Interview by Larry Davis

So what’d we get into today Jaime?

We went and skated the piss ledge in Brooklyn. It lived up to the name, and the shit splattered on the wall was pretty cool too. I’ve skated spots that had a piss smell in the past, but that one was very intense and didn’t go away.

Agreed. So it all started in Florence, South Carolina for you?

Yup, I was born and raised in South Carolina, born in 1974.

Did you start shooting skating there?

Kind of. I remember these girls did a whole slideshow of all the photos they’d taken when we were in high school and I got so bummed there were no photos of any of our crew. So I decided I was going to get a camera just to shoot photos of us hanging out. I started skating when I was like eight or nine, so I was skating by then, but by late high school I was wanting to get a nicer camera to try and shoot skating. But even at that moment I wasn’t thinking like, “I want to be a skate photographer.” I just wanted to be a good photographer, shoot anything and everything, and be a skater.

Yeah you like, really skate man. How?

I mean, I’ve been a skater all my life and then moving to California and doing the whole skate magazine thing, I kind of mentally got in the zone of “I’m the photographer now.” I would come home after work, and I wouldn’t go out on the weekends cause I had new babies to help raise. Going to work at Transworld and having a private skatepark I realized I could go skate at lunch and then go home and be with my family. I could still learn shit, and I was pushing myself to get back to where I was when I was twenty, or even better! I knew the park wasn’t going to last forever, so I needed to start skating on the weekends and get back into skating on my own time. When my responsibility at home loosened up, I was like, I’m back in these streets baby! I’ve skated every day almost, multiple times a day in the past few years and it’s blown my mind. I’m 47 now, and I think I skate better than I ever have in my life.

So let’s go back to high school, did you ever make zines or anything like that yourself?

Nah I never did zine stuff, I sang in punk bands, and we would make fliers and posters but I never got into making skate zines. I was all about that world, so I was always around them but I never thought about making that stuff on my own.

And you were deep in the punk scene, touring and all that shit right?

Oh yeah we toured all around the country. We would always drive up to Detroit, Cleveland, and Dayton and do all these festivals and stuff in the mid 90’s, playing with all the biggest hardcore bands of that era. It was awesome at the time, and it’s still awesome looking back on it. I still love that shit! I love all those bands and I can still listen to them all the time and feel what I felt when I first heard them.

Do you remember the first money you got from the skate industry?

Yes, I was just talking about this the other day actually. So driving to the Santa Ana airport there’s a Boomers, which is like a gaming, putt-putt place or whatever. They decided to open up a prefab skatepark in the back, somewhere around 2000, and they wanted someone from Skateboarder to come down and shoot photos of the opening. Danny Way and Bucky Lasek were gonna be there! I was an unpaid intern at the time and Mike Ballard was just like “I got you a job. You get to shoot the park opening for $500.” I was like $500! I was tripping out. So he gave me his Nikon FM2, no flash cause it was a bright sunny day. He just tells me “put it at 1/500, 5.6 and you can’t brick it! Just go and shoot em.” I didn’t really have a big selection of skate photos to show, so it was really rad of him to believe in me. Even though that was a bullshit assignment, he didn’t give a shit if I blew it or not. The worst part about the story is that we gave Boomers the film right after the session so I never even saw the photos, which means to this day I still don’t know if I blew it.

Is this around the time you got involved with Jackass?

Kind of. So Ballard was friends with Jeff Tremaine and all the Big Brother guys from when he worked there and he asked me if I would be down to drive everyone around because I had a big minivan and they were working on a pilot for a show. So I went and drove them around. I was so paranoid of them because after watching the old videos and stuff, I assumed these guys were just the biggest assholes in the world. I figured they’d probably kick me in the nuts or something, but they were all just super nice. I was expecting the worst because I was just some random redneck.

But you were the redneck with the minivan!

Exactly. So Mike Ballard had this big argument with Jeff Tremaine that day and just stormed off and left me with all of them. Jeff was just like, “Hey we need help, if you don’t have anything going on right now…” So I just picked up the video camera that Ballard left behind and just filmed the rest of the day, and from that moment it was on. I became one of the filmers for the first season of Jackass. It totally just fell in my lap!

When did you come back to magazines after Jackass?

One night Ballard hits me up “Hey man, I’m leaving Skateboarder, but Meza wants to hire you as my replacement as the photo editor.” He was never really in the office doing photo editing anyway. He was out in the streets, shooting, conceptualizing ideas and stuff, and Meza needed someone in the office, being there to help out. I didn’t think twice about it, I just said yes immediately. I was working on a damn TV show. I was just promoted to associate producer, I was moving up in that little realm, but I wanted to be a part of skateboarding so badly. I would edit the photos, but I would also just help Meza with anything and everything. That started in October of 2000. So within one year of moving to LA I had interned at Skateboarder, worked on the first two seasons of Jackass, became associate producer, then became photo editor, and I met my wife-to-be the week before starting. I was like, “This place is magic!”

California dream man. How quickly did you go from photo editor to editor?

So I worked for a couple of years under Aaron Meza which was awesome, those issues were super fun. Then he left to go work at Girl and a lot of the other photographers left. Mackenzie Eisenhower was a writer there, he had left. I made a few issues where it was straight up just me and Donny Miller, the art director. I knew enough of how to make the magazine work so I just kept moving with it until we got a new boss. That new boss decided to get a new editor so we got Brian Peach, who was the editor for SBC Magazine in Canada and I got a raise to Creative Director. Brian was only there two years and then he left and we were looking for another editor. I was like, “I pretty much have been making this magazine, working with photographers, doing the articles, all this shit, can I just be the editor?”

You were with Skateboarder for over a decade right?

Yeah I started working there in 2000, became editor in 2007 and went all the way to 2013.

And then Transworld bought Skateboarder, do I have that right?

Skateboarder bought Transworld actually. So the parent company that owned Skateboarder purchased all the Transworld titles and brought them in house, so there were a whole lot of duplicate titles they had to shut down. Whatever was going on at the time with them, Transworld still had a huge following, were really popular, and had huge subscriptions, so Skateboarder was done. My boss told me on Friday that they were going to be shutting the mag down that coming Monday, just as a little heads up respect thing. They shut us down after the weekend, but because we had an issue printing, and still needed to fulfill the advertiser needs, they kept us on payroll for two months in order to get that work done. But the mag was officially dead.

But then you get the editor job at Transworld. Was it basically the same shit?

The biggest difference was over the last couple years at Skateboarder, we were struggling. We went bi-monthly, then it shifted so we had to think digital first, and print the mag on the backend. My brain was going crazy trying to figure out digital versions of photos, how to make animated gifs, and all that stuff. Then I get to Transworld and it’s like you gotta jump back into the crazy monthly deadlines.

Were you guys still packed with advertisers?

It was still doing really good business wise, but it went down fast. They were already going down from where they once were, but it was still way more money than Skateboarder was pulling in at that time. Every year after that it was fucking nosediving straight down though. We had to do cuts, and layoff all the photographers through the years, layoff writers. You could see the writing on the wall. I was telling everyone there “We know this isn’t going to last forever, right?” We could all see it, literally, the thickness of the magazines getting skinnier each issue. That’s not a good sign!

Did you feel like at the end of Transworld you were trying new things, seeing if anything could stick as far as keeping a print medium going?

It was desperation and it sucked. I hated that feeling. It was just, work with anyone that had money, really just do anything editorially to hopefully keep us going. Because you’d always just hope to get through the bad part and there’d be sunny days ahead. The desperation was the worst part.

Was the beef between Transworld and Thrasher real at the end, or was it just leaned into for competitions sake?

It was manufactured to an extent, but it was also definitely real. Grant Brittain has told me stories of going and shooting up in Norcal in the ‘80’s and getting vibed out and shit. But Thrasher came out and they were punk rock as fuck and were all about the culture, trying to save skateboarding, doing it for the skaters. I went back and read some old Transworlds and I was embarrassed. It was just so corny, like “we don’t want to be mean to people!” So they really did set themselves up to be made fun of, but that’s what drove me crazy once I got to Transworld, like those days are over. We were just skaters making a mag. There was for sure something there in the ‘80’s with that beef. But that was all well before our times at the mag though. As far as we were concerned we didn’t give a shit.

Why do you think they survived when all these other magazines were dying out?

T-shirts. Every kid in America was buying a Thrasher shirt, right? That’s just a fact. So if they didn’t have that they would have felt everything that every other skate mag felt. They would have gone down in page count, in frequency, they would’ve had to! But they fucking crushed it with their logo and that gave them a cushion for sure. When you’ve got all that money from t-shirt sales then you can pay the best prices for all the video content. I mean they had the juice already. Everybody was all on it and the web was crushing it with all the exclusive video parts. It was just the perfect storm of all that shit that just kept them from having to go through the same shit all of us had to go through. Big Brother, Strength, Skateboarder, Skateboard Mag, all of them.

We started in 2010 and back then there was still a lot of diversity in the print game and now there are very few magazines, so what’s your take on skate media as a whole currently?

I love that there is still an outlet for everything outside of Thrasher. It’s still the dominant one, but obviously not everyone wants it to be the only one. I’m sure they don’t want to be the only one! They can’t handle everything with how much skating is going on in the world. I like how there’s niche stuff where everybody has something they can focus on and dive deeper into something than what the big mainstream mags can do. I’m stoked to be a part of that, and to be kind of in that realm of a new, independent part of the skate media realm.

What’s the deal with Closer, it’s quarterly right?

Yeah the idea is to do four mags a year, and try to grow to a big audience of subscribers. I don’t feel the need for it to be another Skateboarder or Transworld, I just want it to be a well respected media outlet.

I feel like it’s nostalgia-driven, would you agree?

Yeah the idea is I want it to be like a life-long skater’s brain in print. All these random images through the years that you think about, that bring you joy when you think about the first time you saw them. Sometimes those might pop up in the mag, but I just want it to be rad skateboarding. So down the road some issues might be 90% new shit, or some might be this huge idea for this old nostalgia thing. I always want it to be mixed and never be just one or the other. There’s a lot of nostalgia in that first issue, because that is the main audience I’m going for, kind of that older skater that can relate to that, and want to help fund that!

Would you say you are more hyped on the past of skating or the future of it?

I think both. Obviously nostalgia for the past of what we lived through and skated through to get to where we are. But I’m also very excited for the future because I want to be a part of the chain of skateboarding history that helps remind people where we came from and why it’s so fucking rad now. You know, if you don’t know where you came from then where are you going?

And so you believe printing it is the right way to solidify the history?

Exactly, it being in print makes it not as easy to be lost in the digital world.

That’s why I was really excited to see Chromeball working with you, because he’s probably the best interviewer of all time.

He has so much knowledge, and he cares so much about the fine details of skate history. He’s built his own following and his own cult status as a skate historian and lover, and doing all that shit for free. He’s a good friend of mine and I’m super stoked that he would honor me by giving me the chance to use his stuff.

It’s just you two?

It’s me doing all the stuff, Sammy Spiteri doing the layout, my friend Kim Stravers does the copyediting, Brian Blakely from Skateboarder and Transworld, super rad kid. He helps out and just looks over everything as a side gig to make sure nothing super wonky is wrong. Farran Golding has been a huge help with interviews as well. But for the most part it’s me and Sammy, then working with Chromeball and all the photographers.

What’s your least favorite task of being editor?

Probably just shutting down ideas or photos from people that are so psyched on it. I’ve tried to do it in a very respectful way over the years. A lot of people just want to hear something, you just can’t leave people hanging. The worst thing is just to not reply.

Any last words or pieces of advice for a teenager reading this?

Fuck, I mean if a teenager is reading this old mans interview then I’m fucking hyped! I’d just say skateboarding will keep you young forever and that’s what’s so magical about it. I appreciate you guys giving me this chance because I’ve never thought of myself as anything in skateboarding, or that it owed me anything. I’m just stoked to be here, stoked to skate with you guys and meet so many new people. Still doing it at this time in my life is so cool.