Fresh Till Death and Full of Smiles

I recently finished watching the Fresh til Death tour clips on the Thrasher site and I was definitely not disappointed. When I heard that this tour was going to go down my initial thoughts were; "tight idea" and "there better be a tour dvd". In much the same vein as the Beauty and the Beast tours, Fresh til Death found the uncanny pairing of the Zero team with the DGK camp for a cross US tour. Zero and DGK together on one tour is like a hot chick driving a really nice car. On their own each thing is awesome, but combine the two and the level of awesome is elevated to a much higher ground, and this is for sure the case with Fresh til Death. If ever there were two lessunlikely teams to hit the road together then Zero and DGK, I can't imagine them. The tight pants, even tighter schedules and choreographed destruction characteristic of the Chief backed Zero is a far cry from the hightops, snapbacks and hip hop influenced brainchild of S dot Williams; DGK. This sentiment is best expressed in part 1 of the videos in the words of one perpetually stony Tommy Sandoval " Like shred, like hesh, gnar and then just like chill, gangster thug. You bring those two together, put em on one tour...just seeing everyone come in was like 'this tour's gonna be fuckin insane".

That's exactly where the beauty of this tour lies. It's a direct extension of one of the most compelling things about skateboarding; it's unrivaled ability to unite, in common bond, a huge variety of walks of life. It doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, what your other interests are, all we need is skateboarding in common and instantly the flame of friendship is ignited. These tour videos illustrate this pretty succinctly and make for a super enjoyable watch .

There are so many sick things about these videos. Some completely expected, like how sick Stevie Williams' pop is, how consistently fucking gnarly Tommy Sandoval is and that Jamie Thomas will probably still be jumping down rails when he's 60. There are some things in these vids that weren't quite so expected and actually had me pretty surprised. Namely, the fact that Keelan Dadd is a smooth ass beast who was tearing shit up on every single stop on the tour. There were way too many sick tricks of his to list here but the nollie front foot flip was pretty craze.

Can I also say, as a Canadian, how tight it was to see Wade Desarmo killing it full force once again. It's pretty common knowledge that Desarmo had been dealing with injuries for the last little while and that he was purportedly back in good health and back on the board, and these vids did nothing but solidify that fact. He's killing it.

I previously hadn't paid much attention to Marquis Henry in the past, but if nothing else these videos serve as a reminder that there's a reason he's Kalis' DGK protege, dudes good. The inward heel 5-0 was crazy and he made that shit look like nothing. Rewind it to really see how nutty that trick is, especially on the ledge he did it on.

Another dude I was pleasantly surprised by was Derrick Wilson. I haven't seen much footage or coverage of him other then the fairly recent DGK ad and welcome video of the pretty burly switch ollie, but these videos were definitely a good intro for the dude. In his interviews he seems like a cool guy and he straight kills it on the board. The section in part 2 of the crews skating the triple set in New Mexico is proof in the pudding of the fact that Wilson can hang. The three flip and switch front bigspin down the triple were both real sick, not to mention he's got some serious steeze to boot.

Oh yea, I can't forget about Sandoval's bs noseblunt up the down near the end of the video, shit was proper!!

So if you ever need a reminder of why you started skating, a reminder that it's fun, a reminder that all this image bullshit that is so important these days is just that, bullshit, and that at the end of the day we're all skaters, then check this shit out!!