Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Joe Nelson - Standing Hard, Hard Stance


Mark "Helmet" Hayworth and Zach De La Rocha at their senior prom. Photo courtesy of Joe Nelson


Orange County Sloth Crew ringleader Joe Nelson, with more tales from the west coast...

-DCXX

I'm going to talk about Hard Stance a little too.... Here's one story I thought of. There's some pretty funny Hard Stance party stories too that I'll throw at you.

But first, Zach De La Rocha got all the hardcore kids in the area the greatest job ever during the spring of 1988. Zach had found this place called measure A, which was some Orange County land development measure on the ballot that year. It had to be backed by big business because they had money to burn. We were the perfect kids to burn it for them too. I think we were all getting $8 an hour which was great money for a senior in High School, which we all were.

We would all meet at the Head Quarters at 3:00 pm. They would then divide us into groups of 4. We were like 20 kids strong too, so we'd have 5 groups. Then we were all supposed to go flyer different precincts in O.C. with their pamphlets or whatever. Instead of doing that we'd all just go to the mall, the movies, the arcade, Hard Stance practice, play baseball, or basketball, go skate somewhere, and when the water was warm we'd surf. We'd do pretty much everything and anything besides that actual job. Then at 7:00 we'd return to the HQ, and clock out.

It lasted for 4 months. The genius of it was it provided us all the opportunity to hang out 4 - 5 days a week together, and do rad stuff we'd never have done without the job. Without the job we'd have probably all been at home by ourselves doing whatever, instead we basically got paid to fuck around with each other every day after school. They got wise to us acouple times, but we were always able to con our way out of it. The good news for them was the measure passed too.

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