In the annals of San Jose skate-punk history, one band looms larger than all the rest. Featuring South Bay skateboarding legend Steve Caballero on guitar and Gavin O’Brien—brother to Corey O’Brien, another San Jose pro and owner of The Ritz—fronting the group, The Faction helped launch a subgenre of fast, aggressive punk-rock music focused on the subculture of skating. Word on the street (and on the flyers) is that this will be The Faction’s last show ever.

The Faction
Sat, 8pm, $25+
The Ritz, San Jose

Not Everyone could pull off an entire art show inspired by a single shoe design, but then most shoes don’t carry the significance that local skateboarder Steve Caballero’s Half Cabs do.

The art show, called “Birth of an Icon,”  Feb. 7 at Cukui in San Jose’s Japantown, will feature work by more than 25 artists, including Caballero, who is also curating the event. The idea behind the show is for each artist to create a single piece of artwork based off the shoe in some way.

“I kind of wanted to do something with the premise of you know when people do artwork of the classic Air Jordans, they have the Air Jordan in the piece of art. People look at that painting and go, ‘oh cool, Air Jordans.’ I wanted to do the same thing but with my shoe, and when people see the painting they go, ‘oh Half Cab,’” Caballero says.

The Half Cabs, which are made by Vans, landed in stores in 1992, right as street-skating was taking off. The shoes came to be synonymous with skateboarding and remain popular to this day.
Artists’ sole instruction in creating their pieces for “Birth of an Icon” was to take inspiration from the Half Cabs, so it probably doesn’t hurt that the shoes have such a memorable logo: a drawing of Caballero doing the Half Cab trick. Interestingly, the Half Cab skateboarding move was actually pioneered by Tony Hawk in an alteration of the Caballerial—one of Caballero’s most influential tricks, which he invented in 1981. It was the launching pad for his career and a big leap forward for skateboarding.

It’s fitting, though, that the shoe is named after a trick inspired by a different trick, as the Half Cabs were based on a previous Vans shoe design of Caballero’s, the Full Cabs. They were essentially the same, only they had high tops. Caballero learned that skaters were cutting off the high tops and duct-taping them back up in order to skate better in them. He called up Vans and suggested they make Half Cabs and take a little height off the ankles.

Caballero’s contributions to skating are well known enough that the Caballerial was the subject of a Jeopardy answer a few weeks ago. (“Time to hit the street on this piece of equipment and do a Caballerial.” The question, of course, is “What is a skateboard?”)

“It was really cool to see that. It’s pretty amazing to see how far skateboarding has come,” Caballero says.

Joe Sib became a household name in DIY punk rock after starting Sideonedummy Records in 1995 in Los Angeles, releasing albums by Flogging Molly, 7Seconds, MXPS, Gogol Bordello and many others. Sib has also gained recognition for his spoken word and comedy act, where he tells tales of punk rocking and skateboarding, most of which he did in San Jose, where he spent his formative years.

We asked Sib, how moved to Los Angeles in 1990,  to revisit some of his favorite memories and San Jose haunts. he knows, the one from the late 80s.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up on the border of Los Gatos and Campbell. This was in the 80s when I moved in with my dad. It seemed like everywhere there were condominiums with these names like Los Gatos Woods and there were a bunch of other people that were recently divorced and living solo and having their kids come stay with them on the weekends.

My dad moved into Los Gatos Estates. I lived there with him and I went to Westmont High School. I was a skateboarder. We were about two minutes away from Winchester Skate Park. That was the best thing. I was in skateboarding distance of anything I wanted to do. It was rural enough because you had orchards back then that you walked through, which isn’t the case anymore.

What was the best show you ever went to in San Jose?

The Ramones. It was 1989 July 4th, 5th and 6th at One Step Beyond. I went to the show on  the Fourth of July and totally get annihilated. If you’re a Ramones fan, you know they’re very American. To this day on Fourth of July at my house, we drink American beer and listen to American bands and blow shit up. My wife hates it, but I love it. It’s the way we roll.

So this particular Fourth of July, it’s 1989, The Ramones come through, I go to all three shows. The first night I got totally annihilated. The second night and the third night I wanted to be sober. The Ramones are in town, I really want to take it all in.

A buddy of mine, Corey O’Brien, who owns the Blank Club, we found out they were staying at the Holiday Inn and we were trying to go down there and find out where they were. Murphy’s Law was opening, from New York City. It was pretty amazing because Murphy’s Law is a legendary hardcore band. They almost blew the Ramones off the stage. All the sudden you had New York hitting San Jose.

The second night I watched the show, I actually climbed onto the lighting board and the sound board during the show and this guy reached over and grabbed my arms and was yelling at me while the Ramones were playing. But of course I couldn’t hear anything cause it’s the Ramones at full volume. He motions me to climb over the barrier. So now I’m in the lighting-sound booth and in-between one of their songs he’s like, in this crazy accent, “You can be up here, but you can’t get in my way.” It was half Spanish and half English. So now I got a full direct view of the Ramones and I’m just watching everyone lose their minds to the Ramones.

At one point the guy says to me, ‘”Hey, go get me a beer and I’ll let you watch the rest of the set up here.” I’m maybe 20 years old abd I run over and grab him a Heineken. I come back. I watch the rest of the set. At the end of the set he tells me he’s Arturo Vega—at that point I didn’t know who Arturo Vega was—but he seemed important.

He tells me, “hey would you like to meet the Ramones?” I’m like, “Nah, I don’t want to meet them cause if they’re dicks it’s going to bum me out.” I loved Ramones—everyone has their gateway band. He said to me, ‘The Ramones are not dicks.” That night he introduced me to Joey, Johnny, Richie and Dee Dee. It was like, there they are, right in front of me. It was insane. I got autographs and everything. Then they split.

I didn’t know it at the time that Dee Dee quit that night. That was the last show he ever did. Since then, I’ve become good friends with Johnny. I produced the 30 year anniversary concert of the Ramones here in LA. I became friendly with the Ramones when I was in Wax. We toured with the Ramones. I became really good friends with Joey when I was in 22 Jacks. 22 Jacks backed up Joey on his last trip to Los Angeles. He did a whole set of Ramones songs, which was pretty amazing. None of those experiences with the Ramones would have happened if it wasn’t there for that night in San Jose.

Tony Hawk had nothing but love for San Jose at the Birdhouse Left Coast Tour 2012, tweeting: “Thanks San Jose! Your park is awesome; hope the city keeps it going. @ Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park .” Our photographer was on site to catch the action with the Birdhouse skate team and local legend Steve Caballero.

Following the demo at Lake Cunningham, Tony and the Birdhouse crew stopped at Circle-A Skateboards in downtown San Jose for an in-store.

Photos by Alex Stover.

MORE PHOTOS: +100 photos from the Tony Hawk Birdhouse Left Coast Tour in San Jose
READ MORE: An interview with Tony Hawk

San Jose is a legendary skating spot, even in the mind of Tony Hawk. When he first started skating in the ’80s, while growing up in San Diego, he wasn’t even supposed to respect it, thanks to the bitter divide between NorCal and SoCal boarders.

“The rivalry was bizarre,” he tells me now, while prepping for the latest tour with his Birdhouse Team, who will come to San Jose’s Lake Cunningham Regional Skate Park Sunday for a demo. “We had a very small population that couldn’t get along. It was very polarized.”

But Hawk couldn’t help himself, because one of his earliest skating heroes lived in San Jose: Steve Caballero. And he’ll never forget the day he got to go to Winchester Skate Park in Campbell and skate with “Cab” for the first time.

“To this day, that’s one of the most monumental events for me,” says Hawk.

Hawk has skated the Lake Cunningham park only once, before it was completed. He calls the design, which features the world’s largest full pipe and cradle, and tallest vert wall, “incredible,” but marvels even more that this is just one of a whole system of public parks that now line California—a far cry from what was around in his younger days.

Of course, Hawk himself is one of the skaters whose fame ushered in the massive popularity of skateboarding that made these bigger and better parks possible in the first place. His new “Left Coast” tour comes not long after director Stacy Peralta, the former pro skater who made Dogtown and Z-Boys, brought his newest documentary to Sundance—a film that is likely to take the legend of Hawk and his fellow skaters to yet another level, even as it breaks it down to very personal and fascinating stories.

Bones Brigade: An Autobiography takes a look at the’80s skateboarding team of the same name that featured both Hawk and Caballero, and changed the sport forever. It allows the various members to tell their own stories, and focuses on their growing fame and rivalries, especially the infamous one between Hawk and Christian Hosoi. In the end, the movie is as much about how they pushed each other as a team as it is about their individual legacies.

For Hawk, the documentary was revealing, but not in the way you might expect. “It was fun to reminisce, but it was more interesting to me to get everyone else’s perspective on what our era represented to people, and to each other.” There was hardly time for such insights back then, he says, because “we were all fighting our own little wars.”

For this tour, Hawk will be bringing along skaters such as Kevin Staab, Willy Santos, Aaron Homoki, Shawn Hale, Clint Walker and several others. He knows his own skating is the main draw for a lot of fans, but he’s also entered in to what he thinks of as a new phase, where part of his goal is to give some visibility to rising stars.

“There’s a new generation of guys pushing the limits,” he says. “If I’m the one who turns on that spotlight for them, I’m happy.”

Tony Hawk and the Birdhouse Skate Team will demo at Lake Cunningham Park in San Jose on Sunday, July 15 at 2pm; free. An in-store will follow at Circle-A Skateboards, 4pm to 5pm.