James “Jamer” Lindsay R.I.P.

It is sad to report that the world is less one epic EPIC dude. The first time I met Jamer was at the Vic West skatepark. It was the early 90′s and skateboarding was at it’s most critical phase. There he was with a wacky hairdo and bizarre kit, riding a shitty old rattly department store board (the kind that doesn’t really turn) with all the plastic, and was blasting massive stylish frontside ollies over the tight pyramid all the while nonsensically shouting over and over, “In like Flynn. Never out… No doubt!”.

This is only my “The first time I met Jamer…” story. It is only one of many, for he touch a lot of lives. I could go on, but I feel it’s better left to Alex Morrison who wrote the following open letter in the days that followed the sad news that we’d all lost a solid friend.

Every time i think of him, all I can hear his laugh. Anyone who has heard it will know what I mean. It is an honest, almost childish laugh with just a hint of mischief… his is the laugh of stoke.

Alex Morrison – I first met James in front of a clothing store on lower Johnson Street. I’d just finished grade six, the summer of 1984. This shop was the hangout spot for local breakdancers as it was nearby a dance school that was holding breakdancing classes that summer. I was with Dave Clifford a lot that summer. We were both going to St. Michaels University School and it was our summer break. This was probably the first time I had ventured on my own downtown. Having grown up in James Bay I don’t think I’d made it past Nootka Court yet as far as going downtown was concerned. So it was sort of a big deal for us.

Grandmaster Flash was on the Beatbox and there was a sheet of cardboard out front. I remember seeing this little kid there. Remarkable only because he seemed our age, and I was maybe a little glad when I found out he was younger. But he wasn’t young in attitude. He seemed to be a fully formed person. He came across as confident and articulate, thoughtful and funny all at the age of 11.

We were all taking turns tagging up the cardboard with our ‘street names’. At the time I was a huge Stones fan and I say this because the freshest memory in my mind from meeting James for the first time was that he drew a perfectly rendered Stones tongue on the cardboard. Everyone else was trying to be cool with their ‘Rap’ thing and here was James going totally against the grain and not caring one bit. I remember saying something like, ‘cool, I love the Rolling Stones…’ and he said something like, ‘awesome! the stones’ rule’. It really stuck with me, partly because this was the first time I met one of my closest friends, but also because he was so casual about everything while I was feeling a terrible teenage self-consciousness the whole time.

I saw him around town a lot that summer, down around the inner harbor and sometimes around Johnson Street but he seemed to be from another world so I kept my distance at the time. That this is my only memory from that summer shows what a strong impression he was capable of making on someone.

Fast forward to winter 1985. I was back in Victoria, having left my private school out in Toronto. That summer previous I had caught the skateboarding bug in Victoria. And ever since then I had wanted to get back to the west coast. I felt a real freedom just roaming around the streets on a skateboard. One of the first things I did when I got to Victoria was to skate downtown alone from James Bay. Back then there was barely any skaters downtown. Mostly we just hung around that alley next to the theater on the still covered Yates Street with the punks and skinheads. One of the first kids I ran into then was James. And here is my second memory of him: he had a Walkman at the time and was listening to the Dayglos. He was super excited about it and handed the headphones to me to listen. I had been listening to punk for a few years at that point. The standard fare that a kid gets into when they are too young to know about their local scene. This music just blew me away, and I immediately asked to borrow the tape. He said they were playing a show the next weekend at what I think was called the ‘Polar Bear Den’.

So the next weekend I went downtown and met him and everyone else from ‘Piss Alley’ who was going to the show. It’s funny to me now, because I had no idea what I was getting into at that point! The show was Dayglos and Redtide and it was earth shattering. This must have been the first months of 1986. It was my first show and it changed my whole way of thinking about music and culture and just about everything at that time. At that point I had only seen some big stadium concerts and really had no idea that you could listen to a record and then go downtown and listen to the same band and have them play a foot in front of your face. Maybe you could even hang out with them after the show.

It was a living culture being produced every day all around you and you could contribute to it. James in his open generosity introduced me to this. I credit him in tuning me into a whole other way of looking at the world and the idea that you could create your own life.

It was around this time I guess that James became ‘Jamer’. He really was a character, I mean, we all had nicknames but his was just perfect, almost more a verb than a name and it stuck. For such a small little guy, he was somehow larger than life. We were the downtown skaters and he was a central figure in this new phenomenon. And it was brand new, and filled with all of the sense of purpose, urgency and excitement fitting of a new cultural movement. Every night, he was reliably downtown and ready for some adventure and every day was filled with reflection on the night before. We bonded strongly throughout all of this. A real sense of camaraderie was developed. We were the anti-heroes of a story of our own making.

When I was 16 I decided I’d had enough of high school and decided to move out of the house. James invited me to come live in a spare room in his mom’s Fernwood house on Rudlin Street. This was a paradise for me at the time. No curfew, endless sandwiches and the kind generosity of his mother Kate. Our days were spent skateboarding, making art at the kitchen table and listening to a lot of music. I remember he really loved Minor Threat’s ‘salad days’ record and we listened to that repeatedly. The house was filled with original art and that left a lasting impression on me. We also spent a lot of time at his father Jim’s studio in Chinatown. I am so grateful to this day to have been invited into the Lindsay world. Being around their house and Jim’s studio lent a sort of legitimacy to my dreams and ideas. I didn’t have to listen to anyone from a school that didn’t understand me. I didn’t have to accept society at face value and I could make my own life. And to get back to the culture idea, there was something about their house and Jim’s studio and their general way of life that really affected me. I didn’t know it at the time but James represented a sort of continuity between Art and skateboarding and family life. It was all connected. He wasn’t living a double life like I felt I was, where my home life seemed to be separate from my life and interests outside of it. I’ll always remember how he was allowed to draw on the walls in his bedroom.

We were making up our lives as we went along, we had no plans for the future and it felt great just being in the day, everyday.

James allowed himself to express a full range of emotions. He could be gregarious and loud. He could be intimate and subtle. He had the Scottish gift for language and conversation. We had an immediate rapport. I was the slightly older private schooled initiate and he was younger street-smart kid that showed me the ropes. I found myself often trying to curb his enthusiasms but this just made him wilder. I guess I acted as the perfect foil. I hated street skating with him sometimes as he drove me to distraction with how many risks he took in traffic. Of course it was all part of his style, perfectly executed and with total self-awareness.

We developed our own perspective on the world around us. We distrusted macho behavior and he taught me emotional honesty and what I can only describe now as being comfortable with vulnerability. It was ok to not know everything and it was ok to be scared of things. In fact it was better to have these feelings because it meant you were alive and learning. His openness about all the questions you might have at a young age was infectious. I felt like it was ok to talk to him about anything. In turn, he gave me the confidence to demand this same honesty from the greater world around us. Needless to say it got us in a lot of trouble but it was also quite educational.

Being with him there was no pressure to perform and I was never afraid of being judged. As a male teenager this was very important. I could talk to him about relationships and crushes and he was always in tune with the complexities of those sorts of articulations. In this way, he always had an ear for me and for many others. He showed me it was all right to be proud of my vulnerability and that I didn’t need to mask it with heroic posturing, a behavior that would be resoundingly and endlessly mocked.

He also possessed a very private side and valued his alone time. I was an early riser and he loved to sleep in. Sometimes it was impossible to get him out of his room. I put this down to him being the hyper social person that he was. He loved others and he met the world and the people in it with so much enthusiasm that he often needed to recharge. This meant sleeping for very long hours. He loved his bed. I teased him endlessly for this, poking my head through his bedroom door every ten minutes and saying it was a sunny day out and we should go skate. In those early days I needed a lot of his attention and this combination often had hilarious results. When we eventually roomed together in Vancouver, he kept a collection of shoes by his mattress in my room so he could throw them at me when I pleaded with him to get out of bed and come skate with me. At these times he was never truly angry with me, although he was good at acting like he was which made things even more hilarious for the both of us.

When I moved to Vancouver at 17, I begged for him to move over and he eventually did. I was starting to get sponsored for skateboarding, trying to take the whole thing seriously and I wanted him to do the same thing so we could stick together. I remember at the time that I was frustrated by him not taking the whole thing as seriously as I did. But looking back now I can see the value in it.

While I was trying to fit into the whole Vancouver thing, James was 100% James. He never compromised. He was too busy having fun and doing his own thing to care about what anyone else thought. He never tried to wear the right clothes, have the correct skateboard or learn the fashionable tricks. He stuck out like a sore thumb and ruffled the feathers of anyone too uptight or fashion conscious. But he was also so talented that people had to give him respect. He showed me how even alternative scenes can be surprisingly conservative and possess their own sets of rules.

In turn, he showed me that punk wasn’t how you looked or what music you listened to. It was an attitude towards life. It was about cultivating a sophisticated attunement towards the world and finding your authentic self within it. It was about progressiveness. He just kept evolving his dialogue with the world whereas a lot of others became stale and old. He was a true artist in this way. He showed me the natural and self-evident progression from being a skate punk to becoming a serious artist.

I learnt from him that the values and sensibilities that we gained in one world could and should apply in the other. This was because he didn’t make these distinctions between scenes and he often gained acceptance in many different ones. He was very honest and in this way, lived a grounded and humble life. He was also never a careerist as he had a healthy distrust of any situations that developed into complacency and worked diligently to upturn any expectations. He was self-made and eventually went on to own his own business but it was one that reflected all of these values.

James was an amazing person and I’ll never forget him. I credit him and his family for making me a sane person at a time when the world around me was making me crazy. He gave me the strength to find my own path in life and to trust my feelings. Where I’ve got to at this point in my life, in a large part I credit to him and those times. As I write this from my apartment in Düsseldorf today I can’t help but reflect upon how much he contributed to my life. It was his sense of adventure and fearlessness in the face of the unknown that he shared, which allowed me to just keep moving forward, to question everything and to take whatever risks I had to in order to stay happy and sane in a crazy world. Thanks, James.

Alex Morrison - 18th January 2012