From Motörhead to Snoop Dogg with Geoff Rowley and Piers Baron of ‘Extremely Sorry’

PHOTO by REMY STRATTON

Having managed crowds in recent months at shows by Marilyn Manson and the Prodigy, the security guards standing at the entrance gates to the Grove of Anaheim on Sept. 16 were prepared for a big crowd—the estimated 4,000 ticket-holders slated to attend the evening’s premiere of Flip Skateboards’ Extremely Sorry, its latest installment the Sorry series—but this night would prove to be a little different.

“Actually, it got shut down after an hour,” says Belmont Shore resident Geoff Rowley, an original Flip team rider and current co-owner (along with Jeremy Fox and Ian Deacon) of the Westminster-based skateboard company. “They thought that skateboarders were going to be tamer than Marilyn Manson, and it turns out that the Marilyn Manson crew were very mellow. They couldn’t handle the skateboarders—even though everyone was behaving themselves. They just weren’t used to young kids so hyped and stoked on the evening.”

“Stoked” would be putting it lightly. Five years in the making, the hour-long Extremely Sorry video—featuring Rowley, who moved from England to Huntington Beach in 1994, and fellow Long Beach rider David Gonzalez (captured here in his middle teen years looking bafflingly young), among others like Lance Mountain and Mark Appleyard—is more than just a formidable offering to the skateboarding world: on that Wednesday night in September, it carried the kind of anticipation usually reserved for Hollywood sequels and Harry Potter novels (or a Pavement reunion).

Also in the works as the Extremely Sorry team compiled countless hours of footage—filmed across the planet, but also here in the city at the port (skateboards and cargo containers make for a bitchen match) and a particularly thrilling stop at the Queen Mary—was its soundtrack, a set of 14 original compositions (plus one cover) by UK-born producer, musician and DJ Baron (née Piers Baron), who moved next door to Rowley in Long Beach in April to complete the album.

Working without footage from the video to draw upon, Baron wrote and recorded a separate track for each segment of the film, pairing different riders with different genres, from the intense, electronic “Scream My Name” (featuring Pennywise’s Jim Lindberg on vocals) during footage of Rune Glifberg; to the Beatles-soul of “Love Shroom” (with Mack Winston singing) in Tom Penny’s segment; to the percussion-heavy tribal rhythms on instrumental “Desert Convoy,” accompanying Bob Burnquist. The end result kicks off with Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister singing on a stripped-down cover of “Stand by Me” (with Slayer’s Dave Lombardo on drums) and closes with Warren G and Snoop Dogg rhyming over the simply addictive grooves of “Swagger Rich,” touching upon nearly every genre imaginable in between.

And yet—with Baron at the helm—a common feel is maintained throughout.

“It was about being a soundtrack and serving the skateboarding, rather than turning it into my artist album,” says Baron. “Because it would be very easy to go in a completely different direction—but I didn’t really want to do that. I wanted to make sure it served the skateboarding, and that’s why there’s such a broad range of stuff on there.”

Included in this broad range are appearances by Black Mountain singer Stephen McBean (on “The End of the Beginning,” during Mark Appleyard’s segment) and Early Man’s Mike Conte (on “The Process of Extinction,” backing footage of David Gonzalez). “As we went through the process, the response from everybody was there,” says Rowley. “They were stoked, because it was something they had never been involved with—like Lemmy, who’d never sang like that, and Dave Lombardo, who’d never played drums like that. The guys from Black Mountain and Early Man, they are amazing musicians in their own right, but they totally sound completely different. Black Mountain’s just incredible, but the music [Baron] made for them wasn’t something they’d make. But it worked.

“It’s definitely got a lot of energy in it,” continues Rowley, “which makes the skating feel better—which is what you want. You want a kid to watch a skate video and want to skate, not to feel intimidated by these crazy skateboard moves but to just feel the energy and want to do it. I think that’s the best thing the music brings to it. People have made original soundtracks in the surf industry, and a little bit in the skating industry, but nobody had really pulled it off. Nobody had made a soundtrack that sounded different, rather than just being an instrumental or whatever. Nobody had made a soundtrack, had made a sound, that worked for skateboarding and came from skating. And that’s what we tried to do. And I think we pulled it off. The work that Baron did, the collaboration from all the guys—everybody came through. For Warren G and Snoop Dogg to be on the same album as Lemmy and Dave Lombardo and all these other different styles of musicians, that’s rad!”

FLIPSKATEBOARDS.COM

Tags: extremely sorry, Film, flip skateboards, geoff rowley, Long Beach, motorhead, Music, piers baron, snoop dogg