Grosso Forever: Loveletter to Jeff Grosso | SKATE | VANS

We all miss Jeff Grosso. It’s been a year since Jeff passed so Grosso’s long time co-creators, Buddy Nichols and Rick Charnoski of Six Stair Productions, put together this special birthday Loveletters episode to celebrate his life in his own words.

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Music credits:

ALL MUSIC BY

THE WHITE LIMO
“Love Letters Intro”
“Untitled 1”
“Force Feed”
“Dig Deep”
“Bananas”
“Dirty Carol”
“Love Me”
“Smelly Spot”
“Talking Title”
“Upbeat Face”
“Untitled 2
“Techno Riky”

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Grosso Forever: Loveletter to Jeff Grosso | SKATE | VANS
https://www.youtube.com/user/VansShoes66

– Hello, Steve van Doren here. It’s been a year since Jeff Grosso’s passing and we wanted to celebrate his birthday and honor Jeff’s legacy to skateboarding. I want you to just see a whole Love Letters with Jeff just Jeff Grosso. – What are we doing? We’re watching what?

– We miss you Jeff. Grosso forever. – Welcome back to the Letters. I’m your host Oliver Grosso. And this is my dad. He did the best hand plants that I’ve ever seen and skating’s the best. Skating’s the best. Skating the best. – Hello friends, foes, apathetic, junior narcissists the world over. My name is Jeff Grosso and I am the host of Love Letters to Skateboarding. And this is my disclaimer. We do the show on a shoestring budget, a shoe string budget. That’s kind of hard to say, and we try to get as much

Of the story as possible. Unfortunately, we cannot get it all. We are not the national geographic society. We are not here to recite the alphabet from A to Z to you. What we are entertainers, if you will. So I don’t know. I lost my train of thought. You know, you get caught up in life and you don’t take time out to sit and kind of remember. Pour yourself a glass of wine and fucking watch some fucking ripping and remember your friends and how awesome it was to fucking skate with them and laugh with them and live with them. And we have to carry on and carry that memory on with us because it has to count for something. One of my driving forces is admiration or respect from my peers, you know, from other skateboarders because I fucking love skateboarding, you know? And I love skateboarders. At no point did I ever come on camera and say that I was the ultimate authority in skateboarding and I fucking know everything. And this is the way it is. Tuck your fucking knees. If you can’t tuck your knee on a fucking frontside air front side boneless one, then stop.

Do another trick. Jesus fucking Christ. I’m a walking contradiction. I’m a hypocrite. I have no idea what the fuck we’re doing, man. We’re probably more confused than when we started. I’ve come on and gone. This is the way it is for me. Yeah. You know, tuck your knee, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But that’s the beauty of skateboarding is it’s for everybody. And it’s for in in whatever capacity you want to do it. Punk rock, skateboarding, all of that, everything that came together at once for me, it made us it made me question the world around me and made me want to know about things. When, before that I didn’t give a shit about knowing about shit. I was just some little kid playing with GI Joes.

And the next thing I know, I’m 47 years old. I’ve been around the world a few times and I’ve loved and lost. Jeff Grosso. I’m 20 years old and I’m visiting down under (chuckling softly) you guys have good beer. Oh yeah. I like it here.

So you guys could all pay for me to come back real soon. Next skater up, Jeff Grosso. And then one day, drugs took my skateboard and that was unacceptable. So drugs had to go. There’s nothing, nothing gets between me and it. You know, except for this failing shell of a fucking manatee like body. (Music) Love Letters for Jeff Grosso who is known to dig dip into your brain Welcome back. We’re going to try to tell you the origins of Love Letters where it all comes from. Well, here’s the postcard from Bobby. It looks like it even has a tear drop here.

The whole thing goes back to Lance. It was originally Lance’s concept Lance’s idea. And then Vans was going to do a Vans TV website or whatever. And I believe it was Jamie Hart that said like you should have, Grosso do a show.

And I was just like, “Yeah, no, I don’t want to do it.” You know? And so I was just trying to get out of him and they’re like, “Okay, good. So you’ll do it.” And I was like, “No, man, not me.” I’m not the fucking guy, right?

Then they were like, we’re going to pair you with the Six Stair guys You two idiots that nobody ever gets to see. – What’s that smell like something. – Check one, two check one, two. – We, we made arrangements to, for me to come up to LA.

– It was a blind date Vans had they liked what Grosso had done before, something on camera. And they, I don’t know how the hell they knew what the hell we had done? – And see if we could kind of pow-wow. And if we were all on the same page

And we could work together. – It’s a magic combination of Grosso being this amazing lead man and us being interested in telling people stories like off the radar people. – The first ones were very short and we toiled away at them for for quite a few years before anybody really paid attention.

I don’t know. I feel like I’m kind of choking this. Are we doing all right? – [Interviewer] You’re fine. – We tell our own truths here. They’re complete. And total lies, fabrications and we don’t care. ♪ Opinions as much like bananas ♪ ♪ Everybody has a bunch. ♪

– Jeff, what are you doing? I go, “Mom, I don’t know, but I’m in the forefront of it.” – There is nothing forefront about this. That’s the mission statement of the show. This is just my shit. This is my view. Welcome to Grosso’s world. I have a very narrow view of skateboarding.

As one guy wrote in his comments. You know, somebody needs to wake this dude up and let him know that he’s not fucking viable anymore. No shit, asshole. I know I’m not viable. I’m 45 year old man. I’m fat. I smoked too much. I used to drink too much. I can barely skate.

You think, I think I’m viable? Really? This is what you get 41 years of skateboarding. You get your neck and this thing is sewn to my body. And then it drains out my neck drains out into this thing. I’m trying to ask serious questions here. And the most serious I can get is here’s the realm. Here’s you. Where do you outside the realm? – You just step over. I can go fast. People like that. – [Jeff Grosso. (spectators cheering) The Gross Man. One of the big guy, he can put it together. Real strong rider. – That’s bullshit and bluff my way through life but I don’t bullshit or bluff skating because you can’t like, you know, you try to bullshit

Or bluff skating and you get your fucking ass handed to you. You know, at the end of the day, it’s like you’re going to stand up and take the fucking hit or you’re going to get, you know, like make it or break it. Like whatever, weird little cliche, like you’re

It’s you in it. Who’s going win? Someday you fucking walk home with a black eye and with your ass dragging on the ground and, but you know get up and do it all over again. We are headed North on Brookhurst Avenue in beautiful Huntington extra we’re in Fountain Valley right now, headed towards the little Saigon and ultimately Garden Grove

California to Kelly Belmar’s house. These days it’s fucking easier to roll than it is to walk. You know, it’s always like I’ll skate as long as I could walk, like, fuck prop me up on it and push me to push me over the edge. You know what I mean? If I can stay on it, I’ll be okay. You know what? I had to learn to tuck my knee to do a frontside air. I had the fucking ugliest stalest fucking frontside air in the fucking business. And I had a very fucking rad group of individuals come and pull lightly donkey punch me in the back

Of the fucking head and go tuck your fucking knee kid. And so I forced myself to learn how to tuck my knee. And nobody cares. Least of all me. You know? Skating is not a sport. I mean, I like saying it immensely, but it’s art. It’s art masquerading is sport. It’s discipline that if you will, you know some people like to compare it to martial arts. It’s a lifestyle. It’s gymnastics on a good day.

It’s a boatload of pain on a bad. (laughing loudly) We like what we’re doing so far? – [Interviewer] Yeah, great. – I’ve been beat up on and stuff for who I am and I didn’t like it. And the last thing I want to do is beat up on somebody else

And make them uncomfortable or make them not feel safe especially when it comes to skateboarding. I see it a lot, you know, and, and I’ve participated in it and you know, and it’s unnecessary. It’s cruel, you know. and skateboarding is it’s this wonderful tool, but you know

We should be able to all how we, as a group came up and what we all went through, you know we should be bigger than, and better than, and everybody should be able to participate and be stoked without fear of judgment or worse. All of us just have this kind of thing inside of it. Like I am here, I am alive. I was here, you know, I tried to do something whatever that is, whether it’s ride a skateboard have a kid, you know, whatever drives people, you know

You get into all this philosophical artsy shit, man. Congratulations. You’ve made it to the end of the episode. I hope you’re enjoying this and getting the same experience that I’m getting, or even an eighth of the education that I’m kind of getting out of doing all of this.

Because, fuck man, there’s just nothing better than skating. Skateboarding’s rule the fucking earth. So turn this shit off and go out there and live your fucking lives. Go skate. Thanks for watching. – [Interviewer] Dr. Jay from the fucking from the fucking free throw line. – Shit. (laughing softly) I can’t do this. Cut.

As far as I’m concerned, I fucking won the lottery. The skateboarding lottery, like, you know I got dropped off at skate city one fucking Friday night. And you know, as a 10 year old fucking child and I got I was befriended by John Lucero, Lance Mountain and Neil Blender.

Like those are the guys that taught me and Nash how to ride like literally, like here’s how you roll in. Here’s how you do a rock and roll. Like your frontside grinds suck. Do them like this. He, my frontside grinds still suck, but I kind of feel like I won.

Like I got to hang out with these just insane, right? Like fucking Blender, like duh. And it was going to take me a second to warm up here. – Go skate. Shoe shoe. Shoe. Come on go skate. – We got one more Love Letters with Grosso coming this summer.

It’s his love letters to Japanese skateboarding. Don’t miss it.