How Did I Get Here (7 page)

“Zoom!” Say Gnarly Disaster Boy

As COO of Tony Hawk Inc., Pat took responsibility for doing the show’s financial projections. First, she and our accountants had to figure out how much the whole thing would cost, then calculate what it would take to make a profit: how many shows we’d have to do, how many tickets we’d have to sell, how much we’d have to charge for each ticket, how much sponsorship money we’d have to bring in, and how much branded merchandise we’d have to move.

The logo for our very first Boom Boom HuckJam reflects our humorous take on the Japanese youth culture that influenced the name of the tour.

Meanwhile, in addition to recruiting athletes, I went out to a bunch of old friends to help produce the show. I gravitated to people who lived skating, BMX, and Moto. Because we’d be in huge arenas, we planned to videotape the show in real time and project the action onto JumboTrons, so we needed cameramen who knew how to shoot that stuff. I enlisted Morgan Stone, the creative producer at my video production company, 900 Films; Carl Harris, producer and co-creator of the MTV Sports and Music Festival; and Bruno Musso, a producer who’d worked with us on my Gigantic Skatepark Tour. I also roped in a bunch of people who already worked for me at Tony Hawk Inc.: the multitalented Jared Prindle (our first employee ever, and still an indispensable part of the team) and cinematographer extraordinaire Matt Goodman. These weren’t just employees or contractors; they were all old friends who I knew would work their asses off, stay cool, and keep it all fun.

Part of the fun came when we tried to think up a name for the tour. “Cirque X” got scrapped because it was too close to “Cirque du Soleil,” so I put the word out to some people I know who are good with words, like Sean Mortimer (one of my oldest friends, and co-author of my autobiography) and my brother Steve. The exercise quickly spun out of control, and we all just started trying to make each other laugh. I’ve always been a fan of Japanese kitsch and that culture’s mangling of the English language. Here are some of the early titles that we considered:

• Heavy Air High Boy
  
• Speed Launch Gnarly Man
  
• “Zoom!” Say Gnarly Disaster Boy
  
• Big Air Rocker (No Lame)
  

At one point the word “HuckJam” popped into my head. So I wrote it down, and then added “Boom Boom” as a prefix, to give it a Japanese flavor. I e-mailed it to the brain trust, and everyone immediately voted for it. In the years since, I’ve been asked by dozens of reporters where the name came from and what it means. To the first question I say, “No idea.” But it actually has meaning: “Boom Boom” refers to the noise (and heavy bass thumps) that comes with loud music and an energized crowd. “Huck” is a term that skaters and snowboarders have used for years; it means to launch into the air: what you do when you launch off a ramp. “Jam,” of course, is an ongoing session of creative improvisation.

Once we had the name figured out, everyone got busy. We were aiming at an April 2001 launch date, and still kind of fumbling in the dark, when good fortune struck in the form of a music industry innovator from Laguna Beach.

In early 2001, Pat got a call from out of the blue from a guy named Terry Hardy, who wanted to know if she was interested in joining him and someone named Jim Guerinot in creating a company to manage action-sports athletes. Jim, it turns out, was a major player in the music world. A former vice president at A&M Records, he now owned a music management company called Rebel Waltz. Among his clients at the time were No Doubt, The Offspring, Social Distortion, Beck, and Chris Cornell. (He later went on to add my favorite band, Nine Inch Nails.) Jim was a trailblazer in the business, helping groups like The Offspring get rich by owning their own publishing and negotiating higher royalties. The big news: Jim and his team were also very good at running tours.

The music business was beginning its tailspin at the time, as people were starting to download music online instead of buying CDs. After a few meetings, Jim, Terry, and Pat decided to form a management agency for alt-sports stars like Kelly Slater and Bam Margera. Almost as an afterthought, Jim mentioned that he’d also be happy to help with the Boom Boom HuckJam show. Before we knew it, his people were on the phone booking the tour, and suddenly we had a partner who knew what he was doing, and who was willing to commit resources to the project. Pat called WMA and TBA and politely told them they were off the tour, so to speak.

At Jim’s suggestion, we brought in Mike McGinley (aka Goon), a tour accountant for Sting and No Doubt. We also hired one of Jim’s best production managers, Ray Woodbury, who’d been a partner on the Warped Tour. I remember that at every meeting we had with the main team, Goon would tell us we were crazy to spend all this money without knowing if anyone would buy a ticket. But we’d heard that before. So we plowed ahead, naïve to the vagaries of the concert business. In the end, Pat, Jim, and I ended up pouring about $2 million into it to get it off the ground, including $500,000 to produce an hour-long “making of the tour” TV show that would air in advance on ESPN, MTV, and various regional networks to promote ticket sales.

Freestyle Moto-X rider Dustin Miller wows the crowd on our first arena tour.

Three weeks before the first show, we set up the ramp in an enormous airplane hangar at the former Norton Air Force Base in San Bernardino, east of Los Angeles, where the other athletes and I went to work choreographing the routines. That was a wild, exciting, stressful time. We were trying stuff no one had ever tried before, with up to five people on the ramp at the same time, sometimes riding over and under each other, their trick lists worked out in advance. We made time for a period of improvised riding in the middle of the show—a jam session—but most of it was precisely scripted.

For the finale, we decided to have the Moto guys fly over the outside edges of the ramp while the rest of us sessioned beneath them. That was the scariest part. We actually had to cordon off sections of the deck with caution tape to keep the skaters and BMXers from wandering into a motorcycle’s flight path. As soon as we heard engines, we knew to stay away from certain zones or somebody would get hurt.

The Moto guys were troopers. Clifford Adoptante was fresh off a broken femur and had to use a cane to walk to his bike. The jump was blind, with a 14-foot-high ramp between takeoff and landing blocking their view. On his first attempt, Drake McElroy overshot the landing and broke his jaw. That was just 10 days before opening night, and we ended up replacing him with our Moto coordinator, Micky Dymond, because by the time Drake got jacked, it was too late for anyone else to learn the routines.

As we rehearsed, Jim and Pat inked deals with the various performers’ agents, and Jim asked Social D and Offspring to play at the first event. We decided to have the premiere at the Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas.

We started selling tickets eight weeks before the first show. Sales were painfully slow. Two weeks out, we’d sold only 25 percent of the available tickets. We were all worried. Jim, who knew the business as well as anyone, was particularly worried. He told us we had to start making plans to “paper the house,” meaning we’d give away tickets to fill empty seats so the press wouldn’t declare it a flop. Fortunately, Jim and steadfast promoter Bill Silva did a bang-up job getting local radio stations to promote the show, and we had a surge of last-minute walk-up business. That gave us hope.

Anyway, the show went on, and we all had a blast, and the crowd seemed to enjoy it.
USA Today
, MTV,
Access Hollywood
, and ESPN all covered the event, and gave favorable reviews. That night, we popped the champagne, exchanged high-fives, and everybody went home happy. Then Pat, Jim, and I looked at the accountant’s reckoning, and freaked. The venue and local labor costs were so enormous, we’d netted next to nothing. At that rate, there was no way we’d recoup all of our start-up costs. It was particularly bittersweet for me. I’d been excited to see so many screaming kids and stoked parents in the stands, but it looked like we were about to lose a whole lot of money.

Our goal had been to launch a summer tour just two months later, but now we were having serious second thoughts. Pat went on a mission to find sponsors. Fortunately, Activision planned to launch the fourth installment of my video game in November of that year. The game’s marketing team agreed to be the HuckJam’s title sponsor if we’d postpone the tour to coincide with the game’s release. Even though kids would be in school by then, we said okay, and began to organize a 24-city tour for the fall, to be sponsored by Activision, Sony PlayStation, and a new pudding-in-tube product called Squeeze-N-Go.

Five months after that first show in Vegas, we gathered up most of the same athletes and crew, studied the films, made some production changes, and went back to the hangar for rehearsals.

After the last rehearsal, when everything was packed, we stepped outside the hangar and took in the sight of the huge convoy of trucks and buses, all ready to roll. I think that may have been the first time the Talking Heads song ran through my head.

In addition to Social D and Offspring, Jim had managed to pull in Face to Face, Good Charlotte, and CKY to play at various stops along the way. Just before the final tour plans were cemented, Jim asked me, “What do you think about Devo?” I thought he was joking. Devo had been one of my favorite bands growing up. They were deeply connected to the underground skate scene of the early 1980s, but I’d never had a chance to see them play because I was so young, and they hadn’t toured in years. I thought Jim was crazy, but he said, “I’ll call Mark.”
Meaning Mark Mothersbaugh, the band’s co-founder?
In my mind, that was the equivalent of saying, “Maybe we should get Zep—I’ll call Robert and Jimmie.” Devo ended up playing two dates with us, Anaheim and my hometown of San Diego. When they played the SD show, it was my dream demo: friends and family in the crowd and one of my favorite bands playing
on the deck.
That night, I pulled my first 900 of the tour.

Trial by Fire—and by the Loop of Death

It didn’t take long to realize, though, that our plans for the first HuckJam tour were stupidly ambitious: too many big-name bands (with their crews, gear, and personalized sound checks) and too many goofy sideshows each night. During set changes, for instance, we had mimes sweep the ramps with giant brooms, hot models in skin-tight space suits walking around with signs introducing each show segment, and a weird mid-arena lounge area where the athletes were supposed to relax between sessions while being interviewed by emcees.

On top of all that, our ramp system covered the entire arena floor, which meant that at each venue we had to install lights to illuminate about four times more space than the typical rock band. And that, of course, required more workers and more money. The first few dress rehearsals were incredibly dangerous, with airborne motorcycles just missing crew members running to change sets. We ended up using spotters and buying red-yellow-green stoplights to avoid mishaps.

Also, we were so thankful to have sponsors that we made some embarrassing compromises to keep them happy. We initially agreed to give out free Squeeze-N-Go pudding samples during intermission, and to have our emcee, Rick Thorne, lead the audience in a “SQUEEZE AND GO!” chant. That made everybody cringe, including most of the spectators, so I asked Pat to tell the Squeeze-N-Go people that we needed to kill the chant. Before the second tour started, BMX star Dave Mirra went through all of the rehearsals, collected his rehearsal pay, and then, on the day before we were flying out, announced that he was leaving to host a reality show on MTV. That was about as pissed as I’ve ever been, because he’d kept it a secret and because his replacement wouldn’t have time to memorize our routines, which put all of the performers at risk. In another stroke of luck, we persuaded BMX legend Dennis McCoy (who had been cut earlier to make room for a newer rider) to sub for Mirra. Dennis hopped on a plane in Kansas City, studied the routines on video while flying, learned them in one day, and kicked ass the whole tour. He remains a key HuckJam performer to this day.