TOMMY GUERRERO: My perception of Thomas is just as a
creative person.
And that's the thing where people go wrong and like,
well, is he, a photographer or is he a painter or is he a
surfer or a skater?
Well, yes.
He's everything.
That's who he is.
TYLER MANSON: This week's episode is on Thomas Campbell,
who I've gotten to know pretty well over the last few years,
by working on a handful of projects with him.
And he has such a deep and rich history, within both the
skating world and the surfing world, that we sort of broke
the mold a little bit with this one and go take a look
back to his younger days, in the '80s and early '90s, and
sort of what shaped him and influenced him to become the
artist that he is.
THOMAS CAMPBELL: I came from skateboarding, so I wasn't
really getting back to surfing.
I surfed since I was about 10.
But I was always skating, and skateboarding was
like my main thing.
It's a pretty emotional thing to work on, especially the
more and more intense that it gets, like what
people are doing now.
It's so athletically impossible and difficult to do
the tricks that they're doing.
They just get destroyed.
And they get upset.
And it's like, I might be too emotionally open
to deal with that.
I dealt with it for so many years.
But you go, and these dudes are like fucking freaking out,
like Vietnam vet breakdown, just like arrgh, fuck, just
freaking out.
And you're just like, ahh, man.
It takes its toll on you.
I was involved in it.
Probably, in the early '80s, I really became more engaged in
a different movement of it.
At that time, people weren't doing things like for
commercial or monetary reasons.
There was no possibility of selling anything or doing
anything that made money.
It just wasn't a thought.
So it was really something kind of smaller.
And people were like, yeah, I want to draw pictures, or I
want to make a fanzine or like just to communicate.
And at the time, it was really like crazy culture, because
you had "Thrasher" magazine, and it had every different
kind of music, all kinds of different stuff.
And that was there.
And then it had like Robert Williams and Basquiat and Puss
Head and all these different artists in it.
And then you had some of the professionals, like Chris
Miller and Lance Mountain, and Neil Blender and Todd Swank
and Mark Gonzales, all doing art.
And it was all, you could tell, from the hip.
They were just trying to do it, and they did it, you know?
It wasn't like they went to some school.
It was really like, oh wow, check out that.
I can do that.
I'll just try to do that.
TOMMY GUERRERO: And then when you have Neil Blender, GSD,
Chris Miller, Mark, all these guys doing just like what?
You guys are crazy.
And Swank, all those guys, and everybody making zines.
It was such a fertile environment.
It was insane.
And it was just to do it.
RAY BARBEE: DIY style, they want to do whatever
they want to do.
I remember early "TransWorld" magazines.
It was the skaters shooting photos of the other skaters.
It was like those guys, like Lance and Neil Blender, had
photo credits.
It was like the mags just gave them cameras and said,
document your guys' trips, and we'll put it in the magazine.
Thomas comes from that school, like same thing.
It's like, if he wants to do something, he goes
for it and does it.
THOMAS CAMPBELL: That's kind of what happened.
It's like, when I was that age, I just started drawing.
And I was really shitty at drawing.
And I just kept doing it and kept doing it. it's kind of
like skateboarding.
It's one of those things that you just have
to keep trying at.
And slamming is normal.
So like it's hard to make things.
It's hard to make tricks.
You're like, oh, bam.
You're like, ah, fuck.
OK, I got to try again.
Oh, bam.
You're used to it.
You're like, I just have to like keep on beating myself up
to do things.
I think that carries off in the creative world.
You're just like, I just got to keep trying.
And then I'll make it, sometime.
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