Chuck Treece is kicking down doors, so others can roll through

A ver­sion of this sto­ry appears in Issue 79 of Huck. Get your copy now, or sub­scribe to make sure you nev­er miss anoth­er issue.

1984, USA. Vanes­sa Williams became the first African Amer­i­can crowned Miss Amer­i­ca. Michael Jack­son was the first solo artist to win eight Grammy’s in one night. And Chuck Treece, already the first Black skater from Philly to be spon­sored, toast­ed his birth­day month that year by becom­ing the first African Amer­i­can skate­board­er on the cov­er of Thrash­er Mag­a­zine. At the same time, his skate rock group McRad dropped their debut EP, Dom­i­nant Force — con­tain­ing some of the most anthemic skate music ever written. 

Fast for­ward to the present, and when we speak, one month away from Chuck’s 59^th, he’s in his hotel room, on tour with Philly rock­ers G Love and fresh from an evening skate. It’s 3am in Lon­don and 8pm in Mia­mi, but behind crys­talline eyes, Chuck radi­ates an ener­gy that tran­scends the late-night Zoom ultraviolets. 

“You find ener­gy when you use your body for the right things and do what you love to do,” he beams. ​“If my ener­gy is run­ning low five min­utes before I get on stage and play, or even tonight when I went to skate, as soon as I put the board down or the music kicks in, it feels electric.” 

Born in Newark, Delaware, on May 30, 1964, Chuck was raised on a diet of rhythm & blues, rock and roll, jazz and Par­lia­ment Funk, among oth­er Black sounds. ​“I start­ed bang­ing on pots and pans at the age of two. At six, I had a drum kit. My father had a Top 40 cov­er band who I would jam with, play­ing drums, or goof­ing around on bass gui­tar. By eight, I was play­ing my first shows with them in Chester, PA at a bar called Boots and Bon­nets. My dad took me to the side and said, ​‘Chuck, you need to sit in tonight on two songs. You’ll get a drum solo’. 

Not long after, Chuck dis­cov­ered skat­ing. ​“I was already play­ing base­ball, so I was ath­let­ic,” he says. ​“But the minute I turned 11, I saw some kids skate­board­ing and it changed my life. I bought a $15 plas­tic board, went out there, scraped my knee, and I’ve been at it ever since.” 

Chuck’s mom and dad split, and he began trav­el­ling back and forth between Philly and Delaware. ​“It was com­mon back then for skaters to trav­el pret­ty far to skate their favourite parks. Skate­board­ing will always be a word- of-mouth fam­i­ly, so when you heard some­thing was going on, you had to fig­ure out how to get there,” he explains. 

“I skat­ed a bunch of parks with that rage-of-the-70s lifestyle. In the 1980s, skate­board­ing was super fun but raw at the same time… it wasn’t easy. Ramps would be found in all sorts of shapes back then. The state of skat­ing was rapid­ly mov­ing. Wheels were chang­ing, boards, the scenes too — and the peo­ple were chang­ing it heavily.” 

Chuck nav­i­gat­ed his way into the under­ground East Coast scene and car­ried that through into his music, defin­ing his own style in his own way. ​“Music and skat­ing hap­pened simul­ta­ne­ous­ly. Punk start­ed show­ing up right when I was 13. All my friends were show­ing me this aggres­sive under­ground music they were into, which led me to punk rock and me form­ing the iden­ti­ty I have today. Skat­ing and punk made the most sense to me. It felt like we were all grow­ing up togeth­er at the same time.” 

Chuck cut his skate chops shred­ding up infa­mous parks like Easy Ride, Cher­ry Hill and Webers Wave along­side skate leg­ends (referred to decades lat­er by New York Mag­a­zine as Dog­town East) like Tom Gro­hol­s­ki, Steve Her­ring, Pup­pet­head, Papa, and was one of the very few Black skaters he says that were ​“sprin­kled here and there.” 

“Fred­die DeS­o­to was on Var­i­flex, and I iden­ti­fied with him because he was also Black. I didn’t let that get to me when skat­ing, but it was good to see those dudes around. Mar­ty Grimes was the only oth­er Black skate­board­er that I knew about.” 

Chuck was deep in the scene and becom­ing a piv­otal force him­self. At 14 years old, he wrote a let­ter express­ing his pas­sion for skate cul­ture and thirst for knowl­edge to one of his heav­i­est inspi­ra­tions; Sta­cy Per­al­ta. ​“I start­ed get­ting into mag­a­zines because guys in my local park were crank­ing airs and doing hand­plants. I’d read oth­er inter­views with Peter Grif­fin and Rick Black­hart, and they were cool, but for some rea­son, Sta­cy put it down right. It total­ly opened my mind. I was so stoked on his interview.” 

Per­al­ta, a for­mer Z‑Boy, had become the high­est-ranked pro­fes­sion­al skate­board­er aged 19 and joined forces with man­u­fac­tur­er George Pow­ell to form Pow­ell-Per­al­ta, which would grow to be one of the most suc­cess­ful skate­board brands of the 1980s. With the cash from Pow­ell-Per­al­ta, he formed the sem­i­nal Bones Brigade, a team com­posed of some of the best skaters at the time, many of whom rev­o­lu­tionised mod­ern skate­board­ing. Per­al­ta would lat­er make cult doc­u­men­tary, Dog­town and Z‑Boys, and write Lords of Dog­town, among many oth­er projects. 

“I wrote Sta­cy Per­al­ta a let­ter. He actu­al­ly wrote me back — in his own hand­writ­ing. I was total­ly blown away. It was great for some­one my age. I was hum­bled that he was writ­ing to me and that he was fill­ing me with infor­ma­tion on a scene that I was just start­ing to get into, let alone being accept­ed into. He was the first West Coast guy to say, ​‘Yeah, we’ve got stuff going on out here, but you’ve got some amaz­ing guys in your area,’ drop­ping names like Jamie God­frey and Mike Jesilowski. 

Once I met those guys, I knew what to expect. The first time I saw Mike, he was doing board slides more than halfway around the egg bowl.” 

Chuck knew he had to keep up the pace to lock down his future. ​“I remem­ber ask­ing my his­to­ry teacher in grade 11, ​‘What is fear?’ He was like, ​‘Why are you ask­ing me that?’ and I said, ​‘Well, I have all my skate­board tricks writ­ten down on this paper here, and I know that one day I want to be spon­sored, but I know that I’ll have to get through about 15 of these tricks first so that I can feel that I’m good enough to rep­re­sent a com­pa­ny and good enough to make a name for myself. He looked at me and said, ​‘Fear is some­thing that you set up with­in your­self, you can con­quer. When he asked me what I was try­ing to con­quer, I said ​‘I want to go out and show­case this art form of skate­board­ing to the world.” 

In 1982, Chuck became a pro­fes­sion­al skater, going on to be spon­sored by San­ta Cruz Skate­boards, Pow­ell-Per­al­ta, and Air­walk. ​“I was sick of high school and I knew I wasn’t going to col­lege. All I want­ed to do was music and skate.” Chuck laughs. By the end of that year, he, and fel­low skater Zeke Zagar, decid­ed to start a band posi­tioned around skate­board­ing and Afro-punk. McRad was com­prised of Chuck (the old­est at 19) and a group of skate rock­ers aged 14 – 16. With­in six weeks, they were play­ing shows and open­ing for bands like DC hard­core group Minor Threat. 

In 1984, Chuck moved to San Fran­cis­co on a mete­oric tra­jec­to­ry through both worlds. ​“Tom Gro­hol­s­ki and I cre­at­ed this new back­yard skate scene at the time, and Glen Fried­man showed up to have a pho­to ses­sion. We all loved Glen; he was an icon­ic pho­tog­ra­ph­er. So when some­body shows up who has been around cats like Jay Adams and Sta­cy, you want to push to do your best. He saw me doing that lay­back roll­out, and he was like, ​“Do you mind doing that about 30 times, I think we have some­thing”, Chuck blush­es. ​“It was weird because the ramp was only 12ft wide, 11ft high! So Glen was lit­er­al­ly stand­ing about 3ft away from me. I’m slid­ing into his face every time he takes the shot. It was cool.” 

The late Faus­to Vitel­lo, a co-founder of Thrash­er, broke the cov­er news. ​“God rest Fausto’s soul; he was more or less the apex of Thrash­er.” Chuck respect­ful­ly states, ​“I called him, and I was like ​‘Tom and I have this whole dou­ble thing where I’m lay­ing back and my head’s going over the top of the ramp, and Tom’s doing an invert over me. Is that in there?’ He goes, ​‘yeah, it’s in there, but you got the front cov­er.’ At that point, I was blown away. I was this unknown skate­board­er from Philadel­phia. I was a grit­ty kid who lived on my skate­board. I just loved skat­ing, going to shows and see­ing my friends. I wasn’t expect­ing where it all would take me.”

“1984 was such a fun year. It’s the year I wrote ​‘Weak­ness’ and ​‘McShred’ in West Philly and San Fran­cis­co. Peo­ple start­ed to notice what I was doing and oth­er folks offered over­all vibes.” Chuck smiles.

By 1986, Chuck was trav­el­ling non-stop, meet­ing friends, skate­board­ing, play­ing shows and had his focus locked on song­writ­ing and stu­dio ses­sion work. ​“At that time, for music, we didn’t have the inter­net. So we were always play­ing out live at skate parks, DIY shows, and mak­ing fanzines.” Per­al­ta invit­ed Treece and McRad to do music for sem­i­nal skate videos Ban This, Pro­pa­gan­da, and Pub­lic Domain. The lat­ter being a street-skate sen­sa­tion that gave the band major expo­sure, fea­tur­ing ​‘Weak­ness’ and ​‘McShred’ played over black-and-white footage of teen prodi­gies Ray Bar­bee, Steve Saiz, and Eric Sander­son ollieing down stair­cas­es and over fire hydrants.

After that, Treece was in demand and being poached to play with bands such as New York hard­core bands Under­dog, Urge to Kill and the moth­er of all Black hard-rock bands, Bad Brains. “‘PMA’ by Bad Brains is my favourite song to skate to,” he says. ​“We played that con­stant­ly grow­ing up skat­ing. When I hear that, I have to grab my board. That first Bad Brains cas­sette is just so epic. If you can’t get ener­gy from that when you’re doing some­thing phys­i­cal, then there’s some­thing wrong with you!” Chuck winks.

McRad had opened for H.R. of Bad Brains and Chuck had already struck a friend­ship, but when Dr Know, Dar­ryl Jen­nifer and the rest of the band approached him to join the band, that was the pin­na­cle. ​“For me, that was like my ulti­mate goal of drum­ming, and to say to myself, ​“OK, now put your skills to the test” Bad Brains’ music is prob­a­bly some of the hard­est music to play and keep your tenac­i­ty up. We were doing 30-night tours, 28 shows, one of the days off, and one was a trav­el day. So you’re talk­ing 2.5 hours every night, 25 songs. I used to have to stick my hands in bowls of ice just so that they wouldn’t blow up.”

He lat­er played on albums with The Roots, Jazzy Jeff, Bedouin Sound­clash, and School­ly D, played bass on Bil­ly Joel’s ​‘Riv­er of Dreams’, and played drums for Pearl Jam on one mem­o­rable live show. ​“My proud­est achieve­ment out of all of this,” he says, ​“is meet­ing some of the most tal­ent­ed and coolest peo­ple in the world. Most of my favourite musi­cians today are peo­ple who skate. I can tell straight away if I meet a musi­cian and they’re a skater. It’s just their atti­tude and the way that they car­ry them­selves. They’ll get in the car and dri­ve 14 hours for a gig because they had to do that with skat­ing. Or we’ll be the peo­ple who crash on a couch if it still means we can go play the gig, we don’t care. We don’t let any­thing stand in our way.”

Through­out his life, Chuck has con­tin­u­al­ly ele­vat­ed those around him. One artist in par­tic­u­lar was Santigold. A young San­ti White start­ed her punk band, Stiffed, in 2002 with Chuck on drums and a vision for her to write songs behind the scenes. But Chuck encour­aged her to step up to the mic. Today, Santigold cred­its him with being the man who got her to sing. ​“San­ti paid her dues. She is one of the only peo­ple I’ve seen start out fronting a punk band and real­ly take it to that lev­el. I had her play some raw shows and she had nev­er been used to that. The punk rock mas­sive saw her tal­ent and every­one start­ed grav­i­tat­ing to her through that from skate­board­ing, under­ground cul­ture, punk ethos. So when she invit­ed me back to play on the first record San­to­gold, it just took off. Then it was rad to play with her on [NPR’s] Tiny Desk Con­cert and toast her 2022 album Spir­i­tu­als.”

When asked how music has impact­ed his skat­ing and vice ver­sa, Chuck replies: ​“the ele­ment of music that’s helped my skat­ing is tak­ing some­thing basic and build­ing on it. If I want to learn a song, I can just learn a piece of it. It might not be the whole thing, but when that part comes around you can play it. The same thing with skat­ing. If I want to learn a trick, I’ll go learn it on the curb or a small ramp first and then take it to a big­ger ramp. So it was the influ­ence of start­ing small and tak­ing it into some­thing bigger.”

Between skat­ing and ses­sion­ing, it’s no sur­prise Chuck failed to notice he’d made his­to­ry along the way. ​“Some­one actu­al­ly had to tell me way lat­er that my Thrash­er cov­er was the first cov­er with a Black skater. I wasn’t even con­cerned about being Black at the time. It was hard enough just being a skate­board­er. I was hap­py Tom Groholski’s back­yard ramp was get­ting expo­sure. Then, about 20 years lat­er, I realised it at this event in LA called As We Roll, which was an event hon­our­ing eth­nic skate­board­ers and their impact on the culture.”

Chuck has cham­pi­oned the evo­lu­tion of the skate scene and rode it out at every twist and turn as more and more skateparks closed due to lia­bil­i­ty issues. ​“I remem­ber once the 70s wave of skate­board­ing kin­da died out it seemed that a lot of the skaters I looked up to left — and not like those guys didn’t want to rebuild it — but I just don’t real­ly know if they knew how to accli­mate them­selves into skat­ing with­out being able to go to skateparks. But I was skate­board­ing, and I felt like ​‘some­thing needs to change about it. We need to inte­grate it into the cities. It’s not just a sub­ur­ban thing, it’s not just a surf thing, it’s this whole world­ly thing.’

“At first, when the change hap­pened it wasn’t for every­one. You had to learn how to street skate and just trav­el blocks and blocks to find the right spot where you’d go, ​“Right, let’s skate it.” Before it’d be, ​“Fuck, the cops are com­ing” or a secu­ri­ty guard was run­ning towards you. Skate­board­ing at that time was com­plete­ly rebuild­ing itself. As a busi­ness, as a lifestyle, as every­thing. Now it feels like it’s all one thing again. Now there are skateparks in the Hills, there are 300 skate parks in Col­orado alone and cool archi­tec­ture all over for cats to street skate,” Chuck concludes.

Off the street, Chuck has helped reopen, rebuild, and keep skateparks alive. ​“There are a bunch of char­i­ty things I’ve done. When­ev­er some­body need­ed to lob­by for a park, I would show up with my son and we would skate or play live and we just kept doing that. For some rea­son that just start­ed to spark.” Out­side of sav­ing skateparks, Chuck was approached by a fel­low skater to get involved on a com­pi­la­tion for The Bren­dan Borek Foun­da­tion for Can­cer in Aval­on, New Jer­sey for a young skater who passed away. Not only did Chuck agree, he brought Bad Brains back togeth­er with Chi­no Moreno of Deftones.

In 2010, Chuck was award­ed a Pew Fel­low­ships in the Arts grant. He’s had a lengthy list of boards made in his hon­our, Speed­lab Wheels put out a McRad Weak­ness Wheel and in 2010, Nike SB cel­e­brat­ed Black His­to­ry Month with The ​‘McRad’ Dunk Hi Pro. Chuck helped design the sneak­ers and the colour­way was inspired by his Thrash­er cov­er.

Now skate­board­ing is in the Sum­mer Olympic Games. ​“We as skaters still feel like the X Games is the crème de la crème because it’s so con­nect­ed to what we’re doing,” he says. ​“But I feel like with the Olympics it’s going to give skat­ing anoth­er place for peo­ple and par­ents to get into it, who may not know how to get into the lifestyle. The Olympics gives them that chance to be ath­letes. It’s not just bas­ket­ball or base­ball any­more, young kids will be on TV inspir­ing oth­er kids to skate all over the world.”

The sun’s com­ing up in Lon­don but the night’s still young in Mia­mi. Chuck ends our chat by say­ing, ​“skate­board­ing and music are one for me; once skat­ing came along it just made sense to have access to both. I want to ride skat­ing and music off into the clouds, stay­ing on the ride as long as pos­si­ble.”

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Fol­low Huck on Twit­ter and Insta­gram.