Memory Screened | John Lucero

1. Variflex Skull and Bat Wings (1983)
“This one is a prototype that never came out. I hand-drew and painted five of them, two of which I kept and three of them went to tradeshows for Variflex to show. There weren’t a lot of skull graphics at the time yet, but I guess for this particular tradeshow Pushead had drawn some graphics for Zorlac, like the John Gibson graphic, and it became all the rage. When the Variflex dudes came back, they said, ‘Pushead graphics are what we need.’ I knew Pushead, so I called him and asked him if he wanted to do my board, but he couldn’t because he was doing all the stuff for Zorlac. He gave me his buddy XNO’s number though, which led to my actual first pro model, the Bondage Chick board.
It’s funny to think that if they hadn’t seen the Pushead stuff at this tradeshow, they probably would have gone with this one. It was gonna get made, but last-minute Pushead fever hit. I really thought after that that my graphics weren’t good enough to be on skateboards.”

2. Variflex Bondage Chick (1984)
“When Pushead told me he couldn’t do my board, he was like, ‘You know what, though? I have a friend in Tennessee named XNO; he can draw some of the craziest graphics for you.’ Chet Darmstadtler is his name, and he sent me a bunch of comic books and ’zines that he was doing. When I got them, I was blown away. I sent him a template of the board with where the holes for the trucks are. He drew all this kinda punk, bondage, really weird dark stuff, always guys chained down. I said, ‘Hey, man, I like what you do. How about a bondage chick on top of this guy?’ He just came up with it and it looked awesome.
Variflex went for it. They made about 200 of the first round and sent them out. A lot of the stores sent them right back. They said it was the most disgusting graphic they’d ever seen; please take it back. That was that. Probably only 400 of them were done.” 3. Madrid Jester (1984)
“At the Huntington Beach contest that year, I got third place and ran into Jerry Madrid. He knew me because he grew up pretty much in the same town I grew up in. He was down to make me the board that Santa Cruz, where I went after Variflex, never would. This one is the first production board that I got to draw my own graphics for. At the time, I was influenced mainly by punk music and always liked demonic, kinda joker guys. The only thing that didn’t come out the way I wanted on it is that I wanted a fluorescent pink board, and Jerry couldn’t quite get it to work. He came up with the bright green board, which worked. Then we got a few runs of this lavender purple color.
I wanted fluorescent real bad ’cause it was the ’80s and I’d shop in Hollywood and buy fluorescent socks. All the stuff that was coming out of England, they had these stores called Posers and Let It Rock. It was awful shit too, man, but it was something different. ‘Check me out, I’m glowing,’ you know what I mean?”

4. Schmitt Stix OG Bars (1985)
“After a while, there was no real reason to leave Madrid, but I just wanted to skate for Schmitt Stix. I got the opportunity and even got a job at the Vision art department, where I did my own graphics plus other skaters’, like the Baby Doll Blocks board for Jeff Grosso, or the Mad Scientist board for Kevin Staab, plus a lot of the Vision Blur ads. Anyway, when time came to do my board on Schmitt Stix, I didn’t look much further than a sticker I had on that little drawer thing I had my TV on. When I was a kid, I got it from a box of Trix breakfast cereal. It had this little guy behind bars and it said ‘dungeon.’ I thought that could look hot on a board, so I redrew it. It’s basically the same thing, and instead of ‘dungeon’ I wrote my name.
People have made up all sort of interpretations of it, but most of my graphics I do ’cause it looks cool or fun or funny and that’s it. Later on, I did a second version of this one, with the Joker coming out of the same bars. This one was a jab at Jerry Madrid, ’cause the year after I left him, he redid my Joker board but with ‘X Team rider’ written instead of my name!”

5. Lucero Ltd Thumbhead (1990)
“I was at my friend John Grigley’s, and he had a postcard from this movie Children Of the Damned. There’s all these little kids with no eyes in it, right? And there are four kids in this postcard, and this guy was in the back kinda, so he was on the top of the postcard and his head was cut off. We just thought he was funny, so we Xeroxed him a couple of times. It got kind of more blown-out like that, and then we just started drawing a bunch of different heads on him. Grigley drew a big, square head. I drew this one, the thumbhead. Actually, he was on another board. Before he got his own board, he was on the nose of a board with racing stripes I put out.”