Ten Years Since Tent City: An Interview with Julien Stranger

I can still vividly remember leaving the skatepark early one morning in March of 2013, driving towards my office, and quickly pulling over when Julien Stranger's name popped up on my ringing phone. A week before, Jim Thiebaud at Deluxe had called to ask if I might want to do a feature to coincide with Antihero's Tent City video being released on iTunes, marking the ten-year anniversary of its initial release. When the guys at Deluxe asked if I might want to interview Frank Gerwer or Tony Trujillo about it, I asked if interviewing Julien might be an option. They said it was a longshot but they'd ask. My bold request paid off, and this is what came of it.—Jeff Thorburn

All photos by Gabe Morford

—

Who was on the Tent City trip?

Umm, shit, [Steve] Bailey, Peter Hewitt, Tony Miorana, Frank Gerwer, Max Schaaf, [John] Cardiel, I might forget somebody, ahh, Rick [Charnoski] and Buddy [Nichols], Matt Rodriguez, ok wait, that’s not it. Gabe Morford. Who am I forgetting?

Tony.

Tony Trujillo, yeah, obviously.

I’ll run through the credits and make sure you didn’t miss anybody.

Thanks man, no doubt. That would be lame to forget someone.

So you traveled through Australia over four weeks. Did you have a tour guide or any friends there showing you around?

Yeah, it was through Kwala, Andrew MacKenzie’s distribution company. He’s a rad dude. He hooked us up with a couple of tour guides. This kid Ben, and I’m going to sound like an asshole because I don’t remember the other kids name. We ran into a lot of people along the way. Adam Luxford too, he definitely hooked us up, let us stay at his place a couple of days. 

Was the plan right from the start to make a video?
Yeah, it was in the works for a while, with Rick and Buddy. I was a big fan of Fruit of the Vine and Northwest. I think I had seen Buddy at a Northwest premiere and I was like, “dude, it would be so sick if we could do something together.” About a year later we finally got it together. I had no idea what it would take to get it done but we did it.
Were Rick and Buddy the crafters of the narrative that runs through the video?
Definitely. I went down to LA maybe twice while they were editing, but it’s their film, video, whatever you want to call it, it’s totally them.
Did they do all the interviews as well?
Yeah, most of those we just picked up on the road. We had a separate car, somebody had rented one, and so we did a lot of interviews in there. They’d pull one guy off while we were driving to another spot and just kind of run down some questions. We did some when we got back too.

The overarching theme in the video seems to be about exploring and getting out of your comfort zone. Is that a message you knew you wanted the video to deliver right from the start?

Without even considering it a theme or anything, it was just like how we do and have always done things. I definitely like that openness of everyone in this adventure together, rather than people in separate rooms at motels, kind of closed off from each other for a lot of the time. I can’t even say if it was a conscious theme, but it was definitely something I wanted to show, the light that I wanted to put skateboarding in, for sure. 

It seemed that everyone involved felt the same way. I found with the interviews it’s sometimes hard to identify the speaker, but everyone seemed to be on the same page with what they value in skateboarding.
Well Bailey said something super rad, something about that Boom Boom Huck Jam era, how there are guys going around in tour buses, and we are just the other side of skateboarding. And it’s funny, I know the Boom Boom Huck Jam days are over, but that kind of hype side doesn’t really go away, does it?
That’s the first thing I thought when I watched it again recently. What Bailey was saying still reflects the current state of skateboarding.
Yeah, totally. I’m not saying that our videos matter, in any way, but it’s just such a legitimate part of skating. At the end of the day, that’s more… I’m going to try to sound smart right here so I’m just going to shut up.
It’s a type of skating that the everyman can relate to more than the mega tours.
Yeah exactly.
Did you have spots you knew about beforehand and wanted to find or were you led to most of them by chance?
We knew we wanted to skate Pizzey skatepark, because it’s just some epic concrete that you have to hit. That little metal capsule, I think it was like a crushed beer vat; it just looked like a crushed can on one end. That was just a score. In the movie, you can see that it had just been raining for days and days, and that was serious, like torrential rain for days on end. Finding that full-pipe just kind of saved us at that moment. We really needed a stoke right then and we got it. Somebody took us there and it was probably the only thing to skate, for like 500 miles or something, so we did it.
When I think back on the video I always think of that image of you guys sliding in the tiny hole into the capsule. Did anyone hesitate to go in there? 
No, everyone eventually got in and it was good. I think you can see a couple of clips where guys wheels were just sliding around— Cardiel comes down off an Alley-Oop and just kind of washes out, and you can just see that people breathing in there was building condensation on the inside. That was kind of sketchy. 

So then the full-pipe at the end was sort of the climax of the video, was that a spot you guys knew about before the trip?
Yeah, someone had clued us into it before, probably Pete. It’s definitely his shit. That was pretty insane man. That was really scary, for me. Those guys seemed to handle it, but I don’t know, that was really gnarly.
Is that just a huge drainage pipe?
It’s just an overflow from a dam. They have a series of dams up in the mountains, and they release water, as they need electricity. It goes from one lake to another lake. It’s interesting, some crazy engineering feat, how there are like five or six dams connected and they let water flow from one to the other, at timed intervals, during peak electricity hours. 
Did you camp there for a couple of days?
I think it was a couple of nights. We got there really late one night, camped out, woke up, cleaned it all up, and I’m pretty sure we stayed the next night. It’s kind of vague though.
Was it just one full day session in the pipe, or multiple trips in?
It was just one long day in there.

So not until years later did everyone come to find out, mostly through the Epicly Later’d series I think, that this was the trip that John had his accident on. I know you touched on this in that series, but was it a conscious decision from the beginning not to mention that in the video?

Yeah, definitely, because that was so heavy man. John was still in Australia recovering the whole time we were making the video. We had almost zero contact with him; he was just really focused on his thing. Rick, Buddy, and I went back and forth on it so many times man, and then we just totally all ended up agreeing that we needed to celebrate the trip as something awesome. Which is what it was, totally, and not let the injury, ahh, I don’t want to say bring it down, but the injury was the heaviest thing ever, for all of us, especially for John. You know, he got hurt on the last day of the trip. I don’t know if anyone knows that. We were just all so happy, so high on the entire journey, and then that happened. We just wanted to portray the positive of the experience, straight up, and not mess with that. I mean if you look at it now, what would be the point in having that in the video? Everyone knows now, it’s obviously terrible, but going back and looking at it, why would you want to be reminded of that every time?

Did you guys go back and forth on even making a video at all?

Wow, I can’t remember if that came up. I bet it was in our minds. I don’t remember though if that was ever truly considered though.

I know it’s ten years later, but why do you think it’s important to rerelease this now, outside of the anniversary?

I guess there is probably a generation that doesn’t know it exists at all. Maybe there is someone younger out there that doesn’t know it exists but might connect with it now. It’s just an important part of skateboarding as far as I’m concerned, that part without the hype. 

I agree. Do you have any mixed feelings about it just being an online release?

No, I mean the physical copies do exist— I think Rick and Buddy are sitting on a couple hundred if anybody wants one. We are going to do a couple of extra things too, like just put in the kitchen sink, the put-everyone-to-sleep footage. There is seriously some retarded stuff; it’ll be funny. And then tonight we are going down to LA to do an audio commentary feature for the online release, which will basically just be getting a bunch of us from the trip in a room, drinking some beer and talking shit over the movie. It could be funny, it could suck, I don’t know. 

So there will be audio of you guys talking shit in present day over audio of you guys talking in the original video.

Right, I don’t know man; it might be some Mystery Science 3000 stuff. You ever watch that show, Mystery Science Theatre 3000?

Yeah I’ve seen that, where they talk shit in the theater over bad movies, right?

Yeah, so we’ll see. I don’t know what to expect.

Tent City is often referenced as a timeless video. It still looks totally current; no huge logos, nothing said or done, and not even the tricks give it a dated feel…
That is rad man, that’s like the best compliment you could give… I’m sorry though, finish your question.
That’s pretty much it, roll with that.
Why does it hold up? You just said it man. I didn’t even think about it. No logos, and all the tricks are pretty basic, more moves than tricks. I don’t know man; maybe that part of skating never gets old? I didn’t really think about if it had held up or not really until now.
I’m 28 now, so I saw this video in some pretty formative years of discovering what I like in skateboarding, and when I look back to the magazines and videos I was aware of at that time, it can be funny seeing the clothing and tricks, fads that came and went. But looking at this video, it still looks like a video you could have just made last year.
That’s really funny man, that’s cool. I think the film has something to do with that too. Just the medium alone can really date something, but Super 8 is always going to look cool. You look at Fruit of the Vine and Northwest, and those aren’t dated at all either.
Well that’s great man, this has been great to talk and I really appreciate you doing this.
I really appreciate you giving us the space. I really haven’t talked about Tent City with anyone in a long, long time. Thanks a lot, that was cool.
—
Thanks to Julien for taking the time and Jim Thiebaud for hooking it up.