Bill Ferrell, also know as Gentle Jones is a performer. Being from Delaware, our paths did cross in the past while on four wheels. His talents have taken him far and wide, both on board and through music.
When did you start skating?
I started skating when I was 7 years old, in Christmas of 1981. At the time I lived with my Mama in a glamorous HUD project in Jacksonville, Florida. We only lived there a few years.
What was your first skateboard?
My first skateboard was a brown, wooden department store board with two strips of grip tape running from nose to tail. No idea who made it–my Mama got it for me as a Christmas gift. I rode it every day. My parents were divorced, so when I went to live with my Dad a couple of years later, I was told skateboards were dangerous and the board disappeared. I complained all year and that next Christmas my Grandma got me a Snoopy “Joe Cool” Nash, which I eagerly skated on my block that morning and immediately got teased by a metal head from my street who had a day-glow orange Nash Executioner. I was mortified and never rode that board again. Soon after, I got a Nash Doz’r “Lockerboard” from my Mama which was a tiny piece of crap with no nose or tail and crummy XR-2 trucks. Eventually I saved up enough to buy a Chris Miller Schmitt Stix deck, my first pro set up. I had Santa Cruz OJII combo wheels (just before wheels had full color printing on them), and Gullwing Super-Pro III trucks with the huge nylon baseplates. In the 1980s it seemed like every kid around my neighborhood skated, though almost none of them could even ollie back then. That Chris Miller was basically the first board with an upturned nose and at the time my friends thought I was a weirdo on it and some said the nose would probably break off. We would all get together and practice early grabs off a sketchy launch ramp into some grass and get super worked. For like 3 years I swore by Rat-Nuts and drilled out all my boards, even the rails, and rattled everywhere I went.
When did you stop or slow down significantly?
I never stopped skating, but last year I had an operation on a broken wrist bone which laid me up pretty much all year, I gained 20 pounds and forgot how to skate switch. I am getting it all back slowly when the weather is nice.
What do you do for a living?
For a living I touch computers in their private places. My passion is music, I’ve recorded since the 1990s and been blessed to have music out on labels in the U.S. and Europe. I do shows regularly in Delaware and have been invited as far away as Ireland. I’ve been the front man for a punk band, won an award fronting a ska band, and I release new solo hip-hop music monthly. Skateboarding introduced me to an entire world of music that you would never hear on television and it informed my taste entirely when I was younger. Skateboarding also taught me how to be creative independently.
When you are not skating, how often do you think about skateboarding?
I think about skateboarding every day. I can’t drive past a parking lot without dreaming about hopping off every curb cut in it.
How did skateboarding affect the direction of your life?
Skateboarding has been the driving force in my life for decades. Right after high school in 1991, I got a job at the local skateboard shop in Wilmington, Delaware. An OG local ripper Ken Gator bequeathed the position to me at a bike shop called “Henry’s.” The Bones Brigade and H-Street did demos there. It was the spot for us around here. Then I moved to New York City to work for Dead End Skateboards with Vinny Raffa, who I met through Henry’s, and we went to all the ASR shows together. I basically learned about the entire industry. Over the years I got on the flow teams of Tracker, Toxic Wheels, Soul Trip Skateboards, and Dave Duncan gave me a few Focus boards. Dead End drove me to the airport in limos for tradeshows and got my name in the big magazines. I had it pretty good for a unknown guy from Delaware. In 1995, I drove to California and entered all the amateur contests I could find and won trophies at nearly all of them. In 1996, I won First Place for the entire season in Southern California (CASL unsponsored division) and Fourth for the season in NorCal series. Between contests I had no place to live so I slept in the streets until the next event. When Sonja Catalano, the owner of CASL (California Amatuer Skateboard League), found out I had been skating all the contests while I was homeless she invited me to work for CASL and PSL on the ramp crew with Tim Payne and Dave Duncan and I even got paid a little. In 1996 for the entire year I actually made $8,000–which is below poverty but it was all from skateboarding. The industry was sort of small back then and I got to meet pretty much everybody. I had a blast. One day it was so crazy, I was alone skating in an amazing drainage ditch in Las Vegas Tony Alva came up out of nowhere and we skated for hours he even gave me the shoes off his feet. Black shoes with ALVA embroidered on the tongue. The raddest day–me and Tony Alva have the exact same size feet.
What is the connection between skateboarding and creativity?
In the 1990s it seemed like everyone I knew in skateboarding was artistically inclined and it was an era where new tricks were still being created and people tried to have distinctive styles. It was common to know people who skated and were in bands, or painted, a lot of cats I knew were learning how to edit video, which was a pretty rare skill back then if you didn’t work in television or film, but in the skate world it was happening all over the place. Nearly all of the people I know from that early era went on to do creative work either as a hobby or full time job. I don’t know if its like that any more. A bunch of mostly smart kids who were sometimes poor kids too and oddly shunned by the mainstream society around us. Years later they became the taste makers of the entire world. Funny how things work out.
More about Bill Ferrell AKA Gentle Jones
GentleJones.com
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