‘I Quit Skating After This’ – The Infamous Tour

infms tour

In the late 1990s, a New York-based company called Infamous Skateboards started up. The first wave of the team consisted of 4 pros and 6 AMs. There was a tour that soon followed, which was cut really short after two dates. Within that little time, half of the team was kicked off. Oh yeah, there was a beer sponsor too.

Fresh off Puleo talking about the demise of Infamous Skateboards in his most normal sounding recent-ish interview (15:25 mark), Howie Glover uploaded the Infamous 1999(?) tour segment from his Pre2k video. Infamous was a brief pitstop for much of the team — Puleo, Nikhil Thayer, Andy Bautista, Jahmal all went on to other board sponsors — but the other half of the roster is a list what-ever-happen-to’s that you may remember from Slap New York features or a montage in Heads.

After watching a video of their tour that apparently ended in 48 hours, it’s not tough to understand why whoever was responsible for the nuts and bolts of keeping the company afloat may have deemed it not worthy of floatation. Mobb Deep hasn’t made a good album since 1999 anyway ;)

Related: The INFMS Video

INFMS: All fifteen minutes of it

Infamous Skateboards’ fifteen-minute video has avoided a one-part internet revival for quite some time. It has occasionally been chopped up on YouTube, but most of the music is usually stripped away thanks to WMG’s notoriety for clinging to an outdated business model. I *think* this was released around 1999 or 2000 (there’s no date in the credits), a few years before Infamous folded altogether. Puleo’s part gets all the YouTube accolades (and has been on there for probably as long as YouTube has existed), but there are some other solid portions throughout the video’s concise duration, including Nikhil Thayer’s demonstrations of how to properly perform flip tricks, Moya skating in Peter Smolik’s pro model, some young Ian Reid footage, a few bits of Jahmal Williams, some pre-Logic 6 footage of Andy Bautista, and a really sick throwaway montage set to John Lee Hooker after the credits that’s as long as the actual video. Not to mention a glimpse at the less friendly days of Pyramid Ledge security guards. (“You dreadhead muhfucker!!!”) Infamous always had pretty nice, subdued art direction that didn’t shove “East coast, yo!” down your throat and still maintained an identity, so with a to-the-point video like this, it would’ve been sick to see where it could’ve went if it was around for a few more years.

It’s kind of crazy that this and 511 are the only videos from New York based hard goods companies (besides the Zoo videos) to exist from this period. But not as crazy as Funkmaster Flex doing voiceovers for Rawkus commercials at the end of skate videos.

Have a good weekend.