By Joshua Finnell
There are dragons to be slayed. Hearing that line will always conjure a baby-faced Geoff-Rowley staring directly into the camera while reverse time-lapse footage of surfers tossing a football in the Pacific ocean plays in the background. The segment would be one of many great clips forming Transworld’s first video release, Uno. Sebadoh’s album Bakesale was released in 1994, the same year that Rowley would move to Huntington Beach, California, with the newly minted Flip Skateboards team. Bakesale, and the album’s second single, Skull, would become Sebadoh’s mostly highly regarded work to date. Rowley, of course, shared his video clip in Uno with his fellow Flip team rider and British mate, Tom Penny. Though spanning less than a minute of footage, Penny’s switch backside flip at the chain-to-bank gently took all our skulls for a ride.
Geoff Rowley on Tom Penny:
“Well, the people that knew him knew it was natural. He wasn’t trying to be cool and look nonchalant. He really did skate like that naturally. Left to his own devices, that’s just the way he rolled. He was insanely innovative, and it just seemed to come from somewhere deep inside him. He single-handedly opened up a whole new realm of street skating that at that time needed to happen. The constant drive that everybody started to have after that almost came from the push he brought to the game. He was a wake-up call to skateboarding.”
