jackassworld

When examining the history of Big Brother skateboard magazine one would be gravely remiss to not pay heed to the influence Glenn Danzig had upon the magazine. No, he wasn’t directly involved with it in anyway whatsoever, but he did become an inside joke of sorts that ultimately had one very serious repercussion causing one of the mag’s original financial backers to back out.

You see, former Big Brother editor and World Industries artist Marc McKee and I used to work side-by-side at our respective light tables in the World art room circa 1992. Typically we would play one CD and leave it on repeat all day every day. Sometimes for up to a week straight. Call it a zen thing, but I’ll be goddamned if it didn’t drive anyone else that came into the art room absolutely mad*. Maybe it was just our way of keeping the atmosphere quaintly antisocial, I don’t know, but it worked for our 12-hour workdays and that was all that mattered.

The first Danzig release was one of those CDs frequently repeated (others being Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All, Master of Puppets, and Ride The Lightning, Soundgarden’s Badmotorfinger, Nirvana’s Nevermind, and a variety of Led Zeppelin releases for the wholly obvious reason that they’re all fucking awesome), so it was only a matter of time before he trivially trickled into the magazine in some manner. Sure enough, in issue #2 we put a random photo of Glenn Danzig in the news making light of some guy starting up a skateboard company called “777″. It was pretty innocuous, something funny to us and maybe about three-percent of our readership, but soon after the issue came out Mike Ternasky (RIP), who was part owner of the magazine, walked into the art room all bummed.

There were a number of things Mike wasn’t particularly thrilled about with the issue, but what really bothered him was seeing that picture of Danzig in the news section. He didn’t find anything remotely funny about it and thought a skateboard photo should have been there instead. Now what you have to understand about Mike is that he was very serious about skateboarding. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, but unfortunately for him the staff working on Big Brother wasn’t serious about anything at all. He stuck it out for one more issue, but quickly realized that we weren’t going to be changing our course anytime soon. So he pulled his money out, Marc McKee put his money in, and thus began our hit-and-run editorial affair with Danzig over the next eight years. Some of which I’ll share with you this week because a Halloween without Danzig would be like St. Patrick’s Day without leprechauns.

If you, too, fail to see in Danzig what we’ve always seen in Danzig, then you’re probably not going to appreciate this treat I filched from the video bag over at MTV.com. (Although I suppose if you live outside the U.S.A. you’re not going to appreciate this video either because you can’t see it!) But if you do … if you do, then feel free to scream-a-long with me: “MOTHER!”

* Conversely, once Jeff Tremaine came along later in ‘92, he would play all sorts of random (r-word) CDs that tended to bug the shit out of Marc and I, the most difficult to deal with being any of the early Wesley Willis CDs that he’d programmed a single Casio keyboard track on and just switched the lyrics up to whatever he wanted to whip a camel’s ass with.