Thrasher Magazine

Photo: Beres

Jacob Rosenberg was the first kid in my Peninsula zone of the Bay Area to film with the big dogs. I would see him out at Castle Golf with Salman Agah. In '91, he helped film and edit DTS: The Video and Think's Partners in Crime. But Jacob really hit the skateboarding world’s radar when he linked up with Mike Ternasky at Skate Camp. Together they made an anthology of arguably the most influential skate videos of their time. Fast forward to 2024 and Jacob has just released a new book from his decade of filming and editing days with Plan B, 1988–98. Along with timeless images of the pros, you also see how Del the Funky Homosapien and Hieroglyphics weaved in and out of those videos, that culture and that era. So I caught up with Jacob at the release party in LA to see how it all came together with the help of legendary filmmaker Greg Hunt. —Schmitty

A sturdy book stands on its own


What’s up, Jacob? How did the big show go?

I have to say, it was an all-time night.

Everything you hoped for and more?

And more, definitely! You know, you have key figures in your life that you have these really close-type relationships with. They show up and there's headlines, right? Mike Carroll and Del were there! That's the shit for me.

Yeah. And Rodney, right?

Yes. Rodney was there. He is really important to me, too. And Guy Mariano is there; there's a lot of photos of Guy on the wall. A lot of people came through, so it was so heartwarming and affirming. The show is really unique; it’s like an expansion of the book. There's actually a lot more images than are in the book, in terms of the skate stuff. It's very skate-centric, but it's LA-focused. So there's photos of Guy and Rudy and Gabriel in the show that aren't in the book. If I was to do a show in San Francisco, I would have way more San Francisco people. If I was to do it in San Diego, way more San Diego people.

The OG skate podcast   Photo Beres

Smart man you are.

But the show has listening stations where you can listen to these interviews. Skullcandy came in—Brian Garofalo and McKenna—and they made us custom headphones that say “Right Before My Eyes” on one ear and 1988–98 on the other. I have the original tapes of the interviews that I did with Del from ‘93. I have original interviews with Guy, Rudy, Gabriel, Sal and Mike Carroll.

Jesus, natural born hoarder society. But all gold! So sick, dude, congrats.

Yeah, literally. Guy is putting the headphones on and just losing his mind. I mean, imagine doing an interview and just never thinking about it for the rest of your life, and then you're transported. The show is very much me—all the shit I save. The people that walk through are there for like 30–45 minutes because there's a screen that is a legitimate two-hour play of raw footage with lots of stuff no one's ever seen.

Sicky. Well, let's start talking about the book in itself. How long ago did you come up with this idea and what was the process?

Yeah. It was really interesting because Greg Hunt was my editor for the book, and he really helped narrow the story. I'm always like, My God, I have to tell the story that relates to my archive and all these skaters. And then I'm super intimidated because, technically, it's a short period of time, but it feels so expansive to me. And so I kept having trouble wrapping my head around this skate book. And now that I have finished this book, I figured that part out. But I was still wondering, What's the story? I was never really published in American skate mags except Big Brother. So I don't ever see myself as a skate photographer. But I kind of have a body of work that is pretty big. So Greg and I started talking about what the story would be, what the chapters of the book would be, what the structure would be. It could be from getting into skating and then that leads to Hieroglyphics because I know I want to make a book on Hieroglyphics. So I sort of was seeing the book as my Hiero book, where it really just was going to focus on Hiero. But in order to pay that story off, you kind of have to understand how I got to Hiero, right? Because I have an exhaustive library of shooting them for almost a decade.

Timeless shirt, if we must say

Dude, such a special time in not only skateboarding but life. So how did it all go down?

In typical Jake Rosenberg fashion, I figured out a way to hijack my way into their crew. And so the book really grew into that. Then it becomes about, Well, if the story is about my relationship with Hiero, then the story has to be about how I developed a relationship with the camera, and my relationship with the camera comes from skating. Ever since I started skating, even before Skate Camp, I was taking photos with skateboarding.

Yeah, same.

David Tullis from Palo Alto was making zines, Christian Cooper was so artistic, and those are guys who were immediately around me that I wanted to be like. So I was taking photos, making little zines and documenting things. Then Skate Camp kind of propels me; I get a video camera and then I'm taking all the photos and working for this European skateboard magazine and it's giving me more of a purpose.

Yeah. Is there a simple way to put how you—a kid from Palo Alto—run into Del and Hiero?

Well, it's kind of interesting. It's really tied to Mike Carroll and that scene at EMB. You remember 1988, which is the beginning of the book, is one of the greatest years in the history of hip hop. It's Public Enemy, Eric B and Rakim, EPMD, Slick Rick, you name it.

NWA, BDP, The Jungle Brothers.

Exactly, a really extraordinary year. So by the time you get to 1990, it really parallels street skating. There's an entrenched sense of like, Okay, these are the older rapper guys. Who's the young guys? And by ‘91, that's Henry Sanchez and Mike Carroll knocking on the door. Everyone's like, Whatever, these guys. But if you were with them, you were like, Hell yeah, THESE GUYS! And it was like that with rap also, RBL and all these underground Bay Area guys who sound raw and different. And then we hear Del in ‘91. It was like, Who's this guy? His vocabulary is crazy. He's our age and he has a crew with him that they're also our age. They're talking about riding the bus and sleeping on their friend's couch and wearing Vans and it was all like talking to us. And so the simple thing is, I'm at EMB, and I'm around Mike Carroll. We're filming; we're hungry for a new sound, and we heard Del.

Leave it to MC.

Yeah, and Jovontae was partying with Del and he got his hand on the Souls of Mischief demo tape, the Hiero demo tape, which had the "Cab Fare" song. Mikey dubbed it and then I stole it secretly from Mikey and dubbed it for myself. 

Boom!

We all have our little tastemakers that we lean on and then we're going to communicate what we're excited about. I think Jovontae and Mikey were definitely tastemakers.

One-hundred percent. Is the book in chapters? How many pages is it?

Yeah, the book is 224 pages. I could walk through it a little bit. Greg and I wanted to get to a point where it was just pictures and no words. And so the book is really just a visual journey of this young kid with a camera, self-portraits. Because I collect so many artifacts, there's really beautiful photography of my old artifacts. Then there's notebooks and journal entries and, old perfect-condition VHS tapes and all that. If you track the story as you're turning the pages, you'll see this young kid from Palo Alto who then gets behind the wheel of his car— who’s going to San Diego, seeing Sal Barbier, who's going to San Francisco and shooting at EMB, filming frame grabs. And then you start to see some of the Questionable ephemera that I have. Then you start to see the Virtual ephemera. I tried to make sure that I always peppered in how Hiero played a role in that. I'm gonna add all the listings so everything's perfect. And so there's frame grabs of those key frames of the music that was called out that was Hiero music and Questionable. And then there's a really lovely spread where we shot a real television. Ray Zimmerman shot the studio work. And there's that key frame, it says, “Go buy this music.” And, to me, that's the book.

You can still stream it today

And when Virtual came around, I didn't want to go through Jovontae and Mike for the music. So I went straight to Domino. I was like, Yo, I know you've seen the success of the video that we did. I want the unreleased shit. So Tony Ferguson's song in Virtual Reality was a track that's unreleased, that no one's ever heard, that they might not hear. There's a spread where you can see all of my tapes and you can see the Tony tape with my note on the tape that says, “Tony,” next to that song.

I'll put it this way, if you're a Plan B fan, you definitely need this. And people need to understand, if they're younger, how important the Plan B era was and how many times people like us rewatch those videos.

Check it out, here is a stack of Hi-8 tapes that have names on them and stuff that's specific to sessions. “Rick-Backside 180 @ Sears curbs,” “Jovontae-White Curbs @ Wallenberg.” That's some of the first footage ever at Wallenberg—that I know of—that was in a video. It was in Useless Wooden Toys.  

Plastic gold

That is so sick.

This is a lovely spread. Mikey's switch frontside heelflip bigspin at EMB from Questionable. That's actually the first trick when the Hiero song comes in. When "Burnt" comes into his part after the Beastie Boys, “Dip, dip, dot,” that's something I shot. So it was sort of like everything kind of started to mold together. I have some of my notebook from Virtual Reality with my handwritten notes in there and all that stuff. But that's the skate section of the book. And I think what I've seen, what younger people connect to, all the aesthetic ephemera and seeing that relationship to these physical objects. The HVW8 show has a lot of those objects.

Is the show going on for a little bit?

Yes. The show is going on until January 20th. The gallery is called HVW8. It's at Spalding and Melrose in Los Angeles. Ironically, my childhood friend, Addison Liu from the South Bay is the partner with Tyler Gibney at the gallery. So it’s super meaningful.

So you self-published this whole thing. It's not backed by anybody. What are the difference in the two books? Because there's a special limited-edition version, right?

Yeah, so the standard edition is this sort of teal book with the dip pages that are teal. Then, as you know, I love magicians and I have a deep relationship with the magic community. So the collector's edition comes in this slip sleeve and it's a slightly different color way. And the slip sleeve pulls out right before my eyes here. My book designer’s name is Alex Hanson.

Revealed from the teal, you know there's magic in these pages

Oh, wow, dude. I’m gonna have to say, I NEED THAT!

And then on the back, that's a frame that I was shooting for a music video for Hiero, and then there's a camera going off in the background. That's actually the photo that the camera took from that, that is in the video. So the collector's edition is this sort of gold color with the gold-dip pages.  

Two times a day with the day-o!

Ha! If you purchase it, it'll be a numbered edition up to 143. I think we have about 35 copies left right now. So you'll get the slip sleeve and then you'll get two film strips from the music video. And then you'll get two prints. One print is a signed print of Del that I took for Blunt Magazine. So that's signed and numbered.

Mista, twista, getcha! Where is that at? 

That's at an arcade in Oakland.

Okay, because I had seen you at Castle Golf with Sal back in the day.

For sure! Then there's a Mikey photo that I took that is signed and numbered as well. It's signed by them and signed by me. It's the collector's edition. I know the collector's editions are $200. The regular standard edition is $70. But I wanted to make something that felt really special, that felt and looked special on the shelf, making it a limited number I liked and then putting the analog objects inside.

 Signed and sealed, collectors are gonna go crazy

That's amazing. Congrats, man. That looks sick. So Right Before Your Eyes, get your copy today! Links will be below for both versions and you are gonna want to have this on your bookshelf or coffee table.

Thank you.

At the show, did you feel kind of like a small kid that wanted to just sit back and be a fly on the wall, watching everyone and their reactions? It must have been magical.

It was extraordinary. If I go too deep on it, I'll get emotional really quickly. I think the big thing for me was that my children were there. My daughter's running around, because I gave her my Minolta little point-and-shoot film camera. She would see me—Huberman rolled up—and she's like, I want a photo with you and Uncle Andrew. I was like, Alright, let's do it. And she's like, Stand there. And I'm like, The flash is broken, so make sure you hold the flash up. And she takes the photo. So seeing my family and my wife, I think she knows how much this era means to me. And Lord knows she's been with me when people have been like, Are you Jake Rosenberg? Not that it happens all the time, but when it happens, people wanna connect and I do too. So I think for her, it was seeing all my friends show up.

Incredible. Where can you buy it?

You can buy it on my website It's self-published, self-financed and you'll feel it. Within your hands, it has weight. It's cloth-bound, foil lettering with a tipped-in photograph on the back of me and my Virtual Reality shirt filming Del—224 pages, 226 images.

Perfect for one’s self and/or a Christmas present. Buy yours while supplies last, kids!

I think Rye got it. First of all, thank you for supporting me and sending someone out. He was like, I got such amazing photos. And he's a nerd for my era, so it was fucking perfect, dude.

Of course! Boneless Zine to the rescue for the Homies. No-fuckin'-brainer!

He had the fisheye at the DJ booth. He's standing there and I'm like, Hold on a second. I was like, Del, take a big rip of your fucking pipe and everyone let's lean in like an album cover. So we go in like this and Del just blows fucking smoke and Rye was like, Bro, that photo's fucking crazy! But it was literally like, hold on. We're all there and OPEO's on one side; I'm on the side. I wanna see all of Rye's photos.

Hell yeah! Well, as always a pleasure catching up with you, bro. Congrats on another epic journey and finished gem. Cheers and happy holidays.

Thanks, Schmitty. No problem. See ya at the Warriors game with your copy of the book. Let's make an SF show happen.

Unveiled for the full effect. Congrats on the book, Jake!     Photo: Beres

In case you missed it, hit this link to buy the book now