#TBT Ray Barbee Ban This

Posted on Thursday, April 14, 2016 by Paul

Context is everything. Case in point: this Ray Barbee part from Powell Peralta’s Ban This video [1989]. It was Ray’s solo debut so to speak, the follow up to the part he’d shared the previous year with Eric Sanderson, Steve Saiz, and very young Chet Thomas in Future Primitive. You have to understand that with no YouTube or Insta back then, videos were pretty much the only time you were ever going to see any of your favorite skaters actually skating. Yet they still were in the habit of filming parts in one day and skating whatever spots they happened to come across. Nowhere is the phenomenon more apparent than it is in this part, which is 90% flatground and serves as further proof that creativity, style, and the right attitude are at least as important as pushing yourself to the edges of your physical limitations. There’s a reason Ray is a legend, it’s not because everything he was doing was so hard, it’s because he was a visionary and an innovator. And you know the stories you’ve heard about how ridiculously nice and down to earth Ray is? All TRUE, Ray rules.