Growing up in New Jersey in the 1970s and ’80s, Mike Vallely was, of course, aware of skateboarding. But it didn’t seem approachable. Popular culture presented it as something made for Californians with nice tans and well-built bodies who wanted to show off and do handstands on their boards. So Vallely didn’t pay it much mind, at first.
“It was not an accepted or appreciated activity in the mid ’80s, at all,” Vallely said. “It was discouraged, seen as useless. It had no end game. There’s no touchdowns in skateboarding. There was no career path, no benefits package, nothing that would make any parent, teacher or concerned citizen look at it and say, ‘Oh, yeah kid, you should be doing that!’”
For most adults in central New Jersey, skateboarding, which evolved in tandem with surf culture on the West Coast, had all the markers of an utterly pointless pursuit. Surfing occasionally occurred at the Jersey Shore, but pretty much the only place on the East Coast where both sports gained traction was a few hundred miles south, in Virginia Beach. Still, skateboarding “really hit home for me,” Vallely said, “when I discovered street skating.”
“People had climbed mountains and learned to ski and surf the ocean, but no one had figured out what to do with concrete, steel and asphalt,” he told me. “Everything we navigate in our daily lives is laid out with right angles and literal barriers — the curbs, the street corners, whatever — so I liked the idea of going out and challenging one’s own environment.”
Street skating incorporates that environment into the practice. Tricks are performed around, over and sometimes on everyday obstacles. Vert, or transition, skating has its origins in suburban backyard “pool riding” — it emphasizes ramps, inclines and the transition from horizontal to vertical positioning. Purpose-built skate parks typically include elements of both.
Vallely’s perspective on skateboarding also works as a metaphor for the way that the pro skateboarding icon has navigated his life and career since he first got his hands on a board in 1984. His path has been one of twists, turns and deftly incorporated barriers, taking Vallely from his hometown of Edison, New Jersey to a quick spin through Virginia Beach, Virginia, a move to Southern California and eventually landing him in Des Moines.
Born in 1970, Vallely was raised in the shadows of postindustrial decay at a time when the steady drip of factory closings caused economic hardships for many of the working-class families in Edison, including his own. These experiences taught him to lean into the positives and make the most of limited resources.
“We were affected by all kinds of things,” he said. “I mean, when we moved out of an apartment and moved in with my grandparents, it seemed normal to me. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we have to do this because of finances’ or something. It’s like, ‘Oh, cool, we get to live with our grandparents!’ My dad worked a lot. He had three jobs at one point, which I also thought was normal, and that’s why I say that me, my brother and sister had a kind of idyllic childhood.”
Vallely participated in team sports like baseball, but by the time he was entering high school he had grown disenchanted with the way that the system seemed rigged in favor of those from wealthier neighborhoods who could afford better equipment and training. The moment that he became aware of those dynamics, Vallely walked away from it all and embraced skateboarding.
At 14, on day one of high school, Vallely befriended a punk rocker who showed him the ropes, opening his eyes to new music and introducing him to Thrasher, a photo-heavy skateboarding magazine that also functioned much like a social media page — connecting members of this rapidly expanding subculture across the nation.
“I went home with him that day, and he made me a mixtape that turned me on to a bunch of punk bands like Black Flag. He also told me to get a skateboard, and while we were listening to the music, I was like, ‘Well, that makes sense. Skateboarding is like a physical way to express what’s going on in that loud, fast, rumbling music.’ Then he said, ‘Go check out Thrasher magazine.’ And I was like, ‘Thrasher?!?’ The first time I heard the word, I was like, ‘Ah, Thrasher. Yeah, I get it.’ It all just kind of clicked.”
In one afternoon, Vallely was turned on to the two things that would play large roles in his life: skateboarding and Black Flag, the influential California punk band that he now fronts. Vallely’s high school punk rocker friend had a little brother with a stash of back issues of Thrasher — which Vallely devoured — and he also got a chance to ride the next-generation skateboards that were favored by street skaters.
“Just looking at the skateboard, it spoke to me,” he said. “I realized, like, ‘Oh, that’s my paintbrush. That’s my guitar. That’s my mode of transportation. That’s how I’m gonna go through the rest of my life.’ It all just hit me at once, and I knew that the rest of my life had just begun.”
The next month, in October 1984, Vallely went to see Black Flag at City Gardens in Trenton, New Jersey — his first live show. That Christmas, he got his first skateboard. From that moment, Vallely spent all his free time with his new friends listening to cool music, watching skate videos, reading Thrasher and skateboarding every single day.
“Wake up, skate to school, and skate during school, and skate after school. Skate before dinner, skate after dinner — skate, skate, skate, skate, skate. I did that all through 1985.”
Just looking at the skateboard, it spoke to me. I realized, like, ‘Oh, that’s my paintbrush. That’s my guitar. That’s my mode of transportation. That’s how I’m gonna go through the rest of my life.’ It all just hit me at once, and I knew that the rest of my life had just begun.
Mike Vallely
The following year, a brief detour through Virginia Beach altered the course of his life. Skateboarding took off early in that beach town, where a recreational area known as Mount Trashmore became the first city-funded skateboarding park in America during the mid 1970s (not to be confused with Cedar Rapids’ Mount Trashmore, completed in 2018). Throughout the next decade, it hosted competitions that drew luminaries like Tony Hawk, who landed the first documented 900 there — that’s two and a half rotations in the air.
The Trashmore ramp also served as a launching pad for Vallely’s career.
“In February of ’86, my dad set the family down and said he had a new job opportunity,” he recalled. “He had a choice of a couple different places that we could move, and one of them was Virginia Beach, which I knew about from following the skate scene. I knew that Mount Trashmore had pro contests, so I was like, ‘We have to go to Virginia Beach. In fact, I’m not moving anywhere, unless it is Virginia Beach!’ They couldn’t believe that I was so passionate about the idea of living there, because I never really spoke up like that before.”
A couple months later, the family moved into a place near Mount Trashmore, where Vallely found his people. But it turned out to be very short-lived; his brother and sister never really found their groove in Virginia Beach, his mother was unhappy, and then his father’s job fell through. After about three months, the family decided to move back to New Jersey.
“But the pro contest had yet to come to town,” Vallely said. “It was a couple weeks away when my parents wanted to leave, and I was like, ‘I’m not leaving till this pro contest occurs!’ So, me and my mom stayed behind and everyone else went back, and I think all the furniture had already been moved when I attended that contest. That’s where I met Stacy Peralta [pro skater in the Z-Boys; writer, Lords of Dogtown] and Lance Mountain [artist; pro skater in the Bones Brigade], which led to me being sponsored by Powell Peralta. But after that weekend, I was back in New Jersey.”
During that pivotal pro competition, he grabbed the opportunity to skate in front of Peralta, and the legend was impressed. Soon after, Vallely was invited to join Bones Brigade — a groundbreaking skateboarding team founded in 1979 by Peralta and George Powell after they launched their skateboard manufacturing company — and the momentum kept building. That summer, his new sponsor flew him to California, where Vallely won the national amateur skateboard championships in streetstyle.
Powell Peralta had set a five-year plan to develop Vallely as a pro skater. But after a photo of Vallely at Mount Trashmore landed on the August 1986 cover of Thrasher, it basically turned into a five-month plan.
“That was unprecedented, and it could only have happened one time in skate history, because street skating was a brand-new phenomenon,” Vallely said. “When Powell Peralta sponsored me, they basically told the entire skateboard world that the focus was shifting from ramps and vertical skateboarding to the streets, because I was just some random street skater kid from the East Coast who no one had ever heard of. It changed the entire industry.”
Vallely’s forward motion never faltered in the decades that followed as he navigated an idiosyncratic path through the world. An animal rights advocate since his late-teens, one of his earliest signature model skateboards, 1989’s The Barnyard, promoted vegetarianism with the slogan “Please Don’t Eat My Friends.” His passions didn’t necessarily align with what mainstream culture encouraged people to believe, but Vallely was on a mission.
“I thought that skateboarding was substantial, and a very meaningful pursuit,” he said. “But no one around me believed that. Even my friends who skated, they didn’t talk about it like that. I wanted to help popularize skating, so it became my calling in life.”
Throughout the 1990s and into the 21st century, Vallely repped many of the world’s most prominent skateboarding companies at demos and pro contests. He also appeared as a recurring character (“Mike V”) in fellow Bones Brigade member Tony Hawk’s popular Pro Skater video game series, which extended his prominence within a subculture that by then had been fully absorbed into popular culture. Vallely returned to another of his youthful passions, and in the early 2000s he began releasing music with Mike V and the Rats before landing a gig as vocalist for the iconic band that introduced him to punk rock.
“Black Flag was the first live music show I ever saw,” he said. “They just blew me away because these guys, they were going for it. It was so, so intense, and just so life affirming. Like, ‘OK, I am alive, and I choose to live my life how I want to live it.’ That’s how I felt when I was watching them perform. It just opened me up and, further up the road, it informed how I approached my professional skating.”
In 2003, Mike V and the Rats were booked to open a series of shows for Black Flag, whose founder, guitarist Greg Ginn, took Vallely under his wing. While planning a one-off Black Flag gig that benefited a cat adoption organization, the guitarist tapped him to sing the entirety of the group’s 1984 My War record, a hardcore classic released on Ginn’s venerable indie label, SST.
A decade later, in 2013, Ginn and Vallely formed the band Good for You, which released one record on SST. Ginn had originally floated the idea to Vallely of making it a new Black Flag record, but Vallely nixed that, not knowing that the guitarist had already been considering relaunching that group — which he did that year with Black Flag’s second lead singer, Ron Reyes.
“I toured with them in 2013, and I saw them night in and night out, and when it kind of unraveled with Ron, Greg asked me if I was interested. We toured in 2014, and I thought it was pretty good, and then we went out again in 2019, but we had some personnel problems and it wasn’t quite gelling. But when we started up again after the pandemic, it really started to click. I was singing the songs as if the words were being lived in that moment. We kept tweaking our personnel, and now we have a really tight band that is all on the same page.”
While he was singing with Black Flag, Mike and his wife Ann Vallely started their own independent skateboarding company, Street Plant, from their garage in Long Beach, California. It’s a literal cottage industry, done right out of their home, and the couple remains committed to keeping everything in-house and not growing beyond what they can manage.
“When I first got into skateboarding,” Vallely said, “I didn’t see these brands as companies, because they were created by people who loved skateboarding. That’s also how punk rock felt. It just felt like a community that you were a part of. You weren’t a consumer of it, you were part of it all. And then I got sponsored, and I found out that the industry was not really like that, but I still didn’t let that tarnish the way that I wanted to interact with the culture.”
“So, when I decided to truly start my own business, I knew I had to run my business the way I dreamed that it was being run when I was a kid. My wife and I receive the orders, pack the boxes and deal with the inventory, so when you interact with our company, you’re interacting with us. We love skateboarding and we want every single interaction to be one of positivity, because it is personal to us.”
Skateboarding sales skyrocketed during the pandemic, which helped Street Plant’s finances, but the rents they were paying in Long Beach were going through the roof. Ann and Mike Vallely realized that their time in Southern California had come to an end. Their daughter’s husband was from Iowa and the young couple had been spending time in the Des Moines area, which they were raving about.
“My wife and I looked at each other and were like, ‘Well, they’re gonna end up there, and we potentially could have grandkids there, so what the hell are we doing here?’ California just didn’t feel like a place of openness, it felt like a place of extreme closed-off conformity. We were mulling the idea over, and then my wife found our house while looking online.”
While Vallely prioritizes everything in his life equally — bringing the same passion and intention to fulfilling Street Plant orders, his music or skateboarding demos — he admits that the upcoming Black Flag gig in Des Moines holds a special place in his heart.
“It’s a hometown show, and so it’s circled on my calendar,” he said. “Yeah, I know that making any special distinction can be a recipe for disaster, but I can’t help it. I’m really looking forward to this hometown show.”
“I’ve traveled all over the world since I’ve been living here,” Vallely said. “Pretty much every major city in the United States and Europe. I’ve been to Japan, Australia, all over South America, and whenever I fly back into Des Moines, I’m really happy. I feel really good. All of the friends that I’ve made here, they’re all really solid human beings. Everyone I know owns their own business or is in business for themselves in some way. I feel like Iowans support Iowans, and people here will get behind you.”
Kembrew McLeod’s first Black Flag album was The First Four Years. This article was originally published in Little Village’s March 2024 issue.
