jackassworld

In the beginning there was Big Brother and CKY. They say great minds think alike, but in this case it was more like birds of a feather flock together—the dodo being the avian species in question here. So it seemed like a natural fit when Jeff Tremaine and Johnny Knoxville first considered enlisting Bam Margera and Brandon Dicamillo for their “dream team” on jackass. Up until this point, however, we’d had minimal contact with Bam, other than a random run-in with him and his father Phil in the streets of Philadelphia while on our Big Brother East Coast road trip in 1995, and I believe he was only 13-years-old then. Little did we know, but in five years time Tremaine, Knoxville, and Spike Jonze would be calling him up to ask if he would be interested in joining forces, so to speak, for an all out idiotic network television blitz.

For pilot presentation purposes, we mostly cherry picked a few select segments from the first CKY/Landspeed video to get the general point across about Bam and his unique world, along with some newly acquired footage that he’d supplied us with. It wasn’t until the show was formally picked up by MTV, though, that we actually flew out to West Chester, PA, in the summer of 2000 to witness and film the madness firsthand.

Our traveling crew was fairly small then, consisting only of Trip Taylor, Michelle Klepper, Rick Kosick, Jaime Owens, Tremaine, and myself (Knoxville, I believe, was preoccupied elsewhere, possibly on location for Big Trouble down in Miami, FL), and I still remember arriving at the Holiday Inn just outside of West Chester where we were scheduled to meet Bam. There was an initial awkwardness when he eventually pulled up, but that soon fell away as he introduced us to Ryan Dunn, whom we’d never really heard of before, and declared that he was going to “swim in shit.” And since they already had a snorkel and mask, who were we to argue?

After a few quick stops, we were skittering across a web of back roads through the outlying countryside until Brandon Dicamillo pulled off onto a gravel road. And there it was: a random-ass sewage tank set back in the woods. Dunn proceeded to strip down to his tighty-whitey’s, at which point Bam and Brandon regaled us by pointing out all these haggard homemade tattoos that littered his thighs. A few duct-tape applications to his underwear later and Dunn was poised in perfect Jacques Cousteau form on the edge of the industrial-sized tub of swirling brown poo. I’m fairly certain this was one of those famously weak-bladdered moments of mine when I squirted a wee bit o’ pee in my boxers while uncontrollably braying with laughter as he took the plunge, maybe even more so when Dunn emerged from the dirty depths only to be told by Tremaine that he had to do it again.

While this may all sound very chaotic and ill prepared, Ryan wisely took several safety precautions beforehand, like by wearing earplugs and an orange life preserver. We even had a bar of soap on hand for good measure, but if I’m not mistaken Bam used it as a projectile to throw at Ryan while he was floundering about in the poop soup.

Back at the Margera’s then humble home (situated directly across from another wastewater treatment facility of sorts, if I remember correctly), April had prepared a spaghetti feast for us all, proving she really was one of the best moms you could ask for in the world—aside from the fact she wouldn’t let Dunn in the house and made him eat his meal roadside. But hey, can you really blame her?

(photos by Sean Cliver; West Chester, PA; 2000)