Willy Nevins: Behind the Buds

SLUG: And that’s what you’d like to keep doing with it, going forward?
Nevins: Yeah, just making a skateboard magazine that’s for Salt Lake, you know? Made here, featuring people that don’t get featured anywhere else.

SLUG: So what about all the art and illustrations throughout?
Nevins: I’ve always drawn and I’ve always been an artist, and those things just go hand in hand. Creativity is a huge part of skateboarding. I think skateboarding was founded by artists and weirdos and people that were doing things against the grain. I mean, including graphics, images with skateboarding—it would be boring just to have a page with a photo on it.

SLUG: So aside from wanting to make a skate magazine for SLC, is there anything else that motivates you to make Street Buds?
Nevins: I heard from a friend that our generation is going to be referred to as the “forgotten generation” or something because all of our stuff is digital now. And one day, the Cloud might blow away or your phone might drop in the toilet. If that’s the only place you have your photos, then that’s a big loss. To put it in some sort of tangible, palpable, creative form that you can hold onto and look at years from now—or it sits at some coffee table at a skate house or on someone’s toilet and they read it every time they sit down—it’s not fleeting. There’s so much media that gets pumped out these days, and it all gets seen once and is swiped and never seen again. Skateboarding—especially photography—is so based on the internet. There’s a huge influx of images, but it’s rarely in a palpable form that people are going to find when they’re cleaning out their room in a year and revisit it. I guess it’s just trying not to be a part of that forgotten generation—trying to make something that’s going to stick around.

SLUG: That’s a damn good answer. Anyway, there’s a good mix of things in Street Buds: art, skating, all that. How’d you decide to cover so many things?
Nevins: To be honest, it initially started with the intention of making it more like the layout of an actual magazine with more written content and interviews and things like that, but it kind of turned into a big photo-art collage and a little bit of written content. Other than that, it just turned into an art collage and that was just the theme of it—not breaking it up into different sections and just having it flow through and be visually stimulating.

SLUG: So is there a way you incorporate everything together?
Nevins: No, just certain photos that I think look good next to each other or a photo that stands out by itself; funny captions, juxtaposing some of the photos from Cvarchives, which is our frien [Andy Cvar]’s photo bank of skate photos from Salt Lake in the 80s, and putting those right next to a contemporary photo we took this summer. Just kind of throwing a wrench in it and making it kind of awkward, but really unique.

SLUG: Do you have zines that you like for your own reading, or anything of the sort?
Nevins: A serious zine that inspired me was a Tully Flynn zine, The Kidnapper. That was a skate zine that came out 10 years ago or more. I still have that one, and I always like the stuff friends make: art, photos zines, whatever’s circulating—shout-out to Saucy! Anything that Sam Milianta makes is always entertaining, and I always like skate magazines that are the big names like Thrasher and TransWorld—smaller print with more attention to photos and content. I enjoy the visual elements of photography next to drawings, text and colors. I just enjoy layout, and if something catches my eye, it inspires me. I would definitely like to emphasize Kidnapper. That was definitely a punk rock skate zine. When I got that as a teenager, it blew my mind.

SLUG: I noticed that you had a Vimeo channel. Does that coincide with this kind of stuff?
Nevins: Yeah, I’m still putting stuff up there, presently.

SLUG: And do those just go on Vimeo or what?
Nevins: Or friends’ premieres—just small screenings. All that stuff is just friend montages. It’s not a full video that warrants renting a theatre, but it’s fun to show them with friends. But yeah, a lot of the videos go hand in hand with the time period. We’re working on a video right now that’s kind of a side project. I’m always filming but trying to shoot photos, too. It kind of goes back and forth.

SLUG: Okay, so anything next? Is there another issue of Street Buds due?
Nevins: Well, we’re trying to get a couple hundred bucks together to go on a skate trip this fall and make a road-trip issue. So maybe this fall, we’ll have some content and be able to put one together before the end of the year.

SLUG: Last words?
Nevins: If you want to get a copy, go visit our friend Brad [Collins] at Raunch and get one from him, or there are some down at Half and Half. Thanks to them for letting us sell zines on their counters. Shoutout to Skelley, Slade, Andy Cvar and all the wild animals.

As you can probably tell from his insightful answers and artistic vision, Willy Nevins is an original. His take on skateboarding, art, and the relationship between the two is just what we need in this wave of fluctuating digital media. If you ask me, Street Buds is a piece of Salt Lake skateboarding to be read and revisited for years to come—even if it’s while you’re sitting atop the john six years from now. If you’d like to get your hands on said zine as well as Sandoval’s Call It Venting 2, you can pick ’em up at shops mentioned above. In the meantime, we’ll all sit patiently (or anxiously) for the next drop of Street Buds.