all
going to Hawaii, all the Venice boys.
And we went to Hawaii for a week and a half,
maybe two week trip.
And that was where I got to skate every day.
Wake up and just go skating.
And some of us hadn't even flown on a plane before.
Me, Block, and Jimbo, and Hosoi.
Suicidal Jimbo, that's Grant in the background.
That was a big trip, big deal.
I like this photo.
That's from like some ditch in Hawaii.
Hosoi took this photo.
Hosoi really inspired me out of anybody.
Hanging out with him and seeing how his career was
going and the lifestyle he was leading.
He was like just going all over the world and ripping,
didn't have a care in a world.
Where I had to go to work on Monday and then just got to
skate like on the weekends.
This is the contest results from the mini ramp contest in
Hawaii, '89.
I got second to Cab.
It was a gnarly mini ramp they built.
And the practice sessions sucked.
So me and Oster went like at 6:00 in the morning, just to
the stadium there, the arena.
And somehow the door was open.
And we just went in there and skated two hours, just me and
him by ourselves.
We used to always cheat, like sneak in early and practice.
Me and Scott Oster were doing all the demos
together back then.
I was doing pretty good in contests, winning contests.
Everywhere I was going, all the shops like Santa Cruz were
the main number one skateboard company.
Santa Cruz hit me up.
Things weren't going as good at Dogtown.
And I just decided I can't pass up this opportunity.
JIM MUIR: As we progressed, we were
getting bigger and bigger.
And I was probably about 27, 28 at the time.
And you're getting some success, and you live in LA.
And we're going to the clubs a lot.
So I was doing probably a little more partying than I
should have.
And I ended up doing a deal with Thrasher Magazine and
moving up north.
Fausto and Eric Swenson, I became
partners with those guys.
And rest in peace, both of them.
We brought up Eric, and we were trying to talk to him.
And go here's what we want to do and negotiate with him.
And apparently at the same time, he went to Santa Cruz
one hour down the way and talked to those guys.
And whatever deal they talked with him, he made a decision
that in his career at the time that it was better for him to
move on and go with Santa Cruz.
SCOTT OSTER: When we were skating together on Dogtown we
never had a video.
And there was like a whole time and era of skating that
we were involved in that never really got documented besides
you can look at the pictures in the magazine.
And I think that kind of kept us out of like the major
markets of just having all that exposure.
We were lucky when we got like little parts
in Santa Cruz videos.
That was kind of like our thing.
A lot of us were getting approached by other teams to
ride for them, and Dressen split.
And I stayed, and a couple of other people stayed.
Dressen was like the smart one and left.
ERIC DRESSEN: Block and me back in the day.
His old space shuttle double quarter pipe thing.
Block, Paul Revere.
Hosoi always had a Polaroid camera with him.
This was right when we started doing hand rails.
An old Venice photo, me and Murray up the jump ramp.
Looks like I'm sky hooking.
First built a little quarter pipe down there before they
painted it.
[INAUDIBLE].
Crazy.