Rest in Peace Marc Johnson

After reading the news about Marc Johnson’s death last night, it took an hour or two before I realized that the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” had quietly been looping in my head — kinda like the mental version of pocket-playing music on your phone’s speakers, until someone catches it and tells you. This is not coming from a massive Rollings Stones fan, but “Miss You” is my favorite Stones song. (No idea what second place would be.) 95% of that has to do with the fact that it is the song in my favorite Marc Johnson part.

Marc’s part in Tilt Mode’s Man Down always stuck out because here was a guy at the height of his powers …kinda fucking around, and …still being incredible at it. Man Down was a fun homie video, sure, but it felt like less of a gag than something like Chomp On This. Skateboarding was generally serious at this time, and was at the tail-end of an era when a mailorder catalog was sent to your house, and you could fill out an order form, attach a check, and send it to the company so they could mail you a physical skate video back. Under most circumstances, companies took this as an unsaid agreement to produce “serious” videos, full of tricks that people tried really hard for.

Marc Johnson has done many tricks that had never been done until he did them, and probably some that will not be done again for a long time. You and I will never do any of those tricks.

But Marc’s Man Down part comprised of lines on the back-end of industrial parks in San Jose suburbs, with tricks on stacks of pallets with pieces of plywood on top of them to make manny pads. He creates spots out of discarded desks, and there’s a nosegrind on a knocked-over lamppost. His ender is, by the standards of the day, kinda sketchy.

While office furniture in empty lots may not seem like anything today — when goof-off footage gets posted to the story or goes to the bro’s iPhone edit — these were not things found as much in the purported “golden years” of skate videos. Teams would fly to Europe to one-up the last team that flew there, trying to make good on the dollars you mailed in for their new video. 2001 was not the first time someone skated some random shit in a parking lot and put it in a video. Yet, within the skate video arms race going on at the time, one of its best turning in a part like this felt relatable and profound.

Those clips sent legions of kids to their local blank space, whether it was an industrial park in Jersey, a swath of asphalt under the FDR drive, or an empty corner of Anywhere, U.S.A. The manny pads those kids set up, or the desks they built ramps up to were a placeholder for the dreams of MACBA being fostered in the other videos, and in most of Marc’s other parts, for that matter. A lot of those kids probably don’t skate anymore, and a lot of them probably never made it to MACBA, but they’ll always remember being a 14-year-old idiot, finding a goldmine of discarded office furniture in some secluded dumpster somewhere with their friends, so they could do their best renditions of Marc in Man Down.

Marc was, in Louie Barletta’s words, “a poor kid from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, who grew up in a trailer at the end of a dirt road,” who “opened doors for guys like me and Jerry, and single-handedly put San Jose back on the map.” In doing so, he gave plenty of kids reason to dream on their skateboards, even if they never made it past that placeholder stack of pallets in their local small-town parking lot.