So, when business and personal are as closely connected as they are in-house in essentially any skater-owned company, issues of substance abuse or more importantly professional skateboarders simply not doing their job become a lot trickier and these issues are all the more complex when one considers the specifics of the foundation of Baker/Deathwish skateboards in particular.
Baker was first established by Andrew Reynolds, Jim Greco and Erick Ellington at the peak of their pro careers, they were big name young pro’s who felt that their take on skateboarding was not being represented by the established brands. Their take on skateboarding essentially entailing jumping down massive sets of stairs during the day and getting bladdered in the trashy nightclubs of early 2000s Hollywood all night every night. This was all fun and games until the comparatively acceptable getting drunk moved into the sketchier territory of shooting heroin, snorting mounds of cocaine and throwing a variety of coloured pills down their gullets all day and night and spending essentially no time at all getting down to the important launching themselves down great flights of stairs side of things.
Thankfully all these men have made it through their respective dark nights of the soul and shaken off their various vices. Some more intact than others: Reynolds is now a clean living single dad running one of skateboarding’s most successful companies, Ellington seems to be the driving force behind Baker’s sister company Deathwish which until recently was Dixon’s home and Greco has spent several years essentially in drag, found god and now has embraced a sort of Jeffrey Dahmer chic. These men have all been on the other side of addiction and have few qualms with speaking openly about the dangers of excess and the compromising positions that young men making a name for themselves in skateboarding often find themselves in.
And yet, Baker’s aesthetic remains focused on the joys of overindulgence. Countless graphics allude to drug use and in the “Baker has a deathwish” summer tour video that came out a few years ago, they go as far as to show members of the team taking various unidentified powders and wobbling around a crowded motel room. Now, people like Reynolds would claim that releasing footage like this is only done in order to offer properly representative and uncensored look into the lives of the pro skaters under the Baker banner and he may have a point.
Does skateboarding really need to compromise its supposed outsider credentials in order to avoid offence or in hope that young skaters could turn out to be upstanding citizens? Probably not. Skateboarding videos could be understood to be pieces of art in the same sense an album is and what is and is not included should be the decision of the artists alone, but the issue again is not that simple when the videos themselves are not only art but in a sense an extended advertisement trying to coax young people into making a purchase.
