Beef Street

Beef Street, by Ray Stevens II, was one of the first skate zines from outside my local scene that I landed my grubby hands on. In the summer of 1985, the Faction and the Drab rolled through town. I lived one house away from the big skate ramp in town built by Rich Flowerday. The Faction stayed with Rich, and I cleared it with my folks to have th Drab stay at our place. As I recall, they had a few days off between shows, so there were some great sessions at Rich’s, where my friends and i took great pleasure in watching Steve Caballero destroy Rich’s newly rebuilt ramp. Dad bought a mountain of hamburger and cooked it up for the crew. Let me know if you can think of a more perfect few days for a fifteen year old skate punk let me know, because I sure can’t!

Flash forward to the spring of 1986, and Beef Street #3 lands in my mailbox. The hospitality, cool locals and hamburger mountain must have left an impression on Ray who sent the zine my way with the note “Say hi to your folks!”

There are loads of great mid-80’s nuggets enclosed in this zine. HOt coverage of a contenst at the famous Montague banks, local scene gossip, a multi-page appreciation of curbs, and a lengthy interview with Tommy Gurrero. The interview is great and contains this shocking piece of skate history — Tommy invented a trick called a ‘nollie’ and it is an ollie to nose. There is photographic evidence in this issue even!

Beef Street is a great time capsule of the era of handwritten interviews, cut-out pics, punk rock, curbs and the joy of being a skateboarder just before skateboarding was about to explode again.

Download a full scan of this issue here.