I went to high school with Spike in Bethesda, MD.
I knew him a tiny bit, held a sign with him for a
yearbook picture for the skateboard club. Shredders.
The sign said "Glen is a woman". We were behind
our friend Glen Graziano. I hung with Glen and Andy
and Terrance some. He was called Spike for as
long as i knew who he was. He had a sweet ramp that I
never actually went to, but I should of. We all
watched his rise to glory. He wasn't really from a
super rich family, just normal, like middle class.
He was a boss ass photographer and stuff at school--Walt
Whitman. At freshman orientation he had a sign,
"Haircuts by Spike, 5 bucks." He was a good
photographer in high school and was the type that
everybody liked, i think. He was like 2 grades over
me, so he was cool. With Terrance and Glen and
stuff. The school doesn't even tell kids that he
went there. We were at this party like 2 or 3 years
ago, and these kids that were younger than us
were like, "No it's just a rumour, he didn't go to
Whitman", and we were all aaaaaahhahhh...Yeah, he
totally went there. My friend Andy was in Boy Scouts
with him. It blew my mind that the school didn't
tell the kids that he went there as some type of
inspiration. Ya know? God, thats so weak. But
now they have a plaque at the new Whitman that they
put up (which looks like a Nordstrom), so Spike didn't
walk those same walls. They tore down our old 60's
style school and made a new state of the art facility.
-Paul, listenoutward@hotmail.com
Also,
you can read about what it was like to work with Spike by a
guy who was in the "Praise You" video.
When Spike worked on the Beastie's "Sabotage", I guess he had planned for some underwater footage, but had no underwater camera. So Spike took the camera and figured it would be alright if he just put it into a clear trash bag... which actually didn't work, and the camera was ruined. Also, he had mounted a camera to a car that was supposed to drive down a hill at 80 mph, but when the car hit a lip, the camera flew off, and was broken too. It's kind of funny to think that Spike broke two $200 000 16mm cameras on a shoot for a video that was budgeted at $55 000.
If you have any personal stories about Spike that you'd like to share, please feel free to send them to me and I'd love to post them!
